Origins and Early Implementations of Non-Territorial Autonomy

Abstract

This chapter explores the origins of the idea of non-territorial autonomy and traces its theoretical development, as well as actual implementations, across time and space from the late Habsburg and Russian Empires to the Paris Peace Conference and to the interwar nation-states. Upon completing this chapter, you will learn how the concept of NTA came into being; what were its main features; who were the concept’s main proponents; which political currents supported the idea and which opposed it; and, finally, how historical events and changes at both the state and the international levels shaped the NTA concept’s ideological metamorphoses and determined its practical applications.

This chapter explores the origins of the idea of non-territorial autonomy and traces its theoretical development, as well as actual implementations, across time and space from the late Habsburg and Russian Empires to the Paris Peace Conference and to the interwar nation-states. Upon completing this chapter, you will learn how the concept of NTA came into being; what were its main features; who were the concept’s main proponents; which political currents supported the idea and which opposed it; and, finally, how historical events and changes at both the state and the international levels shaped the NTA concept’s ideological metamorphoses and determined its practical applications.¹

2.1 Ethnic and Linguistic Diversity Management in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

2.1.1 The Habsburg State Reform: Historical Background

The Habsburg Empire was a multinational empire in Central Europe that comprised more than ten ethnolinguistic groups living, in a mixed pattern, in approximately twenty provinces that enjoyed different statuses within the overarching state. The Revolution of 1848—a democratic revolt against monarchic absolutism—introduced, for the first time, not only the idea of civic equality for all individuals but also the equality for all national groups within the empire. While the revolution itself ultimately failed, the idea of principal equality never receded entirely, despite being overshadowed by the reality of the socio-economic domination of the traditional Austro-German and Hungarian (in some regions—also of Polish and Italian) elites within the empire. The nationality question, born in 1848, remained a pressing issue until the eventual dissolution of the empire in 1918. Continuing tensions between individual rights, rights of the provinces, and the rights of the nationalities marked the decades-long discussions on the state reform within the empire (Stourzh, 1985).

The nationality question A historical term for the problem of accommodating ethno-cultural diversity of populations traditionally applied to Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Europe’s continental empires were so ethnically mixed, it was difficult to speak about majorities and minorities, with the latter term also often perceived as derogatory by those it described. After World War I, and especially during and after the Paris Peace Conference, the ‘nationality question’ was gradually replaced by the ‘problem of national minorities’ in public discourse. It is important to note that minorities themselves continued to prefer the former term (hence the Congress of European Nationalities).

A crucial change occurred in 1867, when the Habsburg Empire was divided into the Austrian and Hungarian parts with separate constitutions and governments. Whereas Austria was established simultaneously as a multinational state and a federation of 17 provinces that all possessed their own provincial parliaments and governments, Hungary was constituted as the unitary state of the Hungarian political nation. Most importantly to our subject, while the new Austrian constitution transformed the various nationalities into legal subjects with certain rights, it nevertheless failed to define nationality itself, as well as its relation to the individual citizen. The discussions on the political implementation of non-territorial arrangements described in this part of the chapter largely refer to the Austrian part of the monarchy.

The Habsburg Empire’s general public engaged in a decades-long state reform discussion that featured both centralist and federalist opinions. However, there was a disagreement within the federalist camp between those who favoured Austria’s federalization according to its historically established provinces, and those who demanded to federalize along the national lines. At the same time, everybody understood that due to the existing highly mixed pattern of settlement, neither such nationally defined units nor the historical provinces would be ethnically homogeneous; thus, minority protection needed to be considered in any case. Following this reasoning and the understanding that nationality was rather a community of people than a community of territory, some suggested that it would be fairer to apply the personality principle rather than territoriality principle when it came to accommodating the linguistic and cultural needs of individuals (Lukas, 1908). This meant that a citizen’s national belonging, rather than their physical presence in a given territory, should decide in what language they could communicate with the authorities, receive education, or exercise their political rights.

