chapter 2 Open Diplomacy and Minority Rights: The League of Nations and Lithuania’s International Image in the Early 1920s
Chiara Tessaris
When the League of Nations was created in 1919 it was entrusted it with ambi- tious tasks. The League was to maintain peace, create a new international order transcending the narrow national interests of individual governments, and promote principles of democracy and formal equality among nations. From now on, the settlement of territorial disputes among states had to take into account the consent of the governed, in order to counterbalance the tradi- tional tenets of Great Power politics. The League was also accountable before international public opinion; the advent of parliamentary democracy made public opinion a new and powerful factor in conducting states’ foreign policies and this clearly affected the League’s work. Lithuania’s international image, as it was represented at the League’s head- quarters in Geneva, is explored here in relation to the emergence of open diplo- macy and international guarantees for minority protection. These were two pillars of the new international order that the League was expected to uphold and promote. Since new members were admitted to the League on the condition that they met several requirements among which minimum standards of minor- ity protection, this chapter analyses the League’s influence on Lithuania’s strategies to obtain international support for a twofold foreign policy agenda. The argument is that the image of the nation promoted abroad was instrumental to establishing the legitimacy of Lithuanian territorial claims to the multiethnic territory of Vilna, and to obtaining the still pending de jure recognition. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Lithuanian delegation had claimed Lithuania’s historical right to statehood based on the continuity between the early modern Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the modern Lithuanian nation. In Geneva, Lithuanian diplomats and politicians had to ‘adjust’ this ideal histori- cal nation to conform to the standards of the League of Nations and the new way of conducting diplomacy that the League represented. As a result, the Lithuanians invested their efforts in convincing the League and international public opinion that if historical rights entitled them to statehood, then their commitment to granting national minorities extensive rights made them wor- thy of admission to the League and the right to rule over Vilna.
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Historical Outline
On 5 September 1920, Poland decided to bring the conflict with Lithuania over the city of Vilna before the League of Nations. As a result of the break-up of the Russian Empire and the great changes brought about by the First World War, the city and the region of Vilna had become a battlefield between Poland and Lithuania. The Poles insisted that the city was Polish while the Lithuanians claimed it as their historical capital. During the First World War, the Germans had taken possession of the region until their military collapse in the autumn of 1918. In Vilna the Lithuanian provisional government (Taryba) proclaimed the independence of Lithuania on 16 February 1918, while still under German occupation, but the Taryba had to retreat to Kaunas as the Bolshevik army entered the city in January 1919. The Vilna question became a territorial dis- pute that the Allies tried to solve in Paris by drawing several demarcation lines, but these did not bring peace to the region, and the question remained unre- solved until Poland brought it before the League in 1920. The high expectations that the Lithuanian public placed on the League were soon disappointed. The Council of the League of Nations decided to administer a plebiscite on the issue if Poland agreed to withdraw its troops from Vilna, where the Polish general Lucien Zeligowki had established a provi- sional government of Central Lithuania. As both parties eventually refused to agree to this plan, the League dismissed the plebiscite idea and instead offered to negotiate a federalist solution in Brussels presided over by the former Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paul Hymans. The Lithuanian and Polish governments accepted the invitation and discussed the Hymans federalist project, but opposition from the Lithuanian public and the unrest that the negotiations caused in the country forced the government to reject the final draft of the Hymans project on 24 December 1922. Ultimately, on 14 March 1923, the Conference of the Ambassadors ratified the de facto frontier recom- mended by the Council of the League of Nations, leaving the Grodno, Lida and Vilna districts to Poland.
The Issue: The Recognition of Civilized Nations
In 1920, the Great Powers were waiting for the League to settle the border dis- pute between Poland and Lithuania before making their final decision regard- ing to the latter’s de jure recognition. Thus, the League became Lithuania’s only chance to gain international recognition and to establish the kind of state that Lithuanian politicians and nationalists imagined: one with Vilna as its capital.