Ethnic Cleansing and the Remaking of Europe

Historically Speaking September/October 2006 Ethnic Cleansing and the Remaking of Europe Benjamin Lieberman The broaderhistory ofthe violent redrawing ofEurope's ethnic andreligious map has been overlooked until recently. In a recent class on European history and politics , I asked students to locate Danzig, the birthplace of Günter Grass, the 1999 Nobel Prize winner in literature and the most influential postwar German novelist. I next asked my students to locate Gdansk, the city where Lech Walesa, the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize winner, gained fame as die leader of the Solidarity trade union. Finally, I asked diem to determine the distance between Danzig and Gdansk. This was of course a trick question because Danzig and Gdansk are one and the same place or, rather, more accurately, the predominandy German city where Grass once lived became the Polish city of Walesa's work as a union leader. This trick question introduced a key point about modern Europe's map. My students at the start of the course did not know many of the details and major themes of Europe's recent past, but they still basically accepted die notion that Europe's economy and political systems had changed gready. It did not surprise them to learn of rapid economic and political change. However, much of Europe has experienced further profound change—a fundamental rupture with the past. Across much of the continent , the residents of many towns and cities speak different languages or practice different religions than the people who once lived in the very same neighborhoods, on the same streets, and sometimes in the very same houses. Gdansk, therefore, is not unique in the radical shift in its population's identity. The lands from Germany east across Central and Eastern Europe and into Western Asia make up a border region of many Gdansks. With a few exceptions this history of violence and expulsion is often forgotten. The Holocaust, of course, has been the subject of growing scholarly and public interest for several decades. There is also a growing awareness of the Armenian Genocide, though historical inquiry on this tragedy remains oddly underdeveloped some ninety years after the crime, probably because so much of the public discourse has focused on whether there was genocide rather than on such key topics as the causes, motives, and execution of genocide. Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia also gained attention during the 1990s. However, the Armenian Genocide, die Holocaust, and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia are more than a sequence of atrocities. They are also part of a broader process of the remaking of much of Europe through ethnic cleansing and related violence. This broader history of the violent redrawing of Europe's ethnic and religious map has been overlooked until recendy for several reasons. For a start, European history has traditionally focused on the history of individual nations, and historians have been far more likely to look at the past of Europe's many nations, rather than at the groups driven out of modern national homelands. These experiences do not fit easily into prevailing historical themes or narratives . The flight, expulsion, and transfer of some 12 to 14 million or even more Germans at the end of the Second World War, for example, make up the largest case of involuntary migration in modern European history. Yet this case was until recendy largely overlooked in American universities where courses focused on the causes of the Nazi rise to power and then more recendy on the Holocaust These topics unquestionably demand the utmost attention, but it is also true that the history of German suffering fits very uneasily within a narrative formed around German aggression. Finally, the Cold War further obscured Europe's history of ethnic cleansing to the extent that experts and students in the West saw die East as a "block" and focused on bipolar relations rather than on ethnic and religious relations within the region east of West Germany. A history of European ethnic cleansing must begin before nationalist movements achieved success in Central and Eastern Europe. Before the rise of nation-states, several large empires—the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and Austria Hungary—ruled most of the region from Central Europe through Western...