Borders (chapter in: Europe’s Postwar Periods 1989, 1945, 1914)

31 Borders Dariusz Stola [penultimate version of a chapter in: Europe’s Postwar Periods 1989, 1945, 1918. Writing History Backwards, ed. by M. Conway, P. Lagrou, and H. Rousso, London-New York (Bloomsbury Academic) 2018, pp. 31-54] Postwar periods are years of restabilization and demobilization, but also of change. This chapter presents two kinds of postwar political and social changes that profoundly transformed Europe in the twentieth century: the movement of state borders and the related movement of peoples. Studies of state systems have pointed to a global tendency to replace large empires with smaller and more numerous nation states, resulting in reshaped political maps through the 20th century. This transformation unfolded in a highly uneven way, with short periods of intensive state-remaking separated by decades of little or no change at all. Of the several such periods of intensive empire-into-nation-statemaking, three in particular have significantly reshaped Europe.1 These were exactly the three postwar periods that are the focus of this volume. From the perspective of border and population movements, the third period, which is of primary interest here, lasted a few years into the 1990s. It ended gradually, with stabilization in the Balkans and the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) – two Western institutions established in the Cold War era – into the former Soviet bloc. Their eastward expansion, which had been very far from obvious in the early 1990s, was, to some extent, a consequence of the international instability, mass forced migrations and humanitarian catastrophes of the post-Cold War Balkan wars. When faced with the choice between exporting stability and importing instability, Western leaders chose wisely.2 Indeed, Central and East Europeans had already opted for an occidentalist orientation. The process of NATO enlargement, which began in the mid-1990s, and EU enlargement, which followed a few years later, provided an international framework for a new European order. This order has stabilized the borders and, to a large extent, conditioned international migrations. Despite being invented and developed in the other 32 half of the continent, the project of European integration appears to have been made to respond well to the set of questions that have haunted Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century. These questions are the focus of this chapter. The EU is an organization sui generis, not a state. More specifically, it is neither a nation state nor an empire, the two solutions to the territory-population nexus that were tested in Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century, sometimes with limited success, sometimes with catastrophic results. The project of European integration has offered a model that is supranational but not imperial, and in this sense it appears to be the most recent in a series of responses to the disintegration of multi-ethnic, land-based empires that had ruled Eastern Europe before 1918. This order has made national government, and consequently national borders, less relevant and thus less controversial than they previously were. It has demanded high standards of liberal democratic governance, emphasizing respect for human and minority rights to a greater extent than the Versailles minority protection system did. It also has made EU internal borders more permeable for capital, people, goods, services and information, thereby fostering the development of transnational social spaces where labor migrants, businesspeople, policymakers, criminals, historians and other Europeans can increasingly interact. For other reasons, it has coincidentally made the intra-EU migration, and the choice of the place to live, more a private matter, a field to be governed by markets rather than by states. While this model poses various problems, it appears to provide avenues for resolving various other problems, the problems which this essay analyses. An East European story This essay in European history is largely about the eastern half of the continent.3 In examining twentieth-century border changes and population movements, we see them strikingly concentrated in Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe. The dividing line between those European countries that experienced many such events during the century and those fortunate enough to see but few of them runs across the continent from Lübeck in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. I locate it west of the Stettin-Trieste line, which Churchill drew in his Iron Curtain speech, such that it includes East Germany. This nowdefunct state was the key area for developments in the post-1989 and post-1945 periods (which Churchill could not have known about in February 1946). Neither, however, does this eastern half of the continent neatly correspond to the former Soviet bloc, as it includes Finland and Greece, as well as Yugoslavia, which, although communist was not a Soviet satellite during the Cold War.4 Of the eight states that were established in Europe after the First World War, all but one emerged in the East. 5 After the Second World War, three states disappeared and one came into being, while ten others changed their borders. All but one of these (Italy) were east of the Lübeck-Trieste line. After the Cold War, sixteen new European states appeared on maps and four disappeared, none of which was in the West. 33 The Irish Free State was the only new state in Western Europe in the twentieth century. As for territorial shift s that did not involve state-making or unmaking, West Europeans did experience a few; namely, border changes at the expense of the losers, Germany and Austria, in Alsace-Lorraine, Eupen-Malmedy, Schleswig and Trentino. All of these occurred in the first of the three postwar periods. Later on, if we exclude the peculiar statehood of the French-occupied Saar in 1947–56 and Italy’s territorial losses east of the line, only minor revisions of the West European borders took place, including two Italian villages (communes) ceded to France after the Second World War. Similarly asymmetric is the history of postwar population movements. Western Europe was, of course, not free of forced migrations: In 1919 alone, the French government removed more than 150,000 Germans from Alsace-Lorraine, and thousands of involuntary migrants crossed other borders after the First World War.6 In the second postwar period, British and Americans assisted in the compulsory repatriation of more than 2 million Soviet and Yugoslav displaced persons (DPs) from western zones of Germany, many of them against their will. Indeed, in all three postwar periods, Western Europe was the destination of thousands and millions of migrants, either from Eastern Europe or, in the 1990s, from outside the continent. Yet these flows were insignificant compared to their East European counterparts. According to Ewa Morawska, who compiled data on various forms of forced migration in the twentieth century, expulsions, deportations, exiles and forcible repatriations, compulsory population transfers and panic-stricken flights, may have affected as many as 80 million Eastern Europeans. Her estimate includes some 10 million refugees or expellees following the First World War, up to 25 million people displaced after the Second World War and around 4 million refugees and displaced persons of the post-communist period.5 Most of those people were members of specific ethnic groups, targeted or affected by violence and discrimination. What unites the vast and ethnically diverse space among the Baltic, Adriatic and Black seas, where the dramatic events described earlier took place, is their shared past of belonging to multi-ethnic, land-based empires before 1918, and a long search for an alternative stable state order afterwards. For several generations before the First World War, this territory had been divided among the Russian, German, Habsburg and Ottoman empires, each competing with the others for power and influence. Their borders might change, but the imperial order remained relatively stable. The spread of modern nationalism, combined with other aspects of European modernization, transformed the region’s societies, economies and armies later but faster than they had in the West, and thereby undermined and eroded the order. The nationalizing of the regions peoples and lands, whether by a separatist movement for a new (or mythically restored) nation-state or by its apparent opposite, state-sponsored Russification, Germanization or Magyarization, subverted both individual empires and their international system, and exposed the region to the dynamic of imperial collapse and nationalist struggle. It 34 introduced a new way of conceiving of politics, focused on discrete populations and a state ideal founded on ethnonational homogeneity; this was so very different from the previous system of dynastic