Tag: transnational history

‘Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Quest for Homogeneity’ goes to press

On By MoH TeamIn Conferences and PublicationsLeave a comment

Our edited volume will be released on 18 May 2023

Cover of the book Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Quest for Homogeneity in Interwar Western Europe

After about three years of work and a global pandemic, Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Quest for Homogeneity in Interwar Europe eventually goes to press. The edited volume will be released in print and electronic formats by Bloomsbury Academic on 18 May 2023 (click here for more info). The electronic version will be available in open access thanks to a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Through 14 chapters, the volume offers an in-depth, comparative and transnational study of minority questions in Europe focusing on, although not limiting itself to, the interwar period. The volume makes two major contributions to current historiographical debates on this topic. First, until now interwar European minority questions have been predominantly discussed in the context of eastern Europe. This volume challenges that geographical emphasis by examining both eastern and western European experiences. It thus lays the foundation for a new comparative international history of the relations between national majorities and minorities in Europe after the Great War. Second, building on the observation that nationalist conflicts are based on dynamic interactions between multiple actors, this book brings together different perspectives and methodological approaches (political, social, comparative and transnational) to provide a comprehensive account of minority questions between the two World Wars.

The volume is the result of a truly international collaboration featuring contributions from leading academics and emerging scholars based in Austria, Ireland, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK and the USA among others (see the table of contents below). We thank them all for their wonderful chapters.

The volume originated in the international workshop Sovereignty, Nationalism and Homogeneity in Europe between the Two World Wars that the Myth of Homogeneity team organised at the Geneva Graduate Institute in February 2020, right before the onset of the first wave of lockdowns outside China due to the global pandemic of covid-19. Some of the initial participants left, while others joined at a later stage. Among the many people that have taken part in this journey with us, we would like to remember Eric Weitz. Eric was supposed to write the conclusion of our volume with a chapter based on the memorable keynote that he gave at the end of our Geneva workshop in February 2020. Unfortunately, Eric left us in July 2021. The volume is dedicated to him.

The research behind this volume has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant n. 169568) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 847635. The Pierre du Bois Foundation contributed to covering editing expenses. We thank them all for their generous support.

South Tyrol and Venezia Giulia a century after the March on Rome

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On the anniversary of Mussolini’s seizure of power, Alessandro and Emmanuel discuss a century of inter-ethnic relations in the Italian borderlands

Vito Timmel, “L’incendio del Balkan” (1941, Rivoltella Museum, Trieste)

At the end of October 1922, King Vittorio Emanuele III offered Benito Mussolini the task to form a new executive. In the previous days, the fascists camicie nere had seized control of several towns in northern and central Italy and threatened the government led by the liberal Luigi Facta to move the assault to Rome if this did not cede power to the National Fascist Party. The details of these events are well-known and have been studied extensively. What is less known however is that at the beginning of October 1922, the fascists had used the same tactics to take over the northern Italian city of Bolzano in what some fascists later defined as a kind of general rehearsal for the planned occupation of the capital.

At first sight Bolzano was an outlier in the series of urban attacks carried out by the fascists in the early 1920s. Indeed the black shirts usually targeted municipalities led by Socialist administrations. By contrast, a coalition of Liberal and Catholics ruled Bolzano. Yet Bolzano was not a random choice. Most of the city’s inhabitants were German speakers and the city was the main urban centre of South Tyrol, a territory that Italy annexed at the end of the First World War along with the mostly Italian-speaking Trentino. South Tyrol was also overwhelmingly German-speaking and several local parties and organisations had repeatedly opposed annexation asking that the local population be given the opportunity to have a say about its future. Post-war Italian liberal governments had rejected these calls, but had guaranteed the preservation of Austro-Hungarian legislation in the area, promised to respect minority rights and begun negotiations for regional autonomy. To the Fascist Party this sounded like a betrayal of the sacrifice of the Italian soldiers who had died in order to conquer an area that – the fascists believed – was ‘inherently’ Italian and had been Germanised by the Habsburg Empire. The March on Bolzano was an attempt to force the Italianisation of the city, as well as a test of the liberal elite’s commitment to respecting minority rights.

