From the Vienna to the Paris system: International politics and the entangled histories of human rights, forced deportations, and civilizing missions

American Historical Review

Volumn 113, Issue 5, 2008, Pages 1313-1343

  Weitz, Eric D ^a,b,c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

^b Northern Studies Program   (United States)

^c PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 58849136344     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.5.1313     Document Type: Review

References (198)

1. Here I would differ with Charles S. Maier by arguing that the defining feature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not just a "rescaling" of territoriality, but a profound emphasis on distinctive populations within clearly demarcated territories. See Maier, "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era," American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 807-831.
2. See Mark Mazower's important article "The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950," Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 379-398, although I shall argue below that group rights continue to be a constituent element of the post-World War II human rights regime.
3. For an important argument on the transformational moment of 1914-1923 that links social revolution and national development with the critical impact of the Bolshevik Revolution, see Geoff Eley, "Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval and State Formation in Eastern Europe, 1914-1923," in Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj, eds., Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective (Edmonton, 1990), 205-246.
4. For effective and interesting treatments of the huge topic of sovereignty, see James J. Sheehan, "The Problem of Sovereignty in European History," American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (February 2006): 1-15;
5. and Jeremy Adelman, "An Age of Imperial Revolutions," American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (April 2008): 319-340.
6. For an important argument concerning the way colonialism shaped the development of international law, concepts of sovereignty, and the civilizing mission, see Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2004).
7. See also Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870-1960 (Cambridge, 2002);
8. and Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of "Civilization " in International Society (Oxford, 1984).
9. See Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia, 1998);
10. Micheline Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley, Calif., 2004);
11. and Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007). Other histories take World War II as the jumping-off point for the human rights "revolution."
12. See, for example, A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford, 2001);
13. and Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
14. On the importance of the borderlands region, see the Project Overview of the research project "Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires since 1848," http:// www.watsoninstitute.org/ borderlands/ (accessed November 16, 2008).
15. See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston, 1979), esp. 69-73, 99;
16. Andreas Hasenclever, Peter Mayer, and Volker Rittberger, Theories of International Regimes (Cambridge, 1997), esp. 8-22;
17. Torbjorn L. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory, 2nd ed. (Manchester, 1997), 208-286;
18. and Paul W. Schroeder, Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe, ed. David Wetzel, Robert Jervis, and Jack S. Levy (New York, 2004).
19. Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 (Oxford, 1994);
20. for his concluding comments on Napoleon, see 394-395,
21. and generally for his appraisal, see 575-582.
22. Text of the Vienna Treaty in Augustus Oakes and R. B. Mowat, eds., The Great European Treaties of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1918), 32-33, 98.
23. Articles 5 and 6 of the London Protocol, ibid., 121. None of the following major works in diplomatic history recognizes the significance of these clauses: M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 17741923: A Study in International Relations (London, 1966), 73-77;
24. Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920 (Seattle, 1977), 48-52;
25. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 662-664.
26. In contrast, see Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen: Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Munich, 1999), 30-31.
27. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (London, 1975). Notably, this is also the period when international law rose to prominence and articulated a powerful progressive optimism.
28. See Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer.
29. See especially Stig Förster, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson, eds., Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference, 1884-1885, and the Onset of Partition (Oxford, 1988);
30. and the earlier study by S. E. Crowe, The Berlin West African Conference, 1884-1885 (London, 1942).
31. Some important documents are collected in R. J. Gavin and J. A. Betley, eds., The Scramble for Africa: Documents on the Berlin West African Conference and Related Subjects, 1884/85 (Ibadan, 1972). The diplomatic histories and the histories of Germany cited below in n. 16 largely ignore the Berlin Conference and fail to see its intimate connection to the Berlin Congress.
32. Otto Pflanze, for example, in Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. 3: The Period of Fortification, 1880-1898 (Princeton, N.J., 1990), devotes all of one-half of one paragraph to it (131).
33. For example, there is no mention of the Berlin Congress in Roland Oliver and G. N. Sanderson, eds., The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 6: From 1870 to 1905 (Cambridge, 1985).
