Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (11 page)

Poland turned out to provide the model for a whole series of minority-rights treaties which the peacemakers in Paris drew up for eastern Europe. Similar obligations were imposed on the other newly created states as well as on former belligerents like Hungary and on older states like Romania and Greece which acquired territory as a result of the war. Thus the League of Nations came to stand for a system which, on the one hand, accepted the nation-state as the norm in international relations and, on the other, made a considered effort to tackle the minority issues which were thereby created. It acknowledged (perhaps thereby sometimes encouraging the creation of) minorities as collective entities.

But the role of the League itself in this system was ambiguous. It was difficult to bring cases to the League’s attention, and even more difficult to push them through the Geneva machine and have them taken up by the Council. Although the League had the power to refer
cases to the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague, it rarely acted on it. On the other hand it jealously guarded this power, and blocked proposals to allow minorities to appeal to the Court more directly. The League secretariat did not see itself as a “champion of minorities” but more modestly as an interlocutor helping governments carry out their own obligations. The League also had few sanctions against egregious offenders. Thus the notoriously repressive behaviour of Yugoslav gendarmes in Macedonia went unchecked, as did the Polish government’s bloody “pacification campaign” against the Ukrainians in 1930.

Polish or Serbian intolerance did not, however, much bother the French, who were more concerned about the stability of their east European allies than about minorities. Nor, increasingly, did it bother the British, who believed the minorities treaties were hindering the process of assimilation. “More harm would in the end be done by unnecessary interference than, even at the risk of a little local suffering, to allow these minorities to settle down under their present masters,” wrote a Foreign Office official in London in 1922. “So long as these people imagine that their grievances can be aired before the League of Nations they will refuse to settle down and the present effervescence will continue indefinitely.”
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Facing such indifference from the League’s main sponsors, many minority groups and their protectors pushed for a more activist stance. Under the diplomacy of Gustav Stresemann, Weimar Germany entered the League and began to assume the role of “defender of minorities,” with an eye to the millions of ethnic Germans scattered across eastern Europe. German and Jewish groups spearheaded the high-profile lobbying of the European Congress of Nationalities, while Stresemann identified himself closely with the cause of reforming the Geneva machinery by creating a permanent minority rights commission. His efforts had limited results, partly because they were suspected to form part of a more general effort to revise the Versailles settlement. German nationalists at home became convinced that the League would never adequately protect the rights of ethnic Germans abroad. Just as the victors at Versailles had prevented Germans in Austria exercising the right to self-determination through
Anschluss
with Germany in 1918, so in the 1920s they appeared to be turning a
blind eye to the grievances of the Germans elsewhere. Tens of thousands in fact migrated to Germany, while the millions who remained were supported through organizations like the two-million-strong Association for Germandom Abroad, and through political movements like the Nazi Party.
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At the same time, the minority treaties were bitterly resented as a humiliation by the countries upon whom they had been imposed. They were particularly irritated by the fact that there was no universal minority rights regime, and asked why they had been singled out when no such obligations had been imposed on Germany, and when Fascist Italy persecuted the German-speaking minority in the South Tyrol with impunity. It is true that of the approximately 35 million estimated minority inhabitants in inter-war Europe, only some 8.6 million lived in western Europe (roughly one in twenty of the total population) whereas about 25 million lived in central and eastern Europe (one in four). Thus the minorities question
was
numerically far more important in the East. Even so, the lack of a universal regime was an embarrassment for the Great Powers.
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Such an idea had in fact been considered in 1919 in Paris, only to be rejected. As James Headlam-Morley, a leading British policymaker, noted at the time, fundamental issues of state sovereignty were at stake:

At first there was, so far as I recollect, a proposal that there should be inserted in the League of Nations some general clause giving the League of Nations the right to protect minorities in all countries which were members of the League. This I always most strongly opposed … for it would have involved the right to interfere in the internal constitution of every country in the world. As I pointed out, it would give the League of Nations the right to protect the Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the French in Canada, quite apart from the more serious problems, such as the Irish. This point of view was, I think, not seriously opposed by any except the unofficial bodies who wished the League of Nations to be a sort of super-state with a general right of guarding democracy and freedom throughout the world … My own view was that any right given to the
League of Nations must be quite definite and specific, and based on special treaties entered into because of definite exceptional cases, and that such a right could only be recognised in the case of a new or immature state of Eastern Europe or Western Asia. Even if the denial of such a right elsewhere might lead to injustice and oppression, that was better than to allow anything which would mean the negation of the sovereignty of every state in the world.
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Thus the Great Powers were happy for the League to interfere in the internal affairs of “new” states, but not in their own. According to their thinking, “civilized” states such as those in western Europe had evolved procedures to facilitate the assimilation of minorities which did not yet exist in “immature states.” That view was, to some extent, true: it was easier for Welsh or Catalan children to make careers in the professions or the civil service than it was, say, for Ukrainians in Poland or Hungarians in Romania where hatreds were more recent. Breton children might suffer at school; they did not have their homes and villages burned down. Thus the minority treaties were a way of educating less civilized nations in international deportment.

