Ethnic Diversity and the Nation

State

This book explores a largely forgotten legacy of multicultural

political thought and practice from within Eastern Europe and
examines its relevance to post-­Cold War debates on state and
nationhood. Featuring a Foreword by former UK Home Secretary
Charles Clarke, it weaves theory and practice to challenge estab-
lished understandings of the nation state.
Eastern Europe is still too often viewed through the prism of
ethnic conflict, which overlooks the region’s positive contribution
to modern debates on the political management of ethno-­cultural
diversity, and towards the construction of a united Europe beyond
the nation state. Based on extensive archival research in Estonia,
Latvia, Germany, Russia, as well as the League of Nations
Archive in Geneva, this book explores this neglected multicultural
legacy and assesses its significance in the post-­Cold War era,
which has seen the reappearance of national cultural autonomy
laws in several states of Eastern Europe.
Ethnic Diversity and the Nation State is invaluable reading for
students and scholars of political science, history, sociology and
European studies, and also for policymakers and others interested
in minority rights and ethnic conflict regulation.

David J. Smith is Professor of History and Politics at the Univer-

sity of Glasgow, UK.

John Hiden is Emeritus Professor of European History, Bradford

University, UK.
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Ethnic Diversity and the
Nation State
National cultural autonomy revisited

David J. Smith and John Hiden

First published 2012
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 David J. Smith and John Hiden
The right of David J. Smith and John Hiden to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data
Smith, David J. (David James), 1968–
Ethnic diversity and the nation state : national cultural
autonomy revisited / David J Smith and John Hiden.
p. cm. – (Routledge innovations in political theory; 43)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Europe, Eastern–Politics and government–1918–1945.
2. Multiculturalism–Europe, Eastern–History. 3. Cultural
pluralism–Europe, Eastern–History. 4. Minorities–Legal
status, laws, etc.–Europe, Eastern–History. 5. Nation-state.
6. Baltic States–Politics and government. 7. Congress of
European Nationalities–History. I. Hiden, John. II. Title.
JN96.A38M575 2012
305.800947–dc23 2011047197
ISBN: 978-0-415-69690-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-11832-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents

Foreword viii
Preface xii

1 Nation, state and minority in modern Europe 1

2 Voices in the wilderness? 9

3 The Baltic arena 26

4 The practice of autonomy 46

5 Nationalities in congress 70

6 The new nationalist wave 92

7 Cultural autonomy: a new chapter? 106

Notes 122
Archival references 144
Bibliography 147
Index 159
Foreword

One of the greatest political and social challenges of our times

remains how to address nationalist feelings and sentiment in a
way that does not result in violent and destructive conflict. In
Europe today, the examples of the former Yugoslavia, the Basque
country, Northern Ireland, Corsica and, in a rather different way,
Belgium, Catalonia, Scotland and Wales all offer a reminder that
nationalism remains a potent political force.
However, in the twentieth century the challenges were far
greater. From 1848 onwards, nationalist feelings had expressed
themselves powerfully, notably in the enormous Austro-­
Hungarian and Russian empires, where the nationalist aspiration
was often progressive and forward-­looking.
The immediate cause of the First World War was the assassina-
tion in 1914 in Sarajevo of Archduke Ferdinand by the Bosnian
Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip. The unsatisfactory Versailles set-
tlement strengthened nationalist forces, notably in Germany, and
led indirectly to the Second World War. And in its turn the
Potsdam settlement legitimized the smothering Soviet blanket over
central and Eastern Europe, which suppressed the many national
identities that are now finding their expression after the collapse
of the Soviet system.
Of course, throughout this period an enormous range of politi-
cal thinkers and ideologists wrestled with the question of how to
deal with nationalities. The traditional historic view was that
nationality should be dealt with through the Western nation state
principle which followed the model of countries like Britain,
France, Germany, Italy, even the USA, where a traditional nation
state had steadily evolved through an often difficult and bloody
historical process that lasted centuries.
 Foreword   ix
This thinking underlay the Versailles settlement, but really was
difficult to apply in practice in the far more complicated inherit-
ance of the Russian and Austro-­Hungarian empires.
David Smith and John Hiden’s exciting and interesting book
looks at the ways in which this debate evolved both in theory and
in practice. They focus particularly on the principle of non-­
territorial cultural autonomy or national cultural autonomy,
which was first elaborated in depth by the Marxist social demo-
cratic political theorists Karl Renner (from 1899) and Otto Bauer
(from 1907) who were very much informed by the experience of
the Austro-­Hungarian Empire.
Renner and Bauer regarded ethnicity and nationality as inde-
pendent factors in social development, not simply as contingent
on economic class. They therefore argued that any new political
regime had to take account of national demands of different
ethnic groups and minorities. They understood that the ambition
for each nation to have their own state was not a practical aspira-
tion in the complex ethnically mixed environment of central and
eastern Europe without deep conflict and human suffering.
This outlook led directly to the need for procedures to protect
ethnic minorities, which were instituted by the new League of
Nations. However, these procedures were still founded in the tra-
ditional Western nation state model.
The national cultural autonomy approach of Renner and Bauer
found little general application. The main exceptions during the
1920s were the newly established Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania. They had a striking willingness to embrace this new,
idealistic but still comparatively novel and unproven approach. For
example, in 1925 the Estonian government passed a law on the cul-
tural autonomy of minorities, following which the Jewish Cultural
Council was elected in 1926. This was disbanded only after the
Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940. This cultural autonomy
allowed full control of education and so, from 1926, Hebrew began
to replace Russian in the Jewish public school in Tallinn.
The global Jewish community saw the significance of cultural
autonomy and so the Jewish National Endowment Keren Kajamet
presented the Estonian government with a certificate of gratitude.
In 1936, the Jewish Chronicle reported:

Estonia is the only country in Eastern Europe where neither

the Government nor the people practice any discrimination
x   Foreword
against Jews and where Jews are left in peace . . . the cultural
autonomy granted to Estonian Jews ten years ago still holds
good, and Jews are allowed to lead a free and unmolested life
and fashion it in accord with their national and cultural
principles.

The establishment of the European Nationalities Congress in

1925 sought to promote this approach and directly challenged the
fixation with unitary, culturally homogenous nation states, which,
for example, had been expressed by Joseph Stalin. His Marxism
and the National Question in 1913 defined (at page 307) the
nation as ‘an historically formed, stable community of people,
united by community of language, of territory, of economic life,
and of psychological make-­up, which expresses itself in commu-
nity of culture’.
I found Smith and Hiden’s focus on the Baltic experience of the
1920s particularly interesting. My wife’s grandfather, August
Maramaa, was a social democrat and the mayor of the Estonian
town of Viljandi for most of the period between the two world
wars where he sought to apply this philosophy. He was taken to
Siberia in 1940 where he died – as did his wife and many of his
family – victims of Stalin’s approach to ‘the nationality question’.
The detailed analysis offered by Smith and Hiden has a great
deal to offer to modern policymakers trying to find practical solu-
tions to these difficult and complex issues. Chapter 7 of the book
sets out some of the ways in which these historic ideas resonate
today.
As we look to the future within our globalized world in which
individual identity is ever more important, it is the time to take
forward the ideas of Renner and Bauer to modern times.
In recent decades the enormous movements of people, the
process of economic and political change and the growth of a
world media have significantly weakened the traditional nation
state. Terrorism has raised people’s fears to a new level and
helped open the way to far-­right, neo-­fascist parties in Europe, all
of them based on a backward-­looking and inverted version of
national identity.
I admire the work of Professor Amartya Sen, whose book Iden-
tity and Violence sets out a full analysis of the complex web of
identities which each of us possesses. He starts from the obvious
point that every individual has a vast range of identities, for
 Foreword   xi
example gender and sexuality, race, faith, parental background,
profession/occupation, residency, age and so on. Nationality is
one of the identities on this list, but only one.
From that it follows that each individual, for themselves, makes
a choice between these identities and how much weight and prior-
ity to give them in their own lives. Everyone has to be able to
make that choice freely for themselves and has the right not to be
categorized in our whole lives by only one or perhaps two of our
identities, for example predominantly by our nationality. It is not
the case that everyone of a particular nationality has the same
motivations; they do not.
Our political and social systems should accept that it is usual
for people to have a range of identities, which include nationality,
that individuals must be able to prioritize their own identities in
accordance with their own lives and that no one should categorize
you by just one of your identities alone.
I believe that these principles are the natural extension of the
ideas of national cultural autonomy whose historical substance
David Smith and John Hiden have charted so interestingly in this
book. I am sure that it will help promote public understanding of
the ways in which this approach could be given effect in the
modern world.
Rt Hon. Charles Clarke
Preface

