Minority Treaties - Importance

Importance

The Minority Treaties, recognized as history's first minority treaties, were an important step in protection of minorities and recognition of human rights, bringing the subject to an international forum. In them, for the first time, states and international communities recognized that there are people living outside normal legal protection and who required an additional guarantee of their elementary rights from an external body, as protection within individual states itself may not be sufficient. Among issues successfully resolved by the Minority Treaties was the Åland crisis.

Nonetheless, the treaties were also subject to past and present criticism. The countries subject to the treaties saw it as limiting their sovereignty and infringing their right for self-determination, as the League was allowed to influence national, religious and educational policy in those countries, and suggesting that they were not competent enough to deal with their internal matters. Further criticism centered around the treaties not being obligatory for the established countries (like France, Germany, United Kingdom or Russia). The Western countries, who dictated the treaties in the aftermath of the First World War, saw minority safeguards as unnecessary for themselves, and trusted that they could fulfill the "standard of civilization". It was the new Central and Eastern European countries that were not trusted to respect those rights, and, of course, Bolshevik Russia, still in the throes of the Russian Revolution, was a separate case.

This inequality further offended the smaller countries. Finally, this inequality also meant that the minority rights were not seen as a universal right; it was exclusively a foreign policy issue, and thus populations that had no state to back up their claims were relatively disadvantaged when compared to ones backed up by a powerful state or group of interests.

With the decline of League of Nations in the 1930s, the treaties were increasingly considered unenforceable and useless. The League Council, charged with enforcing the various minority treaties, often failed to act upon complaints from minorities. There was an unwritten rule that state policies aimed at the cultural assimilation of minorities should be ignored as the "minor evil" with regard to the rights enshrined in the Minority Treaties when those policies were seen as guaranteeing the internal stability of the state concerned.

When the Council did review cases, the reviews were commonly dominated by the countries whose ethnic groups were affected and that tried not only to resolve the problem of mistreatment of their minorities but also score other political goals on the international scene, sometimes even sacrificing the very minority in question (German and Hungarian governments are recognized as having abused the system the most). Also, of course, the League, lacking its own army, could not coerce any state to adhere to its recommendations.

Even before Adolf Hitler seized control of Germany in 1933, the problems with the Minority Treaties were evident. Various European governments continued to abuse minorities, the latter loudly protested, their complaints were exploited by interested parties with ulterior motives, and the League interfered as little as possible. The system suffered an apparent death blow with Poland's rejection of its treaty in 1934.