Suchergebnisse

In response to the atrocities committed during and after the First World War and the need to create a stable east European settlement, the diplomats in Paris constructed the world's first system of international protection for minorities. The League of Nations, charged with the enforcement of the Minority Treaties, set up a cautious 'political' system, which failed either to shield minorities or pacify their governments. No international system was revived after the Second World War, but since the fall of communism, Europe – looking forward to the future as well as back to the past – has organised new supranational institutions to protect endangered religious and national groups.

The international protection of minorities is both a contemporary and a historical problem. During the past five years, new states have been formed, or reformed, from the Oder to the Caucasus. New minorities, suddenly created, have been subject to unfamiliar political, economic, cultural, and legal controls and have become vulnerable to persecution and spoliation, violence and expulsion. Seemingly dormant for the past half‐century, the minorities issue, which long destabilized the international history of Europe, has reemerged as one of the major challenges to those who study war and peace.

Germany under the Weimar Republic played the role of champion of minorities in Europe. A combination of revisionist hopes, völkisch arrogance, and humanitarian concern for the fate of lost kin motivated the Minderheitenpolitik of the Reich. Most historians have interpreted this episode as a link between the imperialism of Wilhelmian Germany and that of the Third Reich, a refinement—dictated by weakness—of Berlin's continuing efforts to dominate Eastern Europe.