legitimacy and state sovereignty within clearly, but not ethnically defined, borders.6 The reordering of territory and the related mass, involuntary migrations had begun in the nineteenth century in the Balkans. The key factors of border and population movements that we discuss here had already been present and dramatically expressed in the two Balkan Wars of 1912-13: the legacies of the empire and looming domination of a neighboring power over vulnerable nations; ethnonationalist mobilization and a spiraling of violence; the search for congruence between the sociocultural space of ethnonation and the territory of the state; the zero-sum-game struggles for territory and people. The First World War, which began as a third Balkan war, helped spread these conditions northward. The war eventually eliminated two of the four regional empires. The two others were weakened considerably, but only temporarily. Thus, while Austria and Turkey did not play any significant role in later developments, Germany and Russia/Soviet Union did twofold. Elsewhere in this volume Pieter Lagrou claims that the 1918-1945-1989 triptych is “the periodization of German history writ large’. It may look this way from a West European point of view. For the observers in the East, however, the triptych is as much Russo-centric as it is Germano-centric, especially if by 1918 we mean not only Compiegne but also Brest-Litovsk, and change 1989 for 1989-91. From a Central or Eastern European perspective, the three wars and their postwar periods were as much about the place and role of Russia/USSR in Europe (and consequently about the lands between them) as they were about that of Germany. The 1990s as a postwar period Histories of territorial settlements and forced migrations provide strong arguments for the claim that Europe after 1989 was in a postwar period. Both phenomena are correlates of war and the postwar consolidation of a new international order; the combination of the two elements even more clearly points to this. They have never occurred together and on such a scale without a preceding war, indeed, a major preceding war.7 Similarly, the wave of many millions of European refugees, ‘forced repatriates’ and other displaced persons that marked the post-1989 period had no precedent unrelated to war. Europe of the early 1990s was busy with state-making as never before. As a consequence of the collapse of Yugoslavia and dissolution of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, sixteen new European states emerged: Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine and (later and still contested) Kosovo. This produced more than 11,000 kilometers of new international borders. At the same time, German unification made the German Democratic Republic (GDR) disappear, together with 1,500 35 kilometers of the intra-German border. All this increased the total length of European land borders by more than a third, to 36,000 kilometers.8 This deeply altered the constellation of states in half of the continent. In particular Ukraine, the second largest European state today, had led no sovereign existence in the modern era, except for a brief moment of contested independence in 1918–19. The third postwar period was also a turning point for the pre-existing states in Eastern Europe. Of Poland’s three neighbors in 1989 none existed in 1993, having been replaced by five new states and the united Germany. Hungary, which had bordered all three erstwhile federations, now has five new nation states as its neighbors. Romania acquired three new neighbours and Bulgaria has gained two, while six other countries have one neighbouring state that did not exist in 1989. Russia has remained the largest state in Europe and the world, but the collapse of the Soviet bloc and Soviet state reversed nearly four centuries of Russia’s westward expansion. The USSR was the heir and continuation of the Russian empire, albeit significantly transformed, and the Soviet satellites were Moscow’s external empire.9 The Soviet imperial space – its differential and hierarchical organization, structured by distinctive center–periphery relations, rapidly withered away or eroded in the 1990s. The patterns and dynamics of this process largely conditioned the European post–Cold War. Various relics of the empire still remain, and some clearly will continue to do so. The most important one, at least for this narrative, is the Kaliningrad exclave within the EU, NATO and Schengen zone: 15,000 square kilometers of Russian territory (half the size of Belgium) and almost a million Russian citizens remain 400 kilometers from the Russian mainland. In contrast to the two previous postwar periods, the 1990s brought no territorial losses to Germany. On the contrary, a German state (the Federal Republic of Germany – FRG) was the only state to expand, which makes it seem the European victor of the Cold War. However, it did so within the overall framework of the territorial settlement of 1945, which meant the final approval of the losses it sustained in the Second World War. Similarly, the disappearance of the GDR-FRG border was unfinished business from the Second World War and Germany’s occupation by the four powers.10 For these reasons, 1990 for Germany constitutes both post-Cold War and a delayed end of the Second World War. The population flow most typical for any postwar years is the relocation and reduction (i.e., dispersal) of military personnel. The high tide of such movements in the early 1990s is another argument for it being a postwar period. While these were much smaller than those that occurred after the two world wars, they were still on a massive scale. Moreover, because during the Cold War the presence of foreign troops was not a temporary incursion but a stable, decades-long part of the landscape, their exit was all the more important. The largest and longest-distance movements of this kind resulted from the disintegration of the Soviet empire and its military withdrawal, but the end of the Cold 36 War enabled all its participants to reap a peace dividend by downscaling their armies. In the few years following 1988, the Soviet army decreased by some 2.5 million men, split into 15 national armies and withdrew from its bases in Central Europe. The latter change alone meant migration of a million people: servicemen, their family members and civilian personnel. Some 550,000 Soviets left East Germany while 400,000 left Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. On a lesser but still substantial scale was the reduction of 700,000 US troops, including 250,000 in Europe.11 Notably, soon after the Cold War’s end, peace and the related troop reduction expanded globally. Between 1992 and 2005 the number of violent conflicts – primarily civil wars – declined by an astonishing 40 per cent, after four decades of prior increase.12 A regular postwar population movement, hardly noticeable in the Europe of the 1990s, was the return or resettlement of people displaced by wartime hostilities or occupation policies. Their absence in 1989 underlies the peculiar, combat-free character of the European Cold War. Of the violence that did occur, such as that in many countries in the late 1940s, in East Germany in 1953, in Poland and Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Greece in 1967–74, in Poland in 1970 and 1981–82 or in Romania in 1989, it was less intensive than in wars more generally and usually not directly related to the Cold War proper. Rather, these were domestic conflicts or conflicts within the blocs, as opposed to NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontations. In 1989, the people whom we could consider post-Cold War displaced persons were relatively few or they had been displaced several decades before; thus, by 1989, many had established roots in their new locations. The return of the Crimean Tartars, who had been deported to the Asian part of the USSR in the Stalin era, may be seen as a case in point. With a few exceptions, we can also include in this group some of the other Soviet ex-deportees, mainly ethnic Germans, who, in the 1990s, emigrated to their ‘external homeland’ in the FRG (despite having never lived there before). Regardless, the numbers were much smaller than those of the two previous postwar periods: Post-1918 Europe saw millions, and post-1945 tens of millions of persons displaced by war.13 One wave of forced migration in the 1990s, with antecedents in the two previous periods, was the mass flight of refugees from the areas affected by local, mainly ethnic, violence. All three postwar periods were ‘violent peacetimes’, when state or paramilitary violence, unleashed by the collapse of the previous order and the struggle for a new one, made millions of civilians flee.14 The wars in the former Yugoslavia uprooted half a million people in Croatia and 2.5 million in Bosnia (i.e. most of its population), of whom half sought refuge abroad and half were displaced internally. Another 850,000 people fled