Topic 9.5 Notes – Postwar Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Atrocities

What Postwar Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict Were

Nationalism means a people who see themselves as a nation should have political unity, sovereignty, or self-government. After World War II, that idea kept mattering even as Western Europe moved toward integration.

A few distinctions matter a lot here:

• Ethnic nationalism defines the nation through ancestry, language, religion, and shared historical memory.
• Civic nationalism defines the nation through citizenship and political participation.
• Separatism means trying to leave an existing state and form a new one. That is one form of nationalism, not all nationalism.
• Autonomy, devolution, and federalism are ways states can ease nationalist pressure without breaking apart.
  • autonomy = a region controls some internal affairs
  • devolution = the central government transfers powers downward
  • federalism = power is constitutionally divided between national and regional governments
• Irredentism means claiming land outside your state because your nation sees it as historically or ethnically theirs.

The exam loves this distinction. Nationalism did not always lead to violence. It could end in compromise, elections, terrorism, civil war, or genocide.

Why Nationalism Turned Violent After World War II

Europe’s borders did not neatly match where ethnic groups actually lived, so minorities were stuck inside states dominated by others. During the Cold War, communist regimes often froze these tensions through repression instead of solving them. After 1989, that lid came off.

A map of central and southeastern Europe helps you keep the main flashpoints in view, especially the Balkans where several postwar conflicts turned violent.

Political map of central and southeastern Europe

Here’s the recurring pattern:

1. Central authority weakens.
2. Rival leaders claim to represent different national groups.
3. Each group fears becoming a minority under another group’s rule.
4. Armed forces fight over disputed land.
5. Civilians are expelled or killed to change who lives there.
6. Refugees, revenge, and foreign involvement deepen the crisis.

Economic crisis made this worse. Unemployment and unequal development gave leaders someone to blame. Propaganda and selective history turned old grievances into fear.

Violence was never automatic. Czechoslovakia split peacefully in the 1993 Velvet Divorce. Belgium used federalism. Northern Ireland reached the Good Friday Agreement.

Major Postwar Nationalist and Separatist Conflicts

Northern Ireland

Partition left six northern counties in the UK. Unionists were mostly Protestant and wanted to stay British. Nationalists/republicans were mostly Catholic and wanted unity with Ireland.

• Catholics faced discrimination in housing, jobs, and representation.
• The Troubles lasted from the late 1960s to 1998.
• Main actors were the Provisional IRA, loyalist paramilitaries, and British forces.
• Bloody Sunday in 1972 became a symbol of British violence against Catholic protesters.
• The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 created power-sharing and sharply reduced violence.

Basque separatism and ETA

The Basques had a distinct language and identity. Franco repressed regional cultures, which helped radicalize separatism.

• ETA used bombings and assassinations for independence.
• Democratic Spain later gave the Basque region broad autonomy.
• ETA ended armed activity in 2011 and dissolved in 2018.

Flemish nationalism in Belgium

Belgium split between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, with bilingual Brussels in between.

• Flemish movements pushed for language rights and autonomy.
• Belgium mostly handled this through reform, not war.
• It became a federal state in 1993.

Chechnya

Chechnya was a distinct Muslim region in Russia’s North Caucasus with a long memory of repression, especially Stalin’s 1944 deportation.

• It declared independence in 1991.
• First Chechen War 1994 to 1996
• Second Chechen War began in 1999
• Russia used brutal repression, and Moscow eventually restored control.

The Breakup of Yugoslavia and Mass Atrocities

Yugoslavia was a multinational federation held together by Josip Broz Tito. After Tito died in 1980, economic crisis and weaker communist legitimacy let nationalism surge.

Slobodan Milošević pushed Serbian nationalism and cut Kosovo’s autonomy. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in 1991. Bosnia followed in 1992.

Bosnia became the worst case because Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats lived mixed together. That made clean separation impossible, so armed groups tried to make territory ethnically pure through ethnic cleansing.

• methods included expulsion, rape, camps, destruction of homes and mosques, and murder
• the siege of Sarajevo showed civilian suffering and international failure
• at Srebrenica in 1995, Bosnian Serb forces under Ratko Mladić killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in a UN safe area. Courts ruled this genocide.

In Kosovo from 1998 to 1999, Serbian/Yugoslav forces destroyed villages and expelled or drove out over 800,000 Kosovo Albanians.

Mass Atrocity Terms and International Response

Mass atrocity is the broad category. It includes genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing.

• Ethnic cleansing = removing a population from territory
• Genocide = intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part

That distinction matters in Bosnia. Many campaigns were ethnic cleansing across territory. Srebrenica specifically was genocide.

The international response was uneven:

• UN peacekeeping in Bosnia was weak and failed at Srebrenica.
• NATO air strikes in Bosnia in 1995 helped produce the Dayton Accords.
• NATO intervened in Kosovo in 1999, which raised the question of state sovereignty vs humanitarian intervention.
• The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia prosecuted leaders for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
  • Milošević was tried but died before verdict.
  • Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić were convicted.

Big effects included refugee flows, demographic change, hardened ethnic divisions, a larger post-Cold War role for NATO, and the growing idea that sovereignty does not excuse atrocities.