to observe that the ethno-national principle was frequently adhered to even after the destruction of the Third Reich in 1945. Everywhere, the victors proclaimed the evils of National Socialism in selfishly and ruthlessly defending the ethnic interests of Germans. Yet the Allies were often similarly ruthless in their methods and aims. They ethnically-cleansed East Prussia, Silesia, and the Sudetenland of some 9 million Germans (perhaps 2 million dead), to make way for homogeneous Czech, Polish, and Russian territories. This was brutal and unjust for the victims, but it was also perfectly successful: There have been no serious ethnic conflicts in those territories since, there has been peace, whereas multinational Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union have fallen apart and many of their still-multiethnic territories are often still afflicted bytribal conflict.

The Jews in Israel — whose numbers had been swelled by Adolf Hitler’s agreement with the Zionists to send German Jews there and by the survivors of World War II — also adhered to the ethno-national principle, adopting a largely-racial definition of Israeli citizenship and Jewish identity, not so different from those of the Nuremberg Laws.[3] Tel Aviv passed Jews-only immigration and nationality laws specifically-designed to maintain a racially Jewish majority over the indigenous Arab population.

Finally, the postwar Federal Republic of Germany itself — what was then West Germany — also largely adhered to an ethnic conception of citizenship. Like Tel Aviv, the Bonn authorities promoted the immigration of co-ethnics, namely of the lost German communities in Eastern Europe, who had arrived there as settlers during the