Personality vs. territoriality principles In general, states organize and categorize their citizens according to both principles. Whereas citizens’ other characteristics, such as social status or gender, are usually not associated with a given territory, their ethno-cultural belonging is most often conceptually and administratively linked to (a part of) a territory. Religious belonging was, for many centuries, also treated according to the territoriality principle. However, with the separation of church and state during the Enlightenment, confession became associated with the personality principle. Proponents of NTA suggested to do the same with nationality, arguing that this is not the citizen’s place of residence that should determine how and in which language this person is educated, and how she or he communicates with authorities, but rather the national group to which this individual chose to belong.

2.1.2 Implementing Non-Territorial Arrangements in Imperial Austria

The first time the personality principle translated into political rights was in the so-called Moravian Compromise of 1905, which consisted of a new provincial constitution and a new suffrage law. Approximately, three quarters of the population of the Habsburg province of Moravia (today’s Czech Republic) spoke Czech, and only one quarter—German; yet, the latter dominated the provincial parliament and institutions. Moravia’s new electoral law introduced universal male suffrage but continued to privilege the nobility and bourgeoisie in the distribution of power. It granted the Czech parties a majority in the common multinational provincial parliament and government but conceded considerable veto rights to the German parties. Hence, the electorate was divided into different social classes, with most of them being also split into Czech and German sections (Glassl, 1967). This meant that a Czech taxpaying resident of Moravia’s capital city Brno (Brünn) and his German taxpaying neighbour would be registered on two different electoral rolls and would elect their representatives in two different constituencies, one sending a Czech, and the other one a German deputy to the provincial parliament. The resulting problem of how to define such national belonging legally occupied Habsburg authorities and courts ever since (Kuzmany, 2023).

Very similar elements of non-territorial autonomy were later agreed upon in the provinces of Bukovina (today’s Ukraine and Romania), Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Galicia (today’s Ukraine and Poland). Given Bukovina’s extremely heterogenous population, more nationalities than in Moravia needed to be accommodated. The Bukovinian parliament passed a provincial constitution and suffrage in 1910 that legally provided for non-territorial arrangements for Ruthenians,² Romanians, Germans, and Poles, whereby Germans were de facto split again into Christians and Jews. The Galician Compromise of 1914 introduced a system combining non-territorially and territorially designed constituencies. The non-territorial arrangement in Bosnia’s 1910 provincial constitution provided separate electoral districts based on the religious belonging of the electorate. However, many contemporaries interpreted the Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, or Jewish electoral registers as de facto national registers of Bosnia’s ethno-confessional groups (Kuzmany, 2016) (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1

At the beginning of the twentieth century, several Habsburg provinces introduced non-territorial arrangements in order to accommodate ethnic, linguistic, and confessional diversity [© Börries Kuzmany]

While all these compromises were clear non-territorial arrangements, there was, however, very little autonomy in them. They were, rather, consociational systems (Lijphart 1977) designed to secure political participation.³ Most importantly, each nationality was entitled to elect its provincial parliament members without interference from other groups and to fill its proportionally allocated provincial government seats independently; in some cases, the elected members were also the highest controlling organ of educational institutions designed for their nationality. The aim was not to create different laws for different nationalities but to apply identical legal norms to people of different nationalities by way of separate local administration (Baernreither, 1910). Hence, no separate assemblies and certainly no separate budgets were ever introduced.

There is no consensus among historians whether this pacification-via-separation strategy in the provinces was successful, not least because there was too little time to observe it in action before World War I started in 1914 (Pokludová & Kladiwa, 2023). However, the very fact that several provinces followed Moravia’s example, and that there were ongoing negotiations in other provinces, accompanied by a very lively public debate on the advantages and disadvantages of national autonomy—as it was called in the Habsburg Empire—testify that the idea was ‘in the air’.

One of the intellectuals most engaged in this debate was Karl Renner (1870–1950). Born in Southern Moravia and trained as a legal scholar, he joined the Austrian Social-Democratic Party in 1890. Together with his younger comrades Otto Bauer and Etbin Kristan, Renner was the party’s leading specialist on the nationality question and the mastermind of the Austro-Marxist concept of non-territorial autonomy. In sharp diversion from the Orthodox Marxist view on nationality, the Austro-Marxists were convinced that even in a future socialist society, national differences would not disappear. They thus argued that the national question was just as important as the class struggle and needed to be addressed immediately.

