The Demographic Inheritance

Abstract

A ‘mosaic of shifting stones’, a ‘patchwork quilt’ and a ‘living kaleidoscope’ are just a sample of the metaphors resorted to by specialists finding their descriptive powers taxed to the limit by contemplation of the ethnic variety of eastern Europe. The complexity of the national pattern in eastern Europe is attributable to the combination of two principal features. Considering that the area of eastern Europe is comparable to that of western Europe, the number of resident nationalities in the east is almost three times that in the west, effecting an intimidatingly lengthy dramatis personae. The second feature is the diffused nature of ethnic distribution: although the conventional taxonomy of population distribution is into ‘compact’, ‘mixed’ and ‘diaspora’ settlement, a single glance at the ethnic map of eastern Europe (Map 1) reveals how practical reality can mock the artifice of the social scientist. Some ethnic groups may legitimately be classified as ‘compact’ in settlement: the Czechs and Albanians, for example, are basically concentrated in a single consolidated mass, with a relatively negligible proportion resident outside the ethnic heartland. At the other extreme, the Jews and Gypsies represent ‘diaspora’ settlement, the human detritus of an outward flow of population which left them scattered haphazardly over a wide geographical area, without either their original homeland or a convincing claim to territorial status.