In this work Erwin Viefhaus analyses the development of the agreement on the protection of minority rights after the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Viefhaus explaines the direct causal link between the norm of the nation-state and the 'minority problem'. He concludes that the emergence and consolidation of sovereign nation-states and the renewed problematization of the minority question were interdependent. The origin of the new problematization of the minority question was an attempt to enforce the political principle of the uniform nation-state under the slogan of national self-determination, a political principle of the nineteenth century.