Chapter 5 Negotiating Equality: Minority Protection in the Versailles Settlement

Although they are not considered the legacy precedents of human rights today, the interwar minorities treaties contributed to developing the legal standard of equality before the law, which would become the keystone of the international human rights regime after the Second World War. The minority protection standards were also the first international rights that were embedded in an international organization. This regime is therefore useful in providing us with an understanding of the origins of later human rights treaties, since the notion of equality they contained is not dissimilar to that outlined in the Universal Declaration and subsequent international instruments of a binding nature.1 This chapter reviews the travaux préparatoires of the interwar minorities treaties, which reflect a broad concern for equality and non-discrimination. Its central proposition is that the international protection of minorities was primarily designed to develop a liberal-democratic agenda premised on equality before the law in order to allay the concerns of national minorities in Eastern Europe. This cause was supported by United States President Woodrow Wilson, whose democratic outlook set the tone of the 1919 Paris peace conference. The first section of the chapter begins by presenting the plight of minorities during the Great War and surveys the war aims of the Great Powers in relation to this problem. It emerges that minority protection was regarded as instrumental in achieving the Allied objectives of spreading democracy and fulfilling nationalist aspirations. The role of self-determination in reconciling the contradictions of these competing notions is also explained through a discussion of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and their connection to the protection of national minorities. Chapter 5