 Each promoted the pan-ethnic idea that these governments were only acquiring lands that had always been inhabited by ethnic Germans.The history of late-comers to the nation-state model, such as those arising in the Near East and south-eastern Europe out of the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, as well as those arising out of the former USSR, is marked by inter-ethnic conflicts.Such conflicts usually occur within multi-ethnic states, as opposed to between them, as in other regions of the world.