Dov Ronen's book is a stimulating account of the unfolding of the Yuugoslav crisis. His special strength is in providing a narrative account of ethnic mobilization and the outbreak of violent ethnic conflict. Through this account he is able to convincingly divorce nationalist political mobilization from overgeneralized commonplace notion of "ancient ethnic hatred" - so widespread in the literature on Yugoslavia. As a professor of history, I will definitely assign this book to my students.

Ronen's book is not only eminently well argued but also outstanding in its careful usage of terminology. He should be specially applauded for surveying the historical roots of the term "ethnic cleansing". Not having done a survey myself, I take Ronen's conclusions at face value: in recent times the first instance of using the term in English occured in 1991 (p. 96.) and the context was, of course, Yugoslavia. As historian of the 20th century however, I would like to provide one small edition to the history of the term, based on Inis L. Claude's seminal work entitled: National Minorities, An International Problem (Harvard University Press, 1955). On p. 98. Claude tells us that On 15 December 1944, the British Prime Minister Wiston Churchill told the House of Commons that contemplated revisions of Poland's borders would involve the "shifting" of several millions of people, and added: "expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause enless trouble. (...) A clean sweep will be made." Claude is, of course, quick to cite Churchill's subjective remark explaining how the terrible toll the British had to pay in the Second World "numbed" his sensitivity to certain "drastic solutions". Indeed, under Chrurchill's historic leadership the British people became the moral heroes of that terrible war standing up to Nazi Germany earlier than any other nation except the Poles. That Chruchill's suggestion of a "clean sweep" in which the German-inhabited areas of the future, victorious Poland would be "swept clean" of Germans should relate to precisely that other country which, besides Britain, chose to stand up to Hitler rather than accept defeat without a fight, is understandable. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Churchill drew the most pessimistic and extreme lesson from the war, namely that nation states cannot be expected to provide a "common roof" for ethnic minorities, and, with this conclusion, he effectively encouraged, yes, the ethnic cleansing, of Germans and other minorities from Central and Eastern Europe. One could perhaps do a deeper survey of historical texts to detect other antecedents, most likely to be found in the literature advocating the conquest of Europe by the Germans. However, the reference to Chruchill remains a striking illustration of the sad fact that - at least in practice, if not in theory - the idea of ethnic cleansing has not been unthinkable in the 20th century even for democrats, not even for the greatest moral hero of the 20th century.