Introduction

...they think with these times while imagining they think against them...

...The status of minorities under the Ottomans was a function of a corporate structure, the "millet" system fashioned after the capture of Constantinople in 1453...

...But as empires were carved up and previously subject nationalities became independent, a fear arose—for good reasons—that the new states would be as uncharitable to their minorities as their imperial masters had been to them...

...And the United States, whose president, after the previous World War, had backed off from the language of collective minority protections, now framed matters solely as individual human rights—as if Brownshirts had shouted "Menschen 'raus" rather than "Aden 'raus...

...Transylvania was returned to Budapest in reward for backing the Axis...

...Five centuries ago, Europe conceived itself as universal Christendom...

...This was a deeply democratic movement, and France is commonly considered its historical archetype...

...But, as historian Hugh Seton-Watson has written, this was a dynasty "paralyzed by its ignorance and fear of the people whom it ruled...

...These developments provide the backdrop to this special issue of Dissent...

...Historian Elie Kedourie, discussing Mideast minorities, writes that the religion of early nineteenth-century Armenians "was not only a matter for the individual conscience, for personal and private devotions...

...Only so much fits within the covers of a single magazine, so many minorities are inevitably absent...

...Hence Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre declared in the French National Assembly in 1789, "One must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation but give everything to them as individuals, they must become citizens...

...centralizing monarchies and the rising commercial classes were their unknowing midwives...

...This sort of predicament is debated by political philosophers when they address questions of tolerance, and I won't rehearse all the arguments here...

...another, elsewhere (or even in the same country), might need cultural autonomy...

...All this departed significantly from Marxist orthodoxy...

...Imagine the difficulties in defining, let alone balancing, both minority and individual rights in light of it...

...Sometimes these supplant and sometimes they complement religious differences...

...But there is, I think, a maxim that Utopus might tender to majorities: "Treat a minority as you would want to be treated were you to find yourself in one...

...In our contemporary world, Bossuet's justification would be somewhat anachronistic...

...sometimes communities that were more compact...

...2See Patrick Thornberry, International Law and the Rights of Minorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) pp...

...This still left little place for self-conscious national minorities—one source of Ankara's inability, even today, to recognize Kurds as a distinct ethnic group (calling them, instead, "Mountain Turks...

...Consequences may range from distemper to pogroms...

...It seems a rhetorical question given all that has happened since 1516, when Utopia was written...

...The head of each community—for example, the respective patriarchs for the Armenian and Orthodox Christian millets, and the chief rabbi for the Jews—represented it to the Sultan...

...But politics doesn't tell the whole story...

...The system of minority treaties fashioned after World War I aimed to be more effective, but in a circumscribed way...

...Concurrently, everyone would, as democratic citizens, share in the country's politics as a whole...

...communitarianism, on the other hand, could use some prejudices of that sort...

...Yet the effort ought to engage the best of our humanity nowadays...

...This further alienated the already unhappy Armenians—they would suffer mass murder during World War I—and also the Arabs, among whom nationalist and secessionist sentiments had burgeoned...

...When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was debated, Moscow's ambassador called for a specific article on minorities...

...Minorities in History The issue concentrates on the present, even though I began with some historical allusions...

...Indeed, only a sense of common humanity would permit us to consider a minority as if we were in its shoes...

...Poland summarily annulled its obligations in 1934...

...This was pragmatic tolerance, compelled by circumstances...

...When the "rights of man" became the issue in the eighteenth century and "the Republic, One and Universal" became the ideal, political and cultural questions blurred...

...Our post-cold war world is both new and old and doesn't seem so well equipped to cope with its tempests, either organizationally or intellectually...

...National categories and the idea of equality before the law had, as yet, little meaning...

...Yugoslavia's calamity represents one possible consequence...

...When it came to minorities, modernity harbored a paradox...

...Now, opposing churches fought bloody wars...

...How shall we understand the genesis of"minority problems" in the West...

...by its link to social egalitarianism and political democracy...

...One's place in it depended on one's social estate, although minorities were defined chiefly in relation to the dominant creed...

