The Borderlands Region

The broad swath of territory running from the Baltic into Central and Eastern Europe, then into Southeastern Europe and Asia Minor, has been the site of some of the most sustained and intense ethnic violence in the modern era. This area, diverse in so many ways, had two common features: it was the meeting point of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, and it was populated by a multiplicity of religious, ethnic, and national groups. Episodes of intercommunal ethnic and religious violence did occur before 1848, and minorities had often been repressed in this region. The premodern past of the three long-standing empires (the German, newly unified in 1871, was the latecomer) cannot be idealized as an epoch of harmony among diverse peoples. But empires were, by definition, multinational and multidenominational, and most emperors accepted the diversity of the populations within their domains. Long periods of relative coexistence prevailed among the multiple ethnic, national, and religious groups.

In contrast, the modern history of the borderlands area has been marked by more frequent, more systematic, and more deadly episodes of both intercommunal and state-sanctioned violence among diverse groups. Some of these episodes developed into sustained and deadly assaults on defined populations and have come to serve as symbols for violence in the twentieth century. Two of the genocides of the modern era, those of the Armenians and the Jews, occurred within the borderlands area. Numerous episodes of what we now call “ethnic cleansing” (where ethnicity was at times closely associated with religion) emerged in the nineteenth century, particularly with the expulsion of Muslims from areas in Southeastern Europe that acquired their independence from the Ottomans and from the Caucasus as the Russian Empire extended its power. Ethnic cleansing accelerated in the twentieth century with the population “exchange” – as it was called in the diplomacy of its day – of Muslims and Greeks in the eastern Mediterranean. Nearly 1.2 million Greeks were forced out of their ancestral homelands in Asia Minor and the same occurred to about 800,000 Turks who had lived for centuries in the territory of a newly expanded Greece. The Great Powers legitimated this policy – and, in effect, the Armenian Genocide – in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The Greek and Turkish ethnic cleansings were the largest of a series of forced population movements that occurred in the devastating wake of World War I and the Versailles Peace Treaty, which sought to make nation-states out of shattered empires. Everywhere ethnic cleansing was accompanied by high levels of violence, often promoted by states.

The genocide of the Jews was the worst but not the only form of ethnic violence perpetrated by a powerful German Empire under Nazi control. Roma and Sinti also endured genocide, while Poles and other Slavs suffered immensely under the force of Nazi racial ideology. In the wake of the Nazi defeat, new waves of ethnic cleansing, once more sanctioned by the Great Powers and again accompanied by communal violence, occurred all over Central and Eastern Europe. Communist power largely (though by no means completely) suppressed ethnic violence for nearly forty-five years, but with the collapse of communism, it has reemerged with a vengeance in the Balkans and Caucasus. Even areas that have not been marked by intense violence have encountered the seemingly intractable problems of diversity. In some postcommunist states, for example, citizenship has been defined along “blood” lines, leading to the exclusion from the polity of large numbers of other people, such as Russians in Estonia.