‘One of the difficulties of the history of ideas is that names are

more permanent than things. Institutions change, but the terms
used to describe them remain the same.’1 Alfred Cobban’s words
perfectly encapsulate the problem of writing about the nation
state, a concept formed in the very specific conditions of late
eighteenth-­century Western Europe and North America. The
nation state was classically defined in terms of congruence
between a territorial state on the one hand and, on the other, a
sovereign national community conceived as having a single homo-
geneous culture.
Few living within longer established European nation states,
such as Britain and France, could meaningfully affirm these prin-
ciples today in a world increasingly shaped by the processes of
globalization. The notion of the unitary, indivisibly sovereign
nation state has found itself challenged simultaneously from
above by European integration and from below by the rise of
regionalist movements. The migration of populations and its
attendant intermingling of different peoples, meanwhile, has
raised additional questions about how best to accommodate
ethno-­cultural diversity within existing state structures.
In seeking answers few would immediately think of looking
towards central and Eastern Europe. All too often this region is
viewed through the prism of the ethnic conflicts that defined it so
markedly during the interwar period and which to some extent
have been replicated after the fall of communism. Indeed, the
whole thrust of post-­communist ‘transition’ in central and Eastern
Europe has been about imposing Western political and societal
templates – paradoxically, at a time when such templates are them-
selves increasingly open to question and, therefore, redefinition.
 Preface   xiii
Those policymakers seeking to graft Western European state
models onto the region seem until recently to have been compara-
tively unaware of central and Eastern Europe’s own positive con-
tribution to modern debates on the political management of
ethno-­cultural diversity. They thus overlook the experiences and
insights of an entire generation of political leaders who devoted
their lives to the pursuit of realizing a democratic multicultural
vision of nation and statehood based on the principle of shared
territorial space. It was to explore this forgotten legacy that we
devised and conducted the joint Arts and Humanities Research
Council (AHRC)-funded research project, ‘Ending nationalism?
The quest for cultural autonomy in interwar Europe’ (2003–2008,
ref. 16232), on which this book is based.
At the centre of our investigation was the principle of non-­
territorial cultural autonomy, also referred to as national cultural
autonomy (hereafter NCA or cultural autonomy). This concept
was first elaborated in depth by the social democratic political
theorists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer within the context of the
late Austro-­Hungarian Empire. Unlike earlier Marxist thinkers,
Renner and Bauer did not view ethnicity and nationality as purely
contingent on class-­based economic relations, but as independent
factors in social development. From this perspective, accommoda-
tion of the emerging national demands of subject ethnicities
within the Empire was central to any proposed reform of the
political order. The Austro-­Marxists were, however, implacably
opposed to the Western nation state principle then starting to gain
currency within the Habsburg lands. They understood that in the
complex ethnically mixed environment of central and Eastern
Europe, the mantra ‘for each nation a state’ would be impossible
to realize – impossible that is, without untold bloodshed and
human suffering.
Renner and Bauer’s point of departure therefore became the
‘personal principle’, which holds that ‘totalities of persons are
divisible only according to personal, not territorial characteris-
tics’.2 As part of a federalist political reform of the Empire, they
argued, each national group should be given the opportunity to
establish its own cultural self-­government. The remit of this body
would encompass the entire territory of the Habsburg state and
would entail responsibility for organizing schooling in the relevant
national language as well as other cultural matters specific to the
nationality in question.
xiv   Preface
Cultural autonomy was piloted at a local level during the final
years of the Habsburg Empire and also became highly influential
within the neighbouring western regions of Tsarist Russia. War
and revolution, however, soon brought about the complete col-
lapse of these multinational states. Thereafter, Renner and Bauer’s
ideas were largely disregarded within the grand restructuring of
European political space that took place during 1918–1923, para-
doxically at a time when many millions of individuals fell into the
category of national minority as a result of new states forming.
The minority protection procedures instituted by the new
League of Nations acknowledged the difficulties of consolidating
those new and enlarged states established under the peace settle-
ment. However, these procedures were informed by Western state
models, leaving little space for the implementation of the multina-
tional vision of Renner and Bauer. The only exceptions were to be
found in those new post-­imperial states that were formed outwith
the provisions of the Paris peace treaties. Foremost in taking up
the thinking of Renner and Bauer during the 1920s were the
newly established Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Their willingness to embrace a still comparatively novel and
untested approach to state–society relations is striking.
It was for this reason that our research project focused heavily
on the formative years of those three states and on Estonia and
Latvia in particular. Their practical application of cultural auton-
omy inspired a debate that went far beyond the confines of the
eastern Baltic region to the very heart of questions about the
future of what was then optimistically termed the New Europe.
While accepting the need to work within the new territorial
boundaries established after the war, liberal national minority
activists from the Baltic states nevertheless sought to look beyond
the new nation state framework. Their work was critically impor-
tant in bringing together like-­minded individuals throughout
Europe in a new transnational organization, the European
Nationalities Congress, founded in the autumn of 1925. This ini-
tiative took the original ideas of Renner and Bauer and sought to
adapt them to the new conditions of post-­war Europe. In this way
it directly challenged the fixation with unitary, indissolubly sover-
eign and culturally homogenous nation states – a concept contrib-
uting in large measure to the outbreak of a second generalized
conflict in Europe only 20 years after the First World War had
ended.
 Preface   xv
Telling the story of the 1920s European Nationalities Congress
and the Baltic experiments that inspired it is both interesting and
important from a purely historical standpoint, given the neglect in
existing historiography of the liberal and multicultural heritage of
central and Eastern Europe. Beyond this the interwar quest for
cultural autonomy has a relevance to wholly contemporary Euro-
pean developments and debates. Since the fall of communism in
central and Eastern Europe, new laws based on the principle of
non-­territorial cultural autonomy have been adopted or discussed
in Hungary, Estonia, Russia, Romania and a range of other coun-
tries in the region. During the early stages of our own research in
February 2005, we were invited to Bucharest to brief ministers,
members of parliament and officials on Estonia’s historic model
of cultural autonomy, as part of discussions around the Roma-
nian government’s draft law on national minorities. This was part
of a project conducted by the European Centre for Minority
Issues in Flensburg, Germany and sponsored by the UK Foreign
and Commonwealth Office.3
The Romanian visit gave rise to further joint academic–­
practitioner seminars on cultural autonomy during 2006–2007.
The first of these took place in Glasgow in July 2006 and involved
delegates from the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe,
and the government of Romania. Additional funding from the
AHRC pilot non-­academic-user dissemination initiative enabled
us to hold a round table, again in Glasgow, in January 2007. This
included represent­atives of the Organization for Security and Co-­
operation in Europe (OSCE) and the governments of Hungary
and Armenia. In May of the same year we organized a session on
cultural autonomy (‘The re-­emergence of an old model’) in
Zagreb, Croatia, in conjunction with the Venice Commission,
under the patronage of the President of Croatia and in coopera-
tion with the country’s Ministry of European Affairs and Euro-
pean Integration and the University of Zagreb. In his introductory
address to the seminar, the Secretary of the Venice Commission,
Gianni Buquicchio, stressed the value of assessing ‘the real prac-
tical significance in modern Europe of this model’. While noting
the particular relevance of cultural autonomy for the East Euro-
pean countries he also cited the application of the model in
Belgium.4 More generally, discussions at these seminars raised
interesting further questions about the potential relevance of the
ideas of Renner and Bauer for current debates on multiculturalism
xvi   Preface
within Western Europe, North America and indeed the wider
world.
Piecing together the quest for cultural autonomy in interwar
Europe entailed prolonged periods of work in archives and librar-
ies in Estonia, Latvia, Russia, Switzerland and Germany. Particu-
lar thanks are due to: all of the staff at the Estonian State Archive
in Tallinn for their efficient and friendly assistance over several
visits; Valters Šč  erbinskis of the Latvian State Historical Archive,
Riga; Bernhadine Pejovic of the League of Nations Archive,
Geneva; Vladimir Korotaev and Nataliia Kolganova of the
Russian State Historical Archive, Moscow; and Christopher and
Elena Hill for their practical help and support during visits to
Moscow. Peter Wörster of the Herder Institut, Marburg helped us
to access additional items from the invaluable collection of private
papers held there. He also first brought to our attention the fact
that Ewald Ammende’s personal papers from his early years are
held at the Russian State Historical Archive in Moscow. Andreas
Lawaty and Joachim Tauber not only gave us access to the excel-
lent research library of the Nordost Institut in Lüneburg, but also
provided us with a congenial writing space during several very
enjoyable visits. Both have taken a keen interest in our project
from the start and participated in the project seminar held in
Glasgow during summer 2006.
We are pleased to acknowledge the financial support of the UK
Arts and Humanities Research Council for this project, including
the additional funds provided for the various joint academic–
practitioner events towards the end. The Department of Central
and East European Studies and, latterly, the UK Language-­based
Area Studies Centre for Russian and Central and East European
Studies at the University of Glasgow also provided additional
support towards travel and arranging project seminars.
Project seminars and other conferences attended during the
course of the research provided us with valuable additional
insights into our work. We are especially grateful to all who par-
ticipated in the two joint academic­–practitioner events held at the
University of Glasgow in July 2006 and January 2007 and in the
subsequent Universities for Democracy session co-­organized with
the Council of Europe Venice Commission in Zagreb in May
2007. Their comments, particularly those of two experts on
liberal multiculturalism, Ephraim Nimni and Will Kymlicka,
proved most helpful. Thanks also to Karl Cordell for helping to
 Preface   xvii
arrange and later co-­editing the publication that arose from the
2006 joint seminar, first in the form of a special issue of Ethno­
politics and later as an edited volume.
Panels outlining aspects of the research were also organized at
the annual convention of the Association for the Study of Nation-
alities (2004) and the five-­yearly World Congress of the Interna-
tional Committee for Central and East European Studies (2005).
In addition, papers were delivered at conferences and symposia in
Glasgow, Belfast, Klaipeda, London and Tartu, as well as at the
Roundtable Conference on Cultural Autonomy in February 2008
in Shrivenham, co-­hosted by the Defence Academy of the United
Kingdom and the New Security Foundation. Of the many col-
leagues with whom we have worked during the project, we would
particularly like to acknowledge the value of our discussions with
Martyn Housden of the University of Bradford, Leonidas Donskis
of Vytautas Magnus University, and Vytautas Petronis, who held
an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Glasgow
during 2009–2010 and is at the time of writing a Fellow at the
Herder Institut, Marburg.
Researching and writing this book has entailed frequent periods
of absence from home over several years. David Smith wishes to
thank his wife Sanna and daughter Anni for their support and for-
bearance during this time. John Hiden, as always, has drawn on
the selfless support and good company of his wife, Juliet.
David Smith and John Hiden
1 November 2011
1 Nation, state and minority in
modern Europe

