European Congress of Nationalities
European Congress of Nationalities
1. Brief description
The ‘Congress of Organised National Groups in the States of Europe’, commonly known as the ‘European Nationalities Congress’, was a non-governmental organisation representing the interests of national minorities. It convened for the first time in 1925. From then on, the Congress met annually, most recently in 1938. The venues and years of the meetings were Geneva 1925–1931, 1935, 1936; Vienna 1932, 1933; Bern in 1934, London in 1937 and Stockholm in 1938. During this period, a total of at least 219 delegates from over thirty European countries took part in the plenary sessions, including just four women; 97 of them had previously served as members of their national parliaments. The main national groups sending delegates were: Germans (74), Jews (25), Ukrainians and Catalans (17 each), Hungarians (16), Russians (13) and Poles (11). The Congress office was based in Vienna from 1925 to 1936 and subsequently in Berlin until 1939–44.[1]
Delegates to the plenary assemblies were appointed by the minority groups. There is no record of any standard rules of procedure for this; evidently, neither the number of delegates per group nor the nomination procedure was laid down.
The Congress cooperated in particular with organisations representing national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe and in Spain. From 1927–28 onwards, the German‘ethnic groups’ dominated these efforts; they were represented by the ‘Association of German Ethnic Groups in Europe’ and its legal adviser, Carl Georg Bruns (1890–1931). Following Bruns’s death, the German-Baltic politician Werner Hasselblatt (1890–1958) took over this role. Close co-operation had existed since at least 1928 with the Reich German ‘Associations for Germans in Border Regions and Abroad’, including the ‘Deutscher Schutzbund’ and the‘Deutsches Auslandsinstitut’. International partners such as the ‘International Law Association’, the ‘League of Nations Union’, the ‘Inter-Parliamentary Union’ and politicians from the peace movements, such as Lord Willoughby Dickinson (1859–1943) and Christina C. Bakker-van Bosse (1884–1963) were intended to enhance the prestige and influence of the Congress as an institution dedicated to securing peace.
Continuous financing since its foundation in 1925 was provided by the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin and, in particular, supplemented by the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (until 1933). Membership fees from the national groups accounted for only a small part of the budget; in many cases, these were also covered by covert subsidies (e.g. for the Ukrainians) or by the ‘Association of German Ethnic Groups in Europe’ covering outstanding contributions using funds from the Foreign Office (e.g. for the Jews during the period from around 1927 to 1931).
2. Tasks
The aim of the congress was to give national minorities a political voice, as a kind of ‘counter-League of Nations’, and thereby to contribute to the recognition of national minorities as subjects of international law. The congress thus made a significant contribution to the internationalisation of the minority issue. In doing so, it placed cultural autonomy, the protection of minorities and the situation of minorities at the forefront of the agenda.
3. Organisation
In 1925, the annual congress was prepared by a ‘hosts’ conference’, followed by an executive committee (also known as the ‘committee’ or ‘executive board’). This committee advised the Presidential Board, which consisted of Josip Vilfan (1878–1958), who served as President from 1925 to 1938, and several rotating Vice-Presidents. The organisational work was led by a full-time Secretary-General, who headed an Office and was also himself a delegate for his national group at the Congress. The following served as Secretaries-General: from 1925 to 1936, the German-Baltic politician and publisher Ewald Ammende (1893–1936); 1936–1939: the Baltic German journalist Ferdinand von Uexküll-Güldenband (1890–1939); 1939–c. 1944/45: Werner Hasselblatt.
Attached to the Office was an ‘Association of European Minority Journalists’. Affiliated to the Congress’s plenary assembly were an organisational commission, a finance committee, a special commission for the study of nationalities (to prepare for an Institute for the Study of Nationalities that was ultimately never established) and, from 1934, a so-called expert panel. In addition, there existed – with an unclear structure and composition – a ‘Commission for the League of Nations and the Generalisation of Minority Rights’, a ‘Commission for Domestic and Inter-State Cooperation among National Minorities’ and a permanent ‘Commission for Matters Relating to the Petitions System’, founded in 1932.
In addition to the delegates, other groups and individuals supported the Congress and its work through public declarations of loyalty, in order to underline its supposed legitimacy as a political representation of minorities. The aim was to demonstrate the existence of a unified European minority lobby. It is on record that between 1925 and 1938 the Congress adopted 63 resolutions, primarily on the topics of the ‘League of Nations’, ‘international co-operation among minorities’, ‘ethnic communities’, ‘cultural autonomy’ and‘minority rights’. These resolutions were published and promoted the organisation’s objectives regarding the political representation of national minorities in Europe. The drafting of the resolutions was based on a total of 308 papers by academics, politicians and minority representatives, and was discussed prior to the adoption of the resolutions. Preparations for their adoption took place within the Executive Committee – which was dominated by the German side – in collaboration with the Presidential Board and the Secretary-General. There is no evidence of any amendments having been made by the plenary assemblies.
4. History
The Congress was founded on the initiative of Ewald Ammende. Preparations were undertaken by the ‘Association of German Ethnic Groups in Europe’ from autumn 1924 onwards. The groups to be invited were defined as ‘ethnic groups’ in the sense of politically conscious representation of minorities; however, as the term ‘ethnic group’ was reserved for German minority groups for political and ideological reasons, the term ‘organised national groups’ was chosen instead.
