Rise, Fall and Revival: One Hundred Years of Transnational Ethnic Coalition-Building in Europe Paper presented at the conference ‘Trans-ethnic Coalition-building within and across States’, Uppsala University, 7-9 January 2015 David J Smith, University of Glasgow The aim of this paper is to offer some preliminary reflections on how transnational minority coalition-building has developed in Europe over the past one hundred years, through a longitudinal case study of two non-governmental organisations – the present-day Federal Union of European Nationalities (established in 1949) and the European Nationalities Congress of 1925-1938. The Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN) traces its foundation to a meeting held in Versailles in December 1949. Incorporating 90 member organisations in 32 countries as of 2014, it declares itself to be the largest umbrella organisation of the ‘autochthonous, national minorities / ethnic groups’ in Europe. FUEN has participatory status at the Council of Europe and consultative status at the United Nations, and is a member of European Civil Society Platform of the European Commission and a participant in its Fundamental Rights Platform. Established with the overall aim of protecting and promoting the identity, language, culture, rights and ‘own character’ of the European minorities, FUEN claims to represent their interests at regional, national and in particular European level, on the basis of its 2006 Charter for National Minorities in Europe. In this regard, it seeks the adaption of state minority policies according to principle of positive discrimination and on the basis of a ‘dialogue of equals’ between majorities and minorities, working with Member States to create a Europe with strong regions and a European Union with enhanced powers to act upon the minority rights-related provisions of the Lisbon Treaty and Fundamental Rights Charter. It also advocates an improved reporting system for the Council of Europe Framework Convention on National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. At several points in its 65-year history, FUEN has portrayed itself as the successor to the inter-war European Nationalities Congress (ENC), which was established in October 1925 by 50 delegates claiming to speak on behalf of 34 minorities in seventeen states. As an example of the purported continuity between the two organisations, one can point to the fact that in 1985, FUEN gave its annual meeting the title of ‘15th Nationalities Congress’, the 14th having been held in 1938. The inter-war Nationalities Congress was an organisation that failed entirely to achieve its aims, and it remains deeply controversial in the eyes of historians. However, I will argue that in its original form, the Congress embodied many if not all of the ideals currently professed by FUEN, in so far as it regarded national minority rights as a basis for achieving peaceful coexistence between ethnic groups, stable states and a united Europe. Here, particular attention can be drawn to the ideas of the Congress Vice President Paul Schiemann – dubbed by his contemporaries as ‘the thinker of the European minorities movement’ – but also to those of other ENC activists such as Ewald Ammende, Mikhail Kurchinskii and Max Laserson. The Nationalities Congress and FUEN can thus be seen as linked organisations, though formed in different eras and different political contexts. Since their histories coincide with the rise, fall and revival of minority rights discourse and practice in Europe over the past hundred years, a comparison of the two provides a valuable lens through which to examine this development as well as the phenomenon of transnational ethnic coalition-building to which it has given rise. Key issues to be addressed within this paper concern: the understandings of ethnicity and minority rights held by transnational movements; the goals and strategies they have adopted; their capacity to mobilise and unite different agent organisations speaking on behalf of a diverse range of minorities and operating in a variety of different state contexts; and, finally, the extent to which European structures have evolved in a way that makes them more open both to the minority rights agenda and to the minority ‘voice’. The Rise and Fall of the Nationalities Congress An obvious point of departure for this comparative discussion is the end of World War One and the collapse of empires in Central and Eastern Europe, a development which placed ethno-political issues at the very centre of the post-1918 European agenda. The creation of new national minorities within the new, putatively national states established under the post-war peace settlements brought in its turn new departures in international law, in the form of minorities treaties and the associated protection procedures of the League of Nations. These changed international structures did much to stimulate the transnational activism of the Nationalities Congress, which presented its own more far-reaching alternatives to the League system. The fifty delegates that assembled at the inaugural meeting of the Congress in Geneva in October 1925 were drawn largely – though not exclusively – from the new states of Central and