The roots of minority protection in Europe date back to the Middle Ages. However, national minorities in the true sense of the term only emerged in the 18th century, following the birth of the concept of the nation state with the French Revolution. Although the rise of nationalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries meant that the issue of protecting ethnic minorities became a problem at international level throughout Europe, it remained a rather marginal area of international law until the First World War. It was only after the collapse of the great powers – the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Tsarist Empire – that the first system for the protection of ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities was established within the framework of the League of Nations.

Minority Treaties, Treaties on the Protection of Minorities

In the narrower sense, the term ‘minority protection treaties’ refers to the provisions for the protection of minorities based on multilateral and bilateral treaties, as well as unilateral declarations, which came into force following the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. In a broader sense, it is used in the literature as an umbrella term for treaties under international law designed to protect minorities.

The concept of peace that prevailed during the interwar period consisted of ethnically homogeneous nation states coexisting side by side, based on the normative concept of the right of peoples to self-determination. Deviating from this ideal, the victorious powers created, after 1918, multi-ethnic states with a multitude of minorities through the redrawing of borders in the wake of the Paris Suburban Treaties, as the state borders did not correspond to the ethnic settlement areas. In order to reconcile the victorious powers’ policy of pursuing their own interests with US President Woodrow Wilson’s (1856–1924) previously announced Fourteen Points programme, a system of minority protection treaties was established as a balancing measure; for the new states in Central and Eastern Europe, participation in the minority protection system was made a precondition for admission to the League of Nations. Meanwhile, the Allied Powers refused to participate in the system of minority protection. This discriminatory aspect – namely, that only the newly formed and the defeated states were obliged to implement protective measures – is regarded as one of the reasons for the failure of the system of minority protection within the League of Nations.

The subject of the negotiations under the Treaty of Versailles was the question of the responsibility of the German Empire and its allies for the outbreak of the First World War, as well as the resulting territorial cessions and reparations payments to the Allied Powers. The German Empire was to be significantly weakened through disarmament and territorial losses. Wilson’s Fourteen Points were invoked by various parties to pursue their own interests – for example, to realise the ideals of self-determination of peoples and territorial correspondence between people and state. However, the negotiations led neither to the lenient peace hoped for by Germany – which would essentially have restored the status quo ante – nor to a guarantee of minority rights for German populations in the ceded territories of Eastern Central Europe.

The most important multilateral treaties are the two main peace treaties: the Treaty of Versailles of 28 June and the Treaty of Saint-Germain of 10 September 1919. Also worth mentioning here are the peace treaties concluded by the Allies with Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey. Specific treaties on the protection of minorities were concluded with Poland, Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Of the bilateral treaties, only the German–Polish Agreement on Upper Silesia of 1922 is highlighted here. The main aim of this treaty was, on the one hand, to establish equality between members of minority groups and other nationals and, on the other hand, to provide the means to preserve the identity of the former.

The Treaty of Versailles was increasingly exploited for domestic political purposes during the Weimar Republic, particularly through the revisionism of the National Socialist movement and the so-called ‘stab-in-the-back myth’. Many provisions were abolished in the first few years after Hitler’s seizure of power, for example through military rearmament and the reoccupation of the Rhineland.

With the end of the League of Nations and the outbreak of the Second World War, the first attempt to establish an international system for the protection of minorities also failed; it was no longer applied, although it had never been expressly repealed. In the immediate aftermath, only a few minority protection treaties were concluded, such as the Gruber–de Gasperi Agreement between Italy and Austria concerning South Tyrol in 1946, or the peace treaty between Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania in 1947.

During the Cold War, minority issues were of lesser political interest. The idea of the United Nations (UN) assuming a protective role towards national minorities was largely rejected. Consequently, the UN increasingly focused on the protection of individual human rights, whilst the protection of minorities shifted to the national level. A cautious shift in attitudes towards the protection of minorities through international treaties began in the 1960s and led to the inclusion of Article 27 in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 19 December 1966. In the 1990s – following the collapse of the multi-ethnic states of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia – minority issues once again gained political significance. Initially, it was the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) and later the Council of Europe that championed the resolution of ethnic conflicts through bilateral and multilateral treaties. The concrete outcome of these efforts within the Council of Europe was two instruments of international law that came into force in 1998: the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. At the same time, bilateral treaties containing provisions on the protection of minorities were once again concluded between some Central and Eastern European countries. International minority protection then received a further boost from the EU’s minority policy in the context of its eastward enlargement.

• Dieter Blumenwitz (ed.): A Century of Protection for Minorities and Ethnic Groups. Cologne 2001 (Treatises on Constitutional and International Law by the Study Group on Politics and International Law 19).
• Dirk Engel: The Linguistic Rights of Members of Minorities under International Law. Berlin 2002 (Human Rights Centre of the University of Potsdam 13).
• Erwin Viefhaus: The Minority Question and the Emergence of Minority Protection Treaties at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. A Study on the History of the Nationality Problem in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Würzburg 1960.
• Frank-Lothar Kroll, Matthias Niedobitek (eds.): Expulsion and the Protection of Minorities in Europe. Berlin 2005 (Chemnitz European Studies 1).
• Gerrit Manssen, Bogusław Banaszak (eds.): Minority Protection in Central and Eastern Europe. Frankfurt am Main et al. 2001.
• Gaetano Pentassuglia: Minorities in International Law: an Introductory Study. Strasbourg 2002 (Minority Issues Handbook).
• Sarah Pritchard: The Protection of Minorities under International Law. Historical and Recent Developments. Berlin 2001 (Tübingen Papers on International and European Law 55).

• www.europa.clio-online.de/quelle/id/q63-28322 (Minority Protection Treaty of 28 June 1919 between the Allied Powers and Poland, in its original wording).

Christoph Schnellbach: Minority Protection Treaties. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2012. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32688 (accessed 7 December 2021).