REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

THE MUNICH AGREEMENT OF 1938 SEEN
THROUGH THE EYES OF MOHANDAS
GANDHI, JAWAHARLAL NEHRU AND OTHER
INDIAN INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICIANS
Tobias WEGER 1
The protection of minority rights belongs to the finest democratic values a State can
apply in practical politics. Historians specialized in the past of the 20 th century tend to
understand minority issues in Europe as a typical product of post World War I history.
They often try to explain that the European state system created by the international
powers at the Conferences at Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye or Trianon in 1919 and
1920 stood at the beginning of all further conflicts which resulted of unjust treatment of
minorities, especially in Eastern and East Central Europe. These historians are wrong or at
least reduce a long European development to just a few decades. Various national or ethnic
groups have always lived within the borders of European states: Germans in the South of
Denmark, Ukrainians and Lithuanians in Poland, Scots and Irish in the United Kingdom,
Hungarians and Romanians in the Ottoman Empire, to give you just a few examples. Some
liberation movements in the early modern period – the anti-Habsburg uprisings in Upper
Hungary and Transylvania from the 16 th to the 18 th centuries or the Scottish revolutions in
Great Britain – can actually been considered as a conflict of majorities and minorities.
These minorities could have an ethnic background, but they could also be defined by social,
religious or other criteria.
The juridical novelty of the 19 th and 20 th centuries is the notion of international security
systems for ethnic and national minorities living in a given state. The newly created or
restored national states at Versailles, Czechoslovakia and Poland had to sign international
guaranties for the protection of their minorities. The right to use the mother tongue in
public life, political representation and the condemnation of different forms of
discrimination are some important elements of these international treaties. Within these
states, specific laws were passed to allow minorities to create organizations, political
parties, to have their own libraries and newspapers. The practical application of these
rights could depend on many economic, social and political factors from inside as well as
from outside. Central European history of the 20 th century saw a clash of two major
political concepts. Western political philosophy was based on the idea of a social contract
between the state and its citizens, an idea that had been formed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and other thinkers of the Enlightenment. In exchange for protection granted to minority
groups by state authorities, the state could expect civilian loyalty of every member of
1 Federal Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, Oldenburg, Germany.