Estranged states

This article offers an anthropological perspective on international relations by studying ‘macro-structures’ as the effects of elite-conducted contingent practices. It draws on Der Derian’s genealogical explanation of diplomacy as a second-order mediation among ‘estranged states’. This view sets up the argument that national minorities are constructed as international security concerns within diplomatic discourse because they obstruct nation-states from mutually securing themselves through diplomacy. Thus, each state has a vested interest in supporting other states as stable actors with established national identities. As Others in the nation-state, national minorities threaten the inter-state system as they destabilize any given nation-state’s identity as a diplomatic actor. This situation ostensibly obstructs diplomacy whereby European nation-states seek mutual security by approximating the putative pre-Westphalian unity from which they emerged after Christendom’s collapse. The argument is demonstrated through a critical analysis of post-Second World War international agreements and ethnographic research among western diplomats working on Estonia’s minority integration policy.