Minority Treaties Research Articles

Between Empire and State: Haudenosaunee Sovereignty at the League of Nations

Abstract In 1923, Haudenosaunee leader Deskaheh Levi General traveled to Geneva and launched a campaign for Indigenous statehood at the League of Nations. Drawing on a not-so-distant imperial past, the campaign was a novel attempt to use international law to assert Indigenous sovereignty. The Haudenosaunee claim hinged on a seemingly impossible conceit: that an independent native polity might persist within the borders of a settled state. The League of Nations’ primary institutional frameworks for grappling with other such problematic sovereignties were minority treaties and the mandate regime. But the Haudenosaunee case, which hinged on the persistence rather than the novelty of sovereignty, fit within neither paradigm. Their campaign illuminates a larger crisis of legal legibility that characterized Indigenous-settler relations from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. By reading Indigenous history into international legal history, this paper shows how Haudenosaunee people leveraged older norms of imperial relationality in their engagements with international law. In doing so, it revises a persistent genealogical account of the history of Indigenous human rights in favor of a more capacious narrative of Indigenous internationalism.

Verfassungs- und Gesetzesvorschriften über die Sprachenregelung im rumänischen Staat während der Zwischenkriegszeit

Language regulations in interwar Romania were affected by the antinomy between their political and legal (especially constitutional) architecture, devised along Western models, and the concrete political circumstances, in a polity whose aims were defined by the ethno-cultural and linguistic character of national community supportive of the state. The perception of the alterity of the new ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities—now accounting for a significant part of the total population—occurred through the lens of two conceptual paradigms, both of them ultimately striving to promote uniformity. On the one hand, the “nation state” character of interwar Romania entailed, at least implicitly, an advancement of the economic, social and professional status of the nation supportive of the state, to the disadvantage of the national minorities. The identity claims of the latter may well be accepted, but in exchange for relinquishing the right to participate in decision-making on major political issues, concerning the state as a whole. On the other hand, the state-centered legal thinking in constitutional and administrative law—adopted under French influence—was an instrument well-suited for promoting and achieving the desired cultural uniformity. Nevertheless, the discrepancy between the Western legal and political paradigm identifying the state with the (political) nation—which formally coined the Versailles Treaty system—and the Central-European (mainly Austrian) pattern of thought, more sensitive to linguistic diversity, was discernable also at the level of the minority treaties.

R. Chris Davis. Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945.

R. Chris Davis. <i>Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945</i>.

Home‐rule versus non‐territorial autonomy? Western European national movements and their views on the minority question, 1919–1939

AbstractThe leading elites of the ethnonationalist movements that developed in the aftermath of World War I in Western Europe usually refused to see their nations and territories as ‘national minorities’. In their view, they were stateless nations or nationalities. However, in the aftermath of World War I, the prior international discussion on the nationality principle was increasingly replaced with the notion of ‘minority rights’, enhanced by the implementation of the Minorities Treaties by the League of Nations. Thus, the term ‘national minority’ emerged as a label that permitted ethnonationalist activist to present their claims on the international stage. This became evident in the participation of some Western European national movements in the activities of some transnational non‐governmental organisations, such as the Congress of European Nationalities (1925–1939). However, the general programme advocated by the most influential leaders of East‐Central ethnic minorities, based on the extension of the personal principle and the implementation of non‐territorial autonomy all over Europe, was hard to accept for ethnonationalist elites from Western Europe, which were interested in territorial home‐rule and believed that their homelands did not fit in the category of ‘minority’. This article explores the modalities and limits of that cultural and political dialogue.

Minorities Treaties and Mandatory Regimes

Abstract The post–World War I treaties of Versailles, Sèvres, and Lausanne collectively created two related frames for ongoing Allied control over unreliable territory: a system of “minority protection” in the new and fragile states of eastern Europe, and a neocolonial regime of externally monitored “mandates” in the Mashriq and elsewhere, with both systems falling under the jurisdiction of the newly constructed League of Nations based in Geneva. This article explores how the architects of the peace agreements developed the concepts of minority rights and mandatory responsibilities in conjunction, as a way of codifying, formalizing, and legitimizing restrictions on sovereignty along immovable racial lines.

