Abstract
An enormously important movement in European politics in the nineteenth century was nationalism. Originally a process of awakening national consciousness of peoples in a mainly cultural sense, nationalism gradually grew into a striving for political self-determination of peoples as well. At the Peace Conferences in Paris immediately after the First World War the majority of the Czechs and Slovaks, the Magyars, the Poles, the Croats and Slovenes, and others found their nationalism realised in political terms in the recognition of national (in a few cases: multinational) States. The same had happened to the majority of the Bulgarians, the Romanians and the Serbs some forty years earlier, at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. But parts of nearly all Central and Eastern European nationalities were left, with their national aspirations, as “national,” “linguistic” or “religious” minorities within the territories and under the jurisdiction of national States that were not their own; in some cases newly established States, and in some cases ex-enemy States at that. Situations such as these admittedly necessitated a system of outside guarantees for the minority populations as a substitute for the protection that ideally should have been afforded by a national State.1
Published Version
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