Scholars have generally taken a “diffusionist” view of the rise of national standard languages—the state pushes for the wider adoption of such languages, and other forces (principally economic modernization) facilitate its diffusion. But such a view is too mechanistic and Eurocentric, and an examination of other, less-familiar cases lends itself to a revised interpretation. Amid Western imperialism and the rise of nationalism in East Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a massive shift in language practices took place between about 1870 and 1950, as regional hegemony shifted from China to Japan. Bound for two millennia by their common use of Classical Chinese, elite literati in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam all moved away from that abstruse lingua franca and turned to the creation of new national vernaculars. I argue for a more “integrationist” perspective: language nationalization was a state-led and top-down process directed at remaking society.

This paper examines changing German and Korean policies towards transborder coethnics (Germans in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and Koreans in Japan and China) during the high Cold War and post-Cold War eras. The paper contributes to the emerging literature on transborder forms of membership and belonging by highlighting and explaining the selective, variable, contingent, contested, and revocable nature of states’ embrace of transborder coethnics. The explanation highlights the relationship of transborder populations to predecessor polities; changing geopolitical contexts and domestic political conjunctures; the constitutive, group-making – and group-unmaking – power of state categorization practices; and the enduring institutional legacies and unintended consequences of such practices.

The Hanwoo cattle of Korea are probably one of the oldest autochthonous breeds in the world that are known to have populated a specific geographic region for over 2000 years. They are also a unique case of a domestic animal genetic resource (DAGR) that after having followed the classical tendency of dangerously and rapidly decreasing numbers (I 740 000 in 1940 down to 393 000 in 1950) moved slowly back to near 2 000 000 in 1993, following an exemplary and voluntary conservation programme and a well organized national improvement scheme. This wellplanned selection scheme made it possible for the average live weight of Hanwoo cattle to nearly double their measure adult weight since the first in official controls were made in the early seventies: sires from 290 kg to 477 kg and cows from 246 kg to 309 kg in a more than 30 year period. This is a unique reference case of D.A.G.R. conservation, of domestic preservation, development, and economic use within the traditional production ten-ns and management conditions of a specific geo-cultural environment.