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The political borders of Europe were violently transformed during the twentieth century. The large, multi-ethnic and moribund empires of the Romanov, Habsburg and Ottoman dynasties were broken up into nation states after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Sovereign states such as "Czecho-slovakia" and "The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes' were confected on the drawing boards of the Parisian châteaux; Poland was once again reconstituted from partition; Romania expanded, as Austria and Hungary contracted. Such was the new power of national self-determination that, as Benedict Anderson has written, "even the surviving imperial powers came to the League of Nations dressed in national costume rather than imperial uniform".¹