...Think of the last years in the ex-USSR and in Eastern Europe, most unhappily, Yugoslavia...

...Still, Communist delegates at post-war forums defended minority rights—in principle, anyway...

...that is accorded to the racial or national majority...

...Some translations amended...

...Such theorists as Otto Bauer and Karl Renner proposed that the empire become a democratic and socialist federation in which minorities would have "national cultural autonomy" on a "personal"— 8 • DISSENT Introduction not residential or territorial—basis...

...The latter ruled by religious right, not just as head of the Islamic millet, but as caliph, titular leader of all Islam...

...A fixed rule to govern all circumstances could, I think, be applied only with considerable difficulties to this diverse world...

...enough of them (religious but also political) still grace us...

...In the Polish Minorities Treaty, the prototype for the others, we read, "Polish nationals who belong to racial, religious, or linguistic minorities shall enjoy the same treatment and security in law and in fact as the other Polish nationals...

...In a free people, language must be one and the same for all...

...emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German...

...1 am greatly indebted to and have drawn considerable material from Thornberry's study...

...Clauses concerning civil and political rights of minorities, not just religious tolerance, also appear in efforts "to extend to Eastern Europe what had become accepted in the West," though they were ineffectually implemented, as Patrick Thomberry, a scholar of international law, notes...

...During the carnage, Seton-Watson, an astute observer of Eastern and Central Europe, wrote that "if the Minorities Problem is not faced with realism and courage at the end of this war, it will be an important...

...An Austrian republic arose on its ruins...

...Moreover, if you speak to the women in our community, you will find that they concur...

...It also assumed the survival, albeit in new form, of the empire's reach...

...They always create new dynamics of Otherness—to which there is little sense saying "You are wrong...

...After the revolution of 1908, hopes that the Young Turks, who initially proclaimed French revolutionary ideals, would liberalize the empire dissipated as events took a turn reminiscent of what we saw in France...

...The nostalgia, however, rests on a myth: here, once, was a tolerant multicultural realm that, alas, was undone by nationalism...

...come modernity, the relevant categories became nation and state on one hand and the individual citizen on the other...

...Is there an alternative—a maxim that might be offered by a contemporary King Utopus, or rather Utopus the democratic (preferably social democratic) citizen...

...What if its elders, told to treat females as they would want to be treated were they to awake one morning as women, retorted: "We would take the place that tradition assigned to us...

...And that, as Jean Jaures, the great French socialist, said when confederates chastised him for defending a bourgeois captain named Dreyfus: all human rights are the business of the left...

...In any event, he failed to carry the day...

...In short, various institutional and constitutional arrangements are appropriate to some places and not to others...

...Linguistic pluralism was a feature of the ancien regime, which had defined itself famously by "One faith, one law, one king...

...I have also relied on various essays in Jack Crawford, ed., The Rights of Peoples (Oxford University Press, 1992) and, for the historical discussion, Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918-1941 (New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks, 1967...

...Migrant populations test past meanings of acculturation, posing new dilemmas of minority rights, pluralism, and tolerance...

...Intermediate forms of collective identification SUMMER • 1996 • 7 Introduction were suspect...

...Yet the champions of minority rights included regimes with their own appalling records on rights of any sort...

...Austro-Marxists also forsook the Marxist proposition that the state would "wither away...

...instead, they suggested it would endure together with national cultures in classless society...

...According to the sixteenth century jurist Michel de l'Hopital, "Division of religion and laws, not languages, sunders kingdoms...

...Finally, by defining cultural membership as personal but also endowing this person with democratic citizenship in a general sense, they incorporated an individualist dimension into the scheme...

...The democratic left has tended to be particularly attentive to socioeconomic injustices, yet we also know that economics isn't everything...

...The needs of a minority in one country might best be secured simply by (effective) equality before the law...

...This was in marked contrast to much of Christian Europe's history and it rested on religious sufferance and not any Western concept of rights...

