In the mid-2000s, the tiny Baltic nation of Latvia had a Janus-like quality. Scenic downtown Riga featured malls, restored medieval architecture, and Western hotels. Snatches of English conversation could be overheard from backpackers and British stag parties eager to explore a newly accessible (and relatively cheap) European capital. The 2004 accession of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to the European Union seemed to herald a new era of openness and economic development for the Baltic states.
The outskirts of the city, where I volunteered at a foster home to get out of a reckless driving charge in Virginia, were quite different. There were no baroque apartments or medieval guildhalls in the suburbs, only drab housing blocks. The most common second language was Russian, not because it had been widely adopted by the Latvians but because so many native speakers had relocated to the Baltics during the Soviet era. Since independence, large Russian minorities in Estonia and Latvia have been agitating for political autonomy and Russian language instruction in schools. Not coincidentally, the Baltics are a target for Russian cyberattacks, aggressive air patrols, and other provocations.
Europeans often make self-congratulatory references to the continent’s post-1945 long peace. In truth, this settlement was built on the violent reorganization of the continent into ethnically coherent nation-states. Even today, countries and regions on the outskirts of Europe are plagued by the same internecine conflicts that wracked the entire continent in the first half of the 20th century.
In the European core, communities that once inflamed great power rivalries — the Sudetenland Germans, the Italians of Dalmatia, the French of Alsace-Lorraine — disappeared or were reabsorbed by their mother countries. It is only on the European periphery, from the Baltic states to the Balkans, where ethnic fault lines persist. These areas are still sites of political tension, great power jockeying, and, in the case of the former Yugoslavia and now Ukraine, open conflict.
In the Western press, the war in Ukraine is often characterized as a battle between a plucky democratic underdog and the authoritarian bully next door. The ethnic and linguistic divisions that gave rise to the conflict are also worth considering. The Ukrainian government’s contentious relationship with its large Russian-speaking minority was the pretext for Vladimir Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. As Russian forces withdrew from Kyiv and moved east, the strategic rationale for the war seemed to shift from quickly toppling the Ukrainian government to consolidating territorial gains in areas dominated by ethnic Russians and Russian speakers.
It is not an endorsement of this war aim to say that by pursuing this strategic goal, Putin could be putting Ukraine in the position of many Western European nations three-quarters of a century ago. A Ukraine oriented toward its Western provinces and severed from a troublesome Russian minority may emerge as a more politically stable and nationally coherent state. In 1996, the political scientist Samuel Huntington described Ukraine as a “cleft country,” caught between its Catholic Western provinces and the Orthodox and Russian-speaking East. Putin’s invasion is brutally ironing out the cleft, leaving the country smaller but more cohesive. Ukraine, often perceived as backward or retrograde by its Western neighbors, is undergoing the same national consolidation that most of Europe experienced in the mid-20th century.
The last time a European conflict shocked the West’s conscience, ethnic and religious divisions were also to blame. Josip Tito’s Yugoslavia was the last in a long line of imperial powers to suppress the varieties of South Slav nationalism. Following his death and the collapse of communism, dormant ethnic and religious grievances reemerged with a vengeance.
Media coverage of the war in Ukraine recalls the West’s appalled reaction to the breakup of Yugoslavia, another conflict that punctured the myth that Europe has permanently eschewed violence. The Balkan Wars, however, did not result in the complete reordering of the region into ethnically coherent nation-states. Bosnia still encompasses a Muslim Bosniak majority, a substantial Catholic Croat community, and the breakaway Republic of Srpska, a Serbian Orthodox enclave to the east. The 1995 Dayton Accords, meant as a stopgap measure until a more durable peace settlement could be agreed upon, remain in force because these ethnic and religious divisions have proved so intractable. As long as these fault lines persist, the Balkans will remain a tinderbox.
Had the Balkan Wars spilled over into a wider European conflict, ethnic tensions would have been the accelerant. According to the American historian Larry Watts, the Hungarian military mobilized along the Romanian border in 1989 to protect the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, with tacit assurances from French President Francois Mitterrand that he would not object if Hungary reclaimed its lost province. In 2000, Corneliu Vadim Tudor came in second in the Romanian presidential election. While campaigning, he called himself “Vlad the Impaler” and said of Hungarians in Romania, “We will hang them directly by their Hungarian tongue!”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a controversial figure in Western Europe in part because he still speaks the language of national grievance. Ethnic conflict between Romania and Hungary is vanishingly unlikely, mainly because the Hungarian enclave in Transylvania is proportionally much smaller than that of the Russian speakers of Latvia or the Serbs of Bosnia. But Orban’s rhetorical support for Hungarian communities abroad recalls an older era of nationalistic passions. Echoes of this era persist, even in liberal Budapest. As I write this in a downtown coffee shop, a woman has just walked in with a map of Greater Hungary, which includes large chunks of modern Serbia, Romania, Croatia, Slovakia, and Ukraine, tattooed on her left calf.
In Western and Central Europe, the grievances that aroused national passions are largely forgotten, mainly because the minorities that inspired these grievances have been erased from the map. Before the First World War, French generals dreamed of revanche and the reconquest of the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine from Wilhelmine Germany. Now, the only reminder that Strasbourg was once contested territory is the city’s charming Germanic architecture. In the wake of World War II, Europe was reorganized by a series of astonishing, and mostly unremembered, population transfers. Bulgaria sent 160,000 Turks to Turkey, Czechoslovakia exchanged 120,000 ethnic Hungarians with Hungary for the equivalent number of Czechs and Slovaks, and some 600,000 Italians and Germans fled or were forcibly removed from the Balkans.
The expulsion of the Germans from Eastern and Central Europe, rarely discussed because of the war and the Third Reich’s own campaign of ethnic cleansing, is the most dramatic instance of Europe’s reorganization into coherent national blocs. After World War II, nearly 3 million Germans left or were expelled from Czechoslovakia alone. In total, some 13 million ethnic Germans resettled in West Germany. “The scale of this resettlement, and the conditions in which it takes place,” wrote New York Times correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick, “are without precedent in history.”
Farther east, approximately 1 million Poles fled or were forcibly removed from western Ukraine to accommodate Stalin’s expansion of Soviet borders. Here, it is worth mentioning that the terms “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” were coined by two Lviv-educated jurists. The western Ukrainian city, once a meeting point of cultures, languages, and nationalities, witnessed some of the most brutal ethnic cleansing of the era.
Europeans often attribute the decades of peace they’ve enjoyed to enlightened attitudes or the gradual expansion of the EU. The reality is considerably less comforting. Trace the lines of conflict along Europe’s periphery, and you’re likely to find the same grievances that once inflamed an entire continent. Sarajevo, with its medley of Islamic and Habsburg influences, is one of the most interesting cities in Europe. It was also the scene of terrible fighting in the 1990s.
“The incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe,” in the words of the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski, no longer exists. The Europe that followed its dissolution is blander and less culturally fertile. It is also very peaceful, an awkward truth that reflects the stabilizing effects of national homogeneity. As the war in Ukraine draws on, Europeans would do well to remember the brutal history behind the peace they’ve long enjoyed.
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Budapest, Hungary.
