The Armenian Genocide as a Nation-Building Policy

In this presentation, I intend to put the Armenian Genocide into a larger historical context of the spread of nationalist ideology through mass schooling, the consequent allergy to alien rule of nationalized peoples, and the homogenization imperative capturing the imagination of most rulers of existing and aspiring nation-states. Within such a context, exclusionary policies were one of the many policies that governing elites could use to render the borders of the state congruent with those of the nation, the most critical element of nationalist ideology. Modernity in South-East Europe led to ethnic separation, not integration or multiculturalism.