34. For example, Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law; Gong, The Standard of "Civilization";
35. and Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer, discuss only the West Africa Conference,
36. while Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, discusses only the Berlin Congress.
37. Germany in 1878, for example, was embroiled in difficulties with Romania over failed investments in Romanian railroads. Bismarck used Romania's appalling treatment of Jews as a club to win recovery of these investments and other commercial advantages for Germany. See Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977), 350-393, for a very thorough discussion.
38. See also Carole Finie, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (Cambridge, 2004), 3-38, for an excellent account of the various state interests at play at the congress.
39. Diplomatie historians and historians of Germany have largely failed to draw out the significance of the Berlin Treaty's focus on populations. See A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (Oxford, 1954);
40. Anderson, The Eastern Question;
41. and Jelavich and Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States.
42. Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 3-38,
43. and Stern, Gold and Iron, 351-393, recognize the pathbreaking character of the Berlin Congress, but both focus only on Jews and neglect the discussions on the fate of the Armenians and other Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Historians of Germany interpret the meeting as an example of Bismarck's artful statecraft, but miss the larger significance of the congress.
44. See, for example, Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. 2: The Period of Consolidation (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 415-441;
45. and Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich: Deutsche Außenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler 1871-1945 (Stuttgart, 1995), 34-65.
46. See Oakes and Mowat, The Great European Treaties, 332-360, for the text of the Berlin Treaty, especially articles 4, 5, and 12 (Bulgaria), 335-336, 339; articles 27 and 30 (Montenegro), 345-346, 348-349; articles 35 and 39 (Serbia), 350, 352-353; articles 43 and 44 (Romania), 353-354; article 61 (Armenians), 358; and article 62 (Ottoman Empire), 358-359.
47. See also Donald Bloxham, "Introduction: Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in Europe's Long Twentieth Century," in Bloxham, Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe (London, 2008), 1-16.
48. See Horst Gründer, "Christian Missionary Activities in Africa in the Age of Imperialism and the Berlin Conference of 1884-85," in Förster, Mommsen, and Robinson, Bismarck, Europe, and Africa, 85-103;
49. and L. H. Gann, "The Berlin Conference and the Humanitarian Conscience," ibid., 320-331.
50. Text of Vienna Treaty in Oakes and Mowat, The Great European Treaties, 37-98, quotes from article 16 (44) and article 36 (57).
51. Again, it is the sovereignty issue that marks off these provisions from all sorts of previous treaties that provided for the protection of religious populations and secured rights of property and person for Europeans abroad, as in the capitulations treaties with the Ottoman Empire and other extraterritorial treaties that the European powers more or less imposed on Asian states. Gong, The Standard of "Civilization, " 64-69,140-146,
52. and Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, 108-117, overemphasize the continuities from these treaties into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
53. as do the older works of C. A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London, 1934),
54. and Ernst Flachbarth, System des internationalen Minderheitenrechtes (Budapest, 1937).
55. On the Armenian issue in international politics, see especially Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005).
56. See especially Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, who argues that only by positing "cultural difference" could Europeans sustain the commitment to the universalism of law and deprive the colonized of sovereignty; at the same time, the civilizing process would move Africans toward sovereignty. See also Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer, 71-78,126-135;
57. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1997);
58. and Gong, The Standard of "Civilization."
59. See H. L. Wesseling, "The Berlin Conference and the Expansion of Europe: A Conclusion," in Förster, Mommsen, and Robinson, Bismarck, Europe, and Africa, 527-540, here 527.
60. Crowe, The Berlin West African Conference, 3-5, emphasizes the failures of the liberal provisions and does not even deign to write about the humanitarian articles, which she considers completely irrelevant.
61. On free trade, see Immanuel Geiss, "Free Trade, Internationalization of the Congo Basin, and the Principle of Effective Occupation," in Förster, Mommsen, and Robinson, Bismarck, Europe, and Africa, 263-280.
62. But note Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 97, who argues correctly that the expansion of commerce in the colonies was considered part of the civilizing mission.
63. Bismarck wrote: "I care for the Rumanians as I do for my glass when it is empty" (emphasis in original). He was similarly disparaging about Jews, whom, he said, "I need to coddle, win over and who can be very useful to me in Germany and whom I like to pay in Rumanian money."
