The Dark Side of Nation States ― Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe

Why was there such a far-reaching consensus concerning the utopian goal of national homogeneity in the first half of the twentieth century? Ethnic cleansing is analyzed here as a result of the formation of democratic nation-states, the international order based on them, and European modernity in general. Almost all mass-scale population removals were rationally and precisely organized and carried out in cold blood, with revenge, hatred and other strong emotions playing only a minor role. This book not only considers the majority of population removals which occurred in Eastern Europe, but is also an encompassing, comparative study including Western Europe, interrogating the motivations of Western statesmen and their involvement in large-scale population removals. It also reaches beyond the European continent and considers the reverberations of colonial rule and ethnic cleansing in the former British colonies.

Philipp Ther holds a Chair of Central European History at the University of Vienna. Previously he was a professor of comparative European history at the EUI in Florence. He has published and edited several books on ethnic cleansing, including Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe 1944-1948 (co-edited with A. Siljak; Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). He also co-edited Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe, (Berghahn, 2007). His most recent book Die neue Ordnung auf dem alten Kontinent: Eine Geschichte des neoliberalen Europa, (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014) [The New Order on the Old Continent. A History of Neoliberal Europe], was awarded with the non-fiction bookprize of the Leipzig bookfare and has been contracted by Princeton University Press.