In international law, there is no such thing as an officially accepted definition of a national minority. The lack of a clear definition not only reflects the well-known combination of objective criteria to decide what national minorities are, but also it is dependent on the subjective will by the minorities themselves to be recognized as such. In order to understand these problems of definition the present article attempts to draw a large picture of their historical legal protection by considering that each national minority identity has its own genetic character in the different modern state nation-building policies