Europe and Ethnicity

The First World War and Contemporary Ethnic Conflict

Seamus Dunn, T.G. Fraser, Seamus Dunn, T.G. Fraser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415119962
• eBook ISBN: 9781134811267
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The 1990s have seen an upsurge in ethnic tensions in many parts of Europe. Europe and Ethnicity suggests the main reasons are to be found in the decisions taken during the first world and at Versailles.
* An introductory chapter analyzes the context of the war with particular reference to regions and states where the national and ethnic questions were particularly complex and intransigent
* Subsequent chapters present case studies from arenas of conflict: Ireland to Yugoslavia; the Middle East to the Baltic states; Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Europe and Ethnicity confirms the mixed legacy of the period for the ethnic stability of the areas examined, while taking into account the impact of the Second World War and the ending of the Cold War.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Seamus Dunn and T.G.Fraser

The intention of this book is to examine the proposition that—in simple terms—a number of the current political conflicts in the world are leftovers or unfinished business from the First World War. The currency of many of these conflicts—and the world-wide dangers created by the proliferation of small wars now at the end of the twentieth century—makes an understanding of their history and context important.

The structure of the book reflects this intention. It consists of this introduction, followed by a general scene-setting chapter; then, at the heart of the book, there are eight chapters, each written about a particular current political conflict or location; and, finally, there is a summary chapter based on the material presented in the rest of the book.

Obviously the set of conflicts or locations chosen for analysis cannot be seen as representative in any universal sense, mainly because any attempt at an exhaustive analysis of all the possible locations would have produced an impossibly large book. The eight examples, therefore, are intended to represent a sample of the range of possible, relevant locations, but chosen so as to reflect the complete spectrum of themes and issues. In each of the eight chapters the authors place the conflict in the context of the First World War, and reflect on the proposition that this war represents an important factor in current difficulties.

The two introductory chapters, along with the final chapter, elaborate on the central question addressed by the book. They deal with the impact and relevance of the war, and provide a general description and analysis with special reference to regions and states where the national and ethnic questions were particularly complex and intransigent. They also deal with the concepts of ethnicity and nationalism, and with the modern significance and ubiquity of ethnic conflict.

The Europe that emerged out of the aftermath of the First World War was barely recognisable as the continent whose statesmen, generals and peoples had rushed to war in 1914. Four powerful dynasties, as well as several minor German ones, had been cast aside by their peoples: the Ottomans who had led the Turks out of central Asia in the late Middle Ages to rule much of south-west Europe and the Arab civilisations of the Middle East; the Romanovs under whom the Russians had come to dominate much of the Eurasian land area; the Hohenzollerns who had welded most of the Germans into a Prussian-dominated empire in 1866–71; and the most venerable of them all, the Habsburgs, Catholic Europe’s historic defender against Islam, protestantism, and latterly nationalism, whose possessions had once reached from central Europe to South America. Germany and Russia survived largely intact under new republican forms, the former being required to restore Alsace-Lorraine to France and the Polish Corridor to the reconstituted Poland, the latter conceding independence to Finland and the three small Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. But the empires of the Ottomans and Habsburgs which for centuries had given coherence to the peoples of the Middle East and central Europe had been replaced by new states which had sprung to life, or in the case of the former been manufactured, in the name of ‘self-determination’. The Ottoman empire had been succeeded by a new Turkishdominated republic in Anatolia, its former Arab territories becoming the French Mandates of Syria and Lebanon and the British Mandates of Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan. Out of the Habsburg domains came the severely truncated nation states of Hungary and Austria, the latter denied its natural association with Germany, and the new countries of Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, each of which reproduced in miniature the ethnic tensions of the old empire. The remaining parts of the earlier Habsburg possessions were distributed to Poland, Romania and Italy, with varying degrees of justice. While the far-reaching nature of these changes to the politico-ethnic map of Europe may in large measure be attributed to defeat, even the victors were not immune to the pace of change, for in the aftermath of the war Britain had to concede virtual independence to Ireland and to a partition of the island which rested to a considerable extent on the notion of ‘selfdetermination’.

