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Understanding Ethnic Conflict in Central Europe: An Historical Perspective*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Charles Ingrao
Charles Ingrao*
Affiliation:
History at Purdue University, U.S.A.
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Nationalities Papers , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 291 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 3–30.Google Scholar

2. Lewis, Bernard, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York and London: Norton, 1982), pp. 49–51, 56, 60–61, 91, 113, 226–229, 300, 302.Google Scholar

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12. Fine and Donia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, pp. 53–70; Malcolm, Bosnia, pp. 119–136; Croat–Serb cooperation was especially evident in 1848 and in parliamentary politics after the Dual Compromise. István Deák, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians 1848–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 126–129; Nicholas Miller, “Two Strategies in Serbian Politics in Croatia and Hungary before World War I,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1995, pp. 327–345.Google Scholar

13. Namely: Serbia proper; the Peloponnesus and Thessaly (Greece); Wallachia and Moldavia (Romania); and Silistria (Bulgaria).Google Scholar

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17. Among the most notable national myths are: the Czech view of the Counter-Reformation as an instrument for imposing German language and culture; Serb historiography's refusal to acknowledge the role of Serbian state intelligence in the Sarajevo assassination or Četnik collaboration with the Nazis during World War II; the Greeks' collective amnesia about the presence and contributions of Salonika's huge Jewish, Turkish, and Bulgarian communities.Google Scholar

18. The best detailed accounts can be found in C. A. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors: The Treaty of Trianon and Its Consequences, 1919–1937 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1937); et al., eds, Essays on World War 1: Total War and Peacemaking, a Case Study on Trianon (New York: Brooklyn College, 1982); Béla Király and László Veszprémy, eds, Trianon and East Central Europe (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1995); R. W. Seton-Watson, Treaty Revision and the Hungarian Frontiers (London: Eyre ∧ Spottiswoode, 1934); Nina Almond, ed., The Treaty of St. Germain: Documentary History (New York: Stanford University Press, 1935); Ivo Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference: Study in Frontier Making (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938).Google Scholar

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20. Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1976), pp. 216–217, 221; C.A. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, 1790–1918 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 812–813; Kelly, “Woodrow Wilson and the Creation of Czechoslovakia,” p. 190.Google Scholar

21. Sked, Alan, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 259–260.Google Scholar

22. Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies , pp. 22, 74, 186, 370.Google Scholar

23. Stephen Fischer-Galati, “National Minority Problems in Romania: Continuity or Change?” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1994, pp. 71–81; Gabriele Simoncini, “The Polyethnic State: National Minorities in Interbellum Poland,” pp. 5–23; Bruce Pauley, The Habsburg Legacy, 1867–1939 (Huntington, NY: Krieger, 1977), pp. 68–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Littlefield, Frank, Germany and Yugoslavia, 1933–1941 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1988), p. 71. Another estimate reduces the number of Serb generals to 156.Google Scholar

25. Nor did the Irish parallel escape Hitler, who cited it in the fateful meeting with Chamberlain at Berchtesgarden on 15 September 1938. Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949–1964), Series D, II: Germany and Czechoslovakia, 1937–1938, p. 797.Google Scholar

26. T. C. W. Blanning, Joseph II (New York and London: Longman, 1994), p. 206. An assessment that was echoed by Emperor Francis Joseph, who once described his empire as “a refuge, an asylum for all those fragmented nations scattered over Central Europe who, if left to their own resources, would lead a pitiful existence, becoming the playthings of more powerful neighbors.” Alan Palmer, Twilight of the Habsburgs: The Life and Times of Emperor Francis Joseph (London: Weidenfeld ∧ Nicholson, 1994), p. 349.Google Scholar

27. Good, David, Economic Transformations in East and Central Europe: Legacies from the Past and Policies for the Future (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 5–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Molho, Anthony, “The Jewish Community of Salonika: The End of a Long History,” Diaspora, 1991, pp. 100–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Jews also constituted a third of Hungary's engineers, nearly half of its doctors and lawyers, and a substantial majority of Vienna's physicians (59%), industrialists (63%), lawyers (65%), and financiers (73%). Bruce Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1992), pp. 45, 62–63; István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps 1848–1918 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 133, 172, 174–175, 196; Rothenberg, Army of Francis Joseph, pp. 128, 151.Google Scholar

