Making Minorities History: population transfer in twentieth-century Europe

While the twentieth century came to be known as the century of the refugee,1 the numbers of stateless persons on the European continent fluctuated during its course. Peaks occurred at key moments, including the end of the First World War, the end of the Second World War and the collapse of communism. This does not mean that people did not flee their states of origin due to ‘a well founded fear of persecution’ (to use the 1951 United Nations definition)2 at other times during the course of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, at the three moments identified above, the numbers of refugees reached peaks due to a combination of factors, including imperial and state collapse. The first of these periods consisted of the First World War and its aftermath, the era in which the refugee and the concept of such a person developed, especially in the early 1920s. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 represents an important point in this process, both because of the sheer numbers of people forced out of their homeland towards Syria and because of the existence of a now large historiography on this subject.3 It is estimated that between 1.5 million and 2 million people fled their homes in southeastern Anatolia towards the Syrian desert, of whom about half died, while others moved westwards.4 But the Armenian Genocide simply represented the most dramatic example of a process occurring throughout Eastern Europe, in particular in the era of the First World War.

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.

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

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.

Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe is an interesting contribution to the discussion of neutrality in scholarship and politics. It is especially useful as a contribution to the analysis of the relationship of science, culture, and politics during an era of strong division. Because the book focuses on the period after the First World War, it offers an interesting prehistory of issues that became prominent during the Second World War and the Cold War. During all of these periods, changes in international politics influenced the relationship of scholarship, culture, and politics.The main focus of the book is on the smaller European states that adhered strictly to a neutral position during the First World War. Important concepts connected to “neutrality” include “impartiality,” “objectivity” and “internationalism,” which are covered in the book's fifteen essays, divided into four thematic parts dealing with internationalism, science, culture, and politics. The starting point for the volume is that neutrality as a cultural, scientific and political resource was in itself a construct that was given meanings and used rhetorically for a variety of new purposes. The concept endowed smaller countries and intellectuals with a new kind of role in European (and even world-scale) scientific, political, and cultural discussions. The aim of the smaller countries was to become neutral mediators between the former belligerent states in order to facilitate international cooperation and enhance international scientific cooperation. The period after the First World War is defined as an era of emerging nation-states, but the main actors in the discourse were primarily individuals, small groups, and organizations.The book discusses the intersections of science, culture, and politics before and during the negotiations that led to the controversial Treaty of Versailles. The talks helped neutrality to gain a new appeal, spurring small, neutral countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway to mediate in the complex situation. The war and its aftermath introduced modern nation-states as the basis for a new world order. Although the actors analyzed in the volume were committed to internationalism, they ultimately reinforced nationalism as representatives of nation-states.Before the First World War, Germany was a scientific powerhouse and closely connected to wider scientific developments in Europe. After the war began and Germany became a defeated power in 1918, the demand to leave Germany out of scientific circles, such as the International Research Council (IRC)—especially in the wake of the “Proclamation of the Civilized World” in 1914—caused a complex situation in European scientific and political spheres. No matter how important the cause of internationalism and peace may have been, remaining neutral in politics and science proved exceedingly difficult. This was true of Dutch relations with Germany and scientific organizations such as the IRC. Denmark met difficulties in enhancing science on the basis of internationalism. In Sweden and Norway, the Nobel Prize institution gave both countries more power within the scientific community. Sweden, which had strongly emphasized its neutral and apolitical role in foreign policy, met the challenge when it wanted to gain a role as a mediator of the new era based on peaceful scientific, technological, and economic progress. The demands and goals of objectivity and impartiality in the case of the Nobel Prize were challenged when international ties in science and culture were severed. Swedish science had been strongly oriented toward Germany, and it had to reassess its Nobel Prize policy under the pressure of divided scientific values.These issues pertained not only to science and politics but also to “European” ideas and idealism. Pan-Europeanism, Zionism, and scientific debate created the basis of cultural encounters in Europe in the 1920s. The aim to restore peace and to solve the problems caused by the war—such as the problem of refugees when millions of people were left without their countries and citizenship—became the main aim of the international actors. The First World War was both a military disaster and a humanitarian catastrophe confronting the League of Nations and individual actors. In the process, neutral Scandinavian countries had a role to play.Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe is an enlightening contribution to the international and transnational interaction of scientists, organizations, and smaller states in the interwar period. By analyzing themes such as neutrality, objectivity, impartiality, and internationalism in the context of a divided world, the volume sheds valuable light on themes that resurfaced during the Cold War. The book is well worth reading for those interested in Cold War–era developments in the fields of science, culture, and politics.

While population transfers were an inseparable part of European policy in the twentieth century, providing compensation for immovable property left behind faced formidable legal, political and economic challenges. Compensation schemes frequently failed to be implemented or left claims of significant groups of migrants or their descendants unsettled, often for several decades. The Jewish minorities, present in most European countries for many centuries and featuring a unique combination of ethnic, religious and nationality related factors were often amongst the most severely impacted. A comparative analysis of the legal frameworks of prominent cases in twentieth century Europe – the population exchanges between Greece and Türkiye in 1923, the post-war border shifts of Poland and the resulting Bug River claims, expulsions from former German territories after World War II and the loss of Carpathian Ruthenia by Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union – focuses on finding factors impacting Jewish communities, common solutions and evolutionary trends.