The concept of national minority is inextricably linked to the

emergence of the modern state and the rise of nationalism as an
ideology and political movement. All collective national identities
are based to varying degrees on ethno-­cultural as well as civic
components and the modern nation state project has typically
aspired to make national space congruent with political space.1
This in turn has held implications for the status of those residents
whose cultural characteristics mark them out as distinct from the
dominant ethno-­cultural core within the state.2
In the western part of Europe, unitary centralized states were
already taking shape prior to the age of nationalism. Over a long
period of time these states ironed out many of the pre-­existing
ethnic and regional differences amongst their populations and
moulded relatively coherent national identities, rooted in shared
institutions and a single official language of administration, edu-
cation and social communication.3 Within this context, the term
‘minority’ became applicable mainly to new migrant populations,
while minority rights were treated as a matter of ensuring freedom
from discrimination on ethnic grounds.4 That new immigrant
minorities would assimilate into the ‘common core’ or dominant
societal culture was taken as read.
The Western European model of state- and nation-­building has,
however, undergone significant change during recent decades.
Greater tolerance and recognition of cultural diversity are now
acknowledged as important building blocks in the construction of
integrated political communities. This understanding has involved,
inter alia, according varying degrees of public recognition to the
distinct cultures of migrant groups.5 Numerous well-­established
Western democracies have also had to contend with new or
2   Nation, state and minority in modern Europe
resurgent movements in the name of more historically rooted
minority groups laying claim to sovereignty over particular terri-
torial sub-­regions of the state. As a result many governments have
made moves in the direction of territorial devolution and the rec-
ognition of minority languages. Thus, after having once deemed
ethnicity as irrelevant, Western liberal democracies have found
themselves confronted with the ‘dilemma of ethno-­cultural diver-
sity’ – how to ensure equal treatment and adequate cultural rec-
ognition for different ethnicities without undermining societal
cohesion.6
In central and Eastern Europe, by contrast, with its long history
of mixed settlement, the political management of multiculturalism
has been a central preoccupation from the very outset of the
modern state-­building process. Here, nationalism as an ideology
and political movement took hold within the context of empire.
Driven by disaffected new intellectual strata amongst the subject
peoples, it was grounded in identification with an ethnic commu-
nity rather than with established political institutions.7 The
nationalist programme was, therefore, concerned not only with
achieving civic equality, but also with maintaining the cultural
distinctiveness of one’s particular group, often in the face of
growing efforts to erode that identity from above. In the case of
larger, more compactly settled populations, nationalist demands
were soon linked to particular territories, which, however impre-
cisely defined, were deemed to be the national homeland of the
group in question. This territorial frame of reference would later
become central to the new political order arising from the rapid
and largely unanticipated collapse of the central and East Euro-
pean empires during 1914–1923.
The Bolshevik regime that took power in Russia from 1917 was
quite prepared to crush separatist national movements in the name
of proletarian solidarity. Nevertheless, Bolshevik leaders had
already realized that they would also need to accord at least some
recognition to prior demands for national self-­determination if
communism was to consolidate its hold over much of the former
Tsarist Empire. In keeping with Josef Stalin’s 1913 definition of
nation as a territorially based community, the new Soviet state was
structured along ethno-­territorial lines.8 In the process, the new
government was trying at the same time to underscore a symbolic
break with the Great Russian chauvinism of the Tsarist past.
This territorial approach went some way towards accommodating
 Nation, state and minority in modern Europe   3
demands for self-­determination made on behalf of larger more
compactly settled national groups. It did not, however, cater for
more dispersed communities, most notably the Jews.
The new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) established
in 1922 also fell far short of being a genuinely democratic multi-
national federation. While the federal structure ultimately endured
throughout the entire seven decades of Soviet power, it was not
necessarily understood by its creators as anything other than a
transitional expedient in the construction of a transcendent Soviet
identity. The dictum ‘national in form, socialist [read Soviet] in
content’ betrayed an agenda in which the expression of cultural
pluralism was strictly subordinated to the goal of maintaining
tight centralized control by a single party. This state of affairs
intensified once Stalin had consolidated his power base in the late
1920s. Autonomous-­minded party elites in the various national
republics were purged in the course of the 1930s, while the
leading role of the Russian people within the Soviet state was
increasingly underlined within official discourse. All such trends
were amplified by the onset of war in 1941, which went hand in
hand with the forcible resettlement of entire ethnic groups by the
Soviet authorities.
Despite a reversion to the Leninist policies of cultural pluralism
during the post-­Stalin era, the Soviet state was never able to
resolve the basic contradictions at the heart of its nationalities
policy, which has been aptly described as formed by an ‘affirma-
tive action empire’ and a system of ‘federal colonialism’.9 By
linking enjoyment of national rights strictly to territory while
simultaneously assigning a personal ethno-­national identity to
each individual citizen, the Soviet state institutionalized a tension
that has had profound consequences for nation-­building in the
successor states to the USSR.10
Further westward, the successor states established in the terri-
tories between Germany and Soviet Russia after the First World
War were explicitly understood as the states of and for particular
ethnic nations. In all cases, however, a significant part of the pop-
ulation belonged to a different ethnic category. These non-­titular
ethnicities had for the most part already established a separate
societal culture prior to the collapse of empire. Some had formerly
constituted the ruling elite within the territories in question; others
had articulated their own demands for cultural recognition and/or
territorial sovereignty.11 Under these circumstances, one could
4   Nation, state and minority in modern Europe
hardly assume a smooth process of voluntary assimilation into the
majority culture of the new countries of residence. De facto, there-
fore, the new countries of central Europe were ‘plural society
states’ whose consolidation would require ‘reaction to diverse
political and national demands’.12
The victorious Western Powers acknowledged this reality by
insisting that the states created or enlarged under the terms of the
post-­war peace settlement sign minority rights treaties. These stip-
ulated that persons belonging to national minorities should enjoy
equal rights as citizens in addition to certain guarantees relating
to the practice of their distinct culture, such as the right to basic
state-­funded education in their mother tongue. Any infringements
of the treaties were to be reported to the newly created League of
Nations, which devised an elaborate system of petitions for
minority complaints. Sadly, the League, never stronger than the
sum of its parts, was ultimately ill-­placed to counter the continued
allure of nationalism within post-­war Europe, which became irre-
sistible following the onset of the Great Depression and Hitler’s
rise to power in Germany. The subsequent events of 1933–1945 –
not least the manipulation of the minority question by Nazi
Germany in the run-­up to war – led many observers to conclude
that collective minority rights had been part of the problem,
rather than a solution. Far from regulating ethnic tensions, it was
argued, such rights had merely contributed to growing instability
and irredentist sentiment within the new states of central
Europe.13
The League model of collective minority rights thus found itself
widely discredited in the wake of the Second World War. For all
of the ravages wrought by mass murder, forced population trans-
fers and border changes during 1939–1948, national and political
space were still far from congruent in post-­war central and
Eastern Europe. Yet the Soviet-­sponsored, state socialist regimes
that took power in the region were largely ill-­disposed to grant
cultural recognition to minority groups living within their
borders.14 More generally, the concept of collective minority rights
all but disappeared from international legal discourse. Instead, the
post-­war agreements drawn up under the auspices of the United
Nations, Council of Europe and Conference for Security and
Cooperation in Europe saw minority rights as a matter of guaran-
teeing individual human rights – no specific collective provisions
were envisaged.15
 Nation, state and minority in modern Europe   5
To view interwar central and Eastern Europe largely through the
prism of 1933–1945 is, however, to neglect the more positive trends
apparent within the region during the 1920s. Here, the work of the
Congress of European Nationalities (also popularly known as the
Nationalities Congress, and hereinafter referred to as such), a tran-
snational lobby group formed in 1925, offers a case in point. The
few existing studies of the Congress to date, most notably Sabine
Bamberger-­Stemmann’s exhaustive survey published in 2000, have
taken their cue from the 1930s when the Nazi government in
Germany was able to extend its influence over the German minority
representatives from various countries that had always formed the
core of the Congress. In light of this it has often been assumed that
from its very inception the Congress was little more than a cover
for efforts by Germany to revise the territorial provisions of the
post-­First World War peace settlement.16
This interpretation fundamentally misrepresents what the Con-
gress was about during the first five or six years of its existence,
when the organization was headed by a quite remarkable group
of liberal minority rights activists – both German and non-­
German – from across central and Eastern Europe. The ideas that
they aired during this period often appear startlingly relevant to
present-­day debates on European integration and in tune with the
preoccupations of postmodern political theorists.17 Encompassing
representatives speaking in the name of 34 national minorities
from 18 European states, the Congress sought mainly to effect a
change to the League of Nations minority procedures. While Con-
gress leaders welcomed the protection afforded by the League
against the threat of dissimilation, they considered the system defi-
cient when it came to ensuring the long-­term preservation of
minority languages and cultures.
Indeed, when considering central and Eastern Europe, League
representatives signalled their clear commitment to building indi-
visibly sovereign, one-­community nation states on the Western
European model. Any suggestion of creating autonomous national
minority institutions as an intermediary between state and indi-
vidual was seen as conducive to creating states within states and
fuelling irredentism. The more limited, individually based rights
adopted by the League were thus seen as little more than a tempo-
rary expedient, which would prepare national minorities for even-
tual merger into the dominant societal culture of the state in
which they lived.18
6   Nation, state and minority in modern Europe
While acknowledging the need to work within the territorial
frontiers established in 1919–1923, the founding fathers of the
Nationalities Congress nevertheless saw the one-­community
nation state model as fundamentally ill-­suited to the ethnically
complex environment of central and Eastern Europe. With differ-
ent ethnicities thoroughly intermingled, any attempt to assert
exclusive ownership by a particular group over territory would
necessarily generate huge discontent. The only solution was to
move towards an understanding of the state as a shared territorial
space occupied by different ethnic groups, all of which had a fun-
damental interest in the welfare of their common homeland. In
keeping with this, Congress leaders conceived of the cultural
nation (Kulturnation) as a collectivity of persons, voluntarily
united in the form of a corporation at public law. Such public–
legal status would act as a foundation for the establishment of
cultural self-­governments. These would have jurisdiction over
native-­language schooling across the territory of the given state,
as well as dealing with cultural matters of specific concern to the
minority community.
Another key demand of the Congress was the establishment of
a permanent minority commission at the League of Nations in
order to give organized national minorities an international pub-
lic–legal status comparable to that enjoyed by representatives of
states. In the longer term, the goal was to bring about the forma-
tion of a federalist Europe transcending the narrow particularism
of the nation state; in other words a genuine ‘Europe of peoples’.
The Congress leaders of the 1920s were inspired by the ideas of
Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, as well as by other pioneers of mul-
ticultural state- and nation-­building within the late nineteenth and
early twentieth-­century empires of central and Eastern Europe.
Other key influences, however, were the unique experiments with
non-­territorial cultural autonomy being pursued after the First
World War in the newly established Baltic states of Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania. Of the leading members of the Congress
during the late 1920s, two – Ewald Ammende and Paul Schie-
mann – were Baltic Germans from Estonia and Latvia respec-
tively. A third, the ethnic Russian Mikhail Kurchinskii, also hailed
from Estonia. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the first meeting
of the Nationalities Congress took place shortly after the adop-
tion of Estonia’s celebrated 1925 law on cultural autonomy for
national minorities. Discussions of similar legislation were still
 Nation, state and minority in modern Europe   7
ongoing in Latvia, although it had already afforded broad auton-
omy to its national minorities under a schooling law of 1919.
In recent years, a number of biographical studies of Congress
leaders have explored the links between their activities at the
international level and the formative environments within which
their ideas came to fruition.19 The only substantial existing study
of the Nationalities Congress, however, focuses chiefly on issues
of organization and on the nature of links with Germany rather
than on the ideal of cultural autonomy that stimulated such rich
and diverse debates during the late 1920s.20
There are a number of accounts of the unique cultural auton-
omy laws adopted in the interwar Baltic states, and the biggest
body of literature relates to the Estonian legislation of 1925.21 The
corresponding laws in Latvia and Lithuania have received com-
paratively less attention.22 Other authors allude to autonomy
within the context of a broader consideration of the experiences
of individual minority groups living within these countries.23 On
the whole, these existing works focus on the origins of cultural
autonomy rather than the actual, practical implementation of
laws and the day-­to-day running of institutions set up for this
purpose. This remains the case even for the path-­breaking cultural
autonomy legislation adopted in Estonia after 1925.24
The present work redresses the balance by providing a compar-
ative analysis of the origins, theory and practice of cultural auton-
omy in all three Baltic states during the interwar period, as well as
examining in this context the varying German, Jewish and
Russian experiences of autonomous institutions. In addition, the
study locates the Baltic case within its wider international setting,
still too often neglected in general books about these countries.
Our work especially emphasizes the interlinkages between the
politics and practice of autonomy in the Baltic countries and the
work of the Nationalities Congress, drawing on materials col-
lected from state archives in Estonia, Latvia and the Russian Fed-
eration, as well as the League of Nations Archive in Geneva. Use
has also been made of the substantial collections at the Johann
Gottfried Herder Institut in Marburg, the Nordost Institut in
Lüneburg and the National Libraries of Latvia and Estonia, both
of which house important newspaper archives.
To reiterate the point we made in the Preface, a study of this
kind is intrinsically interesting from a historical point of view,
opening up a wholly new perspective on minority issues in
8   Nation, state and minority in modern Europe
interwar central and Eastern Europe. Yet it also resonates with
developments in the region following the collapse of communism
and the demise of the USSR, when with the end of the Cold War,
the ‘dilemma of ethno-­cultural diversity’ and the issue of targeted
minority rights were thrust dramatically back onto the European
agenda.
2 Voices in the wilderness?

