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Non- Territorial National Autonomy in Interwar European Minority

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Non- Territorial National Autonomy in Interwar European Minority 13 Non- Territorial National Autonomy in Interwar European Minority Protection and Its Habsburg Legacies Börries Kuzmany* What is the relationship between ethnic diversity and sovereign territoriality? Central Europe was a bustling laboratory for this question both before and after the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. The notion of minority rights overseen by an international organization like the League of Nations was one of the most striking innovations of the interwar international order. From the perspective of Central European activists, scholars, and politicians, however, this system emerged as just one possible response to an older problem concerning the form of rights and jur- isdiction best suited to a region in which different ethnicities, languages, and reli- gions were densely intermingled. In fact, various thinkers had developed a number of bold proposals that sought to redefine the relationship between rights and terri- tory by forming national jurisdictions and communities on a corporate—and thus non- territorial— basis. This chapter traces the emergence of ‘non- territorial au- tonomy’, as this idea is referred to by scholars today, in the multinational Habsburg state and its translation into the area of interwar minority protection. At the very heart of this idea was the aim of disentangling the state from the na- tion, thereby making non- territorial autonomy the exact opposite of what was con- sidered the state of the art in 1918. Yet the true winner of the First World War was the idea of the nation state, which was realized even in those parts of Europe that had previously been ruled by the multinational Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires. New borders were demarcated according to historical, economic, and ethno- linguistic considerations. But the region’s dense ethnic diversity meant that these new borders effectively simply created a set of smaller multinational states. According to their own legal definition, they were all nation states, however— even * I would like to thank Marina Germane, Emanuel Dalle Mulle, and Natasha Wheatley for their very helpful remarks and suggestions, and Timo Aava for his help with Estonian sources. The research for this contribution was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) within the project ‘Non- territorial Autonomy: History of a Travelling Idea’, no. 758015. Börries Kuzmany, Non- Territorial National Autonomy in Interwar European Minority Protection and Its Habsburg Legacies In: Remaking Central Europe. Edited by: Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley, Oxford University Press (2020). © the many contributors. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780198854685.003.0014 316 Börries Kuzmany if they housed a twin- headed state nation like the Czecho- Slovaks or were home to a trinity of nations like the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Any citizens not belonging to the titular state nation had the status of minority— for better or worse. Whereas a national minority is basically a deviation from the ideal type of the nation state, multinational states formally do not perceive their multilingual populations as minorities but as nationalities constituent to the state itself.1 In both cases, arrangements to deal with national diversity must be found— and it is pos- sible for a nation state to treat its minorities more liberally than a multinational state treats its nationalities. The Habsburg Monarchy in particular had struggled with this very issue since the revolution of 1848. As if in a political laboratory, political thinkers and policy- makers discussed and negotiated different options to deal with the empire’s lin- guistic diversity, its fuzzy national dividing lines, and various national movements. While the principal equality of all languages and nationalities was accepted in the wider framework of civil liberties, the question of how— or whether at all—to re- organize the empire on national grounds was fiercely discussed.2 The Hungarian publicist and politician József Eötvös (1813– 1871) elaborated on two options for national reorganization, but eventually dismissed both of them. The first one would have been to redraw the internal borders of the Habsburg Empire according to national criteria and thereby grant national self- rule to the provinces thus de- fined; this has been labelled the ‘territorial principle’. Eötvös’s second option was to transfer cultural self- rule to national collectives that would be constituted by all members of a given national group— which meant organizing political community according to individuals’ national belonging and was therefore labelled the ‘per- sonal principle’ of national autonomy.3 1 Ignaz Seipel, Die geistigen Grundlagen der Minderheitenfrage. Vortrag gehalten im Minderheiteninstitute der Wiener Universität am 14. Jänner 1925 (Franz Deuticke 1925) 3. On the intri- cacies of the emergence of the term ‘national minority’ itself, cf. Anna Adorjáni and László Bence Bari, ‘National Minority: The Emergence of the Concept in the Habsburg and International Legal Thought’ (2019) 16/ 1 Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, European and Regional Studies. 