Interwar East Central Europe, 1918–1941: The Failure of Democracy-Building, the Fate of Minorities

Sabrina P. Ramet, in her preface to this invaluable, multiauthored volume, poses the question, “[W]hy present yet another book about interwar East Central Europe,” when “there have been at least five books published that deal with the politics of this region during the years 1918–1939/1941” since 1945? Her answer is persuasive. Notwithstanding the fact that the volume that has been considered “standard” [Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (University of Washington, 1974)] appeared 46 years ago, and that the most recent of what may be considered the competing studies [Ivan Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (University of California, 1998)] was published two decades ago, the subject is timely. She points out that there is a striking similarity between the problems and challenges that East Central Europe confronted in the interwar period and those facing Europe today. Among them are the erosion of democratic accountability, the growing presence of extreme right ideologies, and the failure to ensure respect for ethnic and religious minorities. We may also add that it is equally important to remind ourselves that as a consequence of the collapse of the Paris Settlement of 1919, Europe tore itself apart in World War II, and thus forced two non-European powers to decide its fate.The challenges faced by the successor states to the Settlement, as well as the manner in which they addressed them, provide the focus of the volume. The countries covered, and the respective authors in this volume, are the Polish Second Republic (M. Biskupski)), Czechoslovakia (Sabrina Ramet and Carol Skalnic Leff), Hungary (Béla Bodó), Romania (Roland Clark), Bulgaria (Christian Promitzer), Yugoslavia (Stipica Grgic), and Albania (Bernd J. Fischer). These case studies are complemented by an analysis of “The Peasantries and Peasant Parties of Interwar East Central Europe” (Robert Bideleux). A perceptive analytical afterword by Stefano Bianchini caps off this rewarding study.The main themes addressed give the book its unity. They are the collapse of parliamentary systems, right radicalism, the economics of peasant agriculture, the impact of the Great Depression on a transitional economy, the failure to respect the minority treaties of the League of Nations that were designed to protect ethnic groups, the nature of the political class, anti-Semitism, the quest to defend the territorial integrity of the new or enlarged states of 1919–1920 in the face of revisionist claims by Nazi Germany and Hungary, and the threat posed by a Bolshevik Russia to a number of the nation-states. Consideration of these issues leads the reader to assess the relative significance of internal structural state weaknesses and pressure from external forces, which, taken together, created problems of harmonization and consolidation that leaders in several of the countries covered had little time or inclination to address. This stimulating study demonstrates that the failure to solve them blighted progress toward modernization and the exercise of genuine democratic rule in the period covered.

Irish-language education and the Council of Europe's Minority Treaties: the monitoring of developments in Northern Ireland

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Historicising the Normative Boundaries of Diversity: The Minority Treaties of 1919 in a Longue Durée Perspective

The article accounts for the specific form a certain legal and, indeed, normative understanding of diversity informed the so-called Minority Treaties of 1919 by historicising the evolution of certain interlocking discourses over the remit of ‘rights’, as well as the identity of their holders. It seeks to account for why certain groups (national minorities) rather than others were singled out for protection and why the rights they were given took the form they did (cultural and linguistic) by positioning them in the context of broader debates within which they were embedded. I thus argue against reading the Minority Treaties from a ‘presentist’ perspective that not only retrojects a certain teleological narrative that tends to read them along the familiar lines of ‘progress’, but bears the danger of naturalising certain categories – such as ‘the nation’, ‘the nation-state’, or ‘nationalism’ – in light of their subsequent prominence, which consequently acquires a certain air of inevitability. To do so, the article first discusses normative conceptions of ‘diversity’ in a longue durée perspective, arguing for the emergence and contestation of hybrid and combined models of managing ‘difference’ during the long 19th century, prompted by the opposing tractions of efforts at homogenisation and hierarchisation. Second, it places the Minority Treaties in their immediate 1919 context, arguing that the form they took was significantly influenced also by contingent and extraneous contemporary factors, such as the expansion of the franchise after World War I or the sustained attempts to contain socialist revolutionary activity. The paper illustrates these developments by making specific reference to the situation of the Jewish minorities in Central and Eastern Europe as a case study.

The League of Nations, Minorities, and Post‐Imperial Turkey

AbstractThe Minority Treaties that were signed at the end of First World War were not only instrumental in establishing the status of minorities in their respective countries but also significant in terms of their impact on nation‐building processes. Through focusing on the post‐Ottoman lands, and specifically on Turkey, this paper examines the tension between the goals of the Allied Powers and the League of Nations, and those of the nationalist political elites in the newly‐created national states.

