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Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: ‘Population Transfer’ and the End of Empire in Europe

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Refugees and the End of Empire

Abstract

In his 600-page work Das Recht der nationalen Minderheiten, published in 1931, the German legal scholar Georg Erler dedicates a considerable amount of space to dissecting, in painstaking detail, the technicalities and imperfections of the existing international framework for guaranteeing the rights of national minorities in the New Europe.1 One of the innovations of the post-1919 international order had been the massive expansion of non-reciprocal minority rights into the successor states of east-central Europe, in the first instance to protect the Jewish populations there. The so-called Minority Treaties — the minority protection clauses which were inserted in the Paris peace treaties — were one of the principal tools which the peacemakers used to break the link between imperial collapse, nation-state creation and refugee flows, and to control the process of ethnic unmixing that has accompanied the end of empire in the modern period. Ever the good German nationalist, Erler passed over the ways in which the system had been exploited and overburdened with complaints by well-organized, disaffected (invariably German) minorities since the mid-1920s, and overlooked the genuine sense of resentment in states with minority statutes towards what was seen as undue outside interference in their internal affairs and constraints on the sovereignty of the nation-state.2

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Notes

  1. G. H. J. Erler, Das Recht der nationalen Minderheiten (Münster, 1931).

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  41. There are also parallels between Lichtenstädter’s ‘far-reaching national reordering’ in Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch and the ‘far-sighted ordering of the life of Europe’ (weitschauende Ordnung des europäischen Lebens) outlined in Hitler’s 6 October 1939 Reichstag speech. In order to establish ‘better dividing lines’ and to remove ‘the reason and cause for continual international disturbances’, Hitler called for a ‘new order of ethnographic relations’ through a ‘resettlement of nationalities’ including the recall of ‘splinters of the German nationality’. See D. A. Loeber, ed., Diktierte Option: Die Umsiedlung der Deutsch-Balten aus Estland und Lettland 1939–1941, 2nd edn (Neumünster, 1972), pp. 79–81.

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  43. Other international bodies, such as the Central Organization for a Durable Peace, while recognizing that national minorities were a ‘source of extreme weakness for every state’, likewise ruled out forcible relocation. See Central Organization for a Durable Peace, A Durable Peace: Official Commentary on the Minimum-Program (The Hague, 1916), p. 12; also Organisation Centrale pour une Paix Durable, Avant-projet d’un traité général relatif aux droits des minorités nationales (The Hague, 1917); Organisation Centrale pour une Paix Durable, Avant-projet d’un traité général relatif aux transferts de territoires (Stockholm, 1917).

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Authors
  1. Matthew Frank
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

    Panikos Panayi (Professor of European History) & Pippa Virdee (Senior Lecturer in Modern South Asian History) (Professor of European History) &  (Senior Lecturer in Modern South Asian History)

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© 2011 Matthew Frank

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Frank, M. (2011). Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: ‘Population Transfer’ and the End of Empire in Europe. In: Panayi, P., Virdee, P. (eds) Refugees and the End of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305700_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305700_4

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-30974-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-30570-0

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