Nationality issues were highlighted as never before during the 20

years leading up to the First World War. This was particularly so
in the multi-­ethnic empires of central and Eastern Europe, which
lacked the relative cultural homogeneity and centralized govern-
ment characteristic of Western states. Moreover, whatever
attempts the empires made to appropriate the features of modern
statehood were by this time certain to run up against the growing
national consciousness of their subject peoples. One of the clear-
est indications of this was the outbreak of revolution in Russia in
1905, which catalysed demands for recognition of distinct ethno-­
cultural nationality amongst the Tsarist Empire’s minority groups.
Significantly, these demands were for autonomy rather than
outright independence and that remained the case when the
national question again came to the fore in the aftermath of Rus-
sia’s February 1917 Revolution. There was thus anything but an
inexorable progression from poly-­ethnic empire towards inde-
pendent nation-­statehood during the approach to war in 1914.1 It
would be truer to say that the subject peoples, or some of them at
least, had nation-­statehood thrust upon them as a result of the
sudden collapse of the dynasties under the pressures of war and
revolution. The process was consolidated by the bias of the peace
settlement towards the purely territorial expression of national
identity.
The central place given to the nation state within the post-­1918
international order has reinforced the perception of separatist
nationalism as the dominant political trend within the pre-­First
World War empires. By extension, it has also obscured the many
novel attempts that were made to promote a democratic and mul-
tinational vision of statehood within the existing borders of
10   Voices in the wilderness?
empire. Yet these efforts cannot be dismissed as mere voices in the
wilderness. The ideas did not simply vanish in the smoke of battle,
but persisted well into the interwar years and provided a founda-
tion for innovative approaches to issues of nationality and
territoriality.
These initiatives were informed first and foremost by the work
of the Austrian social democrats Karl Renner and Otto Bauer
during the last years of the Habsburg Empire. By the mid-­1890s,
the socialist movement in the Austrian half of the dual monarchy
faced a growing challenge from radical nationalist parties seeking
to ferment division between workers from different ethnic back-
grounds. The national question thus became a matter of everyday
practical politics from which no Austrian social democrat could
remain aloof. The Social Democratic Party responded by reconsti-
tuting itself along multinational lines in 1897 and advocating the
transformation of the Empire into a genuinely democratic federa-
tion of peoples.2
As the key thinkers of Austrian social democracy, Renner and
Bauer vigorously attacked the essentialist, ‘petty bourgeois’ claim
that nations and ethnic groups were natural and primordial enti-
ties with their own unique spirit. At the same time, they dismissed
the ‘naive cosmopolitanism’ of orthodox Marxists, who saw
national identity as entirely contingent on capitalism and thus
inexorably set to disappear once a socialist order had been
achieved.3 For Renner and Bauer, nations were substantive histor-
ical and social constructs, ‘communities of character’ born out of
constant reciprocal interaction between those subject to a
common cultural influence and sharing a common language.4
While nationhood could rest upon shared descent, this was by no
means preordained. The national ‘community of culture’, Bauer
observed in 1907, is ‘never solely a community of nature’ – the
character of particular individuals is also determined by the
culture and customs handed down to them, the education they
receive, the laws to which they are subject and the manner in
which they acquire their livelihood. In this respect, continued
Bauer, ‘the conscious choice of membership of a nation other than
that of one’s birth is possible’, as is belonging to an equal or
almost equal degree in the cultures of two or more nations.5
In formulating their ideas, Renner and Bauer followed Karl
Kautsky’s maxim that socialists had to be against all repression,
including national.6 One effect of capitalism, they argued, had
 Voices in the wilderness?   11
been to divide pre-­existing ethno-­linguistic communities according
to education and rights to political participation. The task of
socialism was thus to draw ‘the people as a whole’ into the rele-
vant (ethno) national community through democratization of cul-
tural and political life.7 In the particular context of the Habsburg
Empire, emerging class divisions under capitalism had also fol-
lowed ethnic lines, with German, Hungarian, Polish and Italian
ruling strata presiding over largely Slavic ‘subject peoples’ such as
the Czechs, Ruthenians, Slovaks and Slovenes. From the mid-­
nineteenth century onwards, emerging intellectual and bourgeois
strata drawn from these so-­called non-­historic nations had begun
to question their condition of cultural and political subordination.
The nature of the Austrian Constitution, however, meant that
those seeking greater national rights had little option but to try to
capture power at the state level, as this provided the only mecha-
nism for ensuring proper recognition of one’s culture.8 The politi-
cal logic thus became one of organization along national lines and
competition for power between different groups. It was this state
of affairs above all that pitted workers of different ethnicities
against one another and in doing so risked diverting attention
away from the class struggle. Renner and Bauer quickly realized,
therefore, that it would be impossible to advance the socialist
agenda without redrawing the existing Habsburg state into a gen-
uinely democratic federation of nationalities. As Bauer put it:

the power of the nations to satisfy their cultural needs must

be legally guaranteed if the population is no longer to be
forced to divide into national parties, if conflict between
national groups is not to make the class struggle impossible.9

