MINORITIES RESEARCH - 6
Erzsébet Szalayné Sándor
International Law in the Service of the Protection of Minorities Between the Two World Wars
1. The Evolution of the Minority Protection System - The Lessons
By the end of 1919, Western great powers had successfully persuaded the last reluctant East Central European state to sign a treaty on the protection of minorities. This brought the negotiations on minority protection, put on the agenda during the second phase of the Paris peace conference, to an end. The politicians at the conference, yielding to external pressure, decided to oblige the Central and East European states to sign treaties on the protection of minorities, which would fall under continuous international protection and monitoring following their entry into force. These politicians regarded the treaties as instruments in securing the territorial changes of 1918-1919 and preventing any threat to the peace of Europe. The threat that could destroy European peace in any moment was, according to the politicians embracing realpolitik, the partial application of the principle of national autonomy in Central and East Europe. For those national minorities that had not had the opportunity to exercise their right to autonomy prior to the First World War, minority rights guaranteed in a contractual form as reparations could have been the first step on the path of reconciliation - at least according to the hopes of the participants of the conference. According to the elaborators of this system, the ultimate objective would have been general political and national assimilation. Guarantees under the treaties would have made the path leading to that possible and tolerable. The necessity of offsetting the rather partially applied right to autonomy emerged already during the war. The American delegation appeared responsive and open-minded in this respect during the peace negotiations, and, with its preparations and drafts, in May 1919 it launched officially the process, which would lead to the creation of the system of the protection of minorities. The pre-war fate of Romanian Jews had a decisive effect on the diplomatic steps and steadfastness of the American peace delegation. Several members of the delegation were among the supporters of the initiative of the East European and American Jews. The proposals focused on the guaranteeing of individual and collective minority rights, and national autonomy. In the background, it was also to be acknowledged that the states of Central and East Europe were multinational formations. However, the ideal and model of a homogeneous nation-state left its mark on the negotiations and prevented the advancement of the above-mentioned more liberal and realistic conceptions, which were struck off from the agenda in the end. According to one of the most frequently mentioned, characteristically nation-state arguments that ran counter to the autonomy-concepts, it was a threat that "a state within a state" could eventually evolve. Similarly, it was the preservation of the fiction of the nation-state to guide the great powers at the conference - less the Americans, more the English, and even more so the French representatives - when, based on the proposals prepared by Jewish organisations, they decided on the elaboration of minority protection that would fall under international guarantees. It was not really the objective of positive minority protection that the decisive politicians of the era sought. They focused instead on the possibility originating from the treaties that would prepare the way towards comprehensive national assimilation. Renowned politicians of the Allies expressed these expectations but explicitly and implicitly through the interpretation of certain expressions and concepts in 1919 and thereafter.
When the draft provisions of the minorities treaties were ready in May 1919, further problems emerged. The great powers encountered instinctive and conscious resistance on the part of the countries concerned. They perceived the undertaking of minority protection commitments as constrai