from the violence in Kosovo in 1999. The scale and intensity of these movements resulted largely from deliberate policies of ethnic cleansing, conducted mainly, but by no means exclusively, by various Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims.15 In the former Soviet Union, the flow of refugees and other international migrants in need of protection exceeded 1.8 million, of whom two-thirds moved to Russia. There was a similar number of internally 37 displaced persons within various post-Soviet republics, almost all of them outside the European part of the former USSR, in Tajikistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The tide of displaced persons peaked in the mid-1990s and then began to subside.16 Although dramatic and very intensive in some areas, the refugee flows of the 1990s were much smaller than those of their predecessors in post-1918 and post-1945. Their source areas were much more contained, and the fires of hatred that fueled them, while ominous, were lesser. Contrary to the two total wars, the Cold War in Europe did not leave a legacy of polarized national identities, mass suffering interpreted in ethnic terms or class hatred combined with revolutionary vision, as had been the case following the First World War. The world wars had also normalized mass violence and justified the expansion of the state’s powers over its citizens, which the final years of the Cold War did not. Notably, the post-1989 period saw no population transfers or, for that matter, any other collective deportations at all. To this absence, which would have surprised observers in the two previous postwar periods, we will return later. To be sure, the large involuntary migrations of the three periods under analysis did not result solely from ethnic diversity or the reordering of borders as such. Reordering, in and of itself does not determine mass displacement, nor is ethnicity the ultimate, irreducible source of violent conflict. Ethnic violence is not just a higher degree of ethnic conflict but is also of a fundamentally different form, actively chosen by some; in other words, the violence that forced refugees to flee resulted from struggles for power framed in ethnic terms.17 Therefore, we have good reason to see the 1990s as a postwar period, despite the fact that its comparison to the post-1918 and post-1945 periods shows substantial differences. The differences result largely from the particular character of the European Cold War, combat-free and non-violent for many years before its end. The years of detente, with the Helsinki conference of 1975 at the apex, further distanced the 1990s from the more aggressive, early Cold War period. We could look at detente as a kind of postwar period after the ‘first Cold War’ of the 1950s and early 1960s, before the ‘second Cold War’ of the renewed East–West tensions and arms race of the 1980s. Notably, we can also see the Helsinki conference as a substitute for a Second World War peace conference, with its explicit aim to confirm the borders drawn in the second postwar period (which was the Soviet priority), and to protect human rights and crossborder personal connections (insisted upon by the West). Not incidentally, in the same year Yugoslavia and Italy signed the Treaty of Osimo, which eventually confirmed their postSecond World War border in the region of Trieste. From empires to nation-states and back, and back again In the post–Second World War period, the trends in state (re)making were opposite to what we have seen in the 1990s. As a consequence of the war, Moscow extended its rule further westward than ever before. The Soviet annexations made three Baltic States 38 disappear from the map altogether, while four other countries – Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania – lost large portions of their territories. Poland lost to the USSR almost half of its pre-war territory (46 per cent), but was compensated with German lands and the Free City of Danzig, making the Polish net loss 20 per cent, and Germany’s 25 per cent, of what they had had in 1937. Together with the ‘rationalization’ of the new borders into straighter lines, these changes significantly decreased the total length of European borders. The emergence of two German states instead of one, and of the border between them in 1949, was an exception to the general decreasing tendency in the number of states and state border length, just as the disappearance of the GDR and its western border was an exception to the opposite trend in the 1990s. In Eastern Europe, where the migratory and territorial changes were taking place, in terms of both border changes and population movements, post-1945 was quite similar to the war years and continued the wartime developments, while the post-1989 period differed strikingly from the last decades of the Cold War. In Western Europe the pattern was the opposite: The late 1940s contrasted with the war years, while the 1990s continued the trends of the 1980s, with the stability of borders, unrestricted mobility within the EC and growing refugee inflows from other regions of Europe and the world. In the East, the emancipatory and diversifying logic of domestic and international transformations of the 1990s was opposite to the logic of Moscow’s hegemony and the relative uniformity of communist regimes and policies in the pre-1990 period. The developments of the late 1940s – the border changes, the evolution of interstate relations and domestic regimes – followed a tendency that had dominated for several years. The postwar period following the Second World War was part of a longer period of imperial reconquista of Central and Eastern Europe. Before Hitler’s and Stalin’s expansion projects clashed apocalyptically in 1941, they had jointly restored an imperial order, formal or informal, in almost all the European lands once ruled by the Romanovs, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Ottomans. Twenty years after the dynasties had lost their domains, the empire struck back. It returned in a novel, more powerful form of a totalitarian state, armed with technological, organizational and (im)moral capacity for unprecedented social engineering and statecraft , to which border and absorbed, destroyed or reduced eleven nation states of the region, beginning with Austria and Czechoslovakia, then Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. The two new states that emerged as a consequence of this deconstruction, Slovakia and Croatia, were fully dependent on Germany. The two remaining ones, Hungary and Bulgaria, joined Germany in the spoils but became satellites, parts of Berlin’s sphere of influence (‘external empire’) acting in an obvious center– periphery relation with their German patron. Over the course of these four years, independent nation states disappeared from the zone among the Baltic, Adriatic and Black seas. 39 Four years later, while the Thousand Year Reich had ended, there was no return to the pre-war status quo ante. The Soviet empire filled the void and imposed its own order. This imposition included substantial border changes and population transfers. Territorially, all but four of the above-listed states ended the 1940s either becoming smaller than they had been before 1938, or occupied, or fully annexed to the USSR.18 The new, Moscowdesigned parts of European borders followed rivers or straight lines, not unlike the colonial borders once charted by the European imperialists in Africa. Minorities were exchanged or unilaterally deported from or to all the states of the region except Bulgaria. Moreover, the states were not independent in any meaningful way. To West European countries, the post–Second World War period meant restoration of independence, notwithstanding their war-induced exhaustion and the new influence exerted by the Americans. In the other half of the continent, the Soviet ‘crushing of Eastern Europe’ had begun before the war ended and continued throughout the next decade. While formally sovereign and United Nations (UN) members, the states of the emerging Soviet bloc were not half as independent as they had been before 1938, and decreasingly so. 19 This does not mean there was no distinction between the German and Soviet dominations, of course;20 rather, it means that for a few years before, and for many years after 1945, the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination gave way to a supranational order, to imperial logic and practices originating from the USSR. In this sense, the Soviet bloc was another chapter in the long history of Eastern Europe’s imperial orders. The Red Army brought to the region both a revolution and an old regime. At the same time, it would be wrong to see the post-1945 Soviet domination as a simple return to the pre-1918 order, just under the sickle and hammer instead of the black eagles of the Russian, German and Habsburg empires. The Soviet Union annexed 600,000 sq. km of land and 25 million people, but even so, this represented