While various proposals for the territorial federalization of

Austria had been floated since 1848, the complex ethnic composi-
tion of the Empire – constantly shifting due to internal migration
– made it difficult to conceive of a solution solely on this basis:
however one drew the boundaries, each legally demarcated
national region would inevitably contain national minorities,
thereby simply replicating the existing problems of the Empire in
miniature. The solution was, therefore, to separate the idea of the
nation from that of territory and to allocate national rights
according to what Renner termed ‘the personality principle’. This
aimed to:
12   Voices in the wilderness?
constitute the nation not as a territorial corporation, but as an
association of persons. The national bodies regulated by
public law would thus constitute territorial bodies only
insofar as their efficacy could not extend, of course, beyond
the borders of the empire. Within the state, however, power
would not be given to the Germans in one region and the
Czechs in another; rather, each nation, wherever its members
resided, would form a body that independently administered
its own affairs.10

The personality principle was advocated by the south Slav delega-

tion at the first all-­Austrian Social Democratic Party Congress
(Gesamtparteitag) held in Brünn (Brno) in September 1899 and
found its way into the final Congress resolution outlining the steps
necessary to achieve a national peace.11 Renner elaborated the
principle more fully through his pamphlet ‘State and Nation’,
published that same year, in which he envisaged the nation as a
public law corporation, in a position comparable to that of the
Church. Just as the latter embraced communities of shared belief,
so the nation should be thought of as an association of equal indi-
viduals, bound by a common culture.12
Personal choice was absolutely central to Renner’s view of how
nationality is determined. As he put it, ‘the declared will of the
person, the juridical and the natural, is the soul of legal exist-
ence’.13 Nevertheless, the extent of this free will had to be deter-
mined with reference to the interests of the state as a whole. Thus,
when Renner allocated to the national group responsibility for
managing its own culture and schooling, he envisaged that this
would fall within a basic legal framework prescribed by the state.
His use of the term ‘state free’ in this context was, therefore, a
qualified one, which highlighted by contrast those areas seen as
the preserve of the state alone. Most obviously, these included the
economy, military power, justice and policing.14
A subsequent work by Renner, The Struggle of the Austrian
Nations for the State (1902), drew up a detailed blueprint for a
multinational federal Austria. Territorially, the state was to be
divided into cantons, each with its own elected council. Where
cantons were nationally homogeneous the council would be
responsible for all aspects of public administration, including
schooling and other cultural functions. In nationally mixed
cantons (in practice the vast majority) the elected council would
 Voices in the wilderness?   13
be supplemented by two or more bodies of national self-­
administration, constituted on the basis of individual citizens
freely entering their names onto a national register. These national
delegations, as Renner called them, would have the power to levy
taxes from those listed on the register and would deal independ-
ently with cultural tasks (primarily education) pertaining to the
relevant ethnic group. The canton council, meanwhile, would be
responsible solely for administrative tasks of a ‘nationally neutral’
character.15
At a higher administrative level, each Land or province of the
state would have its own assembly, appointed by the cantons;
these would deal with matters of common concern to all citizens.
Operating in parallel to these assemblies would be Land national
councils elected jointly by the local national delegations and the
nationally homogeneous cantons, with responsibility for the cul-
tural affairs of the relevant nationality. These dual administrative
structures were to be further replicated at the overall state level,
where national councils would take responsibility for higher edu-
cation of the various nationalities.
In nationally homogeneous cantons, public administration was
to be conducted in the language of the local majority; in those
that were ethnically mixed, each national delegation would
conduct its affairs in its own language, while the canton council
and its areas of administrative responsibility would operate on a
bi- or multilingual basis.16 In essence, Renner set out to:

cut in two the sum of the activities of the state, separating

national and political matters. We must organize the popula-
tion twice; once along the lines of nationality, the second time
in relation to the state, and each time in administrative units
of different form.17

If this could be achieved, he reasoned, national disputes would no

longer impede ‘the advance of the classes’. Under the proposed
system, the classes of a single nation would confront each other
within the canton councils of nationally homogenous territories and
within the various delegations of the nationally mixed ones. Differ-
ent nations would come together within the councils of the mixed
cantons and Länder and within the representative assembly of the
state as a whole. In so far as these bodies had no power to rule on
national affairs, however, ‘they could give the nations nothing and
14   Voices in the wilderness?
take nothing from them; here too the population would be organ-
ized according to classes, not according to nations’.18
Renner’s scheme rested on the presumption that the withdrawal
of the state from the sphere of culture would pave the way to
national peace, just as its earlier withdrawal from the sphere of
religion had settled confessional disputes.19 Just as religious belief
did not necessarily affect an individual’s rights and responsibilities
as a citizen, so it was believed that different ethnic groups could
coexist harmoniously for the overall good of the state in which
they lived. According to Bauer, the existing ‘centralist-­atomist’
model of the state made ‘the aspiration to national conquests [i.e.
assimilation of other ethnicities] . . . the law of all national strug-
gle’. While assimilation would still occur in a state organized
according to the personality principle, it would derive from eco-
nomic and ‘convivial’ relationships between different ethnicities
and the ‘natural force of attraction’ of particular cultures, rather
than the ‘brutal force of a law that denies people of one nation
the means of maintaining a cultural community with their fellow
nationals’.20
In saying this, Renner and Bauer recognized that personal cul-
tural autonomy could not wholly eradicate the wellsprings of
nationalist contention where there remained socio-­economic dis-
parities between different groups. In a situation where, say,
German enterprise owners benefited from the surplus value of
Czech labour, the fiscal capacity of the Czech workers to develop
national-­cultural self-­government would necessarily be limited.
Any proposal to remedy this state of affairs through redistributive
taxation, however, could easily become the object of nationalist
quarrels within the relevant canton or Land council. As Bauer saw
it, such a prospect would always remain open as long as the capi-
talist socio-­economic order persisted.21
In other respects, too, Renner and Bauer’s scheme raises interest-
ing questions concerning the boundaries between culture and poli-
tics. How, for instance, does a state based on personal autonomy
ensure communication and interaction across institutionalized
ethnic boundaries and the construction of a shared civic space and
identity embracing all residents? Bauer’s work from 1907 implies
that such interaction would occur as a matter of course in the eco-
nomic sphere provided that the economy was not structured along
national-­territorial lines; perhaps more questionably, Bauer main-
tained that the more the working masses were exposed to education
 Voices in the wilderness?   15
within their particular national-­cultural context, the more interna-
tionalist they would become in their outlook. Also, as already
noted, the system of nationally based education did not imply a
complete absence of state regulation, which could be used to instil a
common overarching civic identity.
There remains, however, the question of how to ensure that
institutionalization of boundaries does not become an end in
itself. A recent critique of national-­cultural autonomy observes
that ‘once one assigns strong moral value to the intergenerational
continuity of particular national cultures, it follows almost inevit­
ably that fluid and overlapping boundaries between nations will
be regarded as an irregularity that undermines the value of
national membership’.22 In this regard, Bauer’s vision of different
cultures competing peacefully for the affiliation of individual citi-
zens appears somewhat fanciful, since national elites will have an
instrumental interest in maximizing the numbers of those belong-
ing to the particular group and, in this way, sustaining the institu-
tional basis for cultural autonomy. As we shall see, these were
issues that had to be confronted in practice in the interwar Baltic
states where fully-­fledged schemes of cultural autonomy were sub-
sequently introduced.
In the more immediate term, Renner and Bauer’s ideas were
highly significant in shaping discussions on the nationality ques-
tion in late-­imperial Austria.23 The personality principle was soon
tested in practice in the form of the so-­called Moravian Compro-
mise of 1905. The arrangement involved drawing up national reg-
isters or cadastres on the basis of individual self-­declaration in an
effort to resolve Czech–German nationalist disputes over control
of schooling and local government. By the eve of the First World
War similar compromises were on the point of being implemented
in the Bohemian town of Budweis (Budvar) and the Galician
region of Austria.24 As Bauer himself observed, the Moravian
Compromise was not about instituting cultural autonomy in the
sense intended by Renner: the registers that were established were
used to elect national curia within a single provincial assembly, as
part of a centralist-­atomist constitutional arrangement still geared
to competition between nationally based parties. In spite of this,
Bauer still felt able to declare that:

the first legislative attempt to base a new form of regulating

the public right of nations on the personality principle is
16   Voices in the wilderness?
without doubt an auspicious beginning, a clear sign that the
conviction is growing that national relations in Austria cannot
be regulated purely on the basis of the territorial principle –
the first victory of a [genuine] principle.25