30. R. J. W. Evans, “The Habsburg Monarchy and the Coming War,” in R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds, The Coming of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 50. Of those Habsburg Jews, 30,000–40,000 were killed. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution, p. 63.Google Scholar

31. “Anti-Semitism was a good means to get ahead in politics, but once one was on top, it was of no further use; it was the ‘sport of the rabble’.” Quoted in Richard Geehr, Karl Lueger: Mayor of Fin de Siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), pp. 171–207.Google Scholar

32. Robert H. Keyserlingk, Austria in World War II: An Anglo-American Dilemma (Kingston and Montreal: Toronto University Press, 1988), pp. 87–121; “Austro-Hungary's Revival during World War II: Anglo-American Planning for the Danube Region,” Études Danubiennes, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1987, pp. 54–64.Google Scholar

33. Jordan, Peter, Central Union of Europe (New York: McBride, 1944), pp. 17, 49, 93–94.Google Scholar

34. Which is not to say that the new borders were the most accurate possible or uniformly successful in uniting all ethnic groups. Discontinuous concentrations of Poles (in Ukraine), Romanians (in Transylvania), Serbs (in Bosnia and Croatia), and Turks (in Bulgaria) were only the most obvious examples of the impossibility of erecting ethnically precise nation states.Google Scholar

35. In the words of Secretary of State Stimson, “the Balkans and their troubles were beyond the sphere of United States action.” Philip E. Mosely, “Hopes and Failures: American Policy toward East Central Europe, 1941–1947,” in Stephen D. Kertesz, ed., The Fate of East Central Europe: Hopes and Failures of American Foreign Policy (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1956), pp. 64, 68–69.Google Scholar

36. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1986).Google Scholar

37. Tito's achievement in institutionalizing a balance of power within Yugoslavia is emphasized in Pedro Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1963–1983 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); for a detailed account of the Albanian coup, see Harold Lydall, Yugoslavia in Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 196–212.Google Scholar

38. Thus the lament of one senior U.S. State Department official that his European colleagues consider him “crazy” for his advocacy of multiethnic solutions.Google Scholar

39. Lewis, Anthony, ”Winking at Karadžić “ The New York Times , 28 October 1996, p. A19.Google Scholar

40. Fragmentary contemporary accounts of the battle suggest that it was a draw or perhaps even a Pyrrhic victory for the Serbs. Timothy Judah, The Serbs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

41. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution , pp. 302–315.Google Scholar

42. Vickers, Miranda, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 145–46; Milčo Lalkov, “Die westlichen Randgebiete in den Bulgarischen–Jugoslawischen Beziehungen 1944–1948,” in Valeria Heuberger et al., eds, Nationen, Nationalitäten, Minderheiten: Probleme des Nationalismus in Jugoslawien, Ungarn, Rumänien, der Tschechoslowakei, Bulgarien, Polen, der Ukraine, Italien und Österreich, 1945–1990 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994), pp. 207–208.Google Scholar

43. C. A. Macartney and A. W. Palmer, Independent Eastern Europe: A History (New York: St Martin's Press, 1966), pp. 451–452.Google Scholar

44. Glenny, Rebirth of History, pp. 141, 215–219.Google Scholar

45. In a conversation in March 1995, the current U.S. ambassador to one major western European capital went so far as to recount oft-repeated expressions of regret by NATO and EU officials about having Greece as a member state.Google Scholar

46. Nor has the utility of a “special relationship” among Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria escaped officials at the U.S. State Department, whether during the tenure of Ambassador Robert Frowick in Skopje or, more recently, as officials have grappled with the need to preserve Macedonia's integrity in the event that the ongoing Kosovo conflict spreads.Google Scholar

47. Indeed, eastern and Central Europe still hold residual minority populations of between thirty and forty million people, which is roughly equal to the number purged over the past century. Arnold Suppan, “Nationalitäten und nationale Minderheiten,” in Veleria Heuberger et al. eds, Brennpunkt Osteuropa: Minderheiten im Kreuzfeuer des Nationalismus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), p. 10; Géza Jeszensky, “Nations and Minorities in Europe,” The Hungarian Observer, May 1994, p. 6.Google Scholar