Eastern Europe. While they expressed their commitment to working with the League of Nations, they saw its minority rights provisions as ill-suited to the particular multinational character of the societies in which they lived. The minorities treaties, for instance, provided for non-discrimination on ethnic grounds as well as for a degree of recognition of minority cultures, but did not envisage any right to minority self-government. In the eyes of the ENC activists, such a right constituted the only viable basis for ensuring the continued longer-term reproduction of distinct minority cultures within the new states. Fears that the state structures put in place would result in assimilation were hardly assuaged by statements emanating from leading figures within the League, which suggested that recognition for minority cultures was intended merely as a transitional phase on the road to constructing more ‘complete’ nation-states patterned on those that existed in Western Europe. A good example can be seen in British Foreign Minister Austen Chamberlain’s claim that the minority treaties were intended ‘to secure for the minorities that measure of protection and justice which would gradually prepare them to be merged into the national community to which they belonged’. The nation state-centric approach of the League was also reflected in its minority protection procedures, which, in the words of one author, ‘scrupulously respected and safeguarded the sovereignty of states belonging to the organisation. In the eyes of the Nationalities Congress, these procedures transformed national minorities into ‘objects’ rather than ‘subjects’ of international law, thus offering little prospect that appeals to the League by minority representatives might result in a ‘boomerang effect’ capable of influencing the practices of individual states. To remedy these perceived shortcomings, ENC activists called for the creation of a Standing Committee of Minorities at the League of Nations, and argued that the minority treaties should be replaced by a genuinely pan-European guarantee of minority rights based on the model of non-territorial cultural autonomy. This model had originally been devised by the Austrian Social Democrats Karl Renner and Otto Bauer at the turn of the 20th century, as part of their project for transforming the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire into a democratic multinational federation. Although never realised in its original context, it was carried through the years of World War One via the advocacy of transnational organisations such as the Committee of Jewish Delegations and the Central Organisation for a Durable Peace, and would later become central to the platform of the Nationalities Congress after 1925. Renner and Bauer’s model was attractive to the Congress in so far as it provided a non-territorial basis for autonomy, thereby undermining the conceptual link between ethnicity and territory which lay at the root of so many nationality disputes within Central and Eastern Europe and indeed beyond. Framing minority claims in these terms would, it was hoped, help to dispel suspicions that ‘autonomy’ would undermine the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states. For early ENC leaders such as Paul Schiemann, there was no inherent contradiction between professing a national minority identity and belonging to a wider political community based on the state in which an individual resided. Indeed, for all of the importance that Schiemann attached to preserving one’s particular ethnic identity, he argued that identification with the overarching state community must take precedence. This thinking is summed up in his famous maxim that ‘politics must be for the good of the place where on resides – any other end is suicide’. Schiemann, then, did not question the new state borders created after 1918. What he opposed was the attempt to graft the model of the culturally homogenous nation-state onto the multi-ethnic patchwork of Central and Eastern Europe. According to his vision, the state should instead be reconceptualised as a shared territorial space inhabited by autonomously organised national communities. Satisfying the cultural needs of the constituent groups in this way would help to inculcate loyalty on the part of all inhabitants, while leaving the state free to focus on more ‘ethnically neutral’ matters that were of concern to all residents. This thinking was formative for the initial platform of the Nationalities Congress, the statutes of which expressly forbade any discussion of border revision or any accusations directed at individual governments. Rather, discussion was to be limited to general principles of concern to all national minorities. Uniting different ethnic communities living in different states around the general principle of non-territorial cultural autonomy proved, however, to be a challenging endeavour. The Congress grew out of a prior initiative by German minority organisations in Central and Eastern Europe, which in 1922 had come together to create the Verband der deutschen Minderheiten Europas. German activists would constitute by far the largest group within the Congress, the second largest being made up of