Renner and Bauer’s ‘organic-­federal’ conception of statehood

also struck a chord within the neighbouring Tsarist Russian
Empire where similar ideas were taking root at the turn of the
twentieth century. Here, too, the inequality and repression
endured by many nationalities were seen as a potent barrier to the
realization of social and political freedom for the individual. Most
obviously, non-­territorial cultural autonomy had relevance for the
unassimilated and geographically dispersed Jewish communities
of Russia’s western borderlands. Austro-­Marxist thinking was
espoused first by the socialist Bund and later (as a concept of
diaspora rights) by the Zionists and the Folkspartei.26
Those speaking in the name of other, more compactly settled
nationalities, such as the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians,
had already begun to call for a territorial form of autonomy based
on an identifiable ethnic homeland.27 Yet even these groups were
aware of the value of cultural autonomy as an adjunct to any ter-
ritorial redrawing of the Empire. As late as September 1917, after
the Russian provisional government had consented to a new prov-
ince of Estland within ethnographic boundaries, key representa-
tives of the Estonian national movement, such as Karl Ast, Ado
Birk, Ardo Jürgenstein and Otto Strandman, continued to discuss
the ideas of Renner and Bauer with which all had become familiar
in the course of the preceding decade.28
Despite the obvious importance of Habsburg developments for
those living in Russia, the traffic was not entirely one way. The
ideas of Karl Renner bore a striking resemblance to those devel-
oped simultaneously yet separately by the Litvak historian, politi-
cian and leading minority rights theorist Simon Dubnow in his
Letters on Old and New Jewry (published 1897–1907).29 Unlike
the members of the Bund, Dubnow and his followers were not
opposed to the project of creating a Jewish national state in Pales-
tine. At the same time they foresaw the continued existence of a
Jewish diaspora that would need to be provided for within its
states of residence. Drawing on long-­standing traditions of Litvak
autonomy within the Polish Commonwealth, Dubnow proposed
non-­territorial cultural autonomy as a model that would enable
 Voices in the wilderness?   17
the Jewish communities of Europe to maintain their distinct iden-
tity and their own languages (Yiddish and Hebrew). At the same
time, in Dubnow’s view, Jews should enjoy equal rights within
their host societies and pursue integration with the majority soci-
etal culture by attaining a good command of the official state
language(s). His ideas were central to the programme of the Soyuz
Polnopraviia (Committee for the Protection of Emancipation of
Russian Jews) formed in Vilnius during the revolution of 1905.30
The upheavals of that year reflected a more generalized ground-
swell of demands for autonomy amongst the non-­Russian nation-
alities of the Empire, including the Estonians, Latvians and
Lithuanians.31 The process could hardly leave untouched the tra-
ditional supremacy of the Baltic Germans, who for centuries had
held sway over the provinces of Estland, Livland and Courland.
The German elites had enjoyed extensive autonomy under a suc-
cession of rulers, most recently the Tsar, giving them complete
political and social ascendancy over the region’s peasantry. Since
the machinery of government was monopolized by the landed
nobility, and German was the language of administration and
education, any social advance for the local peasantry had to be
through Germanization. From the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, however, the German elites faced a two-­pronged chal-
lenge. From below came the Estonian and Latvian national
­awakenings, while from above the Tsarist state intensified policies
of Russification geared towards greater administrative and,
increasingly, cultural standardization.32
The precarious situation of the Baltic German nobility was
graphically underlined by the violence visited upon them by the
local peasantry during the revolution of 1905. From here on, most
within the Baltic German community increasingly saw themselves
as part of an embattled national minority rather than a privileged
ruling caste. While the landed nobility did recover many of the
formal trappings of power once the Tsarist government had
restored order, the bitter experiences of 1905 hastened the forma-
tion for the first time of Baltic German associations (Vereine)
spanning all three provinces. These focused above all on safe-
guarding German schooling and culture against any renewed chal-
lenges from the Russian government. Significantly, therefore, the
Vereine marked an important shift towards closer cooperation
between the ruling landed elites and the urban German
bourgeoisie.33 In short, the Renner and Bauer model of cultural
18   Voices in the wilderness?
autonomy, as opposed to simply defence of historic rights, could
now be seen to have relevance to the Baltic Germans too.
A few enlightened souls amongst the Baltic Germans, notably
the prominent journalist and commentator Paul Schiemann,
responded by urging collaboration with Estonians and Latvians
and political reform, which would allow the latter into govern-
ment. Indeed the Baltische Konstitutionelle Partei that Schiemann
and others were instrumental in establishing explicitly sought to
broaden its membership beyond the Baltic German community, if
without very much success.34 Clearly, the rigidity of the social
order and the accumulated bitterness of the Estonian and Latvian
national leaders against the historic German overlords ruled out
any possibility of a united front in defence of national rights.
More generally, the ideas of Renner and Bauer had little time
to take root before war and revolution brought about the collapse
of the European empires. In the Habsburg lands, many Czech
national leaders had not been won over to the concept of shared
territorial space, continuing to press for the nationalization of
Bohemia and Moravia along Czech lines. In their view, forming
national registers on the basis of free affiliation would perpetuate
German cultural predominance by making it easier for people of
Czech origin to send their children to German-­language schools.
The social democratic Gesamtpartei that Renner and Bauer had
worked so hard to keep together had also unravelled along
national lines by 1911.35 Nevertheless, due weight must be given
to the attempts to reconcile national differences on the basis of
the personality principle. These were after all completely novel
and it took the outbreak of a European-­wide conflict to derail
them completely.36
In the neighbouring Tsarist Russian Empire, the February 1917
Revolution was the event which opened up space for those politi-
cal forces already attracted to Renner and Bauer’s thinking. The
onset of democratization, however, proved to be an all too brief
interlude, as the events of October 1917 paved the way to Bolshe-
vik control over most of the territory formerly ruled by the
Romanovs. On paper, the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) formed in 1922 was a multinational federal state. In prac-
tice, Bolshevik nationalities policy improvised during the course
of the Revolution proved thoroughly inimical to the ideas of the
Austro-­Marxists. First and foremost, the Soviet regime was wholly
undemocratic. Its claim to uphold cultural pluralism was in
 Voices in the wilderness?   19
practice integral to its drive to consolidate a single-­party dictator-
ship, according to the doctrine of ‘national in form, socialist in
content’. Paul Schiemann, ever an astute observer of the region’s
politics, would later cynically react to Soviet pretensions to
uphold cultural autonomy with the comment that Germans living
in the Soviet Union were permitted to read Marx but not
Goethe.37
Soviet thinking, moreover, took its cue from Josef Stalin’s 1913
tract, ‘Marxism and the National Question’. This defined nation
as ‘a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed
on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and
psychological make-­up manifested in a common culture’.38 Those
national rights that did exist within the USSR were, therefore,
conferred on a strictly territorial basis which made no provision
for the needs of smaller, more dispersed groups or those who hap-
pened to be residing outside a designated ethnic homeland. Fur-
thermore, the Soviet model lacked any element of personal choice:
nationality was viewed as a primordial category conferred by
birth. The only exceptions in this regard were those born to
parents of different ethnicities, who were permitted to determine
their own affiliation upon coming of age.
In the areas once controlled by the Habsburg, Hohenzollern
and Ottoman dynasties and in those former western border
regions that broke away from Russia after 1917, the territorial
principle also held sway when it came to matters of national self-­
determination. The new, independent successor states that
emerged from the empires were for the most part created in the
name of single titular ethnic groups, even though all contained a
variety of different ethnicities, each with its own national aware-
ness. The danger was that the new states would engage in ‘nation-
alizing’ policies that prioritized the needs of the majority people
at the expense of new national minorities living within their
borders. This seemed most likely in those cases where a minority
had formerly constituted part of the ruling elite within the old
empire, and could thus be portrayed as responsible for past injus-
tices visited upon the new state-­bearing nation prior to
independence.
Such an approach raised the spectre of a backlash on the part
of national minorities. In those cases – such as the German and
the Hungarian – where representatives of a minority nationality
could look externally to ‘a nation-­state of their own’, any
20   Voices in the wilderness?
perceived injustices might encourage this ‘external national home-
land’ to champion the rights of its ethno-­national kinfolk abroad,
in effect assuming the role of protector of the entire Volk rather
than simply its own citizens.39
Indeed, völkisch-nationalist commentators in Germany made
no secret of their desire to transform the Reich German state con-
sciousness into pan-­German national awareness. One such writer,
influential in right-­wing circles, was Max Hildebert-­Boehm, origi-
nally from the Baltic provinces of Russia. In his provocative book,
Europa Irredenta, published in 1923, Boehm appeared to deny
small states any right to existence: ‘The dependence of the small
on the large,’ he wrote, ‘is a fundamental in the lives of individu-
als and peoples, whose brutality can be modified and its form
changed, but which in essence is inescapable.’ Of the peace settle-
ment he went on to say: ‘The mutilation of Europe has altered the
function of its members in anarchic arbitrariness. Big nations are
artificially restrained, medium states blown up to great powers.
This situation will not last.’40
The victorious Allied Powers showed their awareness of the
potential danger of ethnic conflict by insisting that those successor
states created by the peace settlement after the First World War
sign treaties for the protection of national minorities. The proto-
type for these treaties was the agreement signed by Poland in
1919. Under its terms, persons belonging to national minorities
were promised equal rights as citizens, as well as certain specific
rights pertaining to the preservation and practice of their distinct
culture. These included the right to native-­language primary
schooling for all citizens in addition to the right to set up private
associations for cultural purposes. Any infringements of the trea-
ties could be reported to the newly established League of Nations.
In that respect, the nationalities question was at last international-
ized, thus raising hopes that new European-­wide statute law on
minority rights would eventually be enacted.41 Such a prospect,
however, receded into the distance as minority activists quickly
became disillusioned with the laborious appeals procedures
created by the League of Nations.
Redress for perceived violations of the minority protection
clauses in the treaties had to be sought initially by sending a peti-
tion to the Minorities Secretariat of the League. Invariably,
League officials tried in the first instance to resolve the issue in
question through informal contacts with the government named
 Voices in the wilderness?   21

