Outsiders. A history of European minorities

Outsiders is the first history of all European minority communities by a single author. It aims to explain why minorities exist throughout the continent of Europe at the end of the twentieth century and it identifies three different types of minorities. The first consists of dispersed groupings: people, united by religion or way of life, moving into and across Europe throughout the continent's history who have always felt themselves as minorities. They include both Jews and Gypsies. Secondly, localised groupings, whose origins lie outside Europe, but who could remain largely anonymous until the growth of national states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thirdly, since the end of the Second World War, Europe has witnessed a mass migration of people across its borders, into already existing nation states where the newcomers immediately find themselves outsiders. Almost all countries have disadvantaged ethnic and linguistic minorities, whether minorities without their own states, such as the Bretons, Scots, Vlachs and Kurds; or those, such as the Russians in Estonia or Greeks in Turkey, who form linguistic and ethnic groups different to the native majorities. An accessible and authoritative book, it is split into four chapters: Minorities, States and Nationalism; Dispersed Minorities; Localised Minorities; and Post-War arrivals. The author describes migration that has transformed the demography of Europe and questions the outcomes of the current stance of the European Union in which it attempts to prevent as much migration as it can.