[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Interwar Diplomacy 1967-1973
In the interwar years, however, the international community proved strikingly reluctant to draw on the Greco-Turkish population exchange as a precedent. It was not emulated until Munich and the start of Hitler's own policy of repatriating the ethnic Germans from the South Tyrol, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. Before that, in the heyday of Wilsonian liberalism, the minorities policy with which the League of Nations came to be associated, and which seems to me to remain an experiment of abiding interest, involved keeping minorities where they were and offering them the protection of international law, rather than uprooting and resettling them elsewhere.
The idea of protecting minorities by law emerged rather belatedly during World War I. The sudden collapse of the great empires of Central and Eastern Europe caught most policymakers by surprise. History seemed to have vindicated the dreamers of a "New Europe" - whether it was Wilson himself with his dangerously vague principle of national self-determination, crusaders for oppressed nationalities like Robert Seton-Watson and Arnold Toynbee, or national leaders such as Masaryk and Paderewski. (Rosen, Robyn L.)
Similar doubts were forcefully expressed by Jewish lobbying groups in both Washington and London. Ever since the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, they had tried to alert the Great Powers to the dangers that "half-crazed nationalists" posed to ethnic minorities and international stability in southeastern Europe. During World War I, two national movements proved their point. The first was the Turkish attempt to wipe out the Armenians, which unfolded in all its horror in 1915 and led to the murder of between eight hundred thousand and 1.3 million people.
This was perhaps the first example of the "war of extermination" that the British scholar Arnold Toynbee saw as the result of the extension of the principle of nationalism to the multi-confessional tapestry of the Ottoman Empire. On the heels of the Armenian genocide came the struggle for Poland in 1918-1920......
