Population exchange
Reconciling political and ethnic boundaries has been a major goal of national movements and nation-states since the rise of nationalism. However, these aspirations have long been hampered by multi-ethnic empires and ethnically mixed regions, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. To overcome this contradiction, the idea of population exchange emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and, in addition to genocide, expulsion and resettlement, it has contributed greatly to reducing the ethnic heterogeneity of countries over the course of the century. The first organised population exchanges took place in the Balkans, at the same time as the Ottoman Empire was ousted and the Balkan nation-states consolidated their territories. In addition to the large-scale population movements that accompanied the Balkan wars, population exchanges were agreed between Bulgaria and Turkey in 1913 and between Greece and Turkey in 1914. The latter, however, could only take place between 1923-1925, after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the bloody Greco-Turkish war. The Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria also provided for the completion of the population exchange between Greece and Bulgaria, which had begun before 1913 and lasted until 1927. In 1940, the Romanian-Bulgarian population exchange took place, while the population movements between Poland and the Soviet Union were part of the post-war settlement. During WWII, the Hungarian-Romanian population exchange was also considered, but in the end only a “spontaneous” population exchange – involving some 200-200,000 people – took place between 1940 and 1944. As the Western powers did not agree to the unilateral resettlement of Hungarians from Czechoslovakia after the war, Czechoslovakia and Hungary concluded a population exchange agreement in 1946. As a result, cca. 70,000 Slovaks voluntarily left Hungary, while the Prague government forced nearly 90,000 Hungarians to leave Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1948.