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.

In the population transfers that occurred at the end of the Second World War in Central and Eastern Europe, the case of Poland is unique, as mass population movements there accompanied a westward shift of the entire national territory by over 200 kilometres. While it gave up its eastern border region (Kresy) to the western republics of the USSR (Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania), Poland drifted towards the west into the formerly German areas of Silesia and Pomerania. In the history of population displacements in this country, this example represents the most accomplished of the great post-war ethno-demographic surgeries, as Poles evacuated from the new Soviet eastern territories settled into the annexed western territories from where Germans had been expelled. But the history of this enormous movement has until now been unequally explored; research concerning the new western territories has long been conducted and flourished, while the history of population displacements in the eastern areas has yet to be written. Apart from the significant and long-established taboo on this chapter of Polish-Soviet relations, different explanations can be given as to why historians have taken less interest in the population transfers in this particular area. In the international context, the settlement of the new border and subsequent population transfers were considered a solution to an old problem, rather than a post-war question.

Пам’ять про Першу світову війну у монументальному мистецтві Польщі

The largely incongruent political and ethnic maps of Europe have meant that the competing claims of distinct ethnic groups to self‐determination have been among the most prominent sources of conflicts within and across state boundaries. Striving to achieve internal stability and external security in the face of such demands, many states have sought to minimise the political impact of ethnic minorities with an affiliation to other, often neighbouring, states or parts of their population by expelling them or exchanging them against ethnic kinfolk of their own. Such forced population transfers in Europe are primarily linked with two phenomena, which in themselves are interrelated: the collapse of (multi‐national) states and the redrawing of state boundaries. From the First and Second Balkan Wars, to World Wars One and Two, and finally to the violent break‐up of Yugoslavia, Europe has seen numerous expulsions and exchanges of populations. Against this background, this article discusses in how far ethnic cleansing and its consequences contribute to the internal stability and external security of the states affected by such demographic changes. Following a conceptual clarification of forced population transfers, a number of cases of forced population transfers in twentieth century Europe are outlined. This is followed by an examination and summary of the similarities and differences between these cases from the perspective of common problems before suggesting any lessons that can be learned from the European experience of forced population transfers for developing policies conducive to establishing conditions under which forced population transfers, once they have occurred, can contribute to the internal stability and external security of the states involved, rather than become a source of constant crises. Thus, the article does not attempt to provide a normative assessment of forced population transfers as a whole or of any individual case or make an argument for or against them as mechanisms for resolving self‐determination conflicts. Rather, the focus is on the pragmatic aspects of this phenomenon, which continues to occur in Europe and elsewhere. In other words, the article seeks to establish under what conditions, if any, forced population transfers can contribute to states' internal stability and external security, i.e., whether they can adequately address the root causes of self‐determination conflicts that they are supposed to resolve.

This introductory chapter explores French political philosopher Raymond Aron's thesis of a democratic stabilization of Western Europe, which he believed had occurred since the Second World War. Compared with the destructive struggles of ideology, class, and ethnicity that had marked the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, Aron argued that a new form of industrial society had emerged in the fifteen years since the war, characterized by representative democratic institutions and guarantees of personal freedom. Stability was not, of course, guaranteed. And yet what Aron termed the démocraties stabilisées or pacifiées that had taken root in Western Europe since the Second World War were more than the by-product of the political immobilism imposed on Europe, west and east, by the Cold War. In Aron's view, they marked the coming of age of a new model of Western European government and society, which had not so much resolved the divisions of the past as rendered them obsolete through a combination of economic prosperity, effective governmental action, and social compromise. The book then studies the nature and development of democracy, as well as its limitations, in Europe between the end of the Second World War and the political and social upheavals of the later 1960s and early 1970s.

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.’

This book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe - both West and East - to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Muller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired. Muller pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age.

Despite the proliferation of diverse historical research on commercial sex in recent years and the recognition of the continued political salience of the topic, prostitution has remained on the margins of the historiography of Europe. This special issue seeks to shift prostitution into the very centre of European history. With its wide geographical focus from Italy to the USSR via Sweden, Germany, occupied Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the international stage of the United Nations, this issue encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences. Historiography on prostitution in Europe has predominantly focused on state-regulated prostitution,which was the dominant approach to managing commercial sex in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State regulation combined police surveillance, the registration of women selling sex (or suspected of doing so), and compulsory medical examinations for registered women, as well as various restrictions on personal movement and freedom. The articles in this issue shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution to examine the ruptures and continuities in state, administrative and policing practices following the end of widespread legal toleration. The varied chronology extends the parameters of existing historiography and explores how states grappled to understand, or impose control over, the commercial sex industry following the far-reaching social, economic and political upheaval of the Second World War. In this introduction, the editors sketch out key trends in state approaches to commercial sex in twentieth century Europe, focusing specifically on the law, policing practices and the gendered politics of labour.