Making Minorities History: Population Transfer in Twentieth-Century Europe

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How in the space of a generation did the ethnographic map of Europe go from resembling a Pollock painting to looking like a Rothko? In other words: what ever happened to Europe's national minorities? Making Minorities History (MMH) seeks to address this question by looking at the development of international schemes for the compulsory resettlement of national minorities in twentieth-century Europe. It shows how states attempted to rid the Continent of its 'ethnographic misfits' and problem populations not only through unilateral action but increasingly through multilateral channels, under the umbrella of international law and in the name of international peace and reconciliation.The main focus of the project is on the concept of 'population transfer' - the idea that, in order to construct homogeneous nation-states (and thereby minimize tensions between them), national minorities could be relocated en masse in an orderly way with minimal economic and political disruption as long as there was sufficient planning, bureaucratic rigour and international support. Tracing the rise and fall of the concept from its emergence in the late 1890s through its 1940s zenith and its geopolitical and historiographical afterlife during the Cold War, MMH explores the historical context and intellectual milieu in which 'population transfer' developed from being initially regarded as a marginal idea propagated by a handful of political fantasists and extreme nationalists into an acceptable and 'progressive' instrument of state policy, as amenable to authoritarian regimes and fascist dictators as it was to bourgeois democracies and Nobel Peace Prize winners. As well as providing background on the key thinkers, politicians, international celebrities, political movements and regimes most closely associated with the idea, MMH also offers concrete examples (Greece, South Tyrol, Czechoslovakia, Poland) wherever a 'population transfer' was put into practice. MMH demonstrates that widespread international acceptance of 'population transfer' provides yet further evidence of a crisis of liberalism in mid-twentieth century Europe. Faced with seemingly irreconcilable disputes over national minorities and the dangers these posed for the peace and stability of the Continent, a threatened liberal order sought a morally and politically acceptable solution - short of precipitate expulsion or outright physical extermination - for dealing with these problem populations, and in doing so recast forcible resettlement as a humanitarian act. MMH shows, however, that the significance of the European embrace of the concept of 'population transfer' extends beyond the frontiers of ideology or nation and bears witness to the almost limitless faith that the mid-century mindset had in the capacity of the modern bureaucratic state, equipped with the advances of modern science and technology, to iron out the imperfections of Europe's 'untidy' historical development.