History: Maps

 The past 30 years have witnessed the biggest changes in European frontiers since the Treaty of Versailles at the end of The First World War.

Compare this map of Europe before the collapse of the Communist regimes in the 1990s

with this one of Europe today, where there has been massive fragmentation in central and eastern Europe. 

The German, Austrian and Turkish Empires were broken up in the treaties after the First World War,  and new states were created in their place, supposedly based on ethnic dividions; but, unexpectedly, Lenin contrived to keep almost all the old multiracial Russian Empire together, and Stalin even managed to extend it in 1945. It was only after the collapse of Communism that this empire fell apart, bringing about some completely new states in eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Fighting has resulted in some of these areas.

   The ethnic map of central and eastern Europe was greatly simplified in the aftermath of the Second World War, when many ancient German communities in these regions were forcibly uprooted and expelled. There had been similar mass transfers, often violent, in the new Turkish state after 1918. 

   Czechoslovakia was a new and artificial state created by the Treaty of Versailles. It was destroyed by Hitler, created anew under the Communists, and fell apart, fortunately bloodlessly, after the Communist regime fell.

   Yugoslavia was another artificial Versailles creation. It always had ethnic tensions simmering beneath the surface, which broke out into extreme violence during the Second World War. Then for a generation it was held together by Marshal Tito, an independent-minded Communist who refused to follow Moscow's orders. But once his iron hand was removed, horrific scenes of massacres, bombardments and ethnic cleansing followed: the worst violence seen in Europe since 1945. 

   By contrast, the frontiers of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, established from the ruin of the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire are still unaltered. They are only lines drawn on a map, bearing no relation to ethnic and religious boundaries, and the states created by them have been the scene of appalling violence over the past twenty years, but with as yet no moves to establish more realistic divisions.