Shaping States into Nations: The Effects of Ethnic Geography on State Borders

@article{shaping-states-into-nations,
   abstract = {Borders define states, yet little systematic evidence explains how and where they are drawn. Putting recent challenges to state borders into perspective, this paper analyzes how ethnic geography and nationalism have shaped European borders since the 19th century. We argue that nationalism creates pressures to redraw political borders along ethnic lines, ultimately making states more congruent with ethnic groups. We test this argument with a newly developed Probabilistic Spatial Partition Model that models state territories as partitions of a planar spatial graph. Introducing new data on Europe's ethnic geography since 1855, we consistently find that ethnic boundaries between two locations strongly increase the probability that they are, or will become, separated by a state border. Secession is an important mechanism driving this result. Similar dynamics characterize border change in Asia but not in Africa and the Americas. Our results highlight the endogenous formation of nation-states in Europe and beyond.},
   author = {M\"uller-Crepon, Carl, Schvitz, Guy and Cederman, Lars-Erik},
   journal = {Working Paper},
   title = {{Shaping States into Nations: The Effects of Ethnic Geography on State Borders}},
   year = {2021},
   status = {personal nastac-wp}
}