5 - Odd Cases

Summary

Why did the Turkish state initially accommodate the Jews of Istanbul only to target them with assimilationist policies in the late 1920s? Why did the Greek state accommodate the Muslims in Northen Greece following World War I only to oblige them to move to Turkey after 1923? How come the Romanian state accommodated the enemy-backed Hungarian minority rather than follow intense assimilationist policies as my argument predicts? Why did revisionist Albanian elites not target the Greek-backed communities in the south of their country with exclusionary policies but rather accommodated them? What accounts for the accommodation of most Eastern European Jewish communities immediately after World War I? Why were they not targeted with assimilationist policies as my theory predicts? Why were the Bulgarian-backed Slav Macedonians in status quo Greek Macedonia targeted with exclusionary policies rather than intense assimilationist ones? These and some more puzzles emerge from the incorrectly predicted cases from Chapter 4’s statistical analysis (see Table 5.1).

Examination of these outliers reveals a few pertinent issues: the sensitivity of results to the time horizon of the study, the presence of mixed policies that undermine scholars’ efforts to classify them, the distinction between nation-building policies that are terminal versus those that are transitional and actually have a different ultimate goal, as well as the role of external powers’ foreign policy priorities and how symmetrical alliances are in the decision making process of host states. I also identify a divide-and-rule strategy that Balkan governments pursued both to fragment large groups and to prevent subnational assimilation of small non-core groups to larger ones. I discuss all of these issues in separate sections directly addressing each case but also using other examples from the twentieth-century Balkans.