MO4965 Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in Twentieth-Century Europe

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During the last two centuries modernisation has placed in the hands of governments unprecedented instruments and resources with which they can effect ideologically justified and politically motivated changes in the populations of states. Serious attempts at mass expulsions and exterminations of entire populaces were first made in the 19th century in the colonies of the European powers. In Europe the phenomenon manifested itself during the 20th century, mainly in attempts to achieve a precise fit of nation-states with their ethnolinguistically defined nations. The massacres (genocide) of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were followed by mass expulsions of other populations during and after World War I in Central Europe. World War II culminated in the genocide of the Jews and Roma, while after the war an even bigger wave of expulsions occurred. At approximately the same time, socially and nationally defined groups were exterminated or forcibly relocated within the Soviet Union. The internationally accepted conceptualisation and criminalisation of genocide in 1948 did not prevent renewed rounds of expulsions and attempted genocides in the second half of the 20th century in Central and Eastern Europe.