Search Results

This chapter examines British involvement in the organized movement of German populations in 1946 when the British zone received upwards of 1.5 million Germans from Poland under ‘Operation Swallow’. This experience of population transfer in practice was an unhappy one, made all the more so by the unfavourable comparisons drawn with transfers from Czechoslovakia, and it confirmed many of the earlier misgivings about undertakings of this nature and on this scale. The essentially political motivations for continuing to accept Germans from Poland despite chronic overcrowding in the British zone are discussed, as are the reasons for the more positive appraisal of Czechoslovak policy. The final section of the chapter is a micro-study of the role played by British liaison teams in Poland during ‘Operation Swallow’, and illustrates some of the complications arising from third-party involvement in mass population transfers.

This chapter examines initial British responses to developments in Poland and Czechoslovakia during the transition period from war to peace, when these states began expelling German populations and creating faits accomplis on the ground in advance of any formal decisions being taken at a peace conference. The first signs of public disquiet in Britain at the manner in which Germans, from Czechoslovakia in particular, were being treated are examined, as is the decisive role that the British delegation at the Potsdam Conference played in ensuring that the Great Powers endorsed the principle of population transfer, and called for a halt to further expulsions until a plan for the organized transfer of Germans was in place.

This concluding chapter underlines the centrality of the notion of ‘population transfer’ for understanding British approaches and responses to the expulsion of the Germans. The failure to reconcile a conviction that transfer was justified in principle with doubts about its practicality resulted in an ambivalence which seemed to mark British responses to the expulsion of the Germans. This ambivalence has given rise to successive misreadings of the British position on population transfer. Just as the expelling countries at the time mistook British criticism of the means for doubts about the very principle of population transfer, so, too, later assessments of the British response to the expulsions have mistaken support for the principle as representing acceptance of the way in which it was being carried out. This section ends by placing British abandonment of population transfer within the wider context of changing attitudes towards minority rights.

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the historical and historiographical controversies relating to the expulsion of the Germans, as well as an outline of the methodology, arguments, and structure of the book. It sets out why the concept of ‘population transfer’ is essential to understanding British approaches and responses to the fate of the German populations of Poland and Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War.

This chapter is concerned with the limits of the public rather than the official response to the refugee crisis. It picks up thematically and chronologically where Chapter 4 leaves off with the intensification of the public campaign against the expulsions, loosely centred around Victor Gollancz's ‘Save Europe Now’ movement, and climaxing with a mass rally in London against the backdrop of hysteria about the ‘flooding’ of the British zone with German refugees. The second half of the chapter discusses why public interest in these issues fell away after December 1945, and reflects on the character and wider significance of the British response to the expulsions and refugee crisis, and how this can be explained in terms of a central opposition between population transfer in principle and practice.

Mechanical effects of light are considered in the first section of Chapter 7, together with their application to “optical tweezers.” This leads naturally to a discussion of laser cooling by a variety of techniques. Doppler cooling, magneto‐optic traps, sub‐Doppler cooling, and velocity‐selective coherent population trapping (VSCPT) are all covered. Then coherent population transfer is analyzed as a counterintuitive way of altering the occupation of energy levels in an exceptionally efficient manner. Coherent transverse optical magnetism, covered next, is the only example in the book of an optical effect mediated by the magnetic field of light. This phenomenon is characterized by intense emission of magnetic rather than electric dipole radiation at only moderate intensities and theoretically enables negative indices of refraction and spin control in unstructured, natural (nonmagnetic) materials. Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is also described. This phenomenon is based on tri‐level coherence and can turn opaque media transparent over a limited bandwidth. Additionally, it can intensify high‐order nonlinear optical processes via intermediate step enhancement that is fully resonant. It has been applied to slow or store light as well. In this final chapter, squeezed light is given as an example of a coherent state with altered noise properties. Because the noise in squeezed quadratures of such a state can be reduced below the shot noise limit, it has applications to precision measurements and secure communication. The final section is on cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). This topic treats the interaction of atoms with weak fields that are enhanced through the use of external cavities. In cavity QED, single photons can interact strongly enough with atoms to exhibit Rabi‐splitting behavior, and the strong coupling limit is considered to be a viable approach to quantum computation.