In his seminal 1902 book, Karl Renner suggested reorganizing Habsburg Austria (and later also Habsburg Hungary) into a federation of nationalities through a combination of territorial and non-territorial self-rule. Renner hoped to keep the Austrian polity strong by incorporating the nationalities as legal entities into the state (Arzoz, 2020).

NTA: The Rennerian model ‘National autonomy’, according to Renner, was a combination of territorial and non-territorial national self-rule. He envisioned a strong central parliament responsible for political, economic, and social affairs, along with eight non-territorially conceived national councils. These councils, comprised solely of the deputies of one nationality, have legislative power over the cultural and educational matters of that respective nationality. In Renner’s model, the district becomes the basic administrative unit: in the monolingual districts, the autonomous national administration is identical to the state administration (i.e. territorial autonomy), while in the mixed districts, the state and the national organs are in charge of different affairs (i.e. non-territorial autonomy). Most importantly, the autonomous administration of cultural and educational matters is, according to Renner, not something separated from the state administration, but rather accomplished by the autonomous organs working for the state.

2.2 Ethnic and Linguistic Diversity in the Russian Empires

Similarly to the Habsburg Empire, the multinational Russian Empire (according to the census of 1897, ethnic Russians comprised just 44% of the population) had also seen decades of state reform discussions. These debates aimed at the decentralization and democratization of the autocratic state. One of the earliest proponents of the parliamentary system in Russia, the Ukrainian political theorist Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841–1925), put forward a proposal to build the state up from its smallest entity, the local commune. These communes would then form a voluntary union with other communes, creating territorial units, which, in their own turn, would form the state. Drahomanov’s Free Union (1884) programme, in a striking similarity to Renner’s later model, combined territorial and non-territorial autonomy elements and was a major influence on the subsequent development of the Ukrainian national movement, as well as on the programme of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, arguably the most important socialist party in Tsarist Russia.

The Revolution of 1905—a mass political and social unrest directed against the monarchy and the ruling classes—and the subsequent convocation of the First Russian Duma (state parliament) gave a new impetus to the democratization debates, which flared up at the centre and the periphery alike. The nationality question was understandably central to those discussions, with the idea of cultural autonomy as a possible solution becoming increasingly popular, above all through the advocacy of Jewish thinkers and political activists, concerned with the future fate of Russia’s numerous Jewish population. The Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow (also Dubnov), 1860–1941, developed his own theory of Jewish Autonomism, published as a series of essays between 1897 and 1907. Firmly rooting his theory in the history of the centuries-old self-ruling Jewish communities, Dubnow, in a marked similarity to Renner and Bauer’s ideas, suggested that Jews in the Russian Empire should demand not only civil equality for individual citizens, but also national, or collective, rights.⁴ In essence, Dubnow applied the territorial demands made by other national minorities in the Russian Empire to the ‘non-territorial’ situation of the Russian Jews, calling for Jewish autonomy in the matters of education, culture, and communal welfare, as well as to self-taxation (Rabinovitch, 2014).

Various Jewish parties including socialists, democrats, liberals, and Zionists rallied behind Dubnow’s ideas with a view of developing a political platform for the Russian Jews to stand in the elections to the 1st Duma. The notable exception was the General Jewish Labour Bund, arguably the most organized Jewish political group at the time. Although the social-democratic Bund made autonomy part of its political programme, it was categorically against the Jewish participation in the ‘bourgeois’ Duma.

The years of reaction that followed the Stolypin Coup of 1907 dampened the autonomy aspirations of Russia’s numerous nationalities, but they did not put an end to them. The circulation of the ideas of Renner and Bauer through socialist and Marxist channels bore a deep impact on all Russia’s nationalities, from the Baltics to the Caucasus; while they primarily aspired for territorial autonomy within the ‘free democratic Russia’, there was still a question of other ethnic groups in their midst, as well as of their co-ethnics dispersed through the huge empire. For those, non-territorial solutions were actively discussed (Gechtman, 2005; Khripachenko, 2012).

