NES Center for the Study of Diversity and Social Interactions and HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development are happy to invite you to our joint meeting of the Research Seminar on Diversity and Development and HSE Seminar on Political Economy.

Dr. Felix Rösel (ifo Dresden) will present the paper “Forced migration, staying minorities, and new societies: Evidence fr om ethnic cleansing in Czechoslovakia”(joint work with Jakub Grossmann and Štěpán Jurajda).

Registration: till noon of June 1st, link to video-conference will be sent up to 5 p.m. (Moscow time).

Abstract:

Can staying minorities that escape ethnic cleansing affect the identity of their re-settled communities? After World War Two, three million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. Some Germans were allowed to stay, many of them left-leaning anti-fascists. We study quasi-experimental local variation in the number of anti-fascist Germans staying in post-war Czechoslovakia and find a long-lasting footprint: Communist party support, party cell frequencies, far-left values, and social policies are stronger today wh ere anti-fascist Germans stayed in larger numbers. Our findings also suggest that political identity supplanted German ethnic identity among stayers facing new local majorities.