Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference Of 1919 by Smith Leonard V.;

Author:Smith, Leonard V.; [Smith, Leonard V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

4

The “Unmixing” of Peoples

Implicating “the people” in their own identification had vastly complicated territoriality at the Paris Peace Conference. The Supreme Council’s claim of sovereignty over borders in the lands of the defeated multinational empires rested, at least in part, on its claim to be building a more democratic world. Preserving that sovereignty remained a preoccupation of the Council. Someone, after all, still needed to figure out who “the people” actually were. The conference had two broad choices—adjusting boundaries to suit peoples, or adjusting peoples to suit boundaries. In a nutshell, the Council turned to the latter when and where it could not accomplish the former.

This chapter examines four varieties of population policies—plebiscites, minority treaties, racial classification of mandate populations, and “population exchanges.” All these policies sought to identify peoples. Under plebiscites, peoples could supposedly “self-determine.” But every decision on where to hold a plebiscite also constituted a territorial decision, which demarcated borders within which voters would be presented with a choice. Plebiscites also provided only preselected categories of identity. Minority treaties bracketed certain aspects of identity, notably religion and ethnicity, and placed them under supranational protection through the League of Nations. But this meant politically significant differentiations among citizens within successor states. For this reason, all of the successor states ferociously opposed the minority treaties. These treaties also produced a hierarchy of states, in which some states had their national sovereignty circumscribed by international protections, and others not.

The sovereignty of the conference over “unmixing” peoples had two particularly blunt manifestations. The system of “A-,” “B-,” and “C-” class mandates created a racial categorization of peoples pure and simple. But these identities followed the requirements of imperial politics. Peoples were either more or less “civilized” and either more or less suitable for eventual independence depending on how vigorously the mandatory power had sought direct annexation. Population exchanges were the most brutal of population policies. They imposed “national” identities with no input from the affected populations, and were carried out by physical force or the threat thereof. Indeed, for that reason, the conference went to some trouble to keep population exchanges at arm’s length. But in the end, population exchanges simply amounted to “national self-determination” carried to one logical conclusion. The “self” by that point had little to do with choices made by the peoples in question.

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