After the February Revolution of 1917 dethroned the Czar, the federalist projects of all liberal and socialist parties within Russia, from the Constitutional Democrats to Socialist Revolutionaries, from the Latvian Social Democrats to the Armenian Dashnaktsutiun, and from the Jewish Bund to the Poalei Zion, included autonomy in one way or another. Most often, a combination of territorial and non-territorial elements of autonomy was promoted, as attested by the resolution of the Congress of the Peoples of Russia that brought together more than 90 delegates in September 1917 in Kyiv.

And although the Bolsheviks—who came to power in November 1917—rejected the non-territorial autonomy advocated by the Austro-Marxists and the Bund outright, a closer look reveals that in reality, territorial approaches to the nationality question were often complimented by non-territorial arrangements within the Soviet Union (Battis 2023).

NTA: The Medem Model In his 1904 Yiddish essay ‘The National Question and Social Democracy’, the Jewish Bund’s main ideologue Vladimir Medem (1879–1923), who was also the party’s authority on the nationality question, posited that a full-scope communal self-government is an expression of nationalism and thus undesirable in a socialist society. While being fully committed to the principle of non-territoriality, Medem put the main focus on linguistic and educational needs in the national group’s daily life, rather than on its political participation in the overarching state. Medem also believed that the state was not to be trusted to administer those cultural and educational autonomous institutions with minorities’ best interests at heart. He, therefore, called for the truly autonomous administrative units representing each national group on a non-territorial basis. In short, he favoured a narrower, primarily cultural definition of autonomy that would exist in parallel to the state. It is important to note that it is the Medem model of NTA that can be most often encountered in present times.

2.3 International Scene, NTA, and Minority Rights

Debates on the future of multinational Central and Eastern Europe intensified during World War I, which would eventually bring about the collapse of both the Habsburg and the Russian Empires and their disintegration into multiple nation-states. Those discussions transcended national borders, leading to the creation of transnational organizations advocating for peace and inter-ethnic harmony. One of those transnational bodies, the Central Organization for Durable Peace, founded in the Netherlands in 1915, aimed at popularizing the non-territorial nationalities experiments in the Habsburg Empire with a view of replicating some of those successes at the international level. In March 1919, the Organization forwarded a draft of an International Treaty on the protection of national minorities to the Paris Peace Conference. Its author, the Austro-German legal scholar Rudolf Laun, building on his past-time professional experience in the Habsburg monarchy, suggested the creation of national collectives, as legal entities with an autonomous agency in cultural affairs, through voluntary national registers or cadastres. The draft treaty was ignored by the Conference, but it was not the peacemakers’ last encounter with the demands for minority autonomy (Kuzmany, 2021) (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2

Rudolf Laun’s Draft International Treaty on the Protection of National Minorities (1919) contained NTA provisions that drew on the experience of national diversity management within the late Habsburg Empire © copyright expired

While minority rights were not on the agenda of the Peace Conference at the start, the situation changed radically once a wave of antisemitic riots broke out across Central and Eastern Europe at the close of the war. Being widely reflected in the international press, the widespread disturbances made everybody wonder whether the newly minted nation-states could rival the late Russian Empire in its proverbial antisemitism, and whether additional safeguards were required for the protection of ethnic and religious minorities. The Jewish lobbying delegations to the Peace Conference, which included the representatives of the British, French, East European, and American Jewish organizations, submitted their memoranda to the peacemakers, asking not just for minorities’ equal civil and political rights and non-discrimination on the grounds of race or religious creed, but also for the autonomous management of their religious, educational, charitable, and other cultural organizations. Those demands were, in part, based on the Copenhagen Manifesto issued by the World Zionist Organization in 1918 and asking for ‘social, cultural and political autonomy for the Jews’.

The contribution of the Jewish delegations at the Paris Peace to the formulation of minority rights in the subsequent Minority Treaties that were placed under the guarantee of the League of Nations—thus creating the first-ever international regime of minority rights—is widely recognized by historians (Fink, 2004). And although the final version of the League of Nations’ Covenant contained no reference to minorities at all, minority rights were firmly attached to the conditions of new statehood, and the Polish Minority Treaty, signed—reluctantly—by Poland in June 1919 along with the Treaty of Versailles, served as a template for the other minority treaties and unilateral declarations that were to follow (Robinson et al., 1943).

