Theoretical Paper:

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The twentieth century certainly brought with it aspects of modernity that made ethnic cleansing more virulent, more complete, more pervasive, and more hateful (Kaufman, 2001:3). The development of the nation-state and the end of empires gave the State unprecedented power and means to attack and transfer large minority populations. The drive of the modern State to categorize and homogenize its populations contributed to this phenomenon, as did the intolerance of “high modernity” for economic or political anomalies within their societies (Scott, 1998:4-6). Modern “ethnic entrepreneurs,” politicians ready to exploit ethnic and national distinctions through the media also played an important role (Valentino, 2004:234). The development of integral nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century emphasized the racial content of national groups, thus serving as a convenient ideological motivation for ethnic cleansing. The origins of “industrial murder” during World War I serve as the backdrop for a century of ethnic cleansing, as well as for the horrors of genocide (Bartov, 1996).

Prominent cases of ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century underline its modern character. The Western-educated and modernizing Young Turk government attacked the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, forcing the vast majority on horrendous treks through the Anatolian highlands to Mesopotamia. These death marches ended in the first widely recognized case of genocide in the twentieth century. At the end of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921-22, Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk), at the end of the infant Turkish Republic, engaged in an ethnic cleansing campaign against Anatolia’s Greeks. The Lausanne Treaty of 1923 completed the process of the forced transfer of the Greeks by insisting on a “population transfer” between the remaining Greeks in Anatolia and the Turks in Greece. The Lausanne Treaty served as a pivotal international precedent for transferring populations against their will throughout the twentieth century.

Hitler is known to have said on the eve of his murderous attack against Poland in August 1939, “Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?” (Naimark, 2001:57) The relative indifference of the Great Powers to the fate of the Armenians and Greeks gave Hitler every confidence that his planned attack on the Jews would rouse little opposition. He was right. Hitler’s assault on the Jews began as a campaign of forced deportation and ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Germany and Europe. But given his murderous ideology and the opportunities presented by the Second World War, it quickly mutated into a program of systematic mass murder and genocide, what we know as the Holocaust. One can argue about the “modernity” of Nazism. But there can be little doubt that Hitler’s racism belonged to the modern era, as did the quintessentially modern methods used by the Nazis to eliminate the Jews.

Other prominent cases of ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century underline its modernity and its murderous character. When Stalin and Beria organized the deportation of entire peoples, like the Chechen-Ingush, Crimean Tartars, Kalmyks, Balkars, and Karachaevtsy from their homelands to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan during World War II, there was no demonstrable intention to kill large numbers of them. Nevertheless, the brutal processes of transfer and resettlement to barren and hostile lands served as the source of substantial mortality, perhaps as much as forty percent of some of the peoples involved. Similarly, at the end of World War II, when the Polish and Czechoslovak governments decided to forcibly deport their respective German populations (which together comprised over 11.5 million people), as many as two million may have died, mostly from disease, exposure, and malnutrition. In both sets of cases, the “modernity” of the operations was evident: in the completeness of the transfers, the nationalism that drove them, the State-defined legality that supported them, and the means of moving people from their homes. Although the “Germans” were ultimately responsible for the circumstances that prompted their deportation, their transfer should be seen primarily as a case of ethnic cleansing, one that was given an international imprimatur by the Potsdam Treaty of July-August 1945.

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