The sentiment expressed in the Hobsbawm quote, which places the end of the Ottoman Empire in the same ‘pigeon-hole’ as the Habsburgs' Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Romanovs' Russian Empire, broadly outlines the generally accepted features of the terminal decline of these states. The ending of these empires at the beginning of the twentieth century was marked by the distinct disruption of state structures. Single states were divided into several, and each of these non-national, multi-ethnic entities had to be transformed into a number of notionally national but often, in fact, still multi-ethnic states. More important, the ‘End of Empire’ broke what had been a coherent web of internal relations within the single states, into unintelligible fragments. It automatically set people onto forced journeys of migration seeking others with whom they might take refuge and so mass movements of mainly ethno-religious communities defined the moment.