Dartmouth Events

"Nationalism, Democracy, and the Collapse of the Multinational Empires: Eastern Europe After the First World War."

Join Historian Pieter Judson (Professor of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century History, Department of History at European University Institute, Firenze, Italy) for a lecture on the complex relationship between nationalism and democracy in Eastern European nation states after World War One. 

When the First World War ended in the autumn of 1918, a major casualty was the multinational Habsburg Empire. Newly invented states - Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia) along with existing ones (Italy and Romania) seized the territories of the fallen empire where they could, in many cases justifying their actions by calling themselves “nation states,” whose existence reflected the democratic will of “the people” they now governed.

Judson examines citizenship rights and policing, arguing that successor nation state practices in Europe eventually normalized practices of forcible nationalization, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide during the 20th century.