Refugees and the End of Empire

While nationalist leaders may always celebrate the expulsion of the external ruler as the victory of indigenous peoples, in reality, such victories often signal the arrival of a new type of nationalism, which often proves more ethnically exclusive that the imperial ideologies that preceded it. These imperial beliefs may have operated on the basis of racial hierarchies, with a ruling elite emerging from a 'mother country' hundreds or thousands of miles away, but the system had to have an element of de facto multiculturalism in order to survive. The most visible consequence of the replacement of imperial multi-ethnicity by a more exclusivist nationalism is to be found in the creation of twentieth-century concept of the refugee.