...It sounds so reasonable five centuries later that one might forget what every commentator reminds us—that there is a word play in the title of More's little book: eutopia in ancient Greek means "good place," and thus the good place is nowhere...

...In the meantime, the most ardent petitioners to the Court were minorities with "kin-states" to back them, such as Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Hungarians...

...Rather, it is because national and ethnic identities have come to the fore...

...Since 1989, there has been considerable nostalgia for its polyglot sprawl, especially among intellectuals dismayed by some of the ugly nationalist outbursts that came after communism's fall...

...cause of another European war...

...the republic would be assimilated into Frenchness...

...Soon enough, the Sudetenland was Hitler's pretext for raping Czechoslovakia...

...After the war a new Turkey emerged, inspired by Ataturk's vision of a secular nationalist republic and shed of empire...

...He meant to permit this minority entry into the nation, but his formulation disclosed that as one prejudicial burden lifted, a new problem of intolerance was posed...

...We begin with a group of distinguished 6 • DISSENT Introduction thinkers and essayists addressing basic questions of minority rights: should there be universal standards for the treatment of minorities...

...None of these emissaries objected to Stalin's savage policies...

...To accept particularity and appreciate otherness while insisting on universality and solidarity at the same time—this is no easy matter...

...the revolution began when the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly in 1789...

...If so, should they be expressed in political as well as cultural institutions...

...The Austro-Marxists accepted the validity of national formations that Marx believed epiphenomena: the capitalist market, according to them, was to homogenize the globe, and the proletarian universal class, also a solvent of particularities, was to rise against it to create an esperanto communism...

...There was another war—a cold one, and the status of minorities in the Soviet bloc became a function of it...

...A forceful democratic impulse thus came with a homogenizing drive that easily lent itself to illiberalism...

...In it, millets (confessional communities) had farranging autonomy to run their own internal affairs (e.g...

...The emergence then of contesting Christianities posed anew basic questions of tolerance in the West...

...faith provided a glue for feudalism's decentralized, corporate society...

...Rights, for the Americans, pertained to individuals, not groups...

...While this system sharply distinguished non-Muslims from the Ummah, the community of believers, it provided, until its end in the twentieth century, for considerable tolerance...

...What if a minority demands protection but oppresses its own members...

...Millet membership was on a personal rather than a territorial basis...

...In the nineteenth century, beginning with the Treaty of Vienna, provisions for national minorities are found increasingly in international accords...

...Most likely, a nationalist Bossuet would proffer: "I have the right to persecute you because I am this way and you are different...

...Indeed, murderous religious wars broke out shortly after he wrote and they consumed Europe for a long time...

...But how should one respond to a minority that demands, perhaps rightly, special consideration in a liberal, pluralistic society and, at the same time, refuses pluralism or individuality within its own ranks...

...Mill believed free government required that nationality and state boundaries be coextensive, a rule that also guided Wilson and his collaborators...

...But we hope to illuminate their situations also, if only by comparison...

...What if, for just one example, its religion prescribes second-class status for women...

...If we turn here to a different part of the world and consider the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the contemporary Mideast, we find some interesting parallels...

...210-215...

...It implies only a "regulative idea" (I borrow Kant's term) for varying conditions...

...On the other side of the cold war, Washington's delegate retorted that regard for human rights in general was "the best solution of the problem of minorities...

...They were, as Thornberry summarizes, "not principally group centered, but ascribed rights to individuals: nationals, inhabitants, and persons belonging to racial, religious or linguistic minorities...

...sometimes minorities lived along borders that marked them off from a neighboring principality of religious compatriots...

...Myths are rarely groundless— just forgetful...

...Minority as well as national sentiments were, depending on the case, manipulated or thwarted, often in the name of "internationalism...

...132-137...

...So while it bore similarities to the millet system, their design was also different: in proposing national, not religious, autonomy...

...Since 1989, this sort of political justification has been at a premium...

...In ensuing centuries, similar patterns of majorities and minorities materialized as national states consolidated, adding ethnic or national contours...

...The reach goes far, but we have not tried to be encyclopedic...