In the end, unlike the guarantees of equal rights, the words ‘autonomy’ or ‘autonomous’ did not make it into the Minority Treaties; however, the stipulations on minority schooling, albeit couched in different terms, came quite close to the Jewish demands. But it is important to note that those rights were extended to individuals belonging to national minorities and not the national collectives themselves.⁵ Therefore, as the concept of NTA unequivocally vests minority rights in national collectives, the Treaties’ provisions cannot be regarded as NTA.

In the post-Versailles world, though, it quickly became apparent that minority rights enshrined in the Treaties clashed with the new reality of nation-states. Minorities often complained that the Treaties did not provide them with any meaningful agency, while nation-states perceived the League’s interest in the situation of their minorities as unnecessary meddling in their sovereign affairs. The fact that the Minority Treaties applied exclusively to the enlarged and successor states of Central and Eastern Europe added insult to injury. Notably, throughout the interwar period, minority activists in the new nation-states continued to tirelessly advocate for non-territorial autonomy solutions to the nationality question (Smith et al., 2018).

2.4 Interwar Nation-States and NTA

Once the Bolsheviks grabbed power in November 1917, some of those autonomy projects of Russia’s nationalities that originally had a territorial basis were transformed into claims to independent statehood. Those aspiring nation-states quickly repurposed autonomy that they had foreseen for themselves in the past for their newly made national minorities.

For example, when the Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic declared independence in January 1918, it simultaneously passed the Law on National-Personal Autonomy, which was the world’s first legal act granting non-territorial autonomy to national minorities. The law allowed Ukrainian Russians, Jews, and Poles to organize as corporate bodies of public law. The competences of the autonomous institutions were to be decided by the respective national unions themselves and were not necessarily limited to education and culture, but could also comprise social and economic issues—as long as they did not impair general state interests. The implementation of autonomy—i.e. setting up national registers, preparing elections to a minority constituent assembly, overseeing minority schools, etc.—was assigned to the Russian, Jewish, and Polish minority ministers within the Ukrainian government. Due to the unstable political, military, and social situation in revolutionary Ukraine, none of the minorities reached the full status of non-territorial autonomy (the Jews came closest) before the Republic ceased to exist in 1921 (Liber, 1987).

The Jewish national personal autonomy (NTA) flourished in Lithuania from 1919 to 1922, when the Jewish National Council and the Ministry of Jewish Affairs were responsible not just for cultural and educational matters, but also for social affairs and philanthropy among the members of the Jewish communities; the Council was also granted the right to collect taxes. The foundations of the Jewish autonomy were stipulated in a provisional law passed in 1919, and the rights to autonomy of Lithuanian minorities in general—in the new republic’s constitution of 1922. However, from 1922 on, fears of creating ‘a state within a state’ propagated by the right-wing circles of the Lithuanian majority prevailed, leading to the gradual curtailment of the Jewish autonomy before its final abolition after the 1926 authoritarian coup (Liekis, 2003).

Cultural autonomy (another designation for NTA) was promised to ethnic minorities in Latvia at the dawn of state independence as well. The two education laws (on general and on minority education) passed in 1919 gave minorities significant de facto control over their educational and cultural affairs and looked as a promising step in the NTA direction. However, the laws on minority autonomy, energetically advocated for by the Baltic German liberal MP Paul Schiemann and the Socialist Zionist MP Max Laserson, were never passed, despite the prolonged public and parliamentary debates in 1922–1925. After the authoritarian coup of 1934, minorities lost any control over education (Germane, 2013).

The situation was different in neighbouring Estonia, where various interconnected circumstances led to the adoption of a minority autonomy law in 1925. The law was equally rooted in the Austro-Marxist ideas of NTA and in the concepts developed by the aforementioned thinkers in the former Russian Empire, and is often cited as the best practical example of NTA implementation. The law gave minorities the right to establish cultural self-governments that represented voluntarily constituted communities that were also legally incorporated. In addition to receiving state funding, those communities also had the right to levy taxes on their members (Alenius, 2007).

