Defeat in war is often accompanied by the wholesale transfer of populations via expulsion and resettlement. Brutal and inhumane, but with one notable exception, the agony usually ends in one generation. The First World War famously shattered four empires.  By the end of 1944, the Germans had lost a second empire, seized during World War II, but the Allied victory turned out to be a pyrrhic one for Britain, France, and the Netherlands.  Each lost its empire within two decades of the war’s end.  Then, in 1989, the second Russian empire collapsed.  It had replaced that of the Germans in a third of Europe.  In their treatment of the people they ruled, the nine empires were in no way comparable.  But when each fell, genocidal massacres followed.  Within the new nations that emerged from the ruins of the empires of the former Great Powers, and the multi-ethnic Yugoslav state, were populations of minorities that the new majorities and their...(Read Full Article)