...Nor is it a matter of "post-modernity," in which pronouncements about "eternal" verities are suspect...

...But I bring it up also to warn of the danger of reifying "difference" and celebrating it to the exclusion of common humanity...

...The UN and regional organizations have proven largely ineffectual...

...And though his own terminology tended toward collective and not just individual rights, the minority treaties that were adopted did the opposite...

...The use of treaties to protect minorities has a long lineage, going back at least to the Reformation...

...Consider the ironies...

...Yugoslavia's representative proposed that minority rights were "a condition for the enjoyment of human rights...

...else our worst could own the new millennium...

...a third, victimized by long-standing discriminatory patterns, might require political prerogatives...

...Wilson wanted the League's Covenant to obligate every signatory—not just new states—"to accord to all racial or national minorities within their several jurisdictions exactly the same treatment and security...

...Belorussia's envoy berated U.S.treatment of American Indians and Australia's of aborigines...

...Social Democratic Alternative Another minority-filled empire ended with World War I—Austria-Hungary...

...Among them, surely, are stories as compelling as those we present...

...Liberalism (partly) disables itself by its individualist prejudices...

...It could only work through the aristocracy and was unable to understand the needs or wishes of the rest of the population...

...More vulnerable minorities were reticent, for example, Jews, scattered across Europe without a kin-state...

...The Jacobins sought to standardize the national language on the basis of Parisian French...

...their rights were "fundamental human rights...

...As the century wore on (and the sultan became increasingly oppressive) Armenians grew increasingly nationalistic...

...The new regime sought to break down barriers between millets, turning members into individual subjects of the empire...

...Changing times are inevitably nervous times for minorities...

...These exchanges came just after a war in which a minority had been marked out, stalked, and slaughtered like none before...

...The republic decreed that French teachers be sent to every town "where inhabitants normally express themselves in Breton, Italian, Basque and German...

...Not that inquisitorial Believers are gone...

...Importantly, it places the onus on the majority, the stronger player...

...Notes I draw in the above passages from R. Anthony Lodge, French: From Dialect to Standard (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) pp...

...Nowa10 • DISSENT Introduction days, the bigger powers, perceiving few vital interests to be at stake for them any longer, seldom have the will to protect any besieged populations abroad—though they are sometimes prodded or shamed into doing so, often too late...

...principled acceptance of internal minorities was yet to come...

...Even had this not happened, however, a clash was probably inevitable...

...it was a rule of life regulating all social activities and all relations with the suzerain power...

...Thus the disabilities of Jews, for instance, could be relieved by conversion, not by becoming, say, Frenchmen...

...The monarchy had its reasons for being like a Tower of Babel, but in a democracy, leaving citizens ignorant of the national language and incapable of checking those in power is treason to the fatherland (la patrie...

...Even if individuals didn't live in a compact community with minority compatriots, they would still be joined to them in cultural confederation...

...True, there has been a steep decline in old-style religious persecution, but assaults on Turks in Germany, repressive laws aimed at North Africans in France, not to mention scapegoating of Mexicans and blacks by American politicians, should caution Westerners against too much self-congratulation...

...Group status in a corporate society had been the basis of premodern discrimination...

...No longer was it the older medieval problem of adjusting the status of, say, Jews or heretics or homosexuals scattered within Christendom...

...So recognition by the League of Nations was conditioned on acceptance of treaties aimed to shield minorities...

...In the end, the declaration made no provision for minorities beyond reproving discrimination.2 Some later international statements do go a little beyond this...

...An advocate of this, B. Barêre, captured the mood: Feudalism and superstition speak Breton...

...education, social welfare, personal matters such as marriage...

...the counter-revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque...

...Marx recognized that socialists had to operate within national contexts, but their cultures had no intrinsic value to him—nor to Kautsky, Luxemburg, or Lenin (who advocated the self-determination of nations, though for instrumental—anti-imperialist— reasons...

...Battered holy warriors thus conceded some license to a religious Other...

...This suggests no necessary political structures or cultural imperialism...

