SUMMARY:

This is the Russian translation of chapter 1 “Minorities, Majorities and the Nation-State” in Benjamin Thomas White’s 2011 book The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria. White demonstrates that minority and majority in their modern meaning are very recent terms that gained prominence sometime around World War I, with the spread of modern nation-states. These concepts were meaningless in the structural imperial situation of multidimensional and uncoordinated diversity that characterized societies of the “old regime.” Politically overloaded and analytically misleading in modern societies, “minority” and “majority” are even more meaningless when applied retrospectively to the past.