but a minority of the land and people it took under its control as a consequence of the war. Stalin did not make Poland, Romania or Bulgaria new Soviet republics, which some of their communist leaders asked for. The communists would have made their populations welcome and democratically approve such a decision, just as they had done with populations of the lands annexed in 1939–40. To the contrary, Stalin helped consolidate them as nation states, more centralized, ethnically and culturally homogenous, militarized and economically autarkic than ever before. Nothing demonstrated this consolidation better than the heavily guarded border infrastructure, with thousands of kilometers of barbed-wire fence and watch towers, which the communist governments erected in late 1940s, not only as the Iron Curtain isolating them from the West, but between themselves as well, in particular at the Soviet western border.21 The new, post–Second World War imperial order in Eastern Europe was an innovative synthesis: Moscow-centered, socialist in content, and national in form. The expansion of the communist rule by the establishment of the Soviet bloc, instead of building socialism into one, growing country, as it had been up to 1941, was one of the 40 most consequential of Stalin’s (in)decisions after the Second World War. Its consequences were manifold, especially throughout the decades following 1956, when the satellites were allowed some diversity in their national paths to socialism, and dramatically so in the early post–Cold War period. The Annus Mirabilis 1989 and the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet bloc would have been very different, probably less miraculous and peaceful, had the satellite communist parties, armies, administrations and economies been incorporated into the USSR. The establishment of the Soviet bloc in the post–Second World War period, composed of satellite but separate communist states, laid the foundation for the political dynamics forty years later. This was most apparent in the domino effect of 1989: the impact of the initial Polish events on Hungary, of Hungarian decisions on the GDR, of the developments in these three countries (and Soviet acquiescence to them) on Czechoslovakia, and finally the influence of the changes in the entire bloc on the Soviet Union itself. Notably, the disintegration of the Soviet Union began in the Baltic republics, the only pre–Second World War states fully incorporated into the USSR.22 Similarly, in migration history the variety, intensity and directions of international flows in the 1990s contrasted with the earlier streams, or lack thereof, while the pre- and post-1945 movements have traditionally been depicted as belonging to a longer wave of forced migrations, stretching back at least through the ‘black decade’ of 1938–47.23 The erection of fortified borders in late 1940s ended the black decade and marked the beginning of a period of probably the lowest international mobility in East European history. It also expressed the consolidation of the Soviet bloc as a Moscow-dominated system of territorially stable and closed (i.e. relatively isolated) communist states. As much as it differs from the late 1940s, the post-Cold War period resembles that of post–First World War, when new states came into being, borders multiplied, and Russia rolled back East. Post-1918 saw the first version of a Europe composed almost exclusively of nation-states, the precedent for the Europe of today. The great reordering of the map after 1918 and 1989, respectively, followed a similar logic of nation state building out of larger multi-ethnic polities. The First World War brought an end to the Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman empires, and placed populations – not just borders or sovereign rulers – at the core of international politics. Participants in the Paris peace conference paid great attention to the state-population-territory nexus. Favoring the nation-state model, at least in Europe, they recognized the problems it had with inherited, postimperial diversity, and offered several solutions, ranging from experts looking into linguistic and ethnographic data and plebiscites to define optimal borders, to international protection of minority rights and population transfers. The latter two, as Eric Weitz points out, were two sides of the same coin. The most explicit approval for population transfer came in the Lausanne Treaty with Turkey, which provided international recognition of ‘a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of 41 Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory’. Proponents of similar solutions in the future will cite it as the legal precedent and proof of the effectiveness of transfer in discontinuing interethnic violence and stabilizing states.24 The largest migration flows of the 1990s were also of a postimperial kind. These were the resettlement of the ‘repatriates’, that is, people moving to their alleged ‘homelands’ (which they often had left long ago, or to which they belonged only by virtue of their ethnic origin). The post-Soviet states tended towards an ethnonationalist principle that divided populations into the privileged titular nation and the rest. To the supporters of such policies, it appeared natural that ethnic Russians, Armenians or Estonians living outside of their titular republics should 'return to their historical homelands’. Not surprisingly, Russians and other Russophones, who had enjoyed a post-Soviet space. In total, in the 1990s, about 4 million people resettled in the Russian Federation as repatriates, while more than half a million Russian speakers left the Caucasus and Central Asia for Ukraine and Belarus. The outflow was the largest from Kazakhstan, albeit in relative terms the erosion of Russophone population was greatest in the zones of violence such as the South Caucasus and Tajikistan. Russia also attracted many non-Russians, mostly Armenians and Ukrainians. Although Belarusians, Kazakhs or Turkmen were similarly moving to their ‘historical homelands’, the scale of these flows was much smaller. In general, repatriation was massive but far from ubiquitous, and ethnicity alone cannot explain it. Only a minority of the 25 million ethnic Russians and some 20 million other former Soviet citizens living outside their titular republics, decided to resettle. In the Baltic states for example, despite the interethnic tensions, repatriation involved less than 10 per cent of ethnic Russians. More intensive was the outflow of the groups that enjoyed privileged immigration policies in countries outside the post-Soviet area, mainly ethnic Germans and Jews. For example, Kazakhstan has lost more than 80 per cent of its 1 million ethnic Germans. In total, 2.5 million German and Jewish emigrants left the post-Soviet space. Smaller but nonetheless substantial was the outflow of 150,000 ethnic Greeks to Greece. To be sure, the disintegration of the USSR did not lead to an explosion of migrations but rather to a decline thereof. Between the last years of the USSR and the early 2000s, the migration flows between the (ex-)Soviet republics decreased from almost 2 million people annually to 700,000. This should not be a surprise, as the new international borders fragmented the once unified social, economic and legal space, making resettlement, and mobility in general, much more difficult. What did grow in the 1990s, and dramatically so, was migration into the Russian Federation: While in the 1980s it received a net immigration of 1.5 million people, in the following decade, it was 4.3 million.25 The patterns of post-Soviet resettlement flows resemble the ‘unmixing of peoples’ in the Balkans, as Lord Curzon had named the opposite flows of Muslim and Christian populations across the southward-moving Ottoman border in the long nineteenth 42 century.26 They were, and have been, the most recent of many postimperial migrations that since the nineteenth century have ensued in the vast belt of ‘Rimlands’, extending from the Baltic to the Near East and Transcaucasia. These migrations involved primarily the erstwhile ruling, or otherwise privileged, ethnic groups in a multinational empire that saw their status abruptly deteriorate into that of a minority in new nation-states. The imperial fragmentation included further remaking and unmaking of states – a process to which migration has all too often been central. While this process was repeatedly the key factor in mass population movements, the latter were by no means automatic or unavoidable, as evidenced by diverse migration propensities of ethnic Russians in the ex-Soviet republics or ethnic Germans in various Habsburg lands after the First World War. Except where whole communities were indiscriminately targeted for removal, the postimperial migrations were socially selective and, arguably, not always ‘forced’. Moreover, postimperial ‘un-mixing’ is not a short-term process that exhausts itself in the immediate aftermath