Figure 2.1 Administrative staff of the Minorities Commission.

in the petition. Only if this failed was the complaint referred to an

ad hoc Committee of Three drawn from representatives of the
League of Nations Council.42 Subsequent discussions held with
those governments subject to a petition were confidential, exclud-
ing plaintiffs’ representatives. In effect, minority groups had no
voice. The Committee of Three had the authority to refer cases to
a full meeting of the League Council, although of the 325 peti-
tions referred to committee level by the Minorities Secretariat,
only 14 actually proceeded any further.43 Even when this did
occur, the fact that the accused state was invited to take a seat at
the relevant Council session effectively ruled out any real possibil-
ity of redress, given that decisions had to be unanimous.
What is more, the complaints procedure could be highly pro-
tracted. One petition submitted in 1925 concerning Latvia’s recent
decision not to compensate dispossessed landowners contained
22   Voices in the wilderness?
138 pages, while Latvia’s response to the League was three times
as long. There is no record of Latvia’s answer to subsequent
League advice to explore the prospect of compensation. In spite of
this, the Committee of Three’s review was concluded without any
specific action being recommended to the League Council.44 Such
partial information and defective responses proved to be the rule
rather than the exception.
At the time of the peace conference, at least some commenta-
tors had proposed that minorities in the new states should be
given cultural autonomy in the form previously envisaged by
Renner and Bauer. One such influential figure was the Viennese
international lawyer and academic Rudolf Laun. His memoran-
dum Entwurf eines internationalen Vertrages über den Schutz
nationaler Minderheiten was considered at the 1919 League of
Nations conference in Berne and later during the discussions
leading to the St Germain peace treaty.45 Laun’s suggestions were,
however, firmly rejected. In the eyes of the peacemakers, Euro-
pean security would be threatened by any dilution of the indivisi-
bly sovereign nation state. Giving minorities legal personality and
allowing them to create autonomous public bodies might, it was
felt, lead to the formation of states within states and in extreme
cases fuel irredentism.
There were indeed individuals and groups within the region
who, following the logic of Max Hildebert-­Boehm, were intent on
undermining the ‘small’ states that had emerged after the war.
However, for other influential commentators amongst the new
national minorities, cultural autonomy was predicated precisely
on respect for one’s state of residence and on acceptance of its
existing borders. These genuine minority activists could give qual-
ified approval to the line, articulated by British foreign minister
Austen Chamberlain in 1925, that ‘the object of the minority trea-
ties was to secure for the minorities that measure of protection
and justice which would gradually prepare them to be merged in
the national community to which they belonged’ (emphasis
added).46 What minority leaders understood by merging, however,
was simply the integration of different ethnic groups into an over-
arching state community. They emphatically rejected any sugges-
tion that national minorities should undergo full cultural
assimilation – a notion propounded by the League of Nations rap-
porteur on minority issues, Brazilian diplomat Afranio Mello
Franco.47
 Voices in the wilderness?   23
Spearheading the attacks on Mello Franco’s proposals were,
among others, the Baltic Germans Paul Schiemann and Ewald
Ammende. Both were by now leading lights within a European-­
wide minority rights movement that had begun to develop in the
aftermath of the peace settlement. Ammende was born in 1890 in
the port city of Pernau (Pärnu), which became part of Estonia
after 1917. He was drawn to Schiemann through reading Schie-
mann’s editorials for the liberal German newspaper Rigasche
Rundschau during his youth. The two men met for the first time
in 1918 when Ammende was salvaging what he could from his
family’s import–export business following the collapse of Russia.
Ammende subsequently worked for a spell on the Rigasche Rund-
schau, which Schiemann resumed editing in 1919. Ammende then
completed a doctorate based on extensive travels in central and
Eastern Europe to study the situation of German minorities in the
new states of the region.48 This brought him into contact with
other key German minority leaders, including Rudolf Brandsch, a
parliamentarian from Romania. Ammende’s dismay at the sense
of isolation and hopelessness that he encountered while collecting
thesis material amongst the scattered German populations rein-
forced his conviction that a new association should be formed to
protect German minority interests throughout Europe.49
Brandsch, supported by Ammende, took the first steps in this
direction by organizing a preliminary conference in Vienna
attended by representatives of the 11 German minority popula-
tions from across Europe. It was, Ammende affirmed, to be ‘the
model for all future activities and common measures of the
German minorities in Europe’.50 The outcome of this meeting in
October 1922 was a resolution committing most of those present
to a common Minoritätenpolitik, leading to internationally agreed
cultural autonomy.51
Preparations continued in the ensuing months for the founding
congress of the Verband der deutschen Minderheiten in Europa
(hereafter Verband), which eventually took place between 29 June
and 2 July 1923 in Vienna. On the agenda was discussion of all
aspects of the life of German minorities, including their economic
situation and their problems over schooling, language and culture.
The meeting instituted a standing committee comprising one rep-
resentative from each of the German minority groups and made
plans for the setting up of a permanent office, hopefully, in
Vienna.52
24   Voices in the wilderness?
The title chosen for the organization is instructive, and was
intended to be so. By choosing the term Minderheit (minority) the
organizers expressly acknowledged existing state borders, not
least to disarm the many critics of German minority organiza-
tions. More importantly, use of the word was felt to be vital in
working to influence international legislation, where the concept
of minority was now rapidly establishing itself within the dis-
course.53 It also pointedly distinguished the founders of the
Verband from nationalist revisionists such as Boehm, who dis-
missively equated Minderheit (minority) with minderwertig
(worthless).54
All of this was to underline that the new German organization
had no intention of trying to revise the peace settlement; rather, it
wished to promote a positive agenda of working to give minori-
ties the genuine protection that they felt was not afforded to them
by the existing League of Nations structures. Although the found-
ers of the Verband acknowledged the importance of the League’s
activity in the field of minority rights, they nevertheless saw con-
siderable room for improvement. For example, they lobbied vig-
orously for the establishment of a permanent standing committee
that would give minority representatives the voice on the interna-
tional stage that they so obviously lacked. According to Paul
Schiemann, elected as Verband committee member for Latvia’s
Germans, only in this way would the League of Nations become a
union of free and equal peoples, rather than a body for new and
existing states, whose rights and duties were, as before, unequal.55
Beyond this, the Verband committed itself from the outset to
working for European-­wide statutory legislation on minority
rights based on the principle of cultural autonomy. That principle
was seen as offering the only viable long-­term guarantee against
forcible assimilation of German minorities.56
The setting-­up of the Verband proved to be a landmark in the
history of cultural autonomy, in so far as it provided the first
international platform for countering those European leaders who
saw everywhere the spectre of states within states. No individual
more eloquently attacked this thinking than Paul Schiemann, who
was by now the leading Baltic German politician in Latvia, as well
as editor of the influential liberal daily Rigasche Rundschau. A
long-­term admirer of Renner and Bauer, Schiemann was to
become the most influential figure in developing and adapting
their ideas to the new European realities bequeathed by the post-­
 Voices in the wilderness?   25
war peace settlement. Indeed, he soon came to be referred to by
his co-­workers as the ‘thinker of the minorities movement’.57
Schiemann was no mere theorist but thoroughly involved as a
member of parliament in the day-­to-day political struggles in his
own country, as were many if not most of his Verband colleagues
in their respective states of residence. When it came to cultural
autonomy, however, Schiemann, Ammende and other Baltic
German minority activists undoubtedly benefited from the fact
that a number of leading Estonian and Latvian politicians also
remained favourably disposed to the idea, following their own
achievements in securing independence from Russian rule. More­
over, the specific Baltic experience of Schiemann and others like
him, who fully accepted their own responsibilities in helping to
build up new democratic states, put him in a strong position to
disarm fears that cultural autonomy would automatically under-
mine the unity of those countries. Nothing better exemplified
Schiemann’s approach than his maxim ‘Politics must be for the
good of the state in which one resides; any other end is suicide’.58
3 The Baltic arena

