moved back and forth between Western and Eastern Europe, and even Central Asia. They forcibly displaced
one another, and in this way reshaped the ethnic map of the European continent. This so-called
Völkerwanderung ("wandering of nations")—which, in some instances, stretched into the late Middle Ages—brought
such peoples as the Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, and Cumans into the very heart
of Europe. Its aftereffects were felt as late as the thirteenth century, when the Mongols or Tatars invaded
Europe, conquered the eastern half of the continent, and then settled down there to rule over the East Slavs
for several centuries.
Although this process of forcible relocations has been practiced for millennia, ethnic cleansing as an
official policy did not come into being until more recent times. In the Western world, large-scale forcible
relocation of a specified "people' was introduced in the early nineteenth century United States, as the official
policy of the United State government. Informally, scores of Indian tribes had "emigrated" from their lands
as a result of European pressure, at times escaping from direct violence by European settlers, at times
looking for food, at times being pushed by other native groups reacting to direct pressure from European
settlers. The process of removal became standardized federal policy in 1830, when Congress passed the
"Indian Removal Act." Some of the saddest manifestations of this policy, implemented during Andrew
Jackson's presidency (1829-1837), was the decimation and expulsion of the affiliated Sac and the Fox tribes
from the Upper Mississippi region (Black Hawk War of 1832), the forcible relocation of the Creek, Choctaw,
Chickasaw, and Cherokee nations from the Old Southwest to Indian Territory (Trail of Tears, 1838-1839),
and the similar expulsion of the Seminole Indians from Florida to future Oklahoma (Second Seminole War,
1835-1843). The process of forcible removal to reservations was repeated countless times from the 1820s
through the 1880s.5
In Europe itself, the rise of "national" awareness at the end of the eighteenth century spread across
Europe from West to East. By the middle of the century, some nationalist leaders and thinkers were already
thinking in terms of an exclusivist doctrine calling for the "nation" to correspond with the "state," that is, to
make political borders correspond with ethnic or linguistic borders. Since precise ethnic boundaries hardly
existed anywhere in Europe, any planning for such new "nations" necessitated thinking about what to do
with individuals from other ethnic groups who were left on the inside of someone else's national state.
Carrying out such exclusivist ethnic nationalism was approached in a number of ways in various settings,
and a number of small states moved toward policies of ethnic exclusion in the nineteenth century. It was on
the peripheries of the great European empires (including especially the Ottoman Empire) that a sharp-edged,
ethnicity-oriented policy led to a variety of policies of forced assimilation, expropriation of property,
violence, and in several cases, mass killing.6
Following the destruction or mutilation of such established European empires as Austria-Hungary,
Ottoman Turkey, Russia, and Germany in wake of World War I, and the simultaneous creation of nearly a
dozen allegedly national, but in fact mostly multinational small states, the policy of ethnic cleansing was
introduced into modern Europe as a regular policy and in a certain sense "legitimized." The newly created,
reestablished, or radically enlarged "successor states"—particularly Czecho- slovakia, Yugoslavia, and
Romania in the center; Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey in the south; and to a lesser degree Poland and
Lithuania in the north—expelled hundreds of thousands of minority inhabitants from their newly acquired or
5 See Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783-1846 (Lincoln, 1987); Black Hawk, An Autobiography
(1833 ed.), ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana, Ill., 1990); Ronald N. Satz. American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln, 1975); and Grant Foreman,
Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman, Okl., 1986).
6 On the rise of this hard-shelled, ethnic nationalism in the nineteenth century, see the excellent anthology, John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith, eds.,
Nationalism (Oxford, 1994), esp. 160-195.