Taking advantage of the 100th anniversary of both the March on Rome and Bolzano, in a recent paper published by the Pierre du Bois Foundation for Current History, Alessandro and Emmanuel discuss fascist policies in the new provinces annexed at the end of the Great War – South Tyrol as well as Venezia Giulia – and the impact of the fascist attempts to Italianise the populations living in these borderlands on the rest of the 20th century, most notably on relations with the neighbouring countries of Austria and Yugoslavia (today Slovenia), as well as with Germany. The paper also examines the contradictions of the fascist approach to minorities. It argues that fascist thinking about the allogeni – the fascist term to identify Italians of non-Italian origins – and policy in South Tyrol and Venezia Giulia were informed by a form of ‘consistent ambivalence’ whereby fascists authorities were torn between the naif belief that the assimilation of the allogeni was inevitable and a deep-seated distrust of them, since they were deemed to be inherently disloyal citizens.

Yet 2022 marks another important anniversary: the 50 years since the signing of the second statute of autonomy of Trentino-South Tyrol which ushered in a period of stabilisation in majority-minority relations in the area. This statute of autonomy turned South Tyrol from a hotspot of nationalist conflict to an oft-cited success story of minority recognition and cross-border cooperation in Europe. To account for that, the paper goes beyond the interwar period and details the considerable, although hard-won, advances in minority rights and conflict management achieved in the second half of the 20th century.

The full paper is available here.

Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Quest for Homogeneity in Interwar Europe

On By MoH TeamIn Conferences and PublicationsLeave a comment

Our edited volume with Bloomsbury Academics has eventually gone into production

In September 2022, Bloomsbury Academics announced that the edited volume Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Quest for Homogeneity in Interwar Europe, which Emmanuel, Davide and Mona have been putting together for the last two years, has eventually gone into production and should be released in May 2023.

It has been a long and twisted journey, marked by the pandemic and other dramatic events, first of all the sudden demise of Eric Weitz, who was supposed to write the conclusion of the volume and to whom this will be dedicated. The Myth of Homogeneity team started working on it in March 2020, right after having held the workshop Sovereignty, Nationalism and Homogeneity in Europe between the World Wars, the last event before the first wave of lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic began. The event was co-organised with the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy (more info on it in our podcast on the event here).

The volume bridges the East-West divide still existing in the historiography of minority questions in interwar Europe. It also puts together contributions examining majority-minority relations from different perspectives, notably comparative, bottom-up and transnational. It includes discussions of: the transition from empires to nation-states with an innovative comparison of traditional cases of imperial breakdown, such as the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, with the United Kingdom, usually considered in this context as a nation-state rather than a composite monarchy; the Paris system and how the new international order inaugurated in the French capital extended its influence over the entire continent causing quests for national homogeneity in different European regions; the concept of national indifference, its applicability to the interwar years and its alternatives; and the transnational organisations and networks of activists that defended minority rights, either directly, as in the case of the Congress of European Nationalities, or as part of a broader concern for peace and international collaboration, as in the case of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Through 14 chapters and thanks to an outstanding line-up of authors (see below for the full list), the volume fills an important gap in the historiography of the interwar years, touching upon a wide range of topics such as the history of nationalism, internationalism, minority questions, human rights, activism and gender.

The volume features contributions from: Omer Bartov, Mona Bieling, Alison Carrol, Jane K. Cowan, Emmanuel Dalle Mulle, Sabine Dullin, Marina Germane, Brian Hughes, Alvin Jackson, Pieter M. Judson, Olga Linkiewicz, Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, Volker Prott, Davide Rodogno, David J. Smith and Erol Ülker.

Transnational Minority Actors and Global Spain

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The converging and diverging trajectories of Joan Estelrich and Josip Vilfan discussed at a Conference in Santiago de Compostela

On 9-10 June 2022, the research project La España global: identitades españolas en prospectiva transnacional organised a workshop at the University of Santiago de Compostela to discuss transnational historical research involving Spanish actors, identities and processes. The event allowed presenting results from the Myth of Homogeneity project about the transnational activities of minority representatives in interwar Europe. More specifically, Emmanuel examined the converging and diverging trajectories of the Catalan-Spanish nationalist leader Joan Estelrich and the Slovenian-Italian minority representative Josip Vilfan, both prominent members of the interwar Congress of European Nationalities, as a prism to reflect upon the entanglements between the study of minorities and transnational history.