...But such declarations are famous for being just declarations...

...Has nowhere been the only good place for minorities...

...It was not the era of King Utopus, but of Bishop Bossuet, absolutist defender of Church and Crown, who notified foes (especially France's Protestant minority): "I have the right to persecute you because I am right and you are wrong...

...Only new states were compelled to sign them, and this was resented mightily, especially stipulations subordinating their own laws to the treaties and giving jurisdiction over disputes to the Permanent Court of International Justice...

...There was a point to them: minority problems are not solely a function of the end of the cold war or of multicultural dilemmas, however much these developments throw them into relief...

...During the cold war minorities were pawns in larger strategic games...

...So in this or that kingdom one found mixed populations—sometimes scattered, small communities...

...The minority treaties, of course, failed, and most observers ascribe this to the same reasons as the League's failure...

...They would come forth as twins...

...Then, in the second part of the issue, we present reports and meditations on minorities around the globe by writers from more than a dozen countries...

...Throughout its history, Dissent has been preoccupied with those who suffer because of inequalities, who live vulnerable lives due to circumstances not of their making...

...He asserted this in an era of religious persecution, notably of Huguenots—a minority that raised no problem of ethnicity or language, but of "one faith...

...So an Armenian was a member of his millet wherever he lived in the empire...

...That, of course, was not to be...

...In their different blends of religious, ethnic and national ingredients, they are more often than not both old and new...

...So please keep your humanist prejudices to yourself...

...When all the signposts shift (not to mention when societies experience "shock" therapies), majorities become anxious and minorities, not surprisingly, become queasy...

...So some historical orientation is useful...

...To what extent should local cultures be autonomous...

...The 1975 Helsinki Final Act also addresses minority problems, and the Council of Europe has proposed guidelines for protecting minorities...

...It was now the hour of "self-determination...

...This was a liberal idea, espoused famously by Woodrow Wilson at the Paris peace conference, but summarized some sixty years before when John Stuart Mill wrote, "One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings to choose to associate themselves...

...It was Social Democrats—the "Austro-Marxists"— who provided the most innovative approach to "the nationalities problem...

...I focus here on Europe and, to some extent, the Mideast, as I know these regions best...

...If it could not fend off minority nationalisms this was partly because it had played them off one another rather than truly liberalizing and democratizing itself...

...When Catholics and Lutherans finally agreed to mutual recognition, practical matters were resolved with a territorial principle: cuius regio, eius religio (whoever rules, imposes his religion...

...With these new citizens also came a new national "Frenchness," grounded especially in linguistic culture...

...And in the meantime, not all minorities actually quit dominions dominated by other confessions...

...The guarantor was SUMMER • 1996 • 9 Introduction to be the League of Nations, not the Powers...

...the "Jewish question" was "resolved" by mass murder...

...At the same time, a somewhat different "minority problem" has arisen in various Western societies—the challenge of multiculturalism...

...it is to misunderstand the benefit of the printing press, each printer being an elementary teacher of language and law...

...Still, these developments had a liberal axis: the citizen was conceived in individual terms...

...One wonders if Wilson considered fully the implications of a general agreement for blacks and American Indians...

...Responding to Australia and New Zealand, who were anxious about ramifications for, respectively, their aboriginal and Maori populations, Britain favored instead a series of separate treaties...

...Were you in the minority—if the prince's faith wasn't yours—you had the option to leave...

...SUMMER • 1996 • 11 14 • DISSENT...

...Nationalism, some of it quite nasty, did help bring down the Habsburgs...

...It is devoted entirely to the problems of minorities—religious, national, and ethnic—worldwide...

...In a way, this subject comes naturally to us...

...And then those who had been subjects of the crown, bound by social stratum, would become equal citizens composing a nation...

...The UN's 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says that minorities "shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to possess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language...

...Post-modernists, by fetishizing fragmentation and abjuring humanism, forsake the means to contest a nationalist Bossuet...

...However, these subjects were not to be just individuals, but Ottomans, and soon the government aimed at "Turkification...