Such far-reaching changes to the structure of the continent could hardly have been imagined in the years prior to the outbreak of war. Imperial Germany had its ethnic groups, Danes, Poles and in Lorraine, which were described as reichsfeindlich (‘hostile to the empire’), but otherwise only the United Kingdom, faced with the seemingly intractable Ulster question, appeared to have a major ethnic problem in western Europe. In the Middle East, Arab nationalism had only the most cautious presence. Zionism was still a minority sentiment among European Jews who either preferred assimilation or emigration to the United States. In eastern and central Europe the multinational empires of the Romanovs and Habsburgs seemed to present a very different prospect, but neither was on the verge of dissolution. The latter, in particular, had accommodated itself to the political ambitions of the Hungarians in the Ausgleich of 1867 which had created the Dual Monarchy with capitals in Vienna and Budapest. While tensions between the two parts of the empire could still be acute, Hungarian leaders had no wish to sever an arrangement which allowed them to dominate their half of the empire inside the protection of a larger unit. The major point at issue within the empire was how to reconcile the rising ambitions of some Slav groups, notably the Czechs. It was an empire held together by its army, an honest and efficient bureaucracy, respect for the venerable Emperor and King, Franz Josef, the Catholic church, and by a feeling among its peoples that their common home was a safer prospect than that offered by its fragmentation. Imperial sentiment was notably weakest among the non-Catholic sections of the population, though not the Jews who have sometimes been referred to as the truest Austrians of them all. It was certainly significant that the shot which killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and precipitated the war was fired by an Orthodox Serb. If the other states of Europe went to war for a variety of reasons too long to list here, ethnicity lay at the heart of the decisions taken in Vienna and Budapest.

Recalling the events of 1914, the empire’s chief military figure, Field-Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorff was to write: Two principles were in sharp conflict, the maintenance of Austria as a conglomerate of various nationalities…and the rise of independent national States claiming their ethnic territories from Austria-Hungary’.¹ While Conrad’s analysis certainly held true for the multi-national empire whose future he thus sought to safeguard by curbing Serb pretensions, the struggle in western Europe had very different origins in the competing rivalries of the powers, with their economic and imperial ambitions. Here ethnic tensions played little part in the outbreak of war, with two exceptions. In 1871, the new imperial Germany had taken control from France of the long-disputed provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. With its Germanic character and language, Alsace, it could plausibly be argued, had reverted to its natural home along the Rhine valley; but not so Lorraine which had been acquired in order that its raw materials might serve the developing industries of the Ruhr. Germany’s disregard for the ethnic loyalties of Lorraine was one of the fundamental causes of the war, guaranteeing France’s desire for revanche. In 1914, western Europe’s other ethnic flashpoint was Ireland, or at least Ulster. From 1912, when the government introduced the Third Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons, the situation deteriorated alarmingly as the Ulster Unionists led by Sir Edward Carson mobilised to prevent its implementation. The formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force was followed in March 1914 by the so-called Curragh Mutiny when army officers indicated their unwillingness to act against the UVF. When the UVF succeeded in landing 20,000 rifles the following month, the prospect of a violent confrontation in Ulster had moved measurably closer. That these events were being clearly noted in Vienna and Berlin as the summer crisis of 1914 unfolded need not be doubted.

But it is to the Balkans that we must turn to see the full impact of ethnic tensions. In 1908, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Count Aerenthal sought to consolidate the empire’s position by formally annexing Bosnia-Hercegovina, with its mixed Muslim, Croat and Serb population, which the empire had administered since 1878. However, his attempt to do this with the cooperation of his Russian counterpart, Alexander Izvolski, fell apart. The following year, the question of annexation brought AustriaHungary and Serbia to the edge of war, setting in train the fateful rivalries which reached their climax on 28 June 1914 when the young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, the Countess Sophie. Vienna’s ultimatum to Belgrade, where the outrage had been planned, led to the diplomatic breakdown of the old Europe. By 4 August, all the major powers of Europe, except Italy, were at war.

