Evacuation versus Repatriation: The Polish-Ukrainian Population Exchange, 1944–6

Turkiye ile Yunanistan arasinda nufus mubadelesi sorunu Balkan Savaslari sirasinda ortaya cikmisti. Savasin sonunda iki ulke arasinda bu konuyla ilgili bir antlasma yapilmissa da Birinci Dunya Savasi nedeniyle nufus degisimi yapilamamisti. Birinci Dunya Savasindan sonra Anadolu’da baslayan Turk-Yunan savasinin Yunanlilar tarafindan kaybedilmesinden sonra Anadolu’dan Yunanistan’a Rum gocu basladigi gibi, Yunanistan’dan da Anadolu’ya Musluman gocu baslamisti. Turkiye ile Birinci Dunya Savasi’nin galibi olan devletler arasinda imzalanan Lozan Antlasmasi da iki ulke arasinda karsilikli nufus mubadelesi yapilmasini karara baglamistir. Turk ve Rum nufusun karsilikli mubadelesi 1923-1930 yillari arasinda gerceklestirilmistir. Bu calismada, Turk-Yunan savasinin bitiminden Lozan Antlasmasi’nin Turkiye ve Yunanistan parlamentolarinda tasdik edilerek yururluge girmesine kadar gecen surede, Yunanistan’dan Turkiye’ye goc etmek zorunda kalan Muslumanlarin Yunanistan’da maruz kaldiklari kotu muamele ortaya konmaya calisilmistir. Arastirma yontemi olarak ilgili literatur ve donemin Istanbul basinindan Tanin ve Tevhid-i Efkâr gazetelerine yansiyan haberlerin taranmasi tercih edilmistir. Arastirma sonucunda Yunanistan’in muhacirlere karsi olan tutumu ve Turkiye’nin aldigi onlemler tespit edilmistir.

This is a challenging book with far-reaching implications for our understanding of the Holocaust and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Based upon a careful and judicious reading of the most important literature on the Holocaust, Donald Bloxham seeks to situate the mass-murder of European Jewry between 1941 and 1945 within the broader history of European genocide from 1875 to 1945. In doing so, he takes issue with Steven Katz, and those who insist that the Jewish Holocaust was a unique event in human history, and argues instead that the full meaning of the final solution can only be understood if placed in the larger context of genocide that characterised much of European history from the Congress of Berlin through to the end of the Second World War. The crux of Bloxham's argument is that, with the disintegration and eventual collapse of the three great multi-national empires that dominated the map of central and eastern Europe—the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires—and the emergence of new states based upon the principle of ethnic domination, the status of all religious and ethnic minorities, particularly in the shatterzones where the three empires abutted against each other, became increasingly problematic. Those minorities that were suspected either of having loyalties to other territorial states outside the state in which they lived, or of harbouring hopes of becoming part of a state in which their ethnic group was dominant, were particularly vulnerable. For such minorities, the only answer was expulsion and repatriation to states in which the ethnic groups to which they belonged were dominant. Generally this was to be accomplished through population transfer, but in those cases where population transfer was not feasible the answer was often genocide.

The half century before World War I saw mass population movements from Russia to the Middle East. One of the largest of these was the migration of Muslims (muhajirs) from Russia’s North Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire. This chapter focuses on one strand of this mass migration: after anticolonial unrest in the region of Chechnya in 1864, the Russian and Ottoman governments cooperated in resettling thousands of Chechen Muslims in the Ottoman domains. The chapter juxtaposes and analyzes three documents: 1865 reports by the Russian ambassador in Istanbul, Nikolai Ignat’ev, and by the chief of staff of the Caucasus Army, Aleksei Kartsov; and Chechen migrant leader Jantemir’s 1870 petition in Arabic to the Ottoman Interior Ministry. These documents offer insights into how officials in the two empires negotiated the resettlement of Chechens and the migrants’ experience of being moved.

