Workshop: “Regulating Minority Rights: Historical Legacies and International Law”

July 9 and 10, 2003

View the workshop program in PDF (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).

The workshop “Regulating Minority Rights: Historical Legacies and International Law,” held at the Dubnow Institute on July 9 and 10, 2003, dealt with the topic of what can be called “Jewish diplomacy” within the framework of the non-governmental minority movement after World War I. One of its general aims was to analyze the specific role of Jewish protagonists within the broader context of minority rights, claimed politically as well as substantiated theoretically, in the states that emerged on the map of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe after the breakdown of the multinational empires. In conjunction with this, the workshop also sought to shed light on the political legacy of the theories of national autonomy that were developed by several Jewish and non-Jewish protagonists of political thought at the end of the nineteenth century such as Simon Dubnow, Karl Renner, Otto Bauer and others. The interaction in the political sphere of Jewish defenders of minority rights with representatives of other influential national minorities in the interwar period (in particular, the Baltic Germans) were discussed during the workshop as well. Expanding outwards from this interwar perspective, the conference also examined the tradition of Jewish lawyers contributing to the concept of minority rights and general human rights in international law up through the decades following the Second World War.

The workshop was opened on the evening of July 9 by the director of the Dubnow Institute, Dan Diner, who gave an introductory lecture on Jewish experiences with regard to theoretical and institutional constructions of minority rights. In this context, he stressed the peculiar biographical and political background of most protagonists of Jewish diplomacy, born and bred as subjects of the great multinational empires, and who experienced their breakdown as well as the creation of their successor states after the First World War. In order to assess the political activities of those “Jewish diplomats,” Diner said, one has to be aware of their “imperial background,” which clearly influenced their concepts of national autonomy and minority rights.

The next morning, sessions began with Martti Koskenniemi (Helsinki), who presented his views on Hersch Lauterpacht, a person he dealt with in his famous book The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. Once an active Zionist in his youth, Hersch Lauterpacht was, as Koskenniemi pointed out, undoubtedly the most important English-speaking international lawyer of the twentieth century. It was he who almost single-handedly developed international law from a rather esoteric and marginal “philosophical” occupation into a respected part of jurisprudence and legal education.

Gabriel Motzkin (Jerusalem) gave a talk on Leo Motzkin, the leading political figure of Jewish minority diplomacy in the interwar period and his own grandfather. He closely analysed the development of the concept of minority rights in Leo Motzkin’s political thought. In particular, he stressed the relation between Motzkin’s claiming a Zionist concept of non-religious Jewish identity and his being committed to more general principles of defending minority rights with regard to the restrictive policies adopted by most of the newly founded nation-states in the interwar period – an interdependence which was absolutely fundamental in the context of Motzkin’s political theories.

Gabriel Motzkin’s presentation was followed by that of John Hiden (Bradford) on the Baltic-German lawyer and politician Paul Schiemann. Schiemann was a member of the Latvian parliament. Together with Leo Motzkin, he played a major role in the European Congress of Nationalities, which was established in 1925. Schiemann ultimately developed a theoretical model of the “anational” state, thus seeking to reconcile the claim for national and cultural autonomy of minority groups with the existence of the newly founded nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe.

Next, Verena Dohrn (Göttingen) presented her thoughts on Simon Dubnow’s theory of Jewish national autonomy within the framework of the tsarist Russian Empire. Dorhn emphasized that Dubnow’s concept of Jewish autonomy was not confined to claiming collective rights for the regions of the empire with a more or less considerable Jewish population. It was also meant to comprise a certain degree of individual autonomy for Jews throughout the whole empire, thus reflecting the territorial dispersion of tsarist Russia’s Jewish population. To a certain extent, she said, Dubnow’s theory of Jewish national autonomy resembled the concept of “personal autonomy of minorities” that was developed by Otto Bauer and Karl Renner with regard to the Habsburg Empire.

After lunch, Claudia Kraft (Warsaw) gave a talk about Rafal Lemkin, a famous international lawyer of Jewish-Polish origin. Influenced by his own personal experiences in 1930s Poland, Lemkin turned his attention during the interwar period towards the universal legal goods and human rights that were superior to the sovereignty of nation-states. His main aim was, as Kraft pointed out, to establish a system of legal protection for minority groups, especially those in danger of becoming victims of state-authorized violence. Above all, however, Lemkin became famous as the main initiator of the Genocide Convention, adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and valid since 1951 (in fact, he was the first to use, both publicly and politically, the term “genocide”).

Next, Jan H. Boettger (Bochum) demonstrated the commitment of Henry Morgenthau senior, a man of German-Jewish origin who was American ambassador in Constantinople from 1913 to 1916, to documenting the murder of most of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and 1916. While the deportation of the Armenians was going on, Morgenthau actively sought to prevent the leading figures of the Young Turkish government from carrying out their plans: he also informed the US government about the horrible events, thereby expressing his discontent with the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of another country. Morgenthau’s most important achievement as an American diplomat was undoubtedly the opening of some channels for non-governmental humanitarian aid in the course of the First World War. After the war, he continued his struggle for minority rights – e.g., as chairman of the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission, established by the League of Nations in 1923.

Jacques Picard (Basel) in turn presented the political biography of the Swiss-Jewish international lawyer Paul Guggenheim. Concerned about the fate of the Jewish minorities in the newly founded states of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, Guggenheim actively supported the idea of creating an efficient system of collective minority protection and of making ethnic and national minorities a direct object of international law instead of focusing solely on individual civil rights. As it is widely known, such a system of minority protection did exist in the interwar period, although it did not work too well in political practice and proved to be rather ineffective. When the United Nations Organization was founded, however, this system was abolished and replaced by the general Declaration of Human Rights – a guarantee which applies to the individual freedom of human beings, but is not based on the thought of collective national rights.

The final presentation of the workshop was that of Hildrun Glass (Munich), who spoke about the German-Jewish controversy at the annual session of the European Congress of Nationalities in 1933. This was a crucial event in the history of the European minority movement which, in fact, put an end to the German-Jewish cooperation that had characterized the work of the Congress since 1925. Utilizing a rich archival base, Glass described the efforts of the leading Jewish delegates (Leo Motzkin and Emil Margulies above all) to have representatives of other minority groups within Germany condemn the policy of the Nazi government towards the Jews. Although many of these groups did not sympathize with Hitler’s government, despite some changes made to their leadership and composition in the early 1930s, the German delegation as a whole remained unconvinced. Instead, the Congress adopted a rather vague declaration. This, in turn, prompted the Jewish delegation to leave the Congress and brought about an incurable split in the European minority movement (although the Congress still existed until 1938).

The workshop was concluded by a lively final discussion, which dealt mainly with the terms “national minority,” “minority movement,” and “Jewish diplomacy,” thus deepening the common theoretical background of what had been presented during the talks.

- submitted by Frank Nesemann

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