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8/4/2025, 12:14:12 AM
>JL: Well, the trouble is that what we saw with the great sorting-out in Europe is that all these new states that were created out of multi-ethnic, multi-religious empires after World War I – the class of 1919, as I call them – that includes over nine nation-states in central Europe that were created whole-cloth or reconstituted in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where different peoples were asked to form an organic community and become a nation. These multi-ethnic empires that were destroyed in World War I, the empire-destroying war – Russian Empire, German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and for our purposes, the Ottoman Empire – were turned into nation-states; and they failed spectacularly. And it’s led to the process of this great sorting-out, where Poland, for example, was 64 per cent Poles before World War II; by the end of World War II, by 1950, it was 100 per cent Polish. That meant the destruction of 3 million Jews, the ethnic cleansing of 5 million Germans, mostly at the end of the war, and Ruthenians – that’s Ukrainians and Lithuanians – were also driven out. In Czechoslovakia we see the same thing, where the Sudeten German, 3 million, were destroyed, as well as all the Jews; and then the Czechs and Slovaks, two of the most ... seemingly liberal peoples, could not live together, and chose their Velvet Revolution.
>This should not be mistaken for primordialism. These identities, religious identities, had been accommodated in the Ottoman Empire, as they had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where you see cities like Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, have very distinct quarters for Armenians, Shi’ites, Sunnis, Jewish Quarter, Catholic, Orthodox – all these different quarters, where people lived cheek by jowl. Now, that didn’t necessarily mean that they saw each other as equals, but they had much more in common than separated them.
>This should not be mistaken for primordialism. These identities, religious identities, had been accommodated in the Ottoman Empire, as they had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where you see cities like Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, have very distinct quarters for Armenians, Shi’ites, Sunnis, Jewish Quarter, Catholic, Orthodox – all these different quarters, where people lived cheek by jowl. Now, that didn’t necessarily mean that they saw each other as equals, but they had much more in common than separated them.
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