American jaunts into other people's countries.

[Alex - City Matters]

The part that's in Russia was a military decision obviously, although the population there certainly would have been mixed between German and Slav, the rest had no more reason to stay together than Austria-Hungary.
A more interesting one is Serbia/Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina, those countries had so much in common but allowed politicians looking for power to play on the smallest of divisions. Albania and Kosovo probably needed independence but there's no reason the rest of greater Serbia shouldn't have stayed together.

East Prussia was extensively ethnically German. It had been since the Northern Crusades of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. It had formed one of the core states of Prussia since its inception.

In 1939 East Prussia had 2.49 million inhabitants, 85% of them ethnic Germans, the others Poles in the south who, according to Polish estimates numbered in the interwar period around 300,000-350,000,[15] the Latvian speaking Kursenieki, and Lietuvininkai who spoke Lithuanian in the northeast.

This is from a Polish book, focusing on Poles as a minority in Germany. So one would imagine it isn't really skewed in favour of Polish concentrations of population in East Prussia. I think it is a criminally forgotten issue, that Germany had a large swathe of its core territory robbed from them after the Second World War. It isn't the same as perhaps losing ethnically Danish Schwelsig to Denmark following the First World War. The same case could be made for places like Breslau, now Wroclaw, on a lesser scale. I'm surprised it has almost been airbrushed for history, or that there hasn't been a legitimate move to cede the territory. Although maybe too much time has passed.

The issue with the Balkans can again be found in history; partly due to the emergence of nationalism in the late-Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries and partly because of the cultural imperialism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Places like Dalmatia, later to be part of a larger Croat movement, had to fight to protect their identities against the 'Germanification' policies of the likes of Joseph II. This ultimately created clear divisions between the ethnicities of the Empire, which could easily be exploited by fascist movements at a later date. Furthermore, you also have the historical precedent for all of those nations, bar Kosovo, being a sovereign state. Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Albania all have long traditions, most ending with the Ottoman forays into Europe, but you can see that again this was something easy to manipulate.

 

[ChicagoBlue]

Working for an NGO i just dont have the same viewpoint. Sorry

Don’t let it make you lose all context on global reality, or misunderstand that 2018 isn’t 1946.

I’m sure you do great work, and for that I, along with the people you help, thank you.