Nature has been the major source of demographic shocks until the nineteenth century, after which Politics has gradually become the main factor of catastrophic traumas. During the first part of the past century, war, violence, forced migration, man-made famines, and the epidemics unchained by them were responsible for tens of millions of deaths. They left deep scars in the survivors, distorted the age structure, altered the equilibrium between the sexes and between generations, and affected in multiple ways the continental European demographic system, including the geographical distribution of the population. A quantitative assessment of the victims of these Politics-driven traumas is here attempted, as is a first exploration of the political conviction that drove them: that populations and their number, structure, and geographical location, could be manipulated by the state. The collapse of multinational multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual empires, however illiberal, led to the identification of the state with the nation, and of the nation with an ethnic group, and bred an intolerant hyperethnicism, culminating in ferocious episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide whose consequences resonate to this day in Europe and beyond.

中文翻译：

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欧洲的自然、政治和创伤

直到 19 世纪，自然一直是人口冲击的主要来源，此后政治逐渐成为灾难性创伤的主要因素。上个世纪上半叶，战争、暴力、强迫移民、人为饥荒以及被它们解除的流行病造成了数千万人死亡。它们在幸存者身上留下了深深的伤痕，扭曲了年龄结构，改变了两性之间和代际之间的平衡，并以多种方式影响了欧洲大陆的人口系统，包括人口的地理分布。这里尝试对这些政治驱动的创伤的受害者进行定量评估，第一次探索驱使他们的政治信念：人口及其数量、结构和地理位置，可以被国家操纵。多民族、多文化和多语言的多民族帝国的崩溃，无论多么不自由，都导致了国家与民族的认同，以及民族与民族的认同，并孕育了不宽容的超民族主义，最终导致种族清洗和种族灭绝的凶猛事件其后果至今在欧洲及其他地区引起共鸣。