Politics: Nations, States, and Empires

Genocide and Mass Migration 3 April 2024

No, they are not synonyms. And no, the definitions are not unchanging. But words have consequences, and we can thank President Woodrow Wilson for inadvertently provoking the mass displacement of peoples that have disrupted hundreds of million lives in the past 107 years. (2)

Wilson felt that people speaking one language identified a “nation” and that each nation should be free to determine its own government. Unfortunately, the churn and intermingling of peoples over the centuries, throughout Europe and the Middle East, plus the “empire system” resulted in few states whose population spoke a single uniform language.

Territory with a border and a recognized governing authority is a “state.” Empires can encompass diverse nations, states, ethnicities, and languages, but have distinct “governing classes” speaking the elite language of the empire and usually also of uniform ethnicity.

At the end of WWI, the victors dissolved the empires of the three losers. They did not have a plan to replace the sovereign authorities. They dew up arbitrary maps of imperial territory to recognize new independent states.

Many states had already anticipated their own independence and declared themselves in 1918. Seeds of WW II were sown among the new borders:

* Germany lost its Polish territory and Prussia to newly independent Poland and Lithuania; German-speaking Alsace-Lorraine re-joined France.

* Russia lost the newly independent countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as its Polish lands. The elites in these countries spoke Russian.

* Austro-Hungarian Empire lost land and people to Italy and the newly formed independent countries of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

Czechoslovakia incorporated the territories of Sudetenland, Bohemia, Moravia, and Ruthenia. All of these had large minorities of ethnic Germans and majorities of various other ethnicities (and languages).

Yugoslavia was assembled by incorporating Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. Croatia is Catholic and uses the Latin alphabet; Serbia is Russian Orthodox and uses the Cyrilic alphabet; Bosnia is mostly Muslim and uses Turkish.

* The Ottoman Empire shrank to just Turkey; it gave up the Balkans, the Middle East, and North African territories, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and the Kingdom of the Hejaz.

The various languages, while quite distinct, were everywhere intermingled, so that village to village the language changed, and often the religion varied, too. “Ethnic uniformity” within any of the new states was impractical; civil wars and WW II compounded unrest within most of the territories. Jews were present in significant numbers throughout the three empires, and suffered the most, because of their non-territorial ethnicity.

“Ethnic cleansing” by genocide or deportation has been common since the Assyrians replaced the Jewish population of Israel with people from other nations. (1) Outright genocide accounts for millions of intentional murders. We think of the Holocaust as the most egregious, but Armenians, Don Cossacks, Ukrainians, and many other people were subject to less organized murder.

In retrospect, defining nations by the language spoken by a majority seems to have been a mistake. It excludes the minority language speakers and engenders animosity not seen from any other cause. After the USSR broke up, millions of Russian "colonists" were stranded among nations they had subjugated; they are the casus belli for Putin's territorial aggression.

“Population exchange” has killed millions; they were not “relo’s” in the modern sense. Displaced people could take only what they could carry or haul in a hand cart.

A few examples:

* Six million Muslims leaving India for Pakistan, with five million Hindus and Sikhs going the other way. (After Indian independence in 1947).

* One million ethnic Greeks left Turkey in 1922 in exchange for half million Turks.Expulsions, like exchanges, are brutal. After WW II, twelve to fourteen million ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe. These were not Nazi invaders. These populations were invited to settle the eastern countries to modernize the economies.

My own great grandparents were very lucky in abandoning their established homes in Norka, Russia, probably around 1871, when the Alexander Tsars revoked the privileges Catherine the Great had used in 1763 to induce their forebears to come. (3) (They settled in Oklahoma among many ex-pats). My Grandmother Bertha Siegfried was born in Oklahoma)

The US had its own “Trail of Tears” under Andrew Jackson (His nickname was “Indian Killer”).

For more on Migrations, see Thomas Sowell’s “Migrations and Cultures,” 1996.

1. Wikipedia article, “List of ethnic cleansing campaigns.”

2. See Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” Speech.

3. See Norka history at www.volgagermans.org