64. Quoted in Stern, Gold and Iron, 383.
65. For one study that takes the civilizing mission very seriously and shows its evolution over time, see Conklin, A Mission to Civilize.
66. For an analysis of the modern character of subsequent deportations, see Fikret Adanir and Hilmar Kaiser, "Migration, Deportation, and Nation-Building: The Case of the Ottoman Empire," in René Leboutte, ed., Migrations et migrants dans une perspective historique: Permanences et innovations (Brussels, 2000), 273-292.
67. See Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison, Wis., 1985), 60-77. I thank Peter Holquist for first pointing out to me the existence and importance of the Russian-Ottoman agreements.
68. See also his chapter "To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia," in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001), 111-144.
69. Stephen Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey (New York, 1932), 15-16, 18.
70. Adanir and Kaiser, "Migration, Deportation, and Nation-Building, " 280, 283-284;
71. Fikret Adanir, "Ethnicities in Thrace: From Imperial Core to National Periphery, 1850-1950s" (paper presented at the Borderlands Final Conference, Herder-Institut, Marburg, Germany, May 17-20, 2007), cited by permission.
72. See also Dzovinar Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: Les acteurs européens et la scène proche-orientale pendant l'entre-deux-guerres (Paris, 2004), 195-207.
73. See the recent pathbreaking work of Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, trans. Paul Bessemer (New York, 2006);
74. Füat Dündar, "L'Ingénierie ethnique du Comité Union et Progres et la turcisation de l'Anatolie (1913-1918)" (Thèse de Doctorat, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2006);
75. and David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, N.J., 2007).
76. See the notable quotes assembled by Isabel V. Hull in Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005), 26-33, 47-69;
77. and by Gesine Krüger in Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewußtsein: Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkriegs in Namibia 1904 bis 1917 (Göttingen, 1999), 52-53, 65-66 (the Darwin quote), and 78-79.
78. On a theoretical level, see Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 103, on how Africans' lack of sovereignty meant that the European powers placed no limits on the conduct of colonial wars. However, Anghie connects even these actions with the civilizing mission. But if populations could not be civilized, which was certainly Trotha's view, the only response was removal or annihilation if they challenged European rule.
79. Even more than the orders issued in Berlin, the communiqués of local colonial administrators demonstrate the realities of the apartheid system, which involved building separate settlements for each tribe (as defined by the Germans), requiring passports for all Africans with the exception of the mixedrace Reheboth Bastars, administering "rational" rather than arbitrary corporal punishment, and closely supervising even the Boers. See documents in the National Archives of Namibia relating to the districts of Okahandja and Reheboth: BRE 14/B.10.3/4, 4RS, 9RS; BRE 14/B.10.a/1; BRE 22/E.l.c/10; BRE 26/E.1.8.1/7; DOK29/E.4.a, Bd. 1/4,5,25,17,31; DOK29/E.4.d, Bd. 7/17RS.
80. See also Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (Münster, 2002).
81. See George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990).
82. While the impact of Mitteleuropa on populations is not fully developed in Fritz Fischer's classic work, the outlines are clear. See Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York, 1967).
83. See Vejas G. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000).
84. On Russian occupations, which often involved targeting specific ethnic or national groups, see the following papers by Peter Holquist: " 'It Was a Nightmarish Scene': The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia" (Borderlands Workshop, University of Minnesota, September 2004); "Forms of Violence during the Russian Occupation of Ottoman Territory and in Northern Persia (Ummiah and Astrabad), October 1914-December 1917" (Workshop for Armenian Turkish Scholarship, Salzburg, Austria, April 2005);
85. and " 'In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 Russian Forces Conducted Themselves Differently-But That was a Different Era': Forms of Violence in the First (1914-1915) and Second (1916-1917) Russian Occupations of Galicia and Bukovina" (Degeneration of Warfare Conference, Yale University, 2004), all cited by permission.