This chapter deals with three major phases of deportations of Kurds from Eastern to Western Turkey in the course of roughly two decades. It analyses how the Young Turks and Kemalists used forced population transfer as a strategy of culturally and demographically ‘Turkifying’ the country's eastern provinces. This project consisted of deporting non‐Turks away from, and settling Turks into the eastern provinces. These two vectors of population transfer geared into each other, rendering the deportations an effective tool of ‘Turkification’. The chapter draws comparisons between the three phases and emphasizes the continuity of Young Turk population policies, without overlooking the differences.

This chapter explains why the decision by the wartime Grand Alliance—Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—to authorize mass transfers of population in post-war central and eastern Europe was both historically momentous and singularly anticlimactic. Behind the reluctance of the Allied powers to be drawn into wartime discussion on minorities problems and solutions there was a convergence of fundamental aims and approaches. Each of the ‘Big Three’ came to regard forced resettlement as a legitimate tool of international as well as of domestic politics for promoting the creation and consolidation of stable and homogeneous nation states and safeguarding national and regional security. Each in their own way, and from different national experiences, therefore became conditioned to the idea of population transfer—became ‘transfer-minded’ —in some cases even before the Second World War, and independent of the immediate political context relating to specific wartime population transfer proposals.

After 1945, national minority rights lost their hitherto independent standing in international relations and were subsumed within the newly created universal human rights regime. The failure of the League of Nations discredited national minority rights and the minorities themselves tended to be viewed with suspicion owing to the wartime complicity of certain national minority leaders with Nazi aims in Central and Eastern Europe — though it should also be pointed out that these aims cleverly exploited national minority fears and aspirations within the region. Consequently, unlike in previous eras, national minority rights were considered contrary to international peace and security. The inter-war system of national minority guarantees was not resurrected and no new national minority rights provisions were included in the various agreements of the 1940s and 1950s which laid the foundations of the Cold War human rights regime. This chapter examines the various political calculations and normative assumptions which underlay the Cold War universal human rights regime that gave such short shrift to the particular problems of national minorities.

This chapter begins by describing the state of expulsion, followed by a short review of the various legal instruments that reject population transfers and ethnic cleansing, and the use of these instruments by advocates to assert that population transfers have always been illegal despite the widespread practice of such displacements. Based on these assertions, advocates and international organizations (including the UNHCR) further assert that the remedy for expulsion is repatriation, although this contradicts the international practice. There has been great dissonance between the declarations and practice of refugee politics throughout the twentieth century and a disturbing relationship between the rhetoric of human rights and the practice of expulsion. The present historical investigation explores the continued displacement of refugees as a result of failed repatriation and the lack of alternative policies. It underscores first the almost total lack of examples of minority return as a result of implementing the right to repatriation, with few exceptions that are a result of politics and force, not implementation of rights. This predicament between rhetorical emphasis on rights and lack of action is explored as a particularity of the legal limbo of refugees, who are not citizens of the state that is supposed to protect them. But perhaps the predicament is even wider and applies to rights more generally: the chapter ends with a discussion of Arendt's emphasis on the refugee and the violation of the rights of refugees as an emblem of the limitation of the notion of rights.

This chapter first shows how ‘accomplished facts’—the wartime consensus on population transfer as much as developments on the ground—determined the outcome of the decision taken by the ‘Big Three’ at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 to transfer German populations from east-central Europe. It argues that this was a political act of common endeavour, and one of the last such acts, in fact, of the wartime Grand Alliance, and one of the few decisions at Potsdam that was carried out in full. It then looks at how views of mass population transfer changed with its implementation. The focus here is on France and mass population transfer in central Europe. While sharing the concerns and increasing ambivalence of the other occupying powers towards the influx of millions of expellees into occupied Germany, the French seemed to draw different lessons and offer alternative answers to the problems mass transfer posed.

This chapter examines how by the 1950s the concept of population transfer had disappeared from the international policy agenda at the same time as the ‘minorities problem’ receded as an international issue. Failed attempts in the late 1940s to revive international interest in minorities protection within the framework of the United Nations illustrate this changed post-war climate. Three case studies from the Cold War and after (Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and Bosnia) are then examined in order to demonstrate how the concept of population transfer was nevertheless implicit in all post-war partition proposals and present in the deliberations of international statesmen and policy-makers when all other alternatives seemed to have been exhausted. As an option of last resort at moments of extreme crisis, population transfer was, therefore, as accurate a barometer of political intractability in an era of human rights as it was during the forty-year ‘era of population transfer’.