At the core of the concept of transnationalism there is an idea of border crossing. More often than not, the border that is being crossed is that of the nation-state. Emmanuel’s presentation did engage with cross-border activities that challenged state jurisdictions, but also tried to extend the notion of transnationalism to the trespassing of regional and identity boundaries. Coming from countries beyond the remit of the minority protection system of the League of Nations and acting, for a considerable part of their lives, within repressive authoritarian regimes, Estelrich and Vifan eagerly engaged in transnational minority networks as a way to promote an internationalisation and reinforcement of interwar minority protection. In many ways, their story is one of successful collaboration. Yet, from the mid-1930s, their trajectories diverged considerably. While Vilfan remained a staunch supporter of transnational cooperation and of the work of the CEN, Estelrich drifted towards domestic engagement within the institutions of the Spanish Republic first, and transnational activity on Franco’s side later. However, despite their apparent glaring differences, both Estelrich and Vilfan had to confront similar painful dilemmas of collaboration and betrayal generated by their minority advocacy that forced them not only to cross state borders, but also to redefine the boundaries of their reference communities and severe previous bonds of loyalty.

Beyond the relevance of Estelrich’s and Vilfan’s transnational trajectories for the history of minority-majority relations in interwar Europe, the paper proposed two broader reflections on the nature of transnational history and the state of the current historiography that centred on questioning both the trans and the national in transnational. To be begin with the national, most of the historiography focuses on the national as the nation-state. Yet any scholar familiar with the nationalism studies literature knows that the nation and the nation-state never coincide. This is all the more glaring when it comes to minority populations who do not identify with the state they live in. Hence, the presentation proposed considering the everyday life of people identifying as national minorities within their state of citizenship as a transnational experience in and for itself, even if this everyday experience does not involve crossing the border of any nation-state. Concerning the trans, the paper explored, although still in very tentative form, the possibility that the crossing activity implied in this term might actually occur in the mind of historical actors, rather than in their physical whereabouts. In other words, examining the many identification dilemmas, twists and turns in Estelrich’s and Vilfan’s lives, the paper proposed to explore the concept of transnational interior processes. Stay tuned for future updates.

Minorities in Contemporary and Historical Perspective: 1919-2020 and Beyond

On By Alessandro AmbrosinoIn Minorities in Contemporary and Historical PerspectiveLeave a comment

The Minorities in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives Monthly Series comes to an end. Thanks to all our authors for their insightful contributions and to our readers for their attention.

In these days of looming confined holidays and mass vaccination campaigns, majority-minority relations might not strike as the topic of the day. However, several posts in our Minorities in Contemporary and Historical Perspective series suggest that cultural, linguistic and national differences in modern societies can still be a source of contention and often require setting up specific political arrangements to further positive inter-group relations. The first part of our series privileges an historical approach inquiring into the origins of minority questions and dissecting long-term trends in majority-minority relations.

Laura Robson starts off our discussion with a lucid piece about the establishment of the first minority protection regime by the League of Nations in 1919. Robson argues that, behind the smokescreen of minority rights, Great Power interest and colonial exploitation could be pursued under a veneer of international respectability. Hence, ‘new forms of informal authority and friendly client states’ were created at Versailles, which would eventually undermine the legitimacy of the League of Nations regime. In the Middle East, as well as in Eastern Europe, the transition from imperial sovereignties to the nationalist system sanctioned at the Paris Peace Conference unleashed strong homogenising dynamics. Focusing on the case of Christian minorities in French-Occupied Syria, Joel Veldkamp examines the ‘nationalist dilemma’ confronted by Syrian nation-builders. After having tried, unsuccessfully, to include Christian minorities in their nation-state-in-the-making project, these elites moved from persuasion to coercion, thus shattering any chance to build a cohesive Syrian nation (and generating a substantial amount of violence in the process).

