Imperial revelation: the collapse of the Ottoman and the Hapsburg Empires and the prevalence of violence in the successor states

No abstractThis essay explores the interconnected issues of demobilization and brutalization in the collapsing Hapsburg and Ottoman empires in the period immediately after 1918. The two case studies have not yet received much comparative research, despite the intriguing differences and similarities between them. Although the Ottoman Empire experienced a far more intense period of violence directed against civilians before, during and after the Great War, much of the violence which occurred in formerly Hapsburg Central-Eastern Europe during and after the Second World War cannot be understood without consideration of the transformative, and often traumatic, events of late 1918. The extreme violence witnessed in East-Central Europe after 1939/41 is indeed intimately connected to the issues that were raised but not resolved by the re-drawing of borders in 1918/19 and the creation of successor states that were anything but ethnically homogenous. The violent expulsion and murder of Ottoman Christians in the period of the Great War was mirrored by the process of ethnic unweaving in Central-Eastern Europe during and after World War II. What they have in common is that the violent un-mixing can be traced back to the period of the Great War and its outcomes