Only some of the guns of the Great War were silenced on 11 November 1918. War continued to rage for four more years throughout Eastern Europe and Asia Minor. The day the Great War finally came to an end was 24 July 1923. On the shores of Lake Geneva, Turkey and her former enemies signed the Treaty of Lausanne, ending the state of hostilities that had continued since 1914. This book frames that story of Lausanne in terms of a new and disturbing phenomenon—the civilianization of war. During the Great War and in its aftermath, war mutated. The distinction between military and civilian targets was erased, and non-combatants became the chief victims of war. Until then, wars ended with an exchange of prisoners of war. Lausanne was the first peace treaty which required an exchange of civilian populations. Over one million Greek Orthodox men and women lost their right to live in Turkey, and half that number of Muslims were deported forcibly from Greece. In the Treaty of Lausanne, the right to citizenship was defined by religion, and religion alone. There, on the shores of Lake Geneva, ethnic cleansing entered into international law. This book provides an account of how this happened. It traces humanitarian efforts to save civilian life in the whirlwind of war and looks at how the Great Powers tried to shore up their damaged imperial position in the early 1920s. It shows too how the peace settlement buried the hopes of the Armenian people for a homeland in Anatolia, and the way appeasement was born in the wake of Lausanne. In sum, Lausanne was a pyrrhic victory for the peacemakers.

"Making Minorities History: population transfer in twentieth-century Europe." Social History, 43(2), pp. 284–285

Since the end of the Cold War, painful historical events that could not be openly discussed during Communism have become more salient in public debates throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The border changes and forced population transfers that occurred after the First and the Second World War, and more specifically the plight of the civilians who experienced these traumatic events, have been one of the most contentious issues discussed in the new democratic regimes. The enduring tensions surrounding the situation of the Hungarian minorities are another striking example of the contemporary political consequences of these ‘wounded histories’. The redrawing of Hungary’s borders in the wake of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which resulted in the loss of a large part of its former territory and population,1 is still portrayed as a ‘historical injustice’ by some parts of the Hungarian society and political leaders. This perception justifies ‘symbolic policies’ aimed at reinforcing the link with the diaspora, as was made clear as early as 1989 when the Hungarian Constitution was amended to include the following statement of support: ‘The Republic of Hungary bears a sense of responsibility for the fate of Hungarians living outside its border and shall promote and foster their relations with Hungary.’

Since the end of the Cold War, painful historical events that could not be openly discussed during Communism have become more salient in public debates throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The border changes and forced population transfers that occurred after the First and the Second World War, and more specifically the plight of the civilians who experienced these traumatic events, have been one of the most contentious issues discussed in the new democratic regimes. The enduring tensions surrounding the situation of the Hungarian minorities are another striking example of the contemporary political consequences of these ‘wounded histories’. The redrawing of Hungary’s borders in the wake of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which resulted in the loss of a large part of its former territory and population,1 is still portrayed as a ‘historical injustice’ by some parts of the Hungarian society and political leaders. This perception justifies ‘symbolic policies’ aimed at reinforcing the link with the diaspora, as was made clear as early as 1989 when the Hungarian Constitution was amended to include the following statement of support: ‘The Republic of Hungary bears a sense of responsibility for the fate of Hungarians living outside its border and shall promote and foster their relations with Hungary.’

Since the beginning of the turbulent twentieth century the changes, both in location and function, of European frontiers have been dramatic. The old multinational empires in Europe were showing signs of serious strain before 1914, and were already disintegrating in the Balkans. Even the multinational British state was on the verge of breaking up, threatened by Irish secession, because of the failure to establish a ‘British Isles identity’? In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, radically new frontiers were drawn, influenced by the interests of the victors and by the principle of the self-determination of nations, in Central and Eastern Europe. The Second World War again resulted in boundary redrawing in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the partition of Germany. Transfer of populations on a massive scale accompanied this reallocation of territory, producing a greater coincidence of national and state frontiers. Territorial questions were then frozen for a 40-year period, during which time an ‘Iron Curtain’ separated two incompatible political and economic systems.KeywordsEuropean UnionEuropean Union Member StateIron CurtainEuropean Union StateEuropean Union EnlargementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Conditions of Democracy in German Austria and Hungary, 1918–1919

At the end of the Second World War, mass forced migration and population movement accompanied the collapse of Nazi Germany's occupation and the start of Soviet domination in East-Central Europe. Hugo Service examines the experience of Poland's new territories, exploring the Polish Communist attempt to 'cleanse' these territories in line with a nationalist vision, against the legacy of brutal wartime occupations of Central and Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The expulsion of over three million Germans was intertwined with the arrival of millions of Polish settlers. Around one million German citizens were categorised as 'native Poles' and urged to adopt a Polish national identity. The most visible traces of German culture were erased. Jewish Holocaust survivors arrived and, for the most part, soon left again. Drawing on two case studies, the book exposes how these events varied by region and locality.

NATO Enlargement—Was There a Promise?