Those self-governments were empowered to administer public and private minority schools and other cultural institutions. The law granted non-territorial powers to the dispersed minority groups exceeding 3,000 members (only Estonian Germans, under the leadership of Ewald Ammende and Werner Hasselblatt, and Jews, under the leadership of Hirsch Aisenstadt, set up their respective self-governments under the law provisions), while territorial arrangements at the municipal level were put into place for the more compactly settled Swedish and Russian minorities. The law remained in force until Estonia’s annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940, although after the authoritarian coup of 1934, the powers granted to minorities were partly restricted as a consequence of the general curtailing of democratic institutions (Hasselblatt, 1996; Laurits, 2010) (Fig. 2.3).

Fig. 2.3

The Jewish Cultural Council was the executive board of the Jewish NTA in Estonia. Tallinn, 1940 [© Tallinn City Archive, TLA.1387.1.16]

2.5 The Congress of European Nationalities (1925–1938)

Overall, by the mid-1920s, minorities in Central and Eastern Europe grew increasingly dissatisfied with the minority rights regime under the League of Nations, complaining that within that system, they were objects—rather than subjects—of international law. But minorities’ faith in the League of Nations itself was still strong—they believed that if they could find a way to circumvent nation-states and establish a direct dialogue with the League, matters could be significantly improved. In 1925, upon the initiative of the Baltic Germans, supported by the Jews and other ethnic groups, the Congress of European Nationalities was established in Geneva. The Congress, which was envisioned as an international forum for minorities to exchange their experiences, discuss common problems and inform the League of Nations, in its heyday had over 200 delegates representing 20 ethnic minority groups from 15 European states. The Congress made non-territorial autonomy for minorities a cornerstone of its programme, and it was often discussed at its podium as a preferable solution to the nationality question.

Emboldened by the success of NTA in Estonia, in 1929 the Congress called for the replacement of the existing Minority Treaties by a genuinely pan-European guarantee of minority rights based on the non-territorial autonomy model. There were, however, internal disagreements at the Congress on the matter: while the territorially dispersed minorities, like the Baltic Germans and the Jews, favoured NTA, many compactly settled minorities—the Sudeten Germans most notable among them—preferred territorial solutions. The lack of ideological unity at the Congress did not serve to its credit, and the League of Nations’ verdict was that the Congress had failed to present a convincing case for applying NTA beyond Estonia, and that a spirit of tolerance and liberalism would hardly be encouraged by institutionalizing separation between groups (Smith et al., 2018).

This failure to convince the League of the virtues of non-territorial autonomy, coupled with the aforementioned lack of internal unity and the growing financial dependence on Germany precipitated the demise of the Congress. Starting from the mid-1930s, the organization was gradually subverted by Nazi currents among its German membership, eventually losing its relevance for the European minority movement before finally ceasing to exist in 1938. This subversion, as well as the following collapse of the League of Nations, along with its Minority Treaties regime and the entire international order, tarnished minority rights (and national autonomy by association). After World War II, minority rights all but disappeared from the political agenda, and the focus decisively shifted to individual human rights instead (Smith et al., 2018). As the rights of the national collectives are crucial to all NTA models, from Renner and Drahomanov to Dubnow and Medem, NTA was consigned to historical memory, being effectively transformed from a popular solution to ethno-cultural diversity to a moth-balled intellectual curiosity. Decades would pass before the concept saw daylight again. As the post-1989 transformation in Central and Eastern Europe was linked with the establishment of new nation-states (and re-establishment of the old), new national minorities emerged, and both old and new methods were required in order to of deal with the resulting ethnic diversity. Since then, interest towards NTA has been steadily growing on behalf of both academics and practitioners.

Summing-Up

• Mixed national settlement patterns in many parts of the Habsburg Empire led some legal scholars, politicians, and intellectuals to suggest that a person’s national (i.e. ethnic) belonging should be the decisive in accommodating national diversity within the overarching state (personality principle). One of the most important contributors to these discussions was the Austro-Marxist Karl Renner, who suggested combining non-territorial and territorial elements of self-rule. Eventually, the late Habsburg Empire experimented with elements of non-territorial autonomy in several provinces: Moravia (1905), Bukovina (1910), Bosnia-Herzegovina (1910), and Galicia (1914) implemented new provincial constitutions that empowered their respective inhabitants to exercise their political rights according to their ethno-confessional belonging.