‘The feeling of pursuing an ideal’: a League of Nations civil servant reflects on his work

Three decades before the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the international community – in its newly institutionalised guise as a League of Nations – was charged by its covenant to guarantee the rights and protections of a more limited number of people: those considered to be ‘persons belonging to minorities of race, religion or language’ in certain primarily east European states. The everyday work of ‘supervising’ the minorities treaties was carried out by newly recruited members of an entirely unprecedented genre of administration: an international civil service whose role was to support the League of Nations in all its various activities. This paper draws on unpublished interviews from 1965 and 1966, archival documents and first‐person retrospective accounts in which international civil servants describe and reflect on their work on minorities treaty supervision in the new international institution widely seen as an ‘experiment’. Focusing on the accounts of one important figure, the Spaniard Pablo de Azcarate (who served in the Administrative Commissions and Minorities Questions Section of the League of Nations Secretariat from 1922 to 1933), it explores the ethos, aspirations, frustrations and working practices of international civil servants in an institution still in formation and not yet fully bureaucratised.

National Minority: The Emergence of the Concept in the Habsburg and International Legal Thought

Abstract This paper critically analyses how the term ‘minority’ was conceptualized in the Habsburg and international political and legal thought from the nineteenth century until the Minority Treaties after the First World War. We argue that the phrase ‘national minority’ was absent from the legal language up to 1918. Our paper guides the reader through the various traditions and their interwar interpretations that shaped the emergence of the new concept of ‘minority’. The analysis of parliamentary discourses within the Habsburg Empire shows how old and new meanings coexisted in 1918.

¿Autodeterminación o autonomía cultural? Debates ideológicos en el Congreso de Nacionalidades Europeas (1925-1939)

Tras el establecimiento de los Tratados de Minorías en la Conferencia de Paz de Versalles (1919) y la articulación de un sistema de protección de las minorías nacionales europeas en el seno de la Sociedad de las Naciones, los representantes políticos e intelectuales de varias minorías de Europa Centro-Oriental convergieron a partir de 1925 en una organización de coordinación de sus iniciativas y que pretendía convertirse en su intermediario ante la Sociedad de las Naciones, el Congreso de Nacionalidades Europeas (CNE). En sus congresos anuales, celebrados hasta 1938, y sus publicaciones e informes, el CNE se convirtió en un foro de discusión acerca de las posibles soluciones de la cuestión de las minorías nacionales en la Europa de entreguerras, y para ello articuló un programa común que hacía hincapié en la necesidad de separar los conceptos de Nación y Estado, y asimismo de diferenciar la esfera de la política de la esfera cultural, a fin de permitir la convivencia de diferentes grupos étnicos dentro de un mismo Estado mediante una aplicación generalizada de la fórmula de la autonomía cultural. La autonomía cultural obedecía a su vez a varias tradiciones de pensamiento político presentes en Europa Centro-Oriental desde finales del siglo XIX—desde las propuestas de la socialdemocracia austríaca hasta las formas de organización corporativa autónoma de las minorías germanas en el Báltico—, pero su plasmación en la Ley de Minorías estonia de 1925 la convirtió en fórmula exportable a otros países. No obstante, dentro del CNE se fueron dibujando con claridad dos modos diferentes de enfocar la cuestión de las minorías, que se personalizan en las propuestas de Paul Schiemann y de Werner Hasselblatt.

Ochrona praw mniejszości w II Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w świetle postanowień tzw. małego traktatu wersalskiego z 1919 r.

The Versailles system of the protection of national minorities’ rights was based on international agreements which had been imposed by the victorious powers of Entanta onto the former central states (except Germany), and on to the states formed after World War I. Compliance with the provisions of the minority treaties was covered by political and judicial guarantees from the League of Nations. The first of the series of minority treaties was the treaty signed by Poland on June 28, 1919, simultaneously with the peace treaty with Germany. The so-called ‘small treaty of Versailles’ obliged the Polish state to introduce the principle of equality before the law of all citizens regardless of nationality, to ensure freedom of religious practice, and to grant minorities specific language rights in education and the judiciary. The Jewish population obtained the right to celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday, and to run state-funded schools in Yiddish as a language of instruction. Treaty obligations for all minorities had been given the status of fundamental rights by including them in the March Constitution of 1921. Because the Polish state pursued an ethnic policy unfavourable to minorities, numerous violations of the treaty by its organs were the subject of petitions addressed o the League of Nations Council. The practice-oriented petition procedure allowed representatives of minorities to submit complaints, although the treaty granted the right to intervene to protect minority rights only to member states of the Council. On the initiative of Germany, cases concerning the violation of the rights of the German minority by the Polish state were examined by the International Court of Justice in Hague, which usually issued rulings unfavourable for Poland. Other minorities living in Poland did not gain such support from the Council member states, hence their petitions were dealt with as intended by the Polish government and did not end up in court. The fact that Germany was abusing the treaty guarantees to create an image of Poland as a country persecuting minorities served as an excuse for the Polish state to declare its cessation of applying the treaty obligations. The Declaration on September 1934 was one of the reasons why the Versailles system of the protection of minority rights, which in practice was an instrument of political interference of European powers in the internal affairs of other states, collapsed.