The organised minorities saw themselves – in agreement with sections of the European peace movement – as a potential casus belli. It was the policy of the co-national states, in particular the German Reich and Hungary, to treat their own minorities abroad as part of the respective nation as a whole and to instrumentalise them in their policy of revision against the Paris Suburban Treaties. In contrast, the states of Eastern Central Europe, within the framework of their nation-state ideologies – some of which became increasingly radicalised up to 1935 – regarded the national, cultural, linguistic and ethnic minorities not belonging to the titular nations as politically unreliable, as possible fifth columns within their respective nation-states and thus as a potential threat to the state. Not even the League of Nations’ system for the protection of minorities – which had been negotiated in the wake of the Paris Suburban Treaties and granted minorities the right to petition in Geneva – could fundamentally alter this situation. From the outset, the Congress of Nationalities took a hostile stance towards the League of Nations’ system for the protection of minorities, against which it campaigned with increasing vehemence from 1929 onwards.
In 1927, all national minorities living in the German Reich (Sorbian, Polish, Danish and Lithuanian) withdrew from the Congress because the German and Hungarian minorities within the Congress had prevented the Frisians from being recognised and admitted as a national minority. As a result, the Congress lost the opportunity to exert a constructive influence on the uncodified minority policy in the German Reich: Germany had not been required to sign a treaty on the protection of minorities, nor was there a Reich Minority Act, despite corresponding efforts by the national minorities living there, liberal politicians and associations, and a section of the German minorities in Eastern Central Europe. At the same time, this division meant that the Congress became entirely a tool of the German Reich’s foreign policy towards Poland and Czechoslovakia.
From 1933 onwards, under the influence of the German minorities, the Congress was brought into line with the political agenda of Nazi Germany . For example, the issue of discrimination against and persecution of Jews in the German Reich was not addressed at the Congress, whereupon the Jewish-Zionist groups left the organisation. With Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations at the end of 1933, the Congress’s importance grew in the struggle against the unification of all communist parties (Comintern, 1919–1943), Bolshevism as an ideology and the Soviet Union as a state. In 1933 and 1934, at the instigation of Ewald Ammende and Werner Haselblatt, the Congress adopted strongly anti-Soviet resolutions regarding the politically engineered famines in the USSR. Ammende was thus continuing his anti-Soviet activism of the 1920s, when he had denounced famine as an instrument of Soviet policy against the Ukrainians.
From 1936 onwards, the Congress came increasingly under the influence of National Socialist forces amongst its delegates, in particular the ‘Sudeten German Party’. The General Secretariat under Werner Hasselblatt and the editorial team of the journal *Nation und Staat*, which was closely associated with the Congress, were strongly committed to this cause. Bourgeois-liberal democrats and conservatives within the German nationalities movement, such as Paul Schiemann (1876–1944), Wilhelm von Medinger (1878–1934) and Eduard Pant (1887–1938) were stripped of their power or discredited.
The journal *Nation und Staat*, published from 1927 to 1944 by the ‘Association of German Ethnic Groups in Europe’, was not an official organ of the Congress of Nationalities. The editors of this periodical, however, supported the political role of the Congress, which was directed from the German Reich. Although the “Federalist Union of European Ethnic Groups”, founded in 1949, defined itself as the successor to the European Congress of Nationalities, it did not follow in its tradition, either legally or politically.
Bibliography
The records of the Office and all other sub-divisions of the Congress, as well as the editorial records relating to the Congress’s publications, have been missing since 1944/45. The ‘Communications from the Executive Committee’ (1928–1930) published by the Congress, the ‘Weekly Press Review on the Nationality Question’ (1930–1932; 1933: ‘European Nationalities Correspondence’) and the proceedings of the Congress of Organised Groups in the States of Europe [1925–1938]. Vienna/Leipzig 1926–1938 are scattered amongst a number of (partial) estates.
- Ewald Ammende (ed.): The Nationalities in the States of Europe. Collection of Camp Reports. Vienna/Leipzig 1931.
- Ewald Ammende (ed.): The Nationalities in the States of Europe. A Collection of Camp Reports. Supplements. Vienna 1932.
- Rudolf Michaelsen: The European Congress of Nationalities 1925–1928. Formation, Crisis and Consolidation. Frankfurt am Main et al. 1984 (Europäische Hochschulschriften III/194).
- Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann: The European Congress of Nationalities 1925 to 1938. National Minorities between Lobbying and Great Power Interests. Marburg 2000 (Materials and Studies on East Central European Research 7).
- Xosé Manuel Núñez Seixas: Between Geneva and Berlin. The Question of National Minorities and International Politics in Europe (1914–1939). Madrid 2001 (Akal Universitaria 216).
- John Hiden: Defender of Minorities. Paul Schiemann 1876–1944. London 2004.
- Martyn Housden: The League of Nations and the Organisation of Peace. London 2012.
- Ibid.: On Their Own Behalf: Ewald Ammende, Europe’s National Minorities and the Campaign for Cultural Autonomy 1920–1936. London 2014 (On the Boundary of Two Worlds 37).
Note
[1] For these and other figures, see Bamberger-Stemmann: The European Congress of Nationalities.
Citation
Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann: European Congress on Nationalities. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2019. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32825 (accessed 14 July 2020).
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