Irredentism and Minorities in the Interwar Period

Why did the Minorities Treaties fail to solve the minorities question? To what extent did they merely intensify hatreds and mistrust?

Although well intentioned, the Minorities Treaties ultimately failed to solve the minorities question because they underestimated the sheer complexity of the demographics in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, the enforcement mechanisms of the treaties were weak and therefore ineffectual in truly remediating the issues that arose between the wars. Finally, although it is not clear that these treaties made matters worse for minorities, they certainly did not make them any better.

Most importantly is the sheer ethnic heterogeneity of most of these states. Although we are commonly conditioned to see the minorities of Czechoslovakia as being Hungarians and Ruthenians, the most significant minority was the Slovaks. Therefore, part of the underestimation of the treaties was bound up in an incomplete understanding of the different ethnicities. For instance, Thomas Hammond writes, "Many of the Slovaks resented being dominated by the Czechs and insisted that their nationality was neither 'Czech' nor 'Czechoslovak.'"[1] Moreover, there was the problem of ethnic stratification cutting across class in ways not considered by the treaties. Using the example of Lithuania, whereas the landed gentry was German, the bureaucracy was largely Russian, and the urban middle class was largely Jewish, only the peasantry was Lithuanian on an ethnic basis, and as such, legal protection of minorities so empowered was not likely to mitigate class-based resentments. Moreover, each group also professed a different faith, respectively, Lutheran (at least a majority), Orthodox, Jewish, and Catholic, and as Ivan Behrend notes, "In an area of permanent foreign occupation that lacked independent statehood, religion played an important role in self-identification."[44]

Beyond misunderstanding the sheer complexity of the issues, the Minorities Treaties lacked sufficient enforcement mechanisms. Despite the obvious existence of severe ethnic conflict in some places, Carole Fink writes (specifically about the Polish treaty) that it "was dictated largely by great powers that had refused to accept, even theoretically, similar obligations; it was imposed on behalf of named and unnamed minorities that had not been consulted and would play no role in the enforcement process."[3] A knock-on effect was that countries with minorities outside its borders, principally Hungary and Germany, could use the enforcement process to protect its own ethnic groups while at the same time violating the treaty regarding its own minorities, particularly in the 1930s. According to Jennifer Jackson Preece, "minority grievances (both real and contrived) were deliberately exploited by revisionist Germany and Hungary throughout the 1920s and 1930s."[4]

The explosion of ethnic violence in Eastern Europe occasioned by the outbreak of World War II is sufficient proof that the Minorities Treaties did not help the condition of these minorities before the war. That said, I do not see evidence for the treaties making the situation worse. Rather, the lack of teeth in the treaties resulted in the problems occasioned by the creation of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe remaining when the international system began to disintegrate in the 1930s.
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[1] Thomas T. Hammond, "Nationalism and National Minorities in Eastern Europe," Journal of International Affairs, 20, no. 1 (1966), 21.
[2] Ivan T. Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe Before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 44.
[3] Carole Fink, "Minority Rights as an International Question," Contemporary European History, 9, no. 3 (2000): 273
[4] Jennifer Jackson Preece, "Minority Rights in Europe: from Westphalia to Helsinki," Review of International Studies, 23, no. 1 (1997): 84.