The Challenge of Ethnic Democracy: The State and Minority Groups in Israel, by Yoav Peled

Yoav Peled The Challenge of Ethnic Democracy: The State and Minority Groups in Israel, Poland and Northern Ireland London: Routledge, 2014. 188pp., $145.00 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-415-66421-9The model of was originally developed by Israeli sociologist Sammy Smooha. It describes a particular arrangement of power distribution within states with a substantial ethnic minority, where the state is conceived as belonging solely to the ethnic majority but provides the minority with a suite of liberal individual freedoms and rights. In Yoav Peled's phrasing, these states attempt to balance two conflicting of (13)-an inclusive liberal-democratic one and an exclusive ethno-nationalist one-in a single constitutional structure. Ethnic democracies are therefore diminished democracies that rely on majoritarian concepts of democracy together with a strong conviction about the essential inassimilability of their ethnic minorities to ensure continued dominance by the majority.The titular Challenge of Ethnic Democracy, as proposed by Yoav Peled, associate professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, is twofold: the very applicability of the model to states outside the archetypical case of Israel; and the question of the model's long-term stability. The applicability of the ethnic-democratic model to other states has been questioned ever since the model was originally developed in the 1990s. Smooha himself suggested a number of possible cases-Northern Ireland until 1972, interwar Poland, and Canada until the Quiet Revolution-and argued that as more countries face growing ethnic minorities, we may see new cases of this method of mitigating ethnic conflict in a quasi-democratic framework. The model has been successfully applied to some states in the post-communist bloc (e.g. Estonia and Latvia), but little has been done so far to study older cases. Peled argues that it is exactly those older cases that must be examined to reach any conclusions about the second question, that of stability. By examining 1921-1972 Northern Ireland and interwar Poland, two ethnic democracies that collapsed, he attempts to explain the dynamics that preserve or undermine the stability of the model.While Smooha published several lists of conditions for the success of ethnic democracy, Peled offers a more parsimonious model: the balance between the two conflicting discourses of citizenship can be kept only by the introduction of a third discourse of citizenship that can generate solidarity among the majority without an explicit ethnic component, thus appearing realistically inclusive to members of the minority but effectively excluding them nonetheless. Furthermore, this third principle cannot exist merely as a cultural construct; it must have a material basis (153). This requirement explains the dynamics in the three cases examined. In Poland, where the Allied Powers imposed minority rights by the Versailles Minorities Treaty, democracy was tenuous at best to begin with, but it is the lack of any third principle to curb the strength of Polish nationalism that explains its inability to effectively deploy ethnic democracy. In the second case, the subsidies granted by the British government allowed Northern Ireland for a time to sustain a populist discourse that applied primarily to Protestants, but the fear that those subsidies would decline led to the deterioration of ethnic democracy into the chaos of The Troubles of the 1970s and the abolition of self-rule. In contrast, the republican-civic ethos in Israel, based on its socialdemocratic roots and structured around its chief labour organization, the Histadrut, allowed Israel to sustain its own ethnic democracy; it is the deterioration of this ethos in light of the introduction of neo-liberal policies that has caused the destabilization of ethnic democracy evident since 2000. …

Minority Rights and Humanitarianism: The International Campaign for the Ukrainians in Poland, 1930–1931

Minority Rights and Humanitarianism: The International Campaign for the Ukrainians in Poland, 1930–1931 In October 1930, violent actions of the Polish security forces against the Ukrainian population in Eastern Galicia resulted in an international campaign for the Ukrainians in Poland. Its central claim was the condemnation of these incidents as a violation of the Minorities Treaty of the League of Nations. The article focuses on the involved British extra-parliamentary groups and their international federations as well as leftist intellectuals, socialist parties and the Labour and Socialist International. In most cases, the commitment of the activists was motivated by the desire to expose a humanitarian scandal while the implementation of minority rights played a minor role. When it turned out that the first reports had presented an exaggerated version of the events, they shifted their focus to the Polish opposition, whose persecution started in November 1930.

