John S. Stephens, Danger Zones. A Study of National Minorities

Firstly, because of the analytical freshness with which the English historian Stephens dedicates himself to the subject of the study: As Special Rapporteur of the Minorities Commission of the League of Nations, Stephens travelled to various minority areas in Europe, corresponded with representatives of the local intelligentsia or spoke to local sources, whose information he critically incorporated in his report. In South Tyrol, for example, one of his sources was Baron Paul von Sternbach of Bruneck/Brunico, who, as a member of the “Deutscher Verband”(“German Association”), represented the interests of South Tyrol in the Roman Parliament and maintained close links with the League of Nations in Geneva. Stephens is sensitive to the situation of the continent's numerically smaller and often socially and legally weaker population groups in the 1920s. Himself a member of a religious minority in Britain (he was a Quaker from Cornwall), he knew only too well from the history of his denomination of the potential discrimination that such people could expect from the majority because of their perceived 'inferior status'. This personal perspective also sharpened the judgement he presented to his readers, not without recourse to the topoi of canonical English education and the occasional biblical reference.

‘Minority’ as we understand it today was a relatively new term at the time, first appearing – expressis verbis – in the context of the founding of the League of Nations in Geneva. Stephens approached this multifaceted phenomenon, which was difficult to categorise, with diachronic comparisons: In addition to the Enlightenment, he was particularly interested in the religious wars of the Early Modern period. For him, the denominations of the time were the first ‘minorities’ – such as the Huguenots in Cardinal Richelieu's France and their precarious status between legally guaranteed tolerance, persecution and expulsion. He also wrote his case studies, which range from Soviet Russia to the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, South Tyrol and the Balkans, with an awareness of the historical conditions and conflicting cultures of remembrance of minority issues. In this way, his contemporary account retains a historical depth that reminds us even today that, to paraphrase Churchill, minority regions can always produce 'too much' history for it to be properly processed.

Stephens identified nationalism as the fundamental evil of his time – and here, too, his thoughts are surprisingly close to our own time, which has a head start in terms of knowledge, given the devastating consequences of this ideology after two World Wars. According to Stephens, nationalism holds the continent captive like ‘obsolete chains'’ preventing reason, moderation and pragmatism from finally finding their way into minority issues. On the one hand, “Irredentism on the Italian model” has led minorities to abandon all hope of self-government and to work feverishly towards a war that would change borders and reunite the unredeemed with their nation. Majorities, on the other hand, used the very argument that minority irredentism was threatening and state-destroying to deny minority rights or "not to turn the words promised in Geneva into deeds" . These two extremes fuelled each other and led to an increased risk of war, especially in the border regions, the danger zones of Europe. Stephens counters this scenario with the idea of a borderless and pacified Europe, in which the national question will recede into the background and “national minorities shall have a recognised place as bridges from one culture to another”.

The fact that this positive function of minorities has all too rarely been put into practice shows how relevant this ideal is in today's Europe of resurgent nationalisms and new conflicts in and around minority areas. Stephens' intellectual tour of Europe therefore reveals a great deal: It reveals the peculiar socio-political dialectic between majority and minority, ranging from the treatment of 'one's own' national minorities abroad to the treatment of 'foreign' minorities in the 'kin state', and ultimately leading to the hope for reciprocity in the granting of minority rights and the rejection of violent separatism - in positive terms, this programme promises autonomy and genuine self-government as core elements of the European peace project. To use a well-known painting by Paul Klee, created in January 1929, around the same time as Stephens' publication, the key work “Highway and Byways” (“Hauptweg und Nebenwege”), painted after his second trip to Egypt, should not be interpreted narrowly, but rather in an enchanting way shows a sequence of differently contoured paths, which, with their vertical and oblique structures, could also be related to the historical process from which Klee and Stephens' contemporaries drew their pictorial and intellectual reflections. Some paths of development are tortuous, but if no one follows them, the riddle of history cannot be solved.

Note: This article gives the views of the authors and does not represent the position of the European Association of Daily Newspapers in Minority and Regional Languages (MIDAS) or Eurac Research.