Partitions and Peoples: Forced Population Movements and the Construction of Nations in India/Pakistan, Palestine, and Europe, 1945–71

Forced population movements in Europe have been a feature of inter-state conflict since the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and particularly during the Second World War, when they accompanied other forms mass violence. The post-1945 period, by contrast, is often seen as marking a continental peace until the ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia and the Caucasus in the 1990s. This common view implicitly ascribes success to the population expulsions, especially of ethnic Germans, in the immediate post-war years, which were designed to avoid the perceived problem of national minorities that so plagued inter-war Europe. This paper will advance an alternative perspective based on two propositions. First, that “Europe” extended beyond the continent to encompass its various empires, so that the partitions of India and Palestine, and accompanying violent population movements, need to be included in any satisfactory analytical frame. And, second, that too often scholars have recourse to Lord Curzon’s anachronistic notion of “unmixing peoples” to explain the task policy makers faced when they partitioned space in (re)drawing national boundaries. In fact, far from always separating distinct and hostile peoples, these western international elites, often in symbiosis with subaltern elites, posited peoples that become construction projects for postcolonial states. By linking the partition of Germany in 1945 to the partitions of Palestine and India, and to the secession of East Pakistan in 1971, this paper will argue the 26-year period since the war’s end formed a distinct epoch of “people-making” and state-formation.