The Forgotten Minorities Of Eastern Europe

"The problem of how to protect minorities is an old one which has lost none of its relevance. This impressive study of the [MPS] of the League of Nations in relation to the German minority in Poland illuminates a classic example of the problem: the conflict between a new nation state and a previously powerful minority supported by an outside power, and at another level the conflict between a sovereign state and an international organization charged with upholding minority rights. Dr. Frentz has made use of the extensive collection of minority petitions from the League of Nations' archive to produce an account that is both balanced and absorbing." - Jonathan R. C. Wright, Christ Church, University of Oxford *** "With Europe once again seeing a revival of intense ethnic conflict, this is a very timely and welcome book. Based on very thorough research, it addresses many of the key issues raised by minority problems today and provides a shrewd assessment of the complexities involved in solving them. It ought to be required reading for members of international agencies involved in the Balkan crisis." - Jeremy D. Noakes, University of Exeter

The Potsdam Conference (officially known as the "Berlin Conference"), was held from 17 July to 2 August 1945 at Cecilienhof Palace, the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm, in Brandenburg, and saw the leaders of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States, gathered together to decide how to demilitarize, denazify, decentralize, and administer Germany, which had agreed to unconditional surrender on 8 May (VE Day). They determined that the remaining German populations in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary - both the ethnic (Sudeten) and the more recent arrivals (as part of the long-term plan for the domination of Eastern Europe) - should to be transferred to Germany, but despite an undertaking that these would be effected in an orderly and humane manner, the expulsions were carried out in a ruthless and often brutal manner. Land was seized with farms and houses expropriated; the occupants placed into camps prior to mass expulsion from the country. Many of these were labor camps already occupied by Jews who had survived the concentration camps, where they were equally unwelcome. Further cleansing was carried out in Romania and Yugoslavia, and by 1950, an estimated 11.5 million German people had been removed from Eastern Europe with up to three million dead. The number of ethnic Germans killed during the ‘cleansing’ period is suggested at 500,000, but in 1958, Statistisches Bundesamt (the Federal Statistical Office of Germany) published a report which gave the figure of 1.6 million relating to expulsion-related population losses in Poland alone. Further investigation may in due course provide a more accurate figure to avoid the accusation of sensationalism.

This book asks why several ethnic and linguistic groups in Central Europe and the Balkans have not yet been legally recognized as national minorities. Some of these hidden minorities have not developed an intellectual elite that can visibly present their identity and claims to the majority population. Other groups are deliberately concealing their existence and language for reasons of self-protection. The chapters in this volume address the everyday mechanisms of hiding and being hidden in the transition zone of these two European regions.

The volume undertakes a comparative analysis of the various discursive traditions dealing with the connection between modernity and historicity in Southeastern and Northern Europe, reconstructing the ways in which different "temporalities" produced alternative representations of the past and future, of continuity and discontinuity, and identity.

This study scrutinizes the significance of transnational mobilization for language minorities, both with regard to their ability and their motivation to undertake such action. It is designed as interpretative case study on Romanian minorities in the post-communist countries of Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Hungary. The book concentrates on immobile and marginal groups outside the focus of international politics and research. It contributes to recent research on cosmopolitanism: only an in-depth study of actors' everyday reality can produce qualified claims on the tense relationship between local rootedness on the one hand and possibilities for international mobility on the other. This, in turn, is vital to assess the vigor of international processes such as globalization and European integration. (Series: Region - Nation - Europa - Vol. 75) [Subject: Sociology, European Studies, Minority Studies]