Dalle Mulle, Emmanuel, Prott, Volker and Ambrosino, Alessandro (2024). The Paris System in Western Europe:Minorities, Self-Determination, and the Management of Difference in the “Civilized West”. Nationalities Papers ,
Abstract
In most accounts of peacemaking after World War I, “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 this simplistic view by examining the treatment of German-speaking minorities in the borderlands of Alsace-Lorraine, South Tyrol, and Eupen-Malmedy between 1918 and 1923 in the immediate post-war and the early interwar period. Building on an innovative comparative framework of five key variables, we find 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. The strength of state institutions and liberal principles account for a reversal (Alsace-Lorraine), moderation (Eupen-Malmedy), or hardening (South Tyrol) of measures. International commitment to defend the new borders and the absence of a tradition of ethnic conflict also had a significant impact.
Publication DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2024.24 |
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Divisions: | College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Politics, History and International Relations Aston University (General) |
Funding Information: | The research on which this article is based received funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant n. 169568) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement n. 847635). |
Additional Information: | Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for the Study of Nationalities. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Paris system,Western Europe,borderlands,interwar period,minorities,nationalism,Geography, Planning and Development,History,Political Science and International Relations |
Publication ISSN: | 1465-3923 |
Last Modified: | 22 Nov 2024 08:26 |
Date Deposited: | 10 Jun 2024 16:18 |
Full Text Link: | |
Related URLs: |
https://www.cam ... F718CAB9B31C67#
(Publisher URL) http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL) |
PURE Output Type: | Article |
Published Date: | 2024-05-27 |
Published Online Date: | 2024-05-27 |
Accepted Date: | 2024-05-01 |
Authors: |
Dalle Mulle, Emmanuel
Prott, Volker ( 0000-0002-9000-9986) Ambrosino, Alessandro |