But the underlying premise of this thoroughgoing liberalism was that assimilation into the civilized life of the nation was possible and desirable. Mill had argued decades earlier that “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities”: democracy required assimilation. As a Brazilian delegate put it in Geneva in 1925, the goal of the treaties was not to perpetuate a state of affairs in which certain groups in society saw themselves as “constantly alien,” but rather, to establish the conditions for “a complete national unity.” From this it was not far to Carl Schmitt’s arguments that a modern mass democracy presupposed “first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” “A democracy demonstrates its political power,” he went on, “by knowing how to refuse or keep at bay something foreign and unequal that threatens its homogeneity.”
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Liberalism’s hypocrisies on this score were obvious, preaching one thing and practising another. After all, how universalist and free of racial assumptions was liberalism itself? In 1919, it was the liberal
powers which had rebuffed Japan’s suggestion to insert a clause affirming racial equality in the League of Nations covenant. American liberalism coexisted for years with segregation. And the British and French, too, made it very hard for colonial subjects of the wrong skin colour to acquire full citizenship. “Does the British Empire rest on universal and equal voting rights for all its inhabitants?” Schmitt asked pointedly. “It could not survive for a week on this foundation; with their terrible majority, the coloureds would dominate the whites. In spite of that the British Empire is a democracy.” Some liberals were concerned at the double standard. “France cannot in effect show two faces,” wrote Albert Sarraut, a leading colonial commentator, “that of liberty, turned towards the metropolis, that of tyranny towards its colonies.” Of course it did; the Anglo-French belief in assimilationism only made sense viewed within their national borders.
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In the colonies, liberalism was giving way to new doctrines of separate development for different races, segregation and colour bars; full citizenship was a privilege of the state rather than a right. “Far from a right for natives,” wrote an expert on French colonial law, “the granting of French citizenship must be considered as a favour accorded by the administration only to those who have shown themselves truly worthy … It is permitted to be astonished … at the tiny number of naturalizations, or access to French citizenship offered to natives.” The old self-confident sense of a civilizing mission—which led the Portuguese, for instance, to divide the colonial population into unassimilable
indigenas
and assimilated
civilisados
—was waning. In 1919 the French deported tens of thousands of Algerian labourers as “un-assimilable.” In North Africa, they replaced assimilation with the doctrine of associationism, something akin to the British doctrine of indirect rule. Meanwhile, in 1929 the Hilton Young Commission regarded it as an open question whether representative institutions would ever be suitable in Africa. All this undermined the assumption made at Paris in 1919, when the mandate system established the League’s control over former German colonies, that natives would and could be educated in a democratic way of life.
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Scarcely surprising, then, with such a lead that the nation-states of Europe should also retreat from an assimilationism they had never much believed in. Between the wars, minorities were often seen as
fifth columns for neighbours’ irredentist ambitions, or for Bolshevism, and were regarded as security risks rather than citizens. Most promises made in the minority treaties were honoured in the breach. Minority-language schools were closed down while ambitious resettlement schemes tried (but usually failed) to alter the demographic balance in sensitive border areas such as Eastern Galicia and Macedonia to the detriment of local minorities. The old empires had handled matters more tolerantly. Before 1914 there had been numerous Czech civil servants in Vienna; after 1918, however, the new Czech state—though undoubtedly the most liberal in central Europe—allowed very few civil servants of German ethnicity, despite the fact that Germans comprised one fifth of the population.

Discrimination against minority rights was not primarily the work of reactionaries and conservatives. On the contrary, in eastern Europe it was above all the work of modernizing liberals who were trying to create a national community through the actions of the state. For them, the state had to show that its power was above “everyone and everything,” and to override its opponents whether these be the Church, brigands, communists or ethnic minorities. Thus it was entirely consistent for the Romanian Liberal Minister of Education, Constantin Angelescu, to criticize not only minorities but also the Church and provincial administrators in his desire to build up a centralized school system, since “the interests of the State, the interests of the Romanian people, stand above individual interests, be they those of the communities … The Romanian State that is ours, all of ours, must be strengthened and … this State can only be strengthened by … letting the State mold the souls of all its citizens.”
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Because democracy was about the creation of
national
communities, it was generally anti-Semitic, or at least more ready to allow anti-Semitism to shape policy—through separate electoral colleges, for example, or entry quotas into the universities and civil-service posts—than old-fashioned royalists had been. In Hungary a 1920 law marked out Jews as a separate race rather than as “Hungarians of the Mosaic faith”; had the country been more democratic, it would probably have been more anti-Semitic still. “All citizens in Poland irrespective of creed and nationality must enjoy equal rights,” the Polish Peasant Party announced in 1935, adding the rider that “the Jews, however, as
has been proved, cannot be assimilated and are a consciously alien nation within Poland.” Similar views were evident in Slovakia and Romania. And this was not just an east European problem: such sentiments were on the rise in once ultra-assimilationist France as well, and eventually led to the notorious clause in Vichy’s draft constitution describing the Jews as “a race that conducts itself as a distinct community that resists assimilation.”
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It is in this context of widespread, indigenous traditions of anti-Semitism—common to the modernizing, state-building national elites of authoritarian
and
democratic countries alike through much of central and eastern Europe—that Hitler rose to power. Nazi Germany was not an anomaly, nor even a pioneer in such policies of “cleansing the nation,” though it took them to new extremes and sounded the death-knell for the “assimilation thesis” (as it was dubbed by opponents). And while ethnic nationalism as practised in Warsaw or Bucharest had limited scope for assimilation, biological racial nationalism of the kind which spread across central and eastern Europe in the 1930s, allowed none. The rise of institutionalized anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Germany undermined the whole basis of the League’s approach to minorities, since a supposedly “civilized” state was rejecting the assimilationist idea in the most sweeping possible fashion. In October 1933, Nazi Germany left the League. A year later, the Polish premier, Colonel Beck, drove another nail into the League’s coffin when he denounced Poland’s minority-rights obligations “pending the introduction of a general and uniform system for the protection of minorities.” The number of minority petitions received at Geneva fell sharply from 204 in 1930 to 15 in 1936, a drop which can be taken as a barometer of the waning confidence felt by European minorities in the value of the League.
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