representatives from Jewish organisations. Together, these two minorities supplied around half of the 200 delegates who gathered annually in Geneva following the inaugural Congress meeting in 1925. In the context of the late 1920s it is hardly surprising that an initiative launched by German minorities and (after some initial hesitation) backed financially by the Reich government in Berlin met with considerable suspicion on the part of other European governments. Fears that the Congress would be subject to undue influence from a revisionist Germany were ultimately realised during the 1930s, when National Socialism began to exert growing appeal amongst German minority leaders and the Verband der deutschen Minderheiten was renamed the Verband der deutschen Volksgruppen. This development spelled the end of the broader Nationalities Congress as a genuine trans-ethnic coalition. The decisive turning point within Congress came at its annual meeting in 1933 when, despite gaining some expressions of support, Jewish minority leaders were unable to secure a motion in favour of breaking with the previous policy of the organisation and issuing an explicit condemnation of the anti-Semitic policies being enacted in Germany by the recently installed Nazi regime. In light of this, Jewish representatives refused to attend any further meetings of the Congress. This was also the point at which Paul Schiemann – a consistent and fierce opponent of Nazism – broke with the organisation as well as with the Verband of German groups. While the Nationalities Congress continued its activities until 1938, it was transformed into a wholly German dominated organisation that served as a cover for pursuing foreign policy goals of the Third Reich. As already intimated earlier in this paper, however, it would be wrong to assert (as a number of scholars have done) that the Nationalities Congress was never conceived of by its founders as anything other than a Trojan Horse for a revanchist German nationalism that placed the particular interests of the Volk above those of all other ethnic groups and sources of identity. In this sense, Paul Schiemann was no German nationalist, while – in its early years, at least, the Congress can be seen as a genuine trans-ethnic coalition. Even within this context, though, the preponderance of German representatives was problematic. The size of the German group at the Congress and the considerable resources upon which it could draw lent an obvious asymmetry to the organisation, prompting concerns from those belonging to smaller and less well-resourced groups that they were simply being ‘pulled along’ by German interests. In this respect the adoption of non-territorial autonomy as the centrepiece of the ENC programme was also far from unproblematic. This model was well-suited to the particular circumstances of the numerically small and territorially dispersed German communities living in the Baltic States and some other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The same could also be said of some other nationalities within the region (perhaps most especially the Jews, who were the only other minority to utilise the famous 1925 law on NCA in Estonia after 1925). Others, though, saw the model as less relevant to their needs: the compactly settled Sudetenland Germans, for instance, pursued demands for territorially-based autonomy within Czechoslovakia during the 1920s, while in the case of some minorities, autonomy per se was not such a salient issue. The divergent perspectives and agendas brought to bear by different organisations within the Congress undermined its credibility in the eyes of the League of Nations Minority Secretariat, which concluded in a 1931 report that it could not see a convincing case as to why non-territorial autonomy should be applied more widely beyond the Baltic States. Such an assessment, however, overlooks the fact that the League’s own more limited system had already shown itself to be largely ineffective in preventing continued nationalist conflicts within Europe. Whatever remaining credibility the League could demonstrate in this area quickly vanished following Hitler’s rise to power. The subsequent manipulation of the minority question by the Nazi regime, culminating in the disaster of World War Two served to discredit the concept of national minority rights altogether after 1945. A Tentative Revival: The Federal Union of Nationalities during the Post-War Decades In Western Europe, at least, the establishment of the Council of Europe demonstrated a shared commitment to rebuilding a shattered continent on democratic foundations, while the foundation of the European Community in the 1950s was seen by many as a recognition that the indivisibly sovereign nation-state had had its day and that a new approach based on supranational integration was required. Yet, while these new frameworks allowed for administrative decentralisation within states, they left (with some limited exceptions) very little space for the concept of ‘positive’ national minority rights. The principal legal documents that were supposed to form the basis for the new international order (both globally and in Western Europe) made reference only to individual human rights, including