86. On the importance of the nineteenth-century precedents for the decisions at Paris, see Erwin Viefhaus, Die Minderheitenfrage und die Entstehung der Minderheitenschutzverträge auf der Pariser Friedenskonferenz 1919 (Würzburg, 1960), 46-49;
87. and Flachbarth, System des internationalen Minderheitenrechtes, 1-29, who tracks the precedents back to the sixteenth century and the accords providing for religious toleration. But this position ignores the critical question of sovereignty and underplays the distinctiveness of national versus religious identities.
88. For a statement by one of the participants that also links policies in the borderlands region and Africa, see Manley O. Hudson, "The Protection of Minorities and Natives in Transferred Territories," in Edward Mandell House and Charles Seymour, eds., What Really Happened at Paris: The Story of the Peace Conference, 1918-19 (New York, 1921), 204-230, here 209-210. French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, in his cover letter to Polish prime minister Ignace Jan Paderewski that accompanied the Polish Treaty, referred especially to the Berlin Congress and Berlin Treaty and also to the provisions of the London Protocol of 1830. In somewhat exaggerated fashion, Clemenceau claimed that the treaty "does not constitute any fresh departure."
89. See United States, Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: Paris Peace Conference [hereafter FR US: PPC], 13 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1942-1947), 6: 629-634, quote from 630.
90. The planning for the Paris Peace Conference was extensively covered in the older literature, such as Viefhaus, Minderheitenfrage,
91. and Flachbarth, System des internationalen Minderheitenrechtes, but is treated only sketchily in the most recent accounts,
92. such as Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York, 2001),
93. and Fink, Defending the Rights of Others.
94. Most recently, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2007).
95. Among many others, see Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-1918 (New Haven, Conn., 1959), esp. 75-86, 185-186, 298-304;
96. Michla Pomerance, "The United States and Self-Determination: Perspectives on the Wilsonian Conception," American Journal of International Law 70, no. 1 (1976): 1-27;
97. and Allen Lynch, "Woodrow Wilson and the Principle of 'National Self-Determination': A Reconsideration," Review of International Studies 28 (2002): 419-436.
98. See various references in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 8 vols. (Stuttgart, 1972-1997), 1: 98-99, 206; 2: 501; 3: 150, 224, 1081-1082; 4: 751.
99. V. I. Lenin, "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination" (1916), in Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 22: December 1915-July 1916 (Moscow, 1964), 143-156.
100. See also Maneia, The Wilsonian Moment, 37-38;
101. Eley, "Remapping the Nation"; and Mayer, Political Origins, 298-304.
102. Woodrow Wilson, Address to Congress, February 11, 1918, in Wilson, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, vol. 46: January 16-March 12, 1918 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 318-324, quote from 321.
103. See Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 39-43.
104. See Manela, The Wilsonian Moment.
105. On the important and usually neglected history of the terminology of "minority" and "majority," see Kai Struve, " 'Nationale Minderheit'-Begriffsgeschichtliches zu Gleichheit und Differenz," Leipziger Beiträge zur Jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 2 (2004): 233-258;
106. and Viefhaus, Minderheitenfrage, 8-19, 28-34, 39-53. The tendency to use the term "minorities" for nineteenth-century developments is, in my view, anachronistic. The term does not appear, for example, in the Berlin Treaty of 1878.
107. The writers and publicists on the problem conveniently ignored the fluidity of national identifications. On this matter, see especially Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914, 2nd ed. (West Lafayette, Ind., 2006);
108. and Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
109. For more recent arguments that the Jewish role has been much exaggerated, see David Engel, "Perceptions of Power: Poland and World Jewry," Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 1 (2002): 17-28;
110. and Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 133-169.
111. Mark Levene emphasizes the role of British Jewry, and in particular Lucien Wolf, in the formulation of the minority treaties in War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914-1919 (Oxford, 1992).
112. Commission of Inquiry, "Preliminary Survey" [n.d.], in FRUS: PPC, 1:17-21, here 18-20.
113. See also Hudson, "The Protection of Minorities and Natives in Transferred Territories."
114. The commitment to establishing states based on homogeneous populations is also evident in the commission's call for maps that were based on "racial boundary lines." See Commission of Inquiry, "Preliminary Survey," 20.
