‘Last stop expulsion’ – The minority question and forced migration in East-Central Europe: 1918–49 To Hans Lemberg, in memory MARINA CATTARUZZA Department of History, University of Berne, Switzerland ABSTRACT. This article deals with the European minorities in the period between the two world wars and with their final expulsion from nation-states at the end of World War II. First, the tensions which arose between the organised minorities and the successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy are accounted for primarily by the argument that the various minorities located within the successor states had already undergone a comprehensive processes of nationalisation within the Habsburg Empire. Therefore they were able to resist assimilation by the political elites of the new titular nations (Czechs, Poles, Rumanians, Serbs). A second topic is that of the use made of the minorities issue by Adolf Hitler to help achieve his expansionist aims. The minorities issue was central to the international destabilisation of interwar Europe. Finally, the mass expulsion of minorities (above all, Germans) after the end of the war is explained by strategic considerations on the part of the Allied powers as well as involving the nation-state regimes. It is argued, against a commonly held view, that German atrocities during the period of occupation had little to do with the decision to expel most ethnic Germans from their territories of settlement in Poland, Czechoslo- vakia and Yugoslavia. The article shows that it is necessary to treat national minorities in the first half of the twentieth century as a single phenomenon which shares similar features across the various nation-states of East-Central Europe. KEYWORDS: Europe 1918–1949; Habsburg Empire; mass expulsions; national minorities; territorial revisionism; World War II The breakup of Yugoslavia was simply the last act of a long play. But the plot of that play – the disaggregation of peoples and the Triumph of ethnonationalism in modern Europe – is rarely recognised, and so a story whose significance is comparable to the spread of democracy or capitalism remains largely unknown and unappreciated (Jerry Z. Muller 2008). Many factors led to the European continent becoming for the site of a series of mass expulsions affecting millions of people in the course of the twentieth century. Hundreds of thousands of the expellees, many of them women and children, died as a result, especially because of the brutality and the haste with which the expulsions were carried out. This reached its peak in 1945 and the Nations and Nationalism 16 (1), 2010, 108–126. r The authors 2010. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2010 EN AS JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM NATIONS AND NATIONALISM