Fixing national subjects in the 1920s Southern Balkans: also an international practice

The momentous transition from empire to nation-state in the early 20th century entailed a challenge for European states to produce ¿national¿ subjects-citizens. Scholars examining how diverse populations were incorporated into national projects have typically taken the nation-state's territorial boundaries as analytical boundaries and have rarely considered nation-building comparatively or investigated the creation of national subjects as an international practice. Taking the case of the League of Nation's supervision of the Greco-Bulgarian Convention Concerning Reciprocal and Voluntary Emigration in the 1920s, I explore collaboration between international and national agents in disambiguating multistranded affiliations of certain subjects in pursuit of homogeneous nation-states.