115. See "Memorandum of the Committee of the Jewish Delegations at the Paris Peace Conference," submitted May 10, 1919, in Jacob Robinson et al., Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure? (New York, 1943), 319-325.
116. For a full account of the development of the minority treaties, see Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 133-264.
117. MacMillan, Paris 1919, has amazingly little on this critical topic; she mentions the minority treaties only in the conclusion (486-487, 493), where she writes that "in 1919 the world still shrank from the expulsion of minorities and frowned on forcible assimilation" (486). She may be correct about assimilation, but certainly not about expulsions.
118. A concise statement of this sort appears in David Hunter Miller, "The Making of the League of Nations," in House and Seymour, What Really Happened at Paris, 398-424.
119. See, for example, the memorandum of Polish prime minister Ignace Jan Paderewski to the Allied leaders, June 15, 1919, in FRUS: PPC, 6: 535-540,
120. and Clemenceau's response, the cover letter to Paderewski accompanying the Polish Treaty, June 1919 [no further date], ibid., 629-634.
121. On the explicit definition of "civilization" developed by international lawyers just before World War I, see Gong, The Standard of "Civilization, " 24-53,
122. and Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer, 71-78.
123. Flachbarth, System des internationalen Minderheitenrechtes, 122. Text at http://net.lib.byu.edu/ rdh7/wwi/versa/versa2.html (accessed November 16, 2008).
124. For a highly detailed delineation and examination, see Flachbarth, System des internationalen Minderheitenrechtes, 148-153, 360-365, 376-475. In a few instances, minorities, including the Szekler, a group related to Hungarians, and Saxons (German-speakers) in the Transylvania region of Romania, were granted some political autonomy.
125. Viefhaus, Minderheitenfrage, provides an excruciatingly detailed account of the drafting of all these treaties, agreements, and declarations related to minority issues.
126. See also Robinson, Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure?
127. Flachbarth, System des internationalen Minderheitenrechtes, 153.
128. For details on the workings of the Minorities Committees, see Julius Stone, International Guarantee of Minority Rights: Procedure of the Council of the League of Nations in Theory and Practice (London, 1932);
129. Robinson, Were the Minority Treaties a Failure?;
130. Viefhaus, Minderheitenfrage;
131. Flachbarth, System des internationalen Minderheitenrechtes;
132. and Fink, Defending the Rights of Others.
133. For example, Robinson, Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure? 57.
134. Thomas G. Masaryk, The New Europe (The Slav Standpoint), ed. W. Preston Warren and William B. Weist (1918; repr., Lewisburg, Pa., 1972). Masaryk writes that because of the legacy of history, there will still be national minorities in the new Europe. "The problem is to make these minorities as small as possible" (84).
135. Cecil Gosling to Earl Curzon, November 6, 1919, in Documents on British Foreign Policy, 19191939, 1st Series, vol. 6 (London, 1956), 335-337, here 336.
136. Text of the provision in Lawrence Martin, The Treaties of Peace, 1919-1923, 2 vols. (New York, 1924), 2: 669.
137. See also Flachbarth, System des internationalen Minderheitenrechtes, 343-359, whose numbers are too low;
138. Viefhaus, Minderheitenfrage, 212-226;
139. and Adanir, "Ethnicities in Thrace," with many citations.
140. There is no good biography in English, French, Italian, or German, and one is left with older hagiographies in which Venizelos is portrayed by British or American graecophiles as the great reviver of Hellenism in the modern world; e.g., Herbert Adams Gibbons, Venizelos (Boston, 1920).
141. For a brief, colorful account of Venizelos, see MacMillan, Paris 1919, 347-365, 429-437.
142. More recent scholarship on Venizelos is evident in Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ed., Eleftherios Venizelos: The Trials of Statesmanship (Edinburgh, 2006), but even this volume cannot always manage to avoid idealized treatments of its hero.
143. Viefhaus, Minderheitenfrage, 214-215.
144. Eleutherios Venizelos, Greece before the Peace Congress of 1919: A Memorandum Dealing with the Rights of Greece (New York, 1919), 1.
