Refugees and the End of Empire

The major Empires that collapsed during the twentieth century produced successor states which developed new forms of exclusivist nationalist ideologies which identified, and often expelled, sectors of their populations that did not possess the right ethnic ‘credentials’. This process first manifested itself with the end of the Ottoman Empire, where successor states in the Balkans ‘exchanged’ populations while the newly nationalist rump Turkey eliminated or expelled its Armenian and Greek populations. These processes continued after 1945 because the collapse of the British and French colonial Empires were accompanied by population ‘exchanges’ and expulsions, especially in the case of India/Pakistan. Finally, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Empire triggered a new mass refugee crisis. This chapter examines the relationship between imperial collapse, the emergence of successor nationalism, and the exclusion of ethnic groups with the wrong credentials