As Yoav Peled shows, in Eastern Europe, Polish elites followed similar assimilationist templates. Confronted with a highly diverse country and willing to forge a cohesive nation-state, both dominant Polish parties (Endecja and Sanacja) ‘were determined to make Poland a homogeneous state in the shortest time possible’. Jewish and German minorities, among others, bore the brunt of this political programme, but ‘while assimilation of the Germans into Polish society was seen as unlikely, assimilation of the Jews was seen as undesirable’. Assimilation failed, but between 1939 and 1945 the linguistic and national heterogeneity of Polish society changed dramatically because of war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Albeit much less diverse than in the previous two decades, at the end of the Second World War, Poland also acquired new territories formerly under German rule. John Kulczycki tells us how, in these putative ‘Recovered Lands’, Polish authorities set out to sort ‘true Poles’ from ‘Germans’. Recovering ‘Polish souls’ became a national priority, albeit one for which officers tasked with inquiring into the ethnic nature of the inhabitants of these regions received few guidelines. After about two years of mass expulsion, the Polish Ministry of the Recovered Lands had to recognise ‘the impossibility of creating an objective criterion that would differentiate a German from an autochthon’. As the Polish case suggests, in interwar Europe minorities became an ‘issue’ mostly because majorities felt insecure about the latter’s loyalty to the institutions of the state, which these majorities felt as their own. Chris Davis then historicises the minority question in interwar Romanian Transylvania as a ‘majority problem’, ‘namely that there were too few Romanians, living too far apart, in a region far too important’. To solve this problem, Romanian anthropologists and historians found a creative solution. Armed with presumably scientific data, they asserted that the sizable Hungarian-speaking population of Transylvania ‘possessed a Romanian ethnogenesis’ and had simply been ‘denationalised’ during centuries of Hungarian rule. Against the background of these theories, assimilation in fact became ‘renationalisation’ and minority rights could be all too easily ignored.

The second half of our series moves from historical analysis to contemporary affairs. Ferran Requejo illuminates the old and recent causes of the considerable rise of demands for independence in Catalonia since 2010. Discussing different factors, ranging from economic to identity variables, Requejo concludes that ‘lack of national recognition and accommodation shown by the Spanish state has played a decisive role in causing the predominant Catalan demands to shift from being regionalist or pro-autonomy towards secessionism’. Whatever the outcome of the current tensions between the Catalan and Spanish executive, the Catalan case constitutes an unavoidable reference for the study of self-determination processes in Europe. Adopting a similar mix of historical and political science analysis, Brian Girvin dissects 100 years of majority-minority relations in Northern Ireland. Girvin explains how, by undermining the very concepts of majority and minority, the Good Friday Agreement promoted consensus and cooperation between the Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland. It created a ‘consociational model for power sharing, political cooperation and conflict resolution’ that put the two nationalities on equal terms. Despite its remarkable success, however, demographic changes and Brexit risk unsettling the balance achieved at the end of the 1990s.

Our series concludes with three blogs stemming from a very fruitful collaboration with the Centre on Constitutional Change. Writing about Scotland, Michael Keating argues that Scots are not usually seen as a national minority identifying with a kin-state elsewhere but as a minority nation within a plurinational union. Keating explains that ‘Scottish politics have become more self-referential and detached from the British level’, with the COVID-19 crisis allowing the Scottish Government to occupy the main political space. Yet, Scottish independence is not inevitable. Even in the event of independence, Scotland would remain a small nation nested in larger systems of regulation and policy-making. Judith Sijstermans details how dominant strands of Flemish nationalism have incorporated populist narratives and how this populist turn has led to the adoption of an identitarian approach.  Sijstermans explains how, in Vlaams Belang’s rhetoric, ‘Flemish autonomy from the Belgian state is interwoven with an anti-elite search for autonomy from broader local and international “elite” who are portrayed as corrupt, anti-democratic, and in opposition to the Flemish volk (people)’. Finally, Patrick Utz dissects the complex and multi-layered nature of national identities in South Tyrol, suggesting that they underpin the success of its consociational institutional design. Utz explains that new forms of regionalism are allowing for a patchwork of identities that combine reinterpretations of historic elements with newly emerging alliances. The SVP offers an illuminating example: the party has become more vocal in portraying both Austria and South Tyrol as ‘motherland’ while promoting a ‘European Region of Tyrol’ as part of the European Union’s cross-border initiatives.