The struggle which resulted was not the war planned by the general staffs or imagined by the cheering crowds who thronged the capitals of Europe in the summer of 1914. By 1916, the war had settled into a relentless, and seemingly unending pattern of horror, the mass suicide of a generation. At Verdun the German and French armies bled each other to death, on the Somme the British sacrificed the volunteer armies of 1914, while on the Eastern Front the Brusilov offensive shattered the best of the Habsburg armies while exhausting the last strength of imperial Russia. The Rising in Dublin in Easter 1916 should have served as a warning to more than the British. Amid the slaughter the old Europe died. It remained to be seen what would emerge to take its place. The following year the collapse of the Russian monarchy and subsequent triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution seemed to herald one way forward, deeply disturbing to the propertied classes of Europe and the United States which by then had entered the struggle on the Allied side. An alternative to Lenin with his siren call of social revolution seemed to be the American President Woodrow Wilson with his ill-defined, but to many of the nationalities of Europe infinitely seductive, message of selfdetermination. With the defeat of the Central Empires in 1918, the victorious statesmen of the Allied and Associated Powers could address the task of reconstructing the continent along the principles Wilson had outlined. But too many men had been lost for the leaders of France and Britain to be totally swayed by ‘Wilsonianism’, and the ethnic map of Europe was so complex, that their success was partial. And lying temporarily blinded in a hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania was a young German-Austrian soldier, in whom the most poisonous ethnic hatreds of central Europe had taken hold, who was to play with brilliant success on the inevitable shortcomings of the Allies’ work and march the world to war twenty years later.

When the Great War came to an end, the central problems debated and pursued at the Paris Conference were to do with the boundaries and powers of the major national states, and with Germany and the successor states of Austria-Hungary in particular. However, the less than clear lines of the settlement were confounded by a host of less central, often geographically peripheral, matters to do with old boundary arguments, national identities, migration patterns and ownership of territories. Many of the new states created, and the lines of their borders, were at best crude compromises. ‘Often there was no possibility of drawing any frontier which did not leave substantial minorities on either side.’²

This book reflects the view that many of the current flashpoints in the western and mid-eastern worlds—that is regions with continuing conflicts where political and sectarian violence is either real or incipient—can be traced back to the compromises and failures of that settlement.

The origins of ethnic disputes are usually connected with one or more of a set of fundamental forms of human association (and therefore separateness) such as religion, politics, race, ethnicity and culture. It is becoming customary for the word ethnic to be used as a general and inclusive word to describe all such forms of association. These associations and divisions are of great power and significance because they relate to the ways in which people identify themselves and their individual places in the world. The determination to remain distinctive and separate leads to drawing of boundaries or building of walls, to marking out territories and to a physical and emotional distancing from others. One consequence of this process is called nationalism.

There are currently about 160 nation-states in the international system, in contrast to several thousand cultural and ethnic groups.³ For reasons that are not completely clear, the past two decades have witnessed a remarkable growth in political and economic awareness among a great many of these ethnic groups. Very often they are reacting to the status of being permanent minorities within existing states, and inevitably their new selfawareness leads to conflict with the authority of the state and, often, to violence both from and against the state. It would be a simple matter to list numerous examples, from all parts of the world, to illustrate these developments and there is now a growing literature which attempts to produce structured lists and analytical categories.⁴

One important reason for this awakening of ethnic awareness is the disappearance, at least for the moment, of the Great Power clash of ideologies and world-views that produced the bipolar, Cold War world. With it has gone the immediate fear of, although not the potential for, a world-destroying nuclear war. It was this singular focus, particularly after the Second World War, which succeeded in occluding from view the existence of a great many other conflicts, relatively small in scale, long-lived, ethnic in character, and internal rather than inter-state. Many of them, of course, remain hidden in that the media has not yet f ound a reason to bring them centre-stage. Currently much of the focus is on Africa with attention being given to Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia and Ethiopia. However in East Timor, Georgia, Kurdistan, Colombia, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and many others, the violence continues with little or no attention from western media.