145. See the minutes of the Council of the Heads of Delegations for August 6, 1919, and Appendix F with the draft letter prepared by the Committee on New States along with Venizelos's draft proposal in FRUS: PPC, 7: 547-565, 590-595.
146. Article 1 in Flachbarth, System des internationalen Minderheitenrechtes, 345.
147. Ibid., 81-82; and Roland Huntford, Fridtjof Nansen and the Unmixing of Greeks and Turks in 1924 (Oslo, 1999).
148. Article 1, "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations," in Martin, The Treaties of Peace, 2: 1036.
149. On the treaty provisions and their impact, see Flachbarth, System des internationalen Minderheitenrechtes, 348-359;
150. Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (New York, 2003);
151. and Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire, 71,109-129. As Kévonian writes, although the Lausanne Treaty defined the communities subject to the exchange by religion (Orthodox Christians or Muslims), it really signified a conception of the nation characterized by homogeneity in which religion blended into nation or race (71,135-136).
152. For a recent account that mentions the population exchange but somehow fails to grasp its significance, see MacMillan, Paris 1919, 442-455.
153. On the background to Lausanne, see Michael Llewellyn Smith, Ionian Visions: Greece in Asia Minor, 1919-1922 (New York, 1973). A few areas and populations were excluded from the agreement and were thenceforth designated as minorities. Since the Lausanne Treaty also contained clauses on the Polish Treaty model, the minorities who remained were supposed to be protected, and their situation was to be subject to League of Nations supervision.
154. For some of the criticisms, see Kévonian, Réfugié s et diplomatie humanitaire, 122-124, 252-261.
155. France, Ministère des affaires Étrangères, Documents diplomatiques: Conférence de Lausanne, vol. 1:21 Novembre 1922-ler Février 1923 (Paris, 1923), meeting of December 13, 1922, 170-178, quote from 175. Curzon disingenuously claimed that Greece had nothing to do with proposing the exchange.
156. Ibid., meeting of January 27, 1923, 307-317, quote from 311.
157. Ibid., 310.
158. I thank Stephen Blake for pointing out to me Curzon's plan for Bengal.
159. Figures in Renée Hirschon, "The Consequences of the Lausanne Convention: An Overview," in Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean, 13-20, here 14-15.
160. On the movement of Muslims since the 1860s, see Karpat, Ottoman Population,
161. and Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Princeton, N.J., 1995).
162. In a most unfortunate move, Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (New York, 1995), takes up the phrase "population unmixing" in an entirely uncritical fashion.
163. For the human tragedy that this pallid phrase masks, see many of the contributions in Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean.
164. For a very good, briefer account, see Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 52-56.
165. The forced deportations seem not to have registered very greatly even on its key figures and their associates. Curzon's official biographer never mentions this aspect of the agreement, and ten years later, Harold Nicolson gave it short shrift in his account of Curzon's life and career. See Earl of Ronaldshay, The Life of Lord Curzon: Being the Authorized Biography of George Nathaniel Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, K. G., 3 vols. (London, 1928), 3: 322-343;
166. and Harold Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase, 1919-1925-A Study in Post-WarDiplomacy (London, 1934), 281-350.
167. Abriefer account of Curzon's life, his strengths, and his shortcomings is in MacMillan, Paris 1919, 438-455.
168. David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant (New York, 1928), 34.
169. George Louis Beer, "The Future of Mesopotamia," January 1, 1918, in Beer, African Questions at the Paris Peace Conference: With Papers on Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Colonial Settlement, ed. Louis Herbert Gray (New York, 1923), 411-427, here 421-424 (term "mandates" on 424);
170. and Beer, "The German Colonies in Africa," February 12-26, 1918, ibid., 67.
171. See also Louis Herbert Gray, "Introduction," ibid., xv-xliv, xviii-xxi on the origin of the term "mandates." Gray served under Beer as secretary of the Colonial Division.
172. Amid a very substantial literature, see the account in Christopher M. Andrew and A. S. KanyaForstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 1914-1924 (Stanford, Calif., 1981), which largely depicts the ineptitude of French policy in the Middle East and the triumph of the British.
