Diversity Macht Frei
March 29, 2018

On Twitter, “Russian” Woman Julia Ioffe has inadvertently blurted out a truth Liberals usually seek to conceal: that ethnic diversity is a source of conflict.

The Second World War is now regularly invoked by elites to disparage ethno-nationalism and the ideal of ethnic homogeneity. But in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, it was tacitly understood by everyone that ethnic diversity had been a contributory factor in the tensions that had led to war. There were mass population transfers and some territorial adjustments aimed at creating ethno-states.

Liberal Tony Judt discusses this in his book “Postwar”.

At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place.

After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead. There was a feeling among Western policymakers that the League of Nations, and the minority clauses in the Versailles Treaties, had failed and that it would be a mistake even to try and resurrect them. For this reason they acquiesced readily enough in the population transfers. If the surviving minorities of central and eastern Europe could not be afforded effective international protection, then it was as well that they be dispatched to more accommodating locations.

The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ did not yet exist, but the reality surely did—and
it was far from arousing wholesale disapproval or embarrassment.

…

With certain exceptions, the outcome was a Europe of nation states more ethnically homogenous than ever before.