of war or other political reconfiguration. It has been a protracted – if intermittent – process, spanning three-quarters of a century for Magyars and Germans, and more than a century for Turks. Russian gradual withdrawal from the peripheries of their vast empire, that is, the shift to a positive migration balance for the Russian Federation, began long before the Soviet collapse and certainly has the potential to continue on well into the future.27 From Brest to Belavezha From the perspective of this essay, our first postwar period began not in Compiegne or Versailles, but in Brest-Litovsk, and in March rather than November 1918. On 3 March 1918, at the conference in Brest-Litovsk – once a fortress in the western borderlands of Russia, today a town at the Belorussian-Polish border – the delegations of Bolshevik Russia and the Central Powers signed the first peace treaty of the First World War. The conference became the key moment in the career of the principle of self-determination of nations. This idea not only dominated the Paris conference in the following year, but throughout most of twentieth-century statecraft and population transfers. Not incidentally, the three postwar periods under consideration have been recognized as the three key periods for the development of the principle.28 As Borislav Chernev points out, the diplomatic career of the principle began when the loud, Bolshevik support for this revolutionary, anti-imperialist idea came face-to-face in Brest-Litovsk with the self-interested, imperial plans for East-Central Europe held by the Central Powers.29 The Powers’ delegation welcomed the principle and used it effectively as a tool to legitimize their pushing Russia several hundred kilometers east. Austrian foreign affairs minister Ottokar Czernin put it explicitly in a letter to the German chancellor in November 1917: ‘It would be our business to ensure that the desire for separation from Russia and for political and economic dependence on the Central Powers be voiced from within these [East European] nations’.30 This strategy meant a transfer to Northeastern Europe of a process of ethnonational fragmentation, which, with a helping 43 hand from European powers, had removed the Ottoman Empire from Southeastern Europe in the previous century. The Austrian and German imperial strategists decided for a controlled Balkanization of the Western Russian Empire, so as to establish a system of satellite nation-states. It was a risky gamble, as it soon turned out. Several months later, Austro-Hungary followed the Balkan fate of the Ottoman empire, and Ottokar Czernin lost his family lands in what became Czechoslovakia. The Central Powers forced Russia to abandon most of its European acquisitions gained since the time of Peter the Great, and allowed for the construction of new states between the Baltic and the Black Sea – in particular Ukraine. The first modern Ukrainian state was recognized at the Brest-Litovsk conference. Thus, despite the fact that the March 1918 treaties lasted not even a year, we can consider the conference as a stepping stone for the process of nation-state building in Eastern Europe. It was also the antecedent of another consequential conference, which took place close to Brest in the third postwar period: In December 1991, at a hunting estate in the Belavezha forest, 80 kilometers north of Brest, the presidents of the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the agreement that dissolved the USSR.31 The road from Brest to Belavezha was neither direct nor straight. In between these two Wilsonian moments, the town of Brest was the scene of another event notable in our story: the joint Soviet-German military parade on 22 September 1939, which celebrated the successful partition of Poland. No event better illustrates the joint German-Soviet destruction of the Versailles order, and their division of the lands between the Baltic and the Black Sea into two imperial ‘spheres of influence. It also illustrates the argument that the narrative of the European twentieth century, structured by the three great wars and postwars, is as much Germano-centric as it is Russo-centric.32 The parade and the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, signed a week later, were to mark the end of war in Eastern Europe, not unlike the Brest treaty of 1918. They demonstrated Russia’s return to the lands abandoned twenty years before, and Germany’s acquiescence thereto. The Communist and Nazi revolutionaries who signed the treaty clearly shared a belief in radical methods of making international relations, states and societies. These methods took the solving of the state-territory-population nexus to another level. Notably, the secret protocol attached to the Boundary and Friendship Treaty outlined minority exchanges, sparking a long series of international agreements on population transfers in the following decade.33 If the Brest parade of 1939 marked a shift back from the national to the imperial solution of the nexus, how and when did the tide change again in favor of independent nation-states, which we see in the 1990s? The internal, domestic factors in the nationalist victories in (post)communist states are considered in the following. Explaining their international conditions seems, however, more difficult. This would require determining why, at the moment of the communist regimes’ implosion, there were no candidates for imperial domination of the region; indeed, this exceeds the scope of this essay. We can 44 only go so far as to add that this absence was an important condition in the apparent lack of fear of establishing small, vulnerable states. The Croat, Slovene or Slovak leaders in the post–First World War period had had reasons to federate with their Czech or Serb neighbors, which their successors clearly did not see in the 1990s. When inquiring as to what contributed to nationalist victory in the 1990s, we can point to two interesting shift s in the meaning, or application, of the principle of self-determination: During the Cold War era, the road from Brest to Belavezha went via places as distant as Bandung and Helsinki. The principle of self-determination became so widely accepted in the course of the twentieth century not least because it was vague and allowed for diverse interpretations. In particular, despite being loudly proclaimed with respect to the territory of the vanquished following the First World War, this was done with no intention of undermining the colonial empires of the victors. Eventually, self-determination did contribute to decolonization after the Second World War, but in its travels across the decomposing overseas empires, the principle acquired a novel, territorial aspect, or definition.34 This definition, first applied in international relations in the delineation of borders in postcolonial South America in the nineteenth century, and further developed for the postcolonial situations in Asia and Africa, took the name of uti possidetis juris. This meant recognition of pre-existing administrative boundaries as the borders between newly independent nations.35 These distant developments, symbolized by the 1955 Bandung conference of Asian and African postcolonial states, contributed to post-Cold War European settlement. The uti possidetis became a basis of, and explicit reference for, the firm support by European Powers for maintaining pre-existing boundaries in the 1990s. The international recognition of the new states was, inter alia, based on their respect for these boundaries.36 None of the new international borders in post-Cold War Europe was invented after 1989. They had all existed previously as internal borders within the federal states: They changed their status, but not their shape.37 The second detour on the Brest-Belavezha road was via Helsinki, the capital of the new territory of the human rights, which emerged during the Cold War era. The human rights doctrine, gradually enshrined in law during the Cold War, became a part of a legal mechanism to achieve a range of human rights within the territorial framework of states, rather than simply a tool to justify the dismantling of states. Many international statements on the territorial reconstruction of the 1990s stressed both the protection of human rights and the stability of borders, and referred specifically to the Helsinki Final Act.38 The predecessor of the human rights doctrine was the idea of international protection of minorities. The post-1918 period was the high moment of this idea, which had developed in response to the nation-state building in the European postimperial space, beginning, again, in the Balkans. At the Paris peace conference all the new states of Eastern Europe had to sign treaties guaranteeing the rights of their respective minorities. The combination of minority protection and minority reduction (by ‘exchanges of 45 minorities’ and ‘national options’) was the cornerstone of the post–First World War model of solving the national minority question, as it was understood at the moment. Its apparent failure, and the explosion of ethnic violence through the black decade 1938–47, led to the reframing of minority rights as universal human rights.39 The practical application of the rights doctrine had to wait some time, but in the third postwar period, it reached a point unimaginable in the 1920s or 1940s. A state’s ‘right to expel’, which had been considered both rational and justifiable in the previous postwar periods, gave way to the ‘responsibility to protect’, including an obligation not only to prevent ethnic cleansing, but to reverse it. Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan in their No Return, No Refuge, point at a striking shift in the moral evaluation and legal qualification of state-induced, forced migration of ethnic groups. That which, up until the late 1940s, was euphemistically called population transfer and perceived as a legal means to commendable goals of state consolidation and prevention of war, became condemned as a crime against humanity.40 It bears noting that the boundaries so stridently protected in the 1990s did not necessarily reflect the geographic distribution of ethnic groups, nor were they optimal in an economic or strategic sense. Sometimes they had been arbitrarily set and reset as internal administrative lines, as exemplified by the well-known case of Crimea, transferred by Khrushchev from Soviet Russia to Ukraine. The key reason to protect rather than redraw them as national borders was their pre-existence. Altering the borders (except by agreement) seemed likely to lead to a chain of violent fragmentations of states, producing instability and further ethnic conflicts, that is, Balkanization, as such a process became widely known in the first of our postwar periods. The recent Russian annexation of Crimea ignored this lesson of the past and opened a new, risky stage in the aforementioned process of East European (and Eurasian) territorial reordering. In the 1990s, for most international organizations and Western leaders, annexation and partition had long been dirty words.41 In the second half of the twentieth century, despite many political upheavals, the boundaries on the political map changed little. As any territorial gain by one state meant a loss for another one, which cannot but generate conflict, international law has strongly favored the status quo regarding borders. All states joining the United Nations solemnly renounce the use of war to expand their territory. The invention of the defensive state, which formally uses war only to deter or defeat threats to its territory, and made all ministries of war change their labels to ministries of defense, further stabilized the borders. In Europe, all the signatories of the Helsinki Act made no claims on others’ territories - a previously unheard of situation for this continent.42 The 1990s were also a high point of European integration, and many saw the revival of ethnonationalist divisions in the East as backward and immature. Thus, having accepted the secession of Slovenia and Croatia as a consequence of the dissolution of federal Yugoslavia, Western powers denied the right to secession to the Serb-dominated areas of Croatia and Bosnia. Yet the Serb desire for the secession was fueled by a fear rooted in 46 memories of the same bloody conflicts of the past that made other powers oppose the secession. This controversy reflected an essential disagreement on what makes good statehood. The European leaders no longer believed that the ethnically homogeneous nation-state was the most desirable model for a modern polity, or even a feasible one. Instead, their favored model was a liberal democratic state that respected human and minority rights. Such a state can allegedly function within almost any border, making the choice of preexisting administrative borders as sensible as any other, with the added advantage of being less risky and costly than their change.43 This contrasted with the position held by key powers in the previous periods under consideration. In post-1918 they had encouraged or approved borders drawn along ethnic lines and/or a process of ethnic homogenization through more or less compulsory minority transfers. Such apparent solutions were applied at the borders between Bulgaria and Greece, Greece and Turkey, Germany and Poland, France and Germany and Poland and Russia. In post-1945, the great powers had agreed that ethnic homogeneity in border areas was a prerequisite for stability in Central and Southeastern Europe. Local hatred and the desire of national leaders to get rid of some groups were in the background of the great resettlement programs of mid-1940s, but these programs were possible because of being part of the Soviet and British plans for a new order in Europe.44 There were, of course, also reasons other than political philosophy that made unlikely a Lord Curzon-esque charting of East European borders along ethnic lines in the 1990s. In post-1918 or post-1945 politicians could (inaccurately) claim that France or Germany was ethnically homogeneous. In the 1990s this was evidently not the case. Millions of nonEuropean guest workers, refugees and their Europe-born children had made many West European cities surprisingly similar in ethnic diversity to that of their East European counterparts prior to the Second World War; meanwhile, many of the latter had lost this diversity. Some of the powers were also grappling with their own separatist movements, which they wisely did not want to bolster by endorsing separatism elsewhere. Through the 1990s and thereafter, it has been clear that the potential for state fragmentation in Europe has been by no means exhausted. In addition to the apparently effective secession of Kosovo, separatist tendencies have been visible not only in Bosnia but also in Belgium, France, Italy, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Spain, Ukraine and the United Kingdom, to list just the major controversies. Similar factors protected the borders of the Soviet republics as these became nationstates. Moreover, the dissolution of the USSR was relatively peaceful, cushioned as it was by the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States and carried out by the USSR’s three core, founding republics: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. We can hardly imagine such a peaceful end of the Soviet Union without the willingness of Russian leaders to abandon it. While Russia has supported Serbia in the post-Yugoslav conflicts, if we 47 compare the Soviet and Yugoslav disintegrations we see that Russia’s role in the Soviet dissolution was more similar to that of Croatia than to that of Serbia in the Yugoslav case. Yugoslavia requires us to refine The aforementioned narratives of the 1990s as the third European postwar period of the twentieth century and as a return to the nation-state solution after a return of imperial order cannot explain the most dramatic chapter of the history of the 1990s. This is the chapter on the former Yugoslavia, a state which had been neither part of the Soviet empire nor a member of a Cold War alliance. The end of the Cold War and the end of the Cold War division of Germany and Europe, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, seem to dominate popular images of 1989.45 However, for many of the non-German participants in the events, the most important end in 1989 was the end of their communist regimes. The experience of the communist regime and its end unites all three dissolved states and offers a hint as to where to look for the causes of their fragmentation. What seems the key to explaining the post-1989 border changes and the ensuing population movements is a particular, ethnonationalist way of dismantling, or leaving behind, the communist regimes, in particular the communist regimes of supranational polities. Among the decay and ruin of the regimes, ethnonational affiliation became the unifying characteristic, empowering the local national elites to use this to consolidate or expand their rule. 46 Widespread and intensive ethnonationalisms had predated the communist regime, yet by the 1990s they were also a fruit of the evolution of the regime, its increasingly nationalist legitimization in particular.47 In the societies of the ‘advanced construction of socialism’ (the ‘really existing socialism’) the ethnonational was pervasive, both in the communist nation states such as Poland or Hungary and in the communist federations: the USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Rogers Brubaker has rightly stressed that Soviet institutions of territorial nationhood and personal nationality constituted a ‘pervasive system of social classification, an organizing principle of vision and division of the social world, a standardized scheme of social accounting, an interpretative grid for public discussion, and a set of boundary-markers, a legitimate form for public and private identities’.48 This