This chapter looks at prevailing assumptions about the minorities problem and its solutions (frontier revision, federation, collective and individual rights, resettlement) following the outbreak of the Second World War. It focuses on the position taken by those who were previously understood to have been the staunchest ‘defenders of minorities’ in the interwar period. While liberal internationalists and Jewish intellectuals and organizations offered some of the most trenchant critiques of population transfer of the time, they nevertheless joined in the general retreat from international minority rights and in some cases argued for a wider application of the principle of population transfer in the post-war settlement. The lack of a defender of the status quo ante meant that it was increasingly within the framework of more radical solutions that the minorities problem was addressed during the war and on terms dictated by states with a compelling case for forced resettlement.

This chapter looks at how the concept of population transfer was imported into central Europe by the Axis powers in the late 1930s. While the focus here is principally on negotiations between Italy and Germany over the South Tyrol in the period 1938-9, the wider context of Nazi aims in the East and Germany’s relations with the Soviet Union in the period up to June 1941 are also examined in relation to the Heim ins Reich transfers. The chapter discusses how these transfers were grounded in a shared reading of the European minorities problem and drew upon the ‘Lausanne model’ of interstate agreement on resettlement. Discussion of Romanian transfer proposals in 1940–1 also shows that emulators of the Nazi New Order were also inspired by the earlier Balkan population exchanges mediated by liberal democracies as well as by actions of the Rome-Berlin Axis.

This chapter examines how the notion of population transfer emerged at the turn of the twentieth century in response to the retreat and then collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of competing ethnolinguistic nationalisms in south-eastern Europe. The writings of the earliest proponents of population transfer (Lichtenstädter; Montandon) are examined, as are the initial attempts at an interstate level to ‘de-balkanize the Balkans’ through population exchange on the eve of the First World War. At the centre of the early history of population transfer is the liberal Greek prime minister and nation builder, Eleftherios Venizelos, the first of a series of leaders from small states whose international reputation helped legitimize these ‘fantasies of ethnic unmixing’. The reception of his plans for so-called ‘reciprocal emigration’ treaties illustrates how from the outset attitudes towards population transfer became bound up with the persons invoking the measure and the state and cause they represented.

This chapter concentrates initially on the efforts of Czech exiles, and in particular their president, Edvard Beneš, to win over Allied opinion to the idea of a restored post-war Czechoslovakia without national minorities. The wider resonance of Czech advocacy for transfer is explored in the second part of the chapter, which discusses European exile thinking on minorities and transfer during the Second World War, and how these views were shaped not only by the trauma of war, occupation, exile, and the pre-war experience of the minorities problem, but also by parochial concerns centred on the very conception of the state. While all European governments-in-exile broadly accepted the principle of population transfer, there were differences of opinion over its practical and geographical application that meant that it came to be regarded as an ‘eastern’ measure which set the ‘other Europe’ off from the more established nation states in western Europe.

This introductory chapter provides an outline of the methodology, arguments, and structure of the book. It situates the concept of ‘population transfer’ within the broader sweep of twentieth-century European history and explains why taking a top-down and Eurocentric approach to the subject is appropriate. It argues that each forced resettlement of minorities under international agreement discussed here should be studied not as an individual, isolated episode but as part of a broader continuum of thought and practice which was pan-European in scope. During the forty-year ‘era of population transfer’ from the early 1910s to the late 1940s western liberal democracies as well as authoritarian states and dictatorships saw in internationally sanctioned forced resettlement a means of promoting the creation and consolidation of stable and homogeneous nation states and safeguarding national and regional security.

This concluding chapter underlines how by the end of the twentieth century attitudes towards population transfer had come full circle. Advocates of population transfer were again on the fringes of acceptable political debate in Europe. It outlines five salient features that marked out the concept of population transfer. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, population transfer emerged as (1) a distinct measure; (2) a progressive and humanitarian measure; (3) a pan-European and cross-ideological measure; (4) a limited and localized measure; and (5) an option of last resort and a barometer of political intractability.