A new publication by the MoH Team

Think of the immediate post-First World War period and the Paris Peace Conference will immediately come to mind. German reparations, disarmament and the League of Nations will probably ensue. Some of you would probably have heard of minorities, notably as a ‘problem’ in the eastern part of Europe that the Conference and the following League tried to solve. Most of these minorities, a few would also point out, were made of people who identified as Germans. Yet, very few of you would add that German minorities existed also in western Europe, notably in Belgium, France and Italy, which, at the end of the Great War, annexed territories with sizable German-speaking populations.

A paper written by Emmanuel, Alessandro and Volker Prott (from Aston University Birmingham), which has just been accepted for publication in The Nationalities Papers, examines precisely this topic in a comparative perspective. The paper points that in most accounts of peacemaking after the First World War, ‘flawed’ decisions at ‘Versailles’ caused the ethnically mixed states of central and eastern Europe to descend into violent ethnic clashes, while the allegedly more homogenous western European states faced few issues with minorities.

This article challenges such simplistic view by examining the treatment of German-speaking minorities in the borderlands of Alsace-Lorraine, South Tyrol, and Eupen-Malmedy in the immediate post-war and the early interwar period. Building on an innovative comparative framework of five key variables, the article finds that, in all three cases, post-war borders generated incentives for the respective governments to suppress their new minorities, and that states used ethnic markers to target them. However, the strength of state institutions and liberal principles account for a reversal (Alsace-Lorraine), moderation (Eupen-Malmedy), or hardening (South Tyrol) of measures. Furthermore, international commitment to defend the new borders and the absence of a tradition of ethnic violence conflict also had a significant impact.

The paper is not yet available online or in print, but it should be published in Early View version on the journal’s website in the coming weeks.