von Bismarck's anti-Catholic crusade known as the Kulturkampf (1872-1878), which drove the Religious Order of the Holy Ghost out of Germany, and brought them to a hill in the middle of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where in 1878 they founded an institution of higher learning, known today as Duquesne University. One of the primary functions of the Conference on Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe was to bring to light the state of new research on the various episodes of ethnic cleansing in modern Europe. In doing this, the organizers and contributors hoped to explore the historical and legal aspects of ethnic cleansing and to look comparatively at the experiences of populations expelled and the process of ethnic cleansing itself. Many commonalities emerged in the process of putting the conference together, and from these we developed a number of themes which seemed to be uppermost in the minds of those participating. We stated these before the conference as follows:
1. Definition. What is ethnic cleansing? Should all cases of population transfer be conceptualized as the same phenomenon? Has "ethnic cleansing" been diluted in terms of meaning? Should we adopt another terminology in dealing with the varieties of forced transfers of populations? 2. Origins. Ethnic cleansing has existed in some form from antiquity, but it has never been practiced with more variety or intensity than in the twentieth century. Where do we look for the origins and roots of this outburst? Nationalism? State building? Popular movements? Economic conditions?
3. Consequences. Clearly, many twentieth-century politi– cal leaders have opted to engage in forced population transfers and related behaviors. Misery to those trans– ferred has been one result, and that should not in any way be minimized. We should also ask, however: "What have been the long-term results?" 4. Processes. Looking at many cases of ethnic cleansing, how do the processes, carried out over the century and in many different regions, compare? Can we see a con– tinuity? Or do the cases of ethnic cleansing tend to exhibit highly specific, or particular, characteristics centered around local conditions and history?
We tried to define our topic in such a way as to make it clear that the Holocaust would be a crucial and constant background consideration. Yet in a sense, our conference was an attempt to assess a particular historiography—the analysis of ethnic cleansing—at a relatively early stage of development, while the scholarship on the Holocaust is not only enormously larger, but also more mature in a historiographical sense.12 As one can see in the following book, many conference participants drew on the historiography of the Holocaust for both analytical and comparative purposes, even as they focused on historical episodes that have been studied much less. Indeed, some of the episodes addressed in the following articles are hardly known at all in the English-speaking world, except among small groups of descendants of the "cleansed" people and a few scholars. Although the contributors to this book therefore approach some of these cases for almost the first time in a scholarly way, we should make it clear that the long list of topics is in no way meant to be absolutely comprehensive. Numerous cases of ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Europe are not represented here. Their absence, it must be said, is not due to any desire of the organizers of the conference and the editors of the book to exclude or suppress one case or another of the abhorrent practice of ethnic cleansing.