ABSTRACT
The shape of dialectal continua in Central Europe as it currently exists was established mainly during and in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. However, the earlier Balkan Wars and Great War also strongly contributed to it. Ethnic cleansing (expulsions, deportations, forced evacuations, forced emigration, or forced assimilation) and genocide (“massacres”) occurred in the course of “normal politics” in the region during the first half of the twentieth century, as widely accepted by central Europe’s leaders and populations (see Maps 19, 26–29). Some elements of the politics of demographic engineering were a continuation of processes pursued during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Map 11). This happened in the wake of the Habsburg Reconquista of the Danubian basin, during the southward colonial-like expansion of the Russian Empire around the Black Sea and toward the Mediterranean, and due to the creation of ethnoreligious and ethnolinguistic nation-states in the Balkans. These three processes invariably occurred at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. Likewise, ethnic cleansing did not cease in Cold War Europe either (see Map 30). For most of the citizens of the Soviet bloc countries, it was impossible to cross the heavily militarized and closely guarded Iron Curtain that separated the two opposed political and military postwar blocs. However, it did not prevent the periodic, agreed upon or unilateral “population transfers.” This euphemistic term announced that under the provisions of international law such inhuman decisions were legal, and many commentators actually saw “population transfer” as an instrument for furthering political stability and the observance of human rights. After the end of communism, alongside the breakups of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union, it took the horrors of the wars of Yugoslav succession to convince the international community and the United Nations, in the mid-1990s, that population transfer is a crime against humanity, whose proper name is that of “ethnic cleansing.” Unfortunately, history is no teacher. A recent surge in acts of ethnic cleansing in Europe was triggered by the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the Russian attack on eastern Ukraine, which stalemated into a position war. This war continues to this day (2021).
