So wedded are we to the nation-state system that it is hard for most of us to envision the world in other terms or to realize how recently this conceptual framework came into being. The idea of a nation-state first emerged as a philosophical construct in the late eighteenth century and only became a reality in most parts of the world in the last century. Since then, the notion of a unique ethnic group wedded to a specific territory has come to be the primary basis of political and social organization around the globe. Nation-state status is a marker of legitimacy for those whose collective identities have come to define the places in which they reside, and its attainment one of the central goals and aspirations of those excluded from the “community of nations” through their omission from the map. This chapter examines the emergence of four of the five nation-states of mainland Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos) from their ethnic hinterlands, that is, from the perspective of those who were not named when the world order established boundaries in this region. It focuses on how and why certain peoples came to be excluded — in part or full — from the nation-building project and examines what the consequences of this have been for majority-minority relations in the present day.

The chapter begins with an examination of the concept of a nation-state and the forms of nationalism often tied to it. It then proceeds on a country-by-country basis through the region, looking at the roles of minorities in the nation-building process and at the place of these groups in the contemporary socio-political landscape. The ultimate goal of this analysis is to lay the groundwork for a discussion of a fifth case, the one country of the region not treated in detail, Burma/Myanmar, in which minority-majority relations have arguably been the most complex and conflictual and for which the nation-building process is, in some ways, least complete.