seems to apply well also to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The federal governments of the three states were supranational in the same sense and to the same extent that their federated republics were ethnonational. In their demands for independence in the 1990s, the leaders of the Soviet and Yugoslav republics could call on the principles enshrined in their federal constitutions, which in turn had their origins in the principle of national self-determination.49 As long as the communist parties maintained their monocentric regimes, these were slogans with limited practical consequences. Yet, when the regimes eroded at the Cold War’s end, new ethnonationalist leaders (no matter if they had been communist party members or anti-communists) found in them a readymade basis for their secessionist claims. The ethnonationalism was therefore both symbiotic with the late communist regime and sufficiently opposed to its ideology, to 48 naturally become its successors. They offered ways to overcome or externalize the internal conflicts and desires for revenge resulting from decades of dictatorship and abuse. The role of the ethnonationalist exit strategy seems obvious in case of the three federal states that disintegrated along ethnonational lines. It also appears, however, in the GDR, one of the two states of ein Volk that united in 1990. We may find it similarly in Poland and Hungary, where national unity above the political divisions and national compromise were the basis for the peaceful transition from communism, and in Romania, where the revolution of December 1989 defeated the Ceausescu regime under the national flag (with the Soviet-style coat of arms excised). The post-communist ethnonationalism emerged from the communist one. The latter was not oxymoronic - because of the evolution of communist ideas and practices, from the initial revolutionary internationalism, deep suspicion of nationalism and struggle against it, into making it a pillar, and eventually the pillar of respective regimes. By accepting and then nurturing widespread nationalist emotions, which proved vital at the moments of the regimes’ crises, the communist leaders laid the foundation for the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and their federal countries. 49 1 Andreas Wimmer and Yuval Feinstein, "The Rise of the Nation-State across the World, 1816 to 2001," American Sociological Review 75, no. 5 (2010), 764-790. Andreas Wimmer and Brian Min, "From Empire to Nation-State: Explaining Wars in the Modern World, 1816–2001," American Sociological Review 71, no. 6 (2006), 867-897. 2 Chris Patten, "Speech at the Western Balkans Democracy Forum, Thessaloniki" http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/archives/ear/publications/main/pub-speech_thessaloniki_20020411.htm (accessed 22.6.2014). 3 This is not because its author comes from Central Europe and sees the world from an East European perspective. While these factors play a role, of course, they were among the many reasons he chose to write on the topic in this collective volume. 4 The same may be said about Albania, which left the Soviet bloc to join communist China in the 1960s. 5 Ewa Morawska, "Intended and Unintended Consequences of Forced Migrations: A Neglected Aspect of East Europe's Twentieth Century History," International Migration Review 34, no. 4 (2000), 1049-1087. More accurately, these figures refer to displacements rather than persons displaced, as some individuals were relocated more than once. The degree of compulsion in these involuntary movements varied. See also Peter Gatrell, "Introduction: World Wars and Population Displacement in Europe in the Twentieth Century," Contemporary European History 16, Special Issue 4 (2007), 415-426; Dariusz Stola, "Forced Migrations in Central European History," International Migration Review 26, no. 2 (Summer 1992), 324-341. 6 The East European Borderlands, Rimlands, Warlands and Bloodlands, as they have been variously named, have recently attracted growing interest of contemporary historians, see Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell, Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918-1924, (London: Anthem Press, 2004); Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron, Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945-50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Mark Levene, "The Tragedy of Rimlands, Nation-State Formation and the Destruction of Imperial Peoples, 1912-1948," in Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, ed. Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 51-80; Alxander V. Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870-1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Alexander V. Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914-1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). For an analysis of a wider space in a longer period see Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 7 As an expert in border history noted: 1989 "was followed by a revision of frontiers which had previously happened only after major wars", see Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 58. 50 8 The list of European states follows the catalogue of the UN Statistics Division. Data on border lengths is from the CIA Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html, accessed 20.2.2012); for Russia the calculation includes only its new European borders. 9 Maxim Waldstein and Sanna Turoma, "Introduction: Empire and Space. Russian and the Soviet Union in Focus," in Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Maxim Waldstein and Sanna Turoma (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 1-30; David Chioni Moore, "Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 116, no. 1 (2001), 111-128. 10 The GDR-FRG border did not disappear altogether. Restrictions imposed by the USSR in the German Treaty of 1990 have prevented the stationing of foreign troops and nuclear weapons in the territory of the former GDR, making the Neuen Bundesländer a special part of the FRG and NATO. 11 Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk and Stefan Wolle, Roter Stern über Deutschland: Sowjetische Truppen in der DDR (Berlin: Links, 2001), 225. Mariusz Lesław Krogulski, Okupacja w imię sojuszu. Armia Radziecka w Polsce, 1956-1993 (Warszawa: von Borowiecky, 2001); Robert E. Harkavy, Bases Abroad: The Global Foreign Military Presence (Oxford; Stockholm: Oxford University Press, 1989); US Department of Defense, “Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country”, 1987 and 1997, http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/MILITARY/history/309hist.htm (accessed 10.4.2012). The exception in the Soviet/Russian withdrawal from Central Europe was the Kaliningrad exclave, a transit or destination place for many of the relocating troops, which in 1990 made it the place of highest concentration of military personnel in the continent. 12 Human Security Centre, Human Security Report 2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), part V; Andrew Mack, "Global Political Violence: Explaining the Post-Cold War Decline," in Strategies for Peace. Contributions of International Organisations, States, and Non-State Actors, ed. Volker Rittberger and Martina Fischer (Opladen & Farmington Hills: Budrich Verlag, 2008), 75-107. 13 Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 296n. 14 Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron, "Violent Peacetime: Reconceptualizing Displacement and Resettlement in the Soviet-East European Borderlands after the Second World War," in Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945-50, ed. Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 255-268; Peter Gatrell, "Trajectories of Population Displacement in the Aftermaths of Two World Wars," in The Disentanglement of Populations : Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944-49, ed. Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3-26. 15 Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), chapter 5; Ther, Ciemna strona…; United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, International Migration Bulletin, no. 9 (1996); United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, The State of the World's Refugees, 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 9. 51 16 Andrei V. Korobkov and Zhanna Zaionchkovskaia, "The Changes in the Migration Patterns in the Post- Soviet States: The First Decade," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 37, no. 4 (2004), 481-508; Valery Tishkov, Zhanna Zayinchkovskaya and Galina Vitkovskaya, Migration in the Countries of the Former Soviet Union (Geneva, 2005). 17 Rogers Brubaker and David D. Laitin, "Ethnic and Nationalist Violence," Annual Review of Sociology 24, no. 2 (1998), 425; Katherine Verdery, "Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-Socialist Romania," Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (1993), 179-203; Panikos Panayi, "Imperial Collapse and the Creation of Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe," in Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, ed. Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee (Houndmills; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3-27. 18 The countries that were not reduced (or even did expand, at the expense of Italy): Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, were incidentally those that had no border with the USSR. 19 Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012). Yugoslavia, with its independent communist regime, was truly a land in-between East and West. 20 Hungarian writer Sandor Marai wrote that the Soviet soldier could not bring freedom because he himself had none, but he brought deliverance from the German terror (as quoted by Albina F. Noskova, "Zwycięstwo i zniewolenie," in Białe plamy - czarne plamy: Sprawy trudne w polsko-rosyjskich stosunkach, 1918-2008, ed. Adam Daniel Rotfeld and Anatolij Vasil'evič Torkunov (Warszawa: PISM, 2010), 440). On the other hand, Hungarian or Bulgarian governments had had greater autonomy as German satellites before 1944, than they had as Soviet satellites four years later. 21 Sabine Dullin, "L'invention d'une frontiere de guerre froide a L'ouest de l'URSS (1945-1949)," Vingtiemes siecle. Revue d'historie, no. 102 (2009), 49-63; Dariusz Stola, Kraj bez wyjścia? Migracje z Polski 1949-1989 (Warszawa: IPN, ISP PAN, 2010), chapter I. 22 Similarly, the dissolution of the USSR would have been much different, if possible, if the Soviet Union had not been an “empire of nations” (even if the Russian one had a privileged position among them), see Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge & the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 23 Stola, "Forced Migrations…"; Alfred J. Rieber, Forced Migration in Central and Eastern Europe, 1939-1950 (London: Frank Cass, 2000); E.M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-47 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948). 24 Ther, Ciemna strona…, 142-169; Eric D. Weitz, "From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions," American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (2008), 1313-1343. 25 Korobkov and Zaionchkovskaia, "The Changes in the Migration Patterns…”; International Organization for Migration, "Migration Trends in Eastern Europe and Central Asia," (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2002); Eftihia Voutira, "Ethnic Greeks from the Former Soviet Union as “Privileged Return 52 Migrants”," Espace populations sociétés / Space populations societies, no. 2004/3 (2004), 533-544. The figures refer to registered migrants only, excluding substantial illegal flows. 26 Marrus, The Unwanted…, p.41; Matthew Frank, "Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: 'Population Transfer' at the End of Empire in Europe," in Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, ed. Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee (Houndmills; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 81-101. The term “unmixing” was not only misleading (as if pure, non-mixed populations were the natural state) but obscured how much mixture still remained. 27 Rogers Brubaker, "Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples: Historical and Comparative Perspectives," Ethnic and racial studies 18, no. 2 (1995), 189, 191; Panayi, “Imperial collapse…”; Levene, “The tragedy of rimlands…”; M. Mazower, "Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century," The American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (2002), 1174. 28 Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, 1914-1923 (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001); Antonio Cassese, Self-Determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 29 Borislav Chernev, "The Brest-Litovsk Moment: Self-Determination Discourse in Eastern Europe before Wilsonianism," Diplomacy & Statecraft 22, no. 3 (2011), 369-387; Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System”. Lenin and Stalin had been outspoken on the principle for several years before the Brest conference, see for example Lenin’s “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, published in 1914, and Stalin’s "Marxism and the National Question", published in 1913. 30 Letter of Czernin to von Hertling of 10 November 1917, in: Proceedings of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference: The Peace Negotiations between Russia and the Central Powers 21 November, 1917 – 3 March, 1918 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office 1918), 8, quoted by Chernev, 372. 31 The Baltic states regained their independence several months earlier: the European Communities statement of August 1991 warmly welcomed “the restoration of the sovereignty and independence of the Baltic states which they lost in 1940”, see Roland Rich, "Recognition of States: The Collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union" European Journal of International Law 4, no. 1 (1993), 38. 32 Sławomir Dębski, Między Berlinem a Moskwą: Stosunki niemiecko-sowieckie 1939-1941 (Warszawa: PISM, 2007). The town and fortress of Brest was first taken by German troops, who handed it over to the Soviets. Film footage of the parade and related Nazi-Soviet camaraderie is available online. 33 The Confidential Protocol to the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty of September 28, 1939, http://avalon.law.yale.edu (accessed 20.1.2014). 34 Hurst Hannum, Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 27-28; Malcolm N. Shaw, "Peoples, Territorialism and Boundaries," European Journal of International Law 8, no. 3 (1997), 481. 35 Steven R. Ratner, "Drawing a Better Line: Uti Possidetis and the Borders of New States," The American Journal of International Law 90, no. 4 (1996), 590-624; Tomasz Srogosz, "Geneza zasady "Uti Possidetis" w 53 prawie międzynarodowym publicznym: kilka uwag o kształtowaniu granic państwowych w Ameryce Łacińskiej w XIX i XX wieku," Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne 63, no. 2 (2011), 329-342. 36 Allain Pellet, "The Opinions of the Badinter Arbitration Committee: A Second Breath for the Self- Determination of Peoples," European Journal of International Law 3, no. 1 (1992), 178-185. As per the USSR, the Belavezha agreement and the Charter of the Commonwealth of Independent States adopted in Minsk on 22 January 1993 included a clear “recognition of existing frontiers”. 37 Fifteen new states had existed as (formally) autonomous republics within larger federal polities; the sixteenth (and most problematic) Kosovo had been an autonomous province of the republic of Serbia. 38 Shaw, “Peoples, Territorialism and Boundaries”, 482-496; Ana S. Trbovich, A Legal Geography of Yugoslavia's Disintegration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 23-25. The statements include the Dayton Agreement, the EC Foreign Ministers’ Declaration on the Guidelines on the Recognition of the New States, and their Declaration on Yugoslavia of December 1991. 39 Weitz, "From the Vienna to the Paris System”; Mark Mazower, "The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950," The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004), 379-398. 40 Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan, No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Stefan Troebst, "The Discourse on Forced Migration and European Culture of Remembrance," Hungarian Historical Review, no. 3-4 (2012), 397-414. 41 Chaim D. Kaufmann, "When All Else Fails: Ethnic Population Transfers and Partitions in the Twentieth Century," International security 23, no. 2 (1998), 120-156; Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), 205. 42 Peter J. Taylor, "The State as Container: Territoriality in the Modern World-System," Progress in Human Geography 18, no. 2 (1994), 153-54. 43 44 Ratner, "Drawing a Better Line”, 591. Ther, Ciemna strona państw narodowych, chapter 3.1; Marina Cattaruzza, "‘Last Stop Expulsion’–the Minority Question and Forced Migration in East-Central Europe: 1918–49," Nations and Nationalism 16, no. 1 (2010), 121. 45 A very short (0.35 second) Google research on what is the “Cold War symbol” leaves no doubt that it is the Berlin Wall and the divided Berlin in general. 46 For a sophisticated statistical analysis of nationalisms’ role in dismantling the Soviet Union see Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 47 On nationalist legitimization of communist regimes see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War : The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm. Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (Warszawa: Trio, 2001). 48 Rogers Brubaker, "Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutionalist Account," Theory and Society 23, no. 1 (1994), 48. 54 49 See the article 4 of the Soviet constitution of 1924, art.17 of the Soviet constitution of 1936, art. 70 and 72 of the constitution of 1977.