When empires decline and fall, war seems inevitable. Boundaries shift, families are divided, political and economic systems fall into disarray. Such events give rise to leaders who promise to return that which has been lost—peoples and territories. Aggressive foreign policies may then follow, leading to devastating wars that are always costly, usually of only marginal success, and frequently self-destructive.

The end stages of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires triggered a series of wars, including, ultimately, two world wars. Violence ushered the end of European colonization of Africa and Asia, and violence accelerated after the departure of the Western powers....

Clearly, an irredentist policy is likely to be costly. Irredentism risks war with one’s neighbors, and war is always a costly process, regardless of outcome. Any effort to (re)unify territories inhabited by ethnic kin will certainly antagonize neighboring states whose lands are sought. Further, such foreign policies are likely to alienate the neighbor’s allies, and perhaps even other countries facing similar threats. As we will explore in subsequent chapters, irredentism has brought substantial costs—in deaths, damage, and economic hardship—to states that have pursued it. Our starting point, therefore, is this basic question: why would states do such an...

Irredentism exacerbated the conflicts in the aftermath of the Yugoslavia’s disintegration, as efforts to unite all Serbs in a Greater Serbia and Bosnia’s Croats in a Greater Croatia prolonged the conflict and produced atrocities as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing. While Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia differed on other dimensions, a key distinction between the Velvet Divorce of the former and the brutal disintegration of the latter is the role of irredentism. The dueling irredentisms not only prolonged the Bosnian conflict but also have made progress slow and hardly steady even after the demise of the leaders responsible for the...

In all cases of attempted irredentism in the last twenty years, the Armenian seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh has been the most successful. Armenia’s drive to incorporate cut-off kin and the territory they live on resulted in the de facto (if not de jure) moving of Armenia’s international boundary to cover the Karabakh region and assume control of that area’s Armenian population. In the process, Azeris living in the territory and the corridor between it and Armenia proper were largely driven out, solving the problem that xenophobic nationalists often want to avoid—the incorporation of Others. Armenia’s campaign stands as the greatest...

In any discussion of irredentism in eastern Europe, Hungary figures prominently both for what it has done and for what it has not done. Because it lost roughly two-thirds of its territory and a third of its population at the end of World War I, Hungary faces a set of challenges that risk irredentism. How does Hungary safeguard Hungarians in the neighborhood? Before and during World War II, the answer was irredentism, as politicians and parties promised to regain the lost territories. Hungary sided with Nazi Germany and was successful, in the short run, incorporating lands and peoples primarily from...

Romania has followed a peaceful course in its foreign policy since the “revolution” of 1989. This is especially surprising for several reasons. First, compared to other countries in the region with the exception of Yugoslavia, Romania’s transition from dictatorship to democracy was the most violent. While other communist leaders stepped aside in Eastern Europe, Nicolae Ceausescu lost power only after trying to repress the rising opposition, leading to blood in the streets and eventually his own execution. Even after the National Salvation Front (NSF) took power, force, including the use of miners to repress the opposition, continued to play a...

With the collapse of communism, russia was perhaps the most-watched place for revanchist irredentism in the 1990s. This was entirely appropriate, given both the weight of Russian history as an empire built on contiguous territorial conquest and the substantial number of Russians left outside the new boundaries of Russia. Unlike Hungary, Romania, and other Eastern European cases, these diaspora Russian populations had not had very long to adjust to their new status outside the protection of the motherland. Whereas Transylvanian Hungarians had been outside of Hungary for generations, Russians in the Baltic States, the Ukraine, and the new central Asian...

We have seen both war and peace in the aftermath of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We have found that domestic politics, particularly the content of nationalisms, has helped to explain the puzzle of why some countries engage in war despite the likelihood of losing (or the costs of winning) while others refrain. One could argue that these dynamics are unique to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union due to the perils of transition, their level of development, or the pressures of the European Union. There is nothing in our approach that limits its applicability...

We have seen both more and less violence in the aftermath of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union than we might have otherwise expected. Armenia and Azerbaijan continue to be mired in their conflict, reducing their ability to make a successful transition. Yugoslavia, once one of the most developed and progressive countries in the region, produced the most violence Europe has seen since World War II. Most of the successors to the now-dead federation lag far behind the rest of Europe politically, economically, and otherwise. Hungary, to little surprise, has made the easiest move to democracy and...