We hope that you have enjoyed the series and we encourage you to continue the discussion commenting on our posts. You will find a full list here.

We thank all our authors for their inspiring contributions; the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, the Centre on Constitutional Change, and the Swiss National Science Foundation for their support; H-Nationalism, in particular David Prior, for giving us the opportunity to run the series on their platform; and all our readers for their attention. A special thanks also goes to Mona Bieling, Alessandro Ambrosino and Davide Rodogno for their fundamental help.

Hoping that 2021 will be a less eventful and more cheerful year, we wish you all the best!

Emmanuel Dalle Mulle and Daniel Cetrà

The Minorities in Contemporary and Historical Perspective series is organized by the Myth of Homogeneity Research Project at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and the Centre on Constitutional Change at the University of Edinburgh.

For more information, please visit:

https://themythofhomogeneity.org/

https://www.centreonconstitutionalchange.ac.uk/

Minority Questions as Complex Objects of Enquiry

On By MoH TeamIn Conferences and PublicationsLeave a comment

On 27-28 February 2020 we organised a workshop on Sovereignty, Nationalism and Homogeneity in Europe between the Two World Wars.

For a day and a half, 18 scholars specialised in different aspects of late 19th and early 20th century European history met at the Graduate Institute Geneva to discuss intergroup relations and, more specifically, minority issues in interwar Europe. The papers presented at the event showcased the complexity of minority questions by using different approaches often emphasising varied aspects of majority-minority relations. While some participants examined majority-minority relations in different European countries from a broad comparative perspective, others looked more closely at specific cases or questioned the appropriateness of using the categories of majority and minority to refer to such groups. Others yet followed minority representatives and other individuals concerned with minority questions across borders and into interwar organisations and networks of activism.

A group picture of the participants taken on the morning of the second day.

The overall result was a rich exchange that highlighted how after Versailles, regardless of whether they lay in the ‘civilised West’ or the still ‘backward East’ (to quote some stereotypical views hegemonic at the time), European states tended to fit the populations living within their borders into neat ethno-cultural categories and, although to different degrees, promoted homogeneity through a wide range of nation-building strategies. Minority representatives and organisations vocally denounced violations of minority rights and fought for better protection of their cultural peculiarities, but, at the same time, often exaggerated the importance of group identity for the wider populations they claimed to speak for and the homogeneity of minorities themselves. At times, ordinary people followed the injunction of minority representatives; sometimes, however, they showed signs of ‘national indifference’ and based their behaviour on considerations and interests not directly linked to their purported national identity—of which in many cases they were not even aware. The rich, and sometimes contradictory, tapestry of perspectives stemming from the different panels highlighted the need for a multi-dimensional approach to interwar intergroup relations; one taking into account different actors, contexts and motivations for action.

Eric Weitz’ lecture on “The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States”.

In the evening of the first day, Eric Weitz, Distinguished Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York, broadened the thematic contours of our workshop by presenting his wide-ranging new book, A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States. In the talk, Professor Weitz explored the relationship between nation-states, human rights and minority rights in the context of the ’emergence’ of minorities between the late 19th and early 20th century as well as during the process of decolonisation in Africa.

Apart from advocating the ‘multi-dimensional’ approach mentioned above, the workshop also contributed to bridging the East-West divide currently existing in the literature, whereby minority issues are still implicitly considered as a ‘Question of Eastern Europe’ (to quote the title of a famous interwar work on the subject) while the international history of majority-minority conflicts in Western Europe remains in its infancy.

The Myth of Homogeneity Team would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Pierre du Bois Foundation, the Graduate Institute and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy for their kind support as well as all the participants for their insightful contributions.

Below you can listen to the paper given at the workshop by our team members, Emmanuel and Mona, entitled Sovereignty and Homogeneity: A History of Majority-Minority Relations in Interwar Western Europe.