Non­fic­tion

Ter­ri­ble Fate: Eth­nic Cleans­ing in the Mak­ing of Mod­ern Europe

Ben­jamin Lieberman
  • Review
By – December 19, 2011

The land­scape of Europe, from Turkey and Greece to East­ern Europe, is lit­tered with the rem­nants of once vibrant eth­nic and reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties that had called these places home. Over the past two cen­turies eth­nic cleans­ing has remade the map of Europe and the Mid­dle East. In most cas­es, the his­to­ry of the vio­lence and expul­sions is almost for­got­ten. The Holo­caust is, of course, well-doc­u­ment­ed. There is also a grow­ing lit­er­a­ture on the Armen­ian geno­cide in which as many as 1.5 mil­lion Arme­ni­ans were killed by the Turks. The eth­nic cleans­ing that took place in the 1990’s in Ser­bia, Koso­vo, and Croa­t­ia attract­ed inter­na­tion­al con­dem­na­tions. Each of these events, how­ev­er, can also be seen as part of a much broad­er process of pop­u­la­tion removal that is less well under­stood and ana­lyzed. In Ter­ri­ble Fate, his­to­ri­an Ben­jamin Lieber­man pro­vides the first com­pre­hen­sive his­to­ry of this process that involved the killing and forced migra­tion of mil­lions of peo­ple over the past two centuries. 

Today cor­rect­ly seen as a hor­ren­dous expres­sion of the mis­use of state pow­er, eth­nic cleans­ing was viewed not too long ago as a legit­i­mate tool of for­eign pol­i­cy. From the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry through­out the 20th, forced pop­u­la­tion shifts were not uncom­mon as mul­ti-cul­tur­al empires like the Russ­ian, Ottoman, and Haps­burg empires col­lapsed and nation­al­ism drove the for­ma­tion of new, eth­ni­cal­ly homoge­nous coun­tries. In the process, mil­lions of eth­nic Ger­mans, Jews, Poles, Bul­gar­i­ans, Arme­ni­ans, Turks, Greeks, Ukraini­ans, Bosn­ian Mus­lims, Serbs, Azer­bai­ja­nis, Geor­gians, Pales­tini­ans, and Kurds were forced from their homes. By the end of the 20th cen­tu­ry the eth­nic and reli­gious map of Cen­tral and East­ern Europe and West­ern Asia was remade with new bor­ders between nation-states and homo­gene­ity replac­ing diver­si­ty. Greeks now live with­out Turks, Turks with­out Greeks, Czechs and Poles with­out Ger­mans and, in many coun­tries, vir­tu­al­ly no one lives with Jews. This impor­tant and com­plex sto­ry is pre­sent­ed with skill and detail in Ter­ri­ble Fate.Weav­ing togeth­er a rich vari­ety of sources includ­ing eye­wit­ness accounts, con­tem­po­rary jour­nal­ism, pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments, and diplo­mat­ic records, Lieber­man tells both the polit­i­cal his­to­ry and the human toll of the phe­nom­e­non. Tak­ing the read­er on a tour of hor­rors from eth­nic cleansing’s ear­li­est begin­nings in Bul­gar­ia, Greece, and Rus­sia in the 19th cen­tu­ry, to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, he shows how nation­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy affect­ed the lives of ordi­nary peo­ple as both vic­tims and per­pe­tra­tors. The nar­ra­tive is a bit dry and unin­spired, but the analy­sis and detail make this an impor­tant book on an unchart­ed topic. 

Michael N. Dobkows­ki is a pro­fes­sor of reli­gious stud­ies at Hobart and William Smith Col­leges. He is co-edi­tor of Geno­cide and the Mod­ern Age and On the Edge of Scarci­ty (Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty Press); author of The Tar­nished Dream: The Basis of Amer­i­can Anti-Semi­tism; and co-author of The Nuclear Predicament.

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