the right to non-discrimination on ethnic grounds. The initial hope and expectation in the aftermath of World War Two was that particularistic ethnic identities would be gradually eroded through application of liberal democratic norms and the integrative power of markets. This understanding of the new European order was, however, challenged by the network of minority organisations that came together from 1949 to form the Federal Union of European Nationalities. FUEN emerged out of an initiative by French federalists, who had no specific interest in minority rights but sought to promote regions as the building blocks of a new Europe. One of the delegates at the conference of federalists held in the summer of 1949 – the Breton Joseph Mattray - nevertheless took it upon himself to invite a number of minority activists from different Western European states to the meeting, suggesting thereafter that they should establish a separate organisation to pursue their own specific interests. The minority activists brought together by Mattray subscribed to the federalist ideal, and saw the regional framework as one that they could be exploited in cases where national minorities were largely concentrated within a particular sub-state territory. They could, for instance, draw upon the example of Sud-Tyrol, which constituted one of the rare post-war instances of a working minority rights arrangement based on the territorial principle, as well as emerging practices in the Danish-German borderlands. The territorial principle, though, remained problematic for minorities that lacked a clearly-defined ‘homeland’, and in this sense the emerging European structures did not do enough to cater for the needs of Europe’s ‘stateless cultures’. The Federal Union of Nationalities that emerged during the 1950s focused its initial efforts on the Council of Europe, where it lobbied for consultative status and for the additional of a specific minority clause to the European Convention of Human Rights. Almost four decades would elapse, however, before this status was finally granted in January 1989. Until that point, FUEN had the appearance very much of a fringe organisation, with few resources of its own and only limited structures of opportunity upon which it could draw. By the end of the 1980s the Union counted a total of 25 full and affiliate member organisations, nearly all of which spoke on behalf of minority communities in Western Europe. The core of active members was smaller still, and drawn mainly from Sud-Tyrol and the Danish-German border region (which, as already mentioned, were exceptional in providing working arrangements for minority autonomy during the post-war period). In terms of opportunity structures, many Western European states did move towards a greater acknowledgment of accommodation of linguistic and cultural diversity from the late 1960s onwards, in relation both to new immigrant minorities and (in the case of Belgium and Spain), longer-established sub-state ‘national’ communities. Neverthless, FUEN’s initial emphasis on the collective rights of nationalities, juxtaposed as distinct from state-based political communities, continued to be viewed by many Council of Europe member states as anachronistic and a reminder of a European past that was best forgotten. In this regard, efforts by FUEN to claim continuity from the inter-war Nationalities Congress were less than helpful, not least because they reflected in the part the growing influence within the Union of individuals and organisations representing ethnic Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe following the end of the Second World War. While FUEN and its agenda could by no reasonable estimation be identified with the discredited Nationalities Congress of the Nazi era, certain initiatives taken by the leadership – such as declaring its journal to be a direct continuation (under a new name, but with the same publisher) of the inter-war ENC journal Nation und Staat – suggest a lack of proper reflection on the turn that the inter-war Congress had taken after 1933. Nation und Staat had, in its later years, carried articles that articulated Nazi ideas on issues of nationality and race The Turn of 1989 and its aftermath: A New Impetus to Transnational Coalition-Building While FUEN did finally realise its long-cherished goal of consultative status at the Council of Europe in January 1989, it was by this point – in the words of its own official historian – a ‘sad and tired’ organisation. Just a few months later its fortunes were boosted by the demise of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, which paved the way for a revival of minority claims within the region and opened up new possibilities for contacts across the former West-East divide which brought a doubling of FUEN’s membership within a decade. The organisation claims to have played an important role in the subsequent development of the 1995 Council of Europe Framework Convention on National Minorities, which incorporates many of the points made in FUEN’s own Cottbus Declaration of 1992. According to FUEN’s current chairman, the drafting of the Framework Convention - as well as other steps such as the creation of the post of OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities and the inclusion of ‘respect for and protection of minorities’ in the Copenhagen Criteria set for aspirant EU member states – reflected the view of the main European and Euro-Atlantic international organisations that ‘a solution had to be found’ in order to prevent the outbreak of further violent conflicts along the lines of those that accompanied the demise of Yugoslavia. Motivated as they were by an understanding of minorities as a security issue, however, the provisions adopted could be seen as a means of buying off minority claims in the interests of states, rather than a genuine effort to extend the EU’s motto of ‘united in diversity’ to encompass all cultures rather than simply those of the member states. In this respect, FUEN characterises FCNM and ECRML as ‘light products’ that do little to impose binding international legal obligations upon states. Similarly the EU Copenhagen Criteria - while in themselves a welcome departure – leave themselves open to the same charge of double standards that were levelled at the minority treaties by the Nationalities Congress between the wars. Furthermore, no effective mechanisms have been put in place to enforce to ensure continued ‘respect for and protection of’ minorities post-accession, while the references to minority protection contained in the Lisbon Treaty and the Fundamental Rights Charter have yet to be given substance. Such a view informs the agenda and continued vigorous lobbying efforts undertaken by FUEN, as seen most recently in its ongoing citizens’ initiative to secure approval for a ‘Minority Safepack’ containing ‘a set of measures and concrete legal acts for the promotion and protection of the European minorities and the regional and minority languages’. Conclusions This study has briefly sketched the history of transnational trans-ethnic coalition-building back over a century which has marked the rise, fall and revival of this form of activity. In this respect, it has demonstrated that the current ‘progressive nationalism’ embodied by FUEN (an organisation working in cooperation with EU and CE structures) has its ideological antecedents in the work of the Nationalities Congress during the 1920s. Exploring this continuity usefully illuminates some general issues – such as availability of resources and structures of opportunity – in the study of transnational movements. The comparison also serves to bring to light the thinking of hitherto neglected figures such as Paul Schiemann, whose ideas in many way anticipated the post-war course of European integration and which provide us with an interesting counter-narrative to story of nationalism and conflict that still dominates historical accounts of Central and Eastern Europe in the modern era. The programme of the 1920s Nationalities Congress anticipated that of FUEN in many significant respects. However key differences can also be discerned. ENC seemingly regarded ethnic communities as fundamental building blocks of a political community (Nationalitätenstaat), starting with ethnicity and working outwards to construct an overarching civic state identity. While a similar understanding may have been held by an older generation of FUEN activists during the immediate post-war decades, the organisation as a whole has increasingly situated ethnicity within organising frameworks of citizenship, civil society, multilingualism (and linguistic as opposed to group rights) and – perhaps most importantly - intercultural dialogue. This difference can perhaps be explained at least in part by the fact that ENC originated within a context of newly-established states and generalised geopolitical instability whereas FUEN evolved within a post-1945 Western European setting shaped by consolidated liberal democratic political communities that have been increasingly ready to devolve power within the overall framework of European integration. As numerous authors have observed, this framework has allowed transnational actors such as FUEN the kind of international voice that CEN could never aspire to during the inter-war period: for instance, institutions such as the EU Committee of the Regions) have provided additional mechanisms of ‘brokerage’ (Gupta) facilitating transnational action across states. The longer-term sustainability of this framework (and, by extension, the prospects for a further deepening and widening of the European ‘minority rights regime’ along the lines advocated by FUEN) appears increasingly open to question at the time of writing. In the first decade and a half after 1989, the international environment in Europe appeared far more propitious to peace, stability and integration than it did between the two World Wars. While this still remains the case to a large extent, by 2013 FUEN was warning of the dangers of a ‘renationalisation of the continent’ against a background of economic crisis and burgeoning Euroscepticism. In a further depressing echo of the 1930s, the subsequent crisis over Ukraine has also highlighted the growing salience of a transnational Russian ‘kin state’ nationalism that aspires to ‘diasporize’ rather than integrate minorities and to instrumentalize ethnicity in the interests of state power.