Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe

The term "ethnic cleansing" is associated with Bosnia and the 1990s, but as Lieberman shows in this original work, the practice has helped shape the demographic face of modern Europe—a result, he says, of the end of the multiethnic Russian, Ottoman, Hapsburg and, most recently, Communist empires and the simultaneous rise of national identity. Indeed, Lieberman makes a convincing argument that one of the major themes of the past 200 years in Europe is ethnic cleansing and the end of multiethnic cities and regions. The book ranges over cases of ethnic violence that are well known (e.g., Nazi Germany) as well as lesser-known episodes, such as the Greek flight from Turkish cities in the 1920s under threat of violence as Turkey became a modern nation-state. While Lieberman, a professor of history at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts, is to be commended for his knowledge of so many cases of ethnically driven violence, he is weaker at setting definitions: what distinguishes peacetime ethnic cleansing, pogroms, genocide and wartime flight? Still, this is a book that will have broad appeal among students of modern Europe and of genocide. (Apr. 14)