The border shifts and population exchanges between Central and East European states agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference continue to reverberate in the culture and politics of those countries. Focusing on Poland, this article proposes the term “border trouble” to interpret the politicized split in memory that has run through Polish culture since the end of the Second World War. Border trouble is a form of cultural trauma that transcends binaries of perpetrator/victim and oppressor/oppressed; it is also a tool for analyzing the ways in which spatial imagination, memory, and identity interact in visual and literary narratives. A close analysis of four recent feature films demonstrates the emergence of a visual grammar of cosmopolitan memory and identity in relation to borderland spaces. Wojciech Smarzowski’s Róża (“Rose,” 2011) and Agnieszka Holland’s Pokot (“Spoor,” 2017) are both set in territories that were transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. Wołyń (“Volhynia,” released internationally as “Hatred,” 2016) and W ciemności (“In Darkness,” 2011), also directed by Smarzowski and Holland respectively, are set in regions that were under Polish administration before the war but were transferred to Soviet Ukraine in 1945. All four productions break new ground in the memorialization of the post-war legacy in Poland. They deconstruct hitherto dominant discourses of simultaneity and ethnic homogeneity, engaging in Poland’s wars of symbols as a third voice: anti-nationalist, but also refusing to essentialize cosmopolitan identity. They show the evolution of border trouble in response to contemporary political and cultural developments.

In 1923, Greece and Turkey entered into the Treaty of Lausanne to regulate the orderly transfer of Greek and Turkish populations displaced by the First World War. The treaty established a Mixed Arbitral Tribunal and a Mixed Commission to deal with property issues ensuing from the transfer of populations. However, a dispute arose in the implementation of the treaty which was ultimately referred to the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) for an advisory opinion. In its decision, the PCIJ sketched some of the main features of the international legal personality of international organizations and articulated the basic elements of the implied powers doctrine, thereby initiating the path towards consolidating the role of international organizations as international actors in their own right with powers beyond those strictly attributed to them by their establishing treaties. Some authors have assessed the performance of the Court in critical terms.

This paper describes contemporary changes in marriage, relationships and family in European populations, and then their evolution from the last decade of the twentieth century till present day, as well as various forms and types, in which plurality of contemporary partnership unions is revealed. The other goal of this supplement was to provide a wider theoretical-hypothetical, explanatory framework for understanding what is happening in population (on appearance level) but now in the context of contemporary societies. Three variables are introduced: macro (paradigm of modernization, namely social, i.e. structural and cultural changes), micro (paradigm: resources-limitations-behavior) and mezzo (differences in social and demographic development of countries of North, Western, South and Central and Eastern Europe (former socialistic countries in transition). Cautious predictions on what could be expected in future concerning: empirical documented differences of living arrangements of European populations of the West, but also of the East, as well as relative demographic consequences. On the macro level (paradigm structure/culture) the responses depend on the rate the two main social processes will develop: 1) development of "European society", and 2) the birth of "world" (global) society. Most of the authors conclude on the convergence of social and demographic development on the territory of Western, but not Eastern Europe (and especially the Balkans). This conclusion concerns even the countries of the South European region, considering that it is uncertain in which direction and speed will their integration into the European Union develop. With regards to the trend of decreasing fertility, a continuance of existing secular tendencies may be expected in future as well, even on the whole European territory, and that it will be supported by social changes of (post) modernization, individualization and rational behavior, so that it will become a general model. For now it is evident that convergence of social and demographic development may be demonstrated on the territory of Western but not Eastern Europe as well (and especially of the Balkans). The later is also valid when the Southern European region is in question, considering that it is uncertain in which direction and at what speed will their integration into the European Union develop. With regards to the trend of decreasing fertility, a continuance of tendencies may be expected in future as well, on the whole European territory, and that it will be supported by social changes of (post) modernization, individualization and rational behavior, so that in most cases parents will satisfy their needs with only one child. On the contrary, family forms and life styles will probably reflect differences between countries of the North and Western Europe in future as well on the one hand, and Southern on the other hand, and Central and Eastern Europe (former socialistic countries) on the third hand. Readiness for marriage, partnership styles, as well as aspirations to forming families will depend on individual decisions, which will result from personal resources and limiting factors (macro, mezzo and micro). On the aggregate level of population, the result will be polarization between non-family and family households. Social conditions of foregoing modernization (increase of risks, job uncertainty, country prosperity crisis) as well as globalization will probably contribute to increasing the polarization process. The same conclusion may be derived for the group of former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (and the Balkans) as well, whose key problem now is finishing the process of transformation towards market economy.

The Cold War: A World History