2 The Kremsier/ Kroměříž draft constitution negotiated during the summer of 1848 stipulated the equality of all Austrian nationalities, and Emperor Francis Joseph proclaimed the same in the address during his ascendency to the throne on 2 December 1848. On the importance and acceptance of the principle of equality of all Habsburg nationalities, cf. Stourzh’s seminal monograph: Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Österreichs 1848– 1918 (Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1985). 3 Joseph von Eötvös, Über die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in Österreich (C.A. Hartleben’s Verlag 1850) 83– 85, 90– 92. A huge number of other contemporaries wrote about the Habsburg Empire’s nationalities problems and suggested solutions as well. Following is a very small selec- tion: Franz Palacký, ‘Über Zentralisation und nationale Gleichberechtigung in Österreich’ (23 December 1849) Národní Novíny; Adolph Fischhof, Oesterreich und die Bürgschaften seines Bestands (Wallichauffer´sche Buchhandlung 1869); Ludwig Gumplowicz,Das Recht der Nationalitäten und Sprachen in Österreich- Ungarn (Wagner 1879); Karl Hugelmann, Das Recht der Nationalitäten in Österreich und das Staatsgrundgesetz über die allgemeinen Rechte der Staatsbürger. Zwei Vorträge, gehalten in der juristischen Gesellschaft zu Wien am 25. November und 16. Dezember 1879 (Styria 1880); Aurel Popovici, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Groß-Österreich. Politische Studien zur Lösung der nationalen Fragen und staatrechtlichen Krisen in Österreich-Ungarn (B. Elischer Nachfolger 1906); Non-Territorial National Autonomy 317 In this chapter, I will explore the Habsburg legacy of non-territorial autonomy based on the personal principle in four steps. To begin with, I will sketch the prac- tical and theoretical approaches to the concept as they developed in Habsburg Austria during the last fifty years of its existence, that is, the implementations of non- territorial arrangements in several provinces that arose from pragmatic and administrative considerations as well as the theoretical notions elaborated mainly by Austro- Marxist thinkers. The second section of this chapter scrutinizes the first steps of non- territorial autonomy into the sphere of international minority pro- tection. In the wider setting of the Paris Peace Conference, different protagonists promoted or rejected this form of collective rights. In the third section, I will in- vestigate how intensively the non-territorial autonomy ideas that had developed in imperial Austria were received and adapted in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the Russian Revolutions of 1917. The next section contains an analysis of how transnational minority activists—who were well-acquainted with the idea’s Austrian roots— approached non- territorial autonomy as a solution to Europe’s minority issues, not least because they were unsatisfied with the minority protec- tion system established by the League of Nations. The two final sections of this chapter highlight the role of the continent’s eastern parts within the post-war inter- national order, portraying them as actors and contributors to the field of national diversity management and not as mere objects of considerations. The aim is not to suggest that these Central and Eastern European approaches were better or worse, but simply to include them in the greater picture. I. Two Approaches to Non-Territorial Autonomy in Habsburg Austria There are several ways to begin this story, but I would like to start with Rudolf Laun (1882– 1975), a Prague- born legal scholar of international and civil law who had closely followed the nationalities question in Habsburg Austria during the last two decades before the war. In mid- January 1918, he wired his rather critical remarks on President Wilson’s Fourteen Points to The Hague, where the Central Organization for a Durable Peace had asked him to assess Wilson’s declaration. With reference to the tenth point concerning the autonomous development of the peoples of Austria- Hungary, Laun stated: Edmund Bernatzik, Über nationale Matriken. Inaugurationsrede gehalten von Edmund Bernatzik (Manz 1910); Rudolf von Herrnritt, ‘Die Ausgestaltung des österreichischen Nationalitätenrechtes durch den Ausgleich in Mähren und der Bukowina’ (1914) 5&6 Österreichische Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht; ‘Die Stellung der Kronländer im Gefüge der
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