173. On the impact on Jewish diplomacy, see Levene, War, Jews, and the New Europe, 77-107.
174. Beer, "The German Colonies in Africa," February 12-26, 1918, in Beer, African Questions, 11-12, 14,15, 30, 33, 38-39
175. . See also the important publication by Jan-Bart Gewald and Jeremy Silvester, eds., "Words Cannot Be Found": German Colonial Rule in Namibia-An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book, with an excellent introduction by the editors (Leiden, 2003).
176. Beer, "The Future of Mesopotamia," 414-419, quote from 418.
177. "Convention Revising the General Act of Berlin, February 26, 1885, and the General Act and Declaration of Brussels, July 2, 1890," September 10, 1919, in Beer, African Questions, 507-514; "Convention Relating to the Liquor Traffic in Africa, and Protocol," September 10, 1919, ibid., 500-506.
178. According to Gray, "Introduction," xix-xx, xxiii-xxiv, xxvii, xxxii-xlii, the Council of Ministers for Foreign Affairs created a commission on June 25,1919, to examine three Anglo-French drafts designed to replace the Berlin and Brussels general acts. More than two dozen meetings were held from July to September. Article 126 of the Versailles Treaty specifically bound Germany to abide by the Berlin General Act of 1885 and the Brussels General Act of 1890 and any revisions.
179. "Covenant of the League of Nations," Part I, article 22 of the Treaty of Versailles, in Martin, The Treaties of Peace, 1: 19.
180. For a highly critical analysis of French policy, especially in regard to Syria, see Andrew and KanyaForstner, The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 180-236.
181. Gray, "Introduction," xlii.
182. For a collection of the mandate agreements, see Beer, African Questions, 515-556.
183. Exemplary of newer, more complex histories of the mandate system are Michael D. Callahan, Mandates and Empire: The League of Nations and Africa, 1914-1931 (Brighton, 1999);
184. and Susan Pedersen, "The Meaning of the Mandates System: An Argument," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32 (2006): 560-582.
185. See also Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 115-195
186. , and Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer, 174-175.
187. "Covenant of the League of Nations," in Martin, The Treaties of Peace, 1: 20.
188. A point recognized by Edward M. House in "The Versailles Peace in Retrospect," in House and Seymour, What Really Happened at Paris, 424-444, here 443.
189. See, for example, Hudson, "The Protection of Minorities and Natives in Transferred Territories," 228, and House, "The Versailles Peace in Retrospect," quotes from 430.
190. Once Germany entered the League in 1926, the Weimar Republic became the major advocate of minority protection, largely by taking up the cause of Germans outside the territorial boundaries of the country. See Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 295-335.
191. On the Nazi period, see Holly Case, "A League of Their Own: The Axis Takes On Minority Protection in the Transylvanian Borderlands during World War II" (paper presented at the Borderlands Final Conference, Herder-Institut, Marburg, Germany, May 17-20, 2007),
192. cited by permission. See also her book Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford, Calif., forthcoming). Nicolas Politis, Greece's ambassador to the League of Nations and a jurist, saw Hitler's policies as a consequence of Lausanne, and noted the similarities with the various exchange agreements carried out between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, Estonia, Italy, and Latvia, as well as the one between Poland and Russia.
193. See Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire, 127.
194. See Mazower, "The Strange Triumph of Human Rights," and Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, 327-334.
195. Article 1 of both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (December 16, 1966), http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/b3ccpr.htm, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (December 16, 1966), http://wwwl.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/b2esc.htm (both accessed November 16, 2008).
196. See also the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (December 14, 1960), http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/c- coloni.htm (accessed November 16, 2008).
197. As the legal scholar A. W. Brian Simpson laconically writes in regard to self-determination, "whereas the concept of an individual is fairly straightforward that of a 'people' is certainly not." Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, 301.
198. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 12,15-16,108, 171, 194, remarks on the connection between the Lausanne Treaty and the Potsdam Agreement (which authorized the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe) and the Dayton Accords. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Franjo Tudjman all referred specifically to the "success" of the Lausanne Treaty.