The National Minorities M ANY members of the League Assembly have
per- sistently shown a deep concern for the welfare of those racial minorities which live in other people's countries. The ethnography of the world is a jig-saw puzzle. Whenever fresh national groupings have appeared after a war there has always been a large number of misfits—communities detached from their natural racial allegiance. It is said that the national minorities to-day amount to about 80,000,000 persons. Newspaper readers learn about these minorities from time to time when, for example, Germany objects to Germans who have become Polish citizens being deprived of their own language ; or Austria protests against the Italianizing of those who were once Austrians ; or Hungary protests against the treatment of Hungarians in Rumania ; or Bulgars lament their hard lot in Yugoslavia ; or Assy- rians and Armenians take fright at the thought of being included in the future self-governing Kingdom of Iraq.
The League Assembly always has its say on the difficult question of guaranteeing justice to the minorities. This year in the Sixth Committee of the Assembly the debate was kept going for three days. Behind this enthusiasm is, of course, the suspicion that the Council of the League, which is the guarantor of justice to the minorities, has been shirking its duty. The problem is extraordinarily difficult. For the backward races which are governed under Mandates there is, as everybody knows, the Permanent Mandates Commission to maintain a constant supervision, but there is no such body watching over the destinies of the national minorities. For this omission there is a natural, though we feel not an adequate, reason. Most of the States which have racial minorities within their borders argue that the appointment of a Permanent Minorities Commission, such as Herr Stresemann used to advocate, would mean a derogation from their sovereign- ty. The answer is surely that the supervision of the Mandates is also a derogation from sovereignty. In the practice of our modern world sovereignty has suffered so much attrition that it is not quite recognizable for what it used to be. Yet the academic conception of an undimmed sovereignty is still an hallucination in many brains. If only the Council had been able to exercise its guar- dianship over the minorities with more publicity it might have been saved at least that part of the criticism which has been misdirected. The Council, however, has conducted its business with consistent secrecy. There is nothing very surprising in this, for nearly every Member-State of the Council has felt itself under some compulsion of loyalty to its fellow Sovereign States. The general sense has been that if the Council encouraged unnecessary prying into the affairs of admittedly independent States there would be little hope of keeping the peace. Influenced by this fear, the Council has habi- tually inquired into the grievances of the minorities through a Committee of Three, the members of which apparently report to the individual members of the Council, but not officially or publicly to the Council as a whole.
For the rest, the Council receives its information in the form of petitions sent to it—but not all laid before it, since there is a considerable sifting—by the minorities. It must be admitted that the petition system has led to a good deal of disguised propaganda. But surely a Permanent Minorities Commission could do exactly what the Council wants—save it from the false dressed up as the true.
The work of the Council may be very much better done than some members of the Assembly suppose, but the awkward fast is that there is no accurate means of knowing. In the debate of the past few days at Geneva M. Briand and representatives of the Little Entente firmly refused, for the reasons we have indicated, to tolerate any notion of a Permanent Minorities Com- mission. Neither Germany nor Great Britain took the other side definitely, and the proposal cannot therefore be regarded as practical politics for the present. It is an ideal, however, by no means to be forgotten. Mean- while it would be satisfactory if there could be more publicity. Perhaps the best means of bringing this about would be to ask the Permanent Court of Inter- national Justice to give a ruling upon the precise functions of the Council, as these are continually under dispute.
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