The collapse of the Soviet empire led to a dramatic redistribution of world power, and the removal of some previously resolute forms of centralised restraint. Almost inevitably—it now seems—the way was clear for the emergence, or re-emergence, of ethnic awareness and mobilisation, whether this was defined in terms of civic nationalism, that is as a response to the f ailure of the previous system, or as ethnic nationalism, that is as primordial, racial, and characterised by ethnic continuity. In either event, many of these ethnic awakenings led quickly to quarrels which became violent and war-like, or teetered (and continue to teeter) on the edge of violence. The cumulative effect of the many—often bloody—disputes associated with the break-up of Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union is to suggest that ethnic loyalty is ineradicable, with a constant potential for mobilisation. Many such loyalties are of great age, and reflect long-standing fears, separations and hostilities; they did not just emerge suddenly, without a past. Their persistence and virulence suggest that they will not be transformed by any simple remedy. A substantial and important subset of internal conflicts, not all of which are violent but all with the potential to become violent, contains those states and regions where minority ethnic groups wish to secede and set up independent states. Very few modern conflicts are of the classical interstate war kind:

there were only four inter-state armed conflicts for the whole period 1988–93. Strikingly, not one inter-state armed conflict was going on in 1993. In all, 90 armed conflicts took place during the five years, 1989–93, in 61 locations around the world, and more than 60 governments participated in at least one armed conflict.⁵

The actual number of ethnic groups in the world, whether self defined or defined by others, is not easy to compute but their involvement in and commitment to armed conflict all round the world is not in doubt. Wallenstein and Axell identify 175 ‘nongovernmental forces’ involved in the 90 conflicts described above, but argue that the actual number is considerably higher. ‘For instance, the government of India estimated that there were 180 groups active in Kashmir in 1992’⁶

For these reasons, ethnic conflicts and consequent violence are likely to have the greatest impact on world affairs during the next period of history. Already the structure, constitution and rationale of international institutions is being affected: the composition of the United Nations as a body representative of states, rather than nations; the reluctance of the UN to interf ere in what are deemed to be within-state conflicts; the increasing difficulty in policing the world; the growth in regional UN-like organisations. For many western Europeans after 1945, closer economic and then political unity seemed to offer the way forward from the ethnic and national tensions which had bedevilled the continent, but it seems fair to say that the hopes of the founders have been painfully slow to realise and that true European union is still some way off. Even so, the emergence of regional groupings within Europe may yet offer a mechanism for softening ethnic tensions and in the case of the Tyrol this book explores one of these in some depth.

Finally, since 1917 Europe and the Middle East cannot be viewed in isolation from the United States. In 1941 even Adolf Hitler acknowledged this with his declaration of war on America. The onset of the Cold War bound the United States firmly to Europe. The Gulf Crisis of 1990–91 confirmed America as the dominant power in the Middle East. Much of this book is concerned with the working out of President Wilson’s support for self-determination. Yet it should not be forgotten that America’s relationship to ethnicity is complex and has been increasingly under scrutiny since the publication in 1963 of Glazer and Moynihan’s pioneering study Beyond the Melting Pot, which challenged established assumptions about the ‘melting pot’, at least in parts of the country.⁷ Wilson’s own missionary zeal to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Genie that Would Not Go Back into the Bottle
• Chapter 3 Yugoslavia
• Chapter 4 From Czechs and Slovaks to Czechoslovakia, and from Czechoslovakia to Czechs and Slovaks
• Chapter 5 Trentino and Tyrol
• Chapter 6 Hungary
• Chapter 7 Ukraine
• Chapter 8 The Baltic States
• Chapter 9 The Middle East
• Chapter 10 Ireland
• Chapter 11 The Enduring Legacy