Ideological Fluidity of Collective National Rights

Interwar Europe was profoundly marked by the national minority question. Despite in most cases being ethnically heterogeneous, the newly-created states were all conceived as nation states. The peace treaties acknowledged this in part, obliging them to respect the rights of their minority citizens. The protection offered by this system was however based predominantly on the rights of individuals. Perceiving this as insufficient, many national minority activists pushed for more comprehensive solutions founded upon collective rights. These ranged from the culturalist models designed for liberal political settings that dominated the 1920s to the radically illiberal ones that came to the fore during the 1930s. The project looks at a variety of collective rights-base approaches emerging within the framework of interwar minorities activism in order to show the ideologically open and fluid character of collective national rights and associated concepts such as national autonomy and ethnic community. It pursues two main objectives: I. It seeks to illuminate an illiberal potential, inherent to the concept of collective rights, as it manifested during the 1930s when collective rights-based approaches ultimately came to be instrumentalized by National Socialism; II. Arguing that there is nothing essentially anti-egalitarian or authoritarian in conceding ethnic groups collective rights and using relevant examples from the same context, it simultaneously aims to show that the discussed illiberal potential should not be mistaken for inevitability. These objectives are to be pursued through closely examining public and personal writings emerging within a pan-European network of minority activists of various political leanings and national backgrounds. The project combines the approaches of intellectual history with those of conceptual history and historical study of ideologies and employs a broad transnational perspective. By focusing on the concept of collective rights and introducing the notion of ideological fluidity, the project opens up a new research perspective on interwar minority activism. Apart from their undisputable value and relevance for European history, the questions addressed in it however also echo with broader contemporary and global debates concerning the challenges of diversity accommodation and multicultural citizenship within a liberal framework. The case of interwar minority activism in Europe namely enables us to tackle the more general question on how collective rights may be thought both through liberal and illiberal lens and which circumstances and dispositions might make collective rights thinking go illiberal.