In pursuit of homogeneity: the Lausanne Conference, minorities and the Turkish nation

Following World War I, the Allied Powers signed Minority Treaties with a number of Central and Eastern European states. These treaties delineated the status of religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities in their respective countries. Turkey would be one of the last states that sat down to the negotiation table with the Allied Powers. In the Turkish case, the Lausanne Treaty would be the defining document which set out a series of rights and freedoms for the non-Muslim minorities in the newly created nation. The present article explores how and why the non-Muslim minorities were situated in the fringes of the new nation. In doing so, the article highlights the content of the discussions in the Lausanne Conference and in the Turkish Grand National Assembly with an emphasis on the position of the Turkish political elite.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Jewish Secularism

This special issue provides an opportunity to consider from the perspective of social science the situation of contemporary Jews outside of the framework of religion. In its essence Jewish secularism asks and answers the questions ‘‘Who are the Jews?’’ and ‘‘What are the Jews?’’ without reference to the claims of historic or normative Judaism—the precepts of the Halachah and the authority of the rabbinate. The vast majority of Jews today would refute the early medieval Jewish thinker R. Saadiah Gaon’s theocratic assertion, that the Jewish people was a nation ‘‘... only by virtue of its Torah.’’ In the twenty-first century that phrase does not resonate in either theory or in practice; in the current jargon ‘‘it doesn’t compute.’’ Of course, historically the Jews were a unique collectivity—a people comprising a combination of religion and nation and recognized as such both by themselves and gentiles. This dual system of Jewish identity broke down after the French revolution under the challenge of emancipation in Europe and nationalism in both Europe and the Islamic world. Following emancipation in Western Europe, Jews were convinced to become Frenchman, Germans and Englishmen of the Hebrew or Mosaic persuasion and to slough off their national and ethnic loyalties and particularities. But importantly, in the process most Jews also rejected traditional rabbinical authority in favor of individual autonomy and free thinking. In the period 1870–1914 in the multi-national empires of Central and Eastern Europe, the mass of Jews copied other oppressed minorities and, whether Zionists or Bundists, asserted their identity as a nationality based on the secular principle of a common Hebrew or Yiddish language and volkisch kultur. So by the 1920s across large swathes of Europe—whether under the Soviet constitution, in the successor states under the Minority Treaties of Versailles or even in the newly recognized ‘‘National Home for the Jewish People’’ in Mandatory Palestine—the Jews were

Tolerant majorities, loyal minorities and ‘ethnic reversals’: constructing minority rights at Versailles 1919*

ABSTRACT. The 1919 Versailles Peace Conference created new states in East Central Europe (ECE), but the imperfect implementation of the ‘one nation, one state’ formula resulted in more than twenty‐five million ‘unassimilable’ minorities. With the introduction of majoritarian democracy, this gave rise to what we term ‘ethnic reversals’: ‘formally dominant majorities’ suffered status decline, while previously ‘minoritised majorities’ found new political powers. Accordingly, the 1919 Minorities Treaties sought to manage these ‘ethnic reversals’ by instituting a liberal minority rights regime that tried to create both ‘tolerant majorities’ and ‘loyal minorities’. While the Treaties reflected the influences of Anglo‐American and Anglo‐American Jewish elites – the most notable voices of liberalism in an age of ethnic homogenisation – we suggest that in contexts of historical diversity with little institutionalised liberalism, ‘ethnic reversals’ raise issues that cannot be resolved within liberal conceptions of minority rights that rely solely or primarily on cultural protections.

Who's Afraid of Violent Language?

The peace treaties following the Great War dictated that certain nation-states accept, as the price of international recognition, agreements to protect the rights of their minority populations. Responsibility to `guarantee' and `supervise' the minority treaties fell to a novel and untried international institution, the League of Nations. It established the `minority petition procedure', an unprecedented innovation within international relations that initiated transnational claims-making. Focusing on the supervision of agreements pertaining to the Macedonian region, I examine how the Minorities Section of the League of Nations Secretariat handled `minority petitions' alleging state infractions of minority treaties. I consider, in particular, a preoccupation among both bureaucrats and states with `violent language' in petitions. I argue that this preoccupation signalled anxieties about honour, sovereignty and legitimacy, about the ambiguous position of `minority states' and about the potentially explosive effects of popular energies in the post-war international order.

Conditional recognition as an instrument of ethnic conflict regulation: the European Community and Yugoslavia

The European Community's conditional recognition of new states in Yugoslavia in 1991–2 represents the revival of an approach to ethnic conflict management that harks back to the Congress of Berlin (1878) and the minority treaties negotiated at the end of the First World War. Despite the historic parallels, and the continued relevance of this approach to ethnic conflict regulation, scholars have given scant attention to the strategic logic governing the EC's use of recognition. This article seeks to recover the conceptual thinking behind the EC's recognition policy. It argues that however much extra‐strategic considerations may have informed EC policy and however imperfectly that policy may have been implemented, conditional recognition represented a genuine attempt to address some of the presumed sources of violent conflict in the region.