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  • Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe
  • Hal Elliott Wert
Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe. By Benjamin Lieberman. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2006. ISBN 1-56663-646-9. Maps. Notes. Index. Pp. xv, 396. $27.50.

Thomas Masaryk, the first President of the newly independent Czechoslovakia in 1919, bluntly remarked: "Europe is a laboratory built on a graveyard." Masaryk, who died in 1937, noted this unpleasant fact prior to the Holocaust and the widespread ethnic cleansing that swept across Europe at the end of World War II. Perhaps he had a premonition of things to come, a feeling, to paraphrase the Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki, that all of Europe's darkness was boiling down to irreducible black goo. Sixty-three years later, at the millennium, Mark Mazower challenged our "standard interpretation" of Europe's twentieth century by dubbing Europe the Dark Continent. If any doubt remained as to the continent's persistent ugly underbelly, that fantasy has been dispelled by Terrible Fate. Benjamin Lieberman clearly demonstrates that the Holocaust, while the culminating ethnic slaughter, must be understood in the wider context of two hundred years of ethnic turmoil which continues to be a central problem from the former Yugoslavia to Chechnya. The old question of what is Europe, where is Europe, and who is European remains pertinent today. Lieberman begins his convincing analysis by focusing on the rise of nineteenth-century nationalism within the pluralistic Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. Nationalism pushed groups of people to accentuate differences, to see those with whom they had lived peaceably for centuries as "others," as people who posed a threat. These centrifugal forces weakened the three empires by touching off repeated crises. World War I was the coup de grâce.

Many European leaders in the teens and twenties came to consider forced population transfers as solutions to the problem at the heart of human conflict and slaughter—the inability of humans to live with those that were outside their tribe, religion, or group. Woodrow Wilson, a Southern segregationist, along with many leading American academics who accompanied him to the Paris Peace Conference, upgraded ethnicity as the basis of the nation state. While Wilson proposed many brilliant and progressive solutions to the world's problems, self-determination based upon ethnicity was not one of them. The Versailles settlement attempted to restructure Central Europe on ethnic lines, but instead furthered Europe's problems by leaving minority populations within the borders of the newly created states, hybrid states with little or no future. This problem could only have been avoided by forcing huge population transfers or creating even more and smaller states. The saison states, as Hitler called them, these orphans of Versailles, were left on their own to solve inherently difficult ethnic problems. For example, what place, what future, was there for Jews, Germans, Ukrainians, and White Russians, now second class citizens or worse, in a new Polish state? Minorities fought hard to maintain their identity and either longed to be in another state or have a state of their own or create a state within a state, separate and hopefully more equal. Like the empires that proceeded them these new, weak, inexperienced states were pulled apart by the centrifugal forces of ethnicity and nationalism. The solutions [End Page 584] imposed by the Paris peacemakers did not bring about the stability they sought, but tragically brought about war, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.

Terrible Fate is an important, well-written book that places the Holocaust in a wider perspective and rightly sees ethnic cleansing as a key component in any explanation of the making of modern Europe. Lieberman claims that his "new history" is not just a more accurate reading of the past, but that it challenges the exclusive national histories that have exacerbated ethnic problems. These new histories, he idealistically claims, can play a role in helping people to redefine themselves, a way "to look beyond their own people's suffering to acknowledge the tragedies of their neighbors and former neighbors." Only time will tell if a broader understanding of the past will help the center to hold, when, as W. B. Yeats reminded...

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