• In the late Russian Empire, the theoretical contributions on autonomy by the Ukrainian political thinker Mikhailo Drahomanov and by the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, along with the ideas of Austrian Marxists, were the main inspirations for all Russia’s liberal and socialist parties striving for democratization. The February Revolution of 1917 brought these ideas out in the open, with territorial and non-territorial arrangements being advocated as a solution for the nationalities question from the Baltics to the Caucasus by various political parties.

• International debates on the future of the multinational Central and Eastern Europe intensified during World War I. Non-territorial solutions to the nationalities question were advocated by various international organizations, such as the Central Organization for a Durable Peace and the World Zionist Organization, and were also put forward at the Paris Peace Conference. But while provisions for minority schooling were eventually incorporated into the Minority Treaties, those rights were extended to ‘individuals belonging to minorities’ rather than to the national collectives. Therefore, the provisions of the Minority Treaties cannot be regarded as NTA.

• The world’s first legal act granting non-territorial autonomy to minorities was passed by the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918. The Jewish national personal autonomy flourished in Lithuania from 1919 to 1922; it was gradually curtailed before being finally abolished after the authoritarian coup of 1926. Although Latvia granted its minorities de facto autonomy in education and cultural affairs in 1919, the promised law on NTA never materialized, with minorities losing control over education after the authoritarian coup of 1934. The Estonian 1925 Cultural Autonomy Law is widely regarded as the best practical example of NTA implementation. The law, albeit with some curtailments, survived the authoritarian coup of 1934 and remained in force until Estonia’s annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940.

• The Congress of European Nationalities, an international forum representing minority groups from 15 European states, made NTA into a cornerstone of its programme and suggested replacing the Minority Treaties by a pan-European minority rights regime based on the principles of NTA. The proposal was rejected by the League of Nations on the grounds that assigning collective rights to minorities would institutionalize separation between groups, against the spirit of tolerance and liberalism. After World War II, minority rights all but disappeared from the international agenda, with the focus shifting towards supposedly all-encompassing individual human rights.

2.1.1 Study Questions

• 1. Why was there a state reform discussion in the Habsburg Empire, and what was the reasoning behind it?

• 2. Which political parties in Imperial Russia advocated for NTA?

• 3. How did NTA activists try to influence the creation of an international minority rights regime during and after World War I? Were they successful in promoting NTA?

• 4. Which countries implemented NTA, and what were the similarities and differences among them?

• 5. What were the proclaimed goals of the European Nationalities Congress, and what role did NTA play in them?

• 6. Which historical events tarnished the perception of the concept of NTA after 1945?

2.1.2 Future Readings

• 1. Coakley, J. (Ed.). (2017). Non-Territorial Autonomy in Divided Societies: Comparative Perspectives. Routledge.

• 2. Hiden, J. (2003). Defender of Minorities. Paul Schiemann, 1876–1944. London.

• 3. Kuzmany, B., Battis, M., & Mulej, O. (2022). Accommodating National Diversity Within States: Territorial and Non-Territorial Approaches Since the Late 19th Century. Nationalities Papers, 50(1), 850–856.

• 4. Núñez Seixas, X. M. (2022). Home‐rule Versus Non‐Territorial Autonomy? Western European National Movements and Their Views on the Minority Question, 1919–1939. Nations and Nationalism, 29(2), 482–497. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12847.

• 5. Renner, K. [Pseud. Synopticus] (1899). Staat und Nation. Zur österreichischen Nationalitätenfrage. Staatsrechtliche Untersuchung über die möglichen Principien einer Lösung und die juristischen Voraussetzungen eines Nationalitäten-Gesetzes. Vienna.

• 6. Renner, K. [Pseud. Rudolf Springer] (1902). Der Kampf Der Österreichischen Nationen Um Den Staat. Das Nationale Problem Als Verfassungs- Und Verwaltungsfrage. Deuticke.

• 7. Smith, D. J., & Hiden, J. (2012). Ethnic Diversity and the Nation State: National Cultural Autonomy Revisited. Routledge.

• 8. Żyndul, J. (2000). Panstwo w Panstwie? Autonomia narodowo-kulturalna w Europie Srodkowo-wschodnej w XX wieku. Wydawnictwo DiG.