The League of Nations and National Minorities: The case of South Tyrol

Historians argue that efforts by the League of Nations to protect national minorities following the First World War might have been counterproductive. Open to abuse from ethnic minorities and irredentists in protector states, they served more to perpetuate than to solve these problems. Such a view posits that without interference from the League’s Minorities Commission, nation states and the ethnic minorities they harbored or protected, might have had better chances at finding a workable solution to overcome inter‐ethnic strife.
 
The minority conflict around the Austrian population of South Tyrol presents an opportunity to investigate this counterfactual assertion. Italy was not a signatory to the Minority Treaty and repeated appeals to Geneva from South Tyroleans were met with determined silence from the League’s Minorities Section. My paper traces various attempts by individuals and interest groups to circumvent the League’s opposition and internationalize the question of South Tyrol. At the same time I show how government officials in Germany, Austria and Italy, interested in resolving the question, worked to prevent such internationalizing of the problem.
 
I argue that it was precisely the failure to internationalize the conflict and the refusal of the League of Nations to debate or intervene on behalf of Austrians in South Tyrol, which facilitated the compromise of 1930. That year, Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Austrian Chancellor Johannes Schober signed an accord, which effectively abandoned the South Tyroleans to their fate, in return for Italian diplomatic assistance in obtaining a foreign loan for Austria.

Moderator: Alexander Semyonov (PhD, Professor, Chair, Departament of History, National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg)

Time and venue: October 22, 18.30, assembly hall,17 Promyshlennaya St.

Language of the presentation: English.