In the context of early 1920s Europe, the new Baltic states stood
out by virtue of the unique constitutional provisions that they
made for national minorities. In all three cases, legislation passed
during the initial phases of independent statehood not only guar-
anteed the civil and ethnic rights of individual citizens but also
devolved certain cultural functions – most notably administration
of education – to representative bodies of organized minority
groups. Estonia and Lithuania directly adopted many of the prin-
ciples previously elaborated by Renner, Bauer and Dubnow. The
Latvian approach was somewhat different but is nevertheless
usually characterized as a form of collective cultural autonomy.1
It has been observed with regard to the Baltic states collectively
that, ‘this latitudianarism was . . . unique in the world, and . . . had
no western models’.2 Active lobbying by Baltic German, Jewish
and other minority representatives was certainly one important
factor that brought the cultural autonomy ideal to the point of
realization. However, the success of these efforts was, of course,
also contingent upon the support of politicians drawn from the
titular national majority.
In all three countries, governments adopted at the outset of
independence general provisions acknowledging the rights of
minorities. Lithuania promised most, paradoxically as a result
of being under German occupation from 1915, in so far as Berlin
had encouraged national demands as part of a strategy for break-
ing up Russia and securing German dominance. The occupying
German military authorities of what was designated Land Oberost
gave recognition to no fewer than six local languages in this highly
complex multi-­ethnic region.3 They also sanctioned the formation
of a Lithuanian National Council (Taryba) in September 1917,
 The Baltic arena   27
which subsequently became the main engine of the independence
movement and the key forum for discussion of the nationalities
issue. Inevitably the nationalities question figured prominently on
the political agenda during 1918–1920. At this time the emerging
Lithuanian state faced not only the external threat of Bolshevism,
but also Polish national designs on the Vilnius region.4
The leaders of the Lithuanian national movement claimed
Vilnius as their capital on the grounds that it had once been the
hub of the mediaeval and early-­modern Grand Duchy of Lithua-
nia. However, the Duchy had in no sense been a proto-­national
state. The Lithuanian claim underlined the impossibility in this
region of resolving nationality issues territorially since the
majority of those living in the Vilnius area were of Polish,
Jewish, Belorussian or Russian ethnicity. Lithuanian speakers
made up fewer than one in five of the population in 1918.
Expediently, therefore, the Lithuanian national movement set
out to win Belorussian and especially Jewish support for its
programme.5
Backing from the Jewish population assumed a particular rele-
vance given the international lobbying then being carried out by
the Comité des délégations juives auprès de la Conférence de la
Paix, under the leadership of the liberal Zionist Leo Motzkin. A
memorandum presented to the peacemakers contributed to the
pressure on the Taryba. The document called for full Jewish
autonomy in the spheres of religion, culture and social welfare,
including a separate ministry for Jewish affairs, as well as propor-
tional representation for Jews within state institutions. Once
Lithuanian foreign minister Augustinas Voldemaras accepted the
main points the way was cleared for the passage in March 1920
of a law granting Jewish cultural autonomy on the basis of the
traditional Jewish councils (kehillot).6
Indeed, Lithuania’s Jews had already instituted 78 such local
bodies by the time the new legislation officially sanctioned the
process. The kehillot were recognized at public law and thus had
the right to impose taxes and issue ordinances dealing with reli-
gious affairs, education and philanthropy. They were also respon-
sible for registering Jewish births, marriages and deaths. The 1920
law nevertheless fell short of what Jewish leaders desired in that it
failed to provide a legal basis for centralized organization at the
national level. What they had instead was an informal de facto
arrangement, tolerated by the government, whereby they elected a
28   The Baltic arena
standing national council, which then worked in conjunction with
the state minister for Jewish affairs.7
Promises of cultural autonomy for all ethnic groups were also
contained in the ‘manifesto to all the peoples of Estonia’, adopted
by the leaders of the Estonian National Council on 24 February
1918, just one day before German military occupation was
extended to the entire territory of Russia’s Baltic provinces.
Hardly surprisingly, the occupation exacerbated long-­standing
tensions between Estonians and Latvians on the one hand, and
the Baltic German population on the other. Under the German–
Soviet treaties of Brest-­Litovsk and Berlin, signed respectively in
March and August 1918, the future of the Baltic territories was to
be determined by the will of the people living there.8 In practice,
the voices of the Estonians and Latvians were muted as the pres-
ence of the German army encouraged conservative Baltic German
elites to try to restore the dominance lost as a result of the Febru-
ary 1917 Revolution. ‘Self-­determination’ thus turned out to
involve consultation with a Baltic German-­dominated council
augmented by compliant Estonian and Latvian politicians.9 At this
point those who had proclaimed the Estonian Republic in Febru-
ary 1918 were either imprisoned or driven underground. It was
symptomatic of this period that Paul Schiemann, already a com-
mitted liberal opponent of the landed estates (Ritterschaften), was
forced to leave the German military zone for Berlin.10
Schiemann would always bitterly regret the way in which rela-
tions between his own community and the new leaders of Estonia
and Latvia were further aggravated by the events following on
from the end of the war and the armistice. With Germany’s defeat
in the First World War, national leaders were able to re-­emerge in
Estonia and also in neighbouring Latvia where a declaration of
independence was adopted in November 1918. Like the earlier
Estonian declaration, this was addressed not solely to the titular
Latvian nationality but to all citizens of Latvia, who were urged
‘to maintain peace and order and to support the provisional gov-
ernment in its difficult and responsible work’. Although the decla-
ration referred to the ‘united ethnographic boundaries’ of the
state, undertakings were also made to respect the ethnic rights of
minority groups. A nationalities commission was established to
oversee this.11
Under the provisions of the 11 November 1918 armistice,
however, Reich German volunteer forces were allowed back into
 The Baltic arena   29
the Baltic territories as an interim defence against the advancing
Soviet armies bent on retaking the area for Lenin’s government at
the turn of 1918–1919. Baltic Germans too were prepared to help
defend the lands on which they lived; in Estonia a Baltenregiment
was created that very soon operated under the umbrella of the
rapidly improvised Estonian national army. In the more volatile
political conditions of Latvia, the Baltic German Landeswehr
pursued its own agenda, notwithstanding its undoubted role in
keeping the Bolsheviks at bay. Not until the defeat of German
forces in June 1919 at the hands of a joint Estonian–Latvian force
were Baltic German liberals able to come back into play in Latvia.
Their path was eased by the fact that the remaining political power
of the old German elites was broken by the draconian agrarian
reforms of the new Baltic governments during 1919–1920.
As the agrarian laws showed only too well, many within the
Baltic national movements saw the attainment of statehood as a
means of prioritizing the rights of the ethnic majority following
centuries of oppression at the hands of foreign overlords. Even
after military victory had been attained there remained a deep-­
seated sense of insecurity and resentment amongst more nation-
ally minded Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian political elites,
occasioned by the perceived threat of neighbouring great powers
and the continued influential position occupied by minorities
within the new states.
Nationalizing impulses proved hardest to resist in Lithuania.
Poland’s annexation of Vilnius in October 1920 and, later, the
dispute with Germany over Memel (Klaipeda) gave the politics of
the early independence period ‘a far more explicitly and shrilly
nationalistic tinge than was the case in Estonia and Latvia’.12 As
the prospect of reclaiming Vilnius receded during the early 1920s,
so the Lithuanian state attached correspondingly less importance
to the rights of Jews living within its existing borders. Indeed, the
liberal provisions for Jewish autonomy put in place during
1919–1920 were already being undermined by the time Lithuania
drafted its first formal constitution in 1922.
The promise in this document to allow the establishment of
centralized institutions of cultural autonomy was never fully real-
ized. Conservative nationalist politicians such as Voldemaras,
who had championed Jewish cultural autonomy at the start of
independence, found themselves marginalized politically after the
elections of 1922 when power passed to a Christian democratic
30   The Baltic arena
bloc that was rather less well disposed to the concept of public
corporate organization for minority groups. Opponents of auton-
omy had little difficulty in exploiting internal divisions within the
Jewish community and thereby contriving to bring about the abo-
lition of the existing kehillot by the start of 1926, even before the
eclipse of liberal democracy in Lithuania in December of that
same year. The new head of state installed after the 1926 nation-
alist coup, Antanas Smetona, had been one of those conservative
politicians who had originally favoured cultural autonomy for
Lithuania’s Jews. While residual traces of this sentiment can be
found in Smetona’s continuing support for Jewish schooling,
autonomy as envisaged at the start of the decade was now effec-
tively a lost cause.
This is not something that could be said of neighbouring
Latvia, despite inevitable pressure from more nationalistically
minded forces at the start of the 1920s. For these, Latvia’s recog-
nition by the Western powers and the League of Nations in 1921
was seen as opening up the possibility for a more assertive line
towards national minority groups.13 Some confirmation of this
came from a memorandum addressed by the Paris-­based Comité
des délégations juives to the League in April 1922, claiming that
the Latvian government had failed to deliver on the promise of
equal treatment before the law for all residents, regardless of
ethnicity:

The Latvian government protests against the claims [of our

memorandum] that the Jews are subject to persecution in
Latvia which to some extent recalls the persecution perpe-
trated by the former [T]sarist regime, and insists that these
assertions are baseless. . . . We will restrict ourselves to citing
the fact that . . . tens of thousands of Jews who have lived in
this country for years, even decades, and in some cases were
even born in Latvia but who because of the war were forcibly
displaced from their homeland and exiled in the far off prov-
inces of Russia, are now prevented by the Latvian government
from returning home.14

Nevertheless, the balance of political forces within Latvia’s new

institutions precluded the complete abandonment of the liberal
ideals enshrined in the original declarations of independence.15
By December 1919, Latvia had placed on the statute book a
 The Baltic arena   31
framework law for the schooling of minorities allowing minority
representatives to manage their own schooling in their own lan-
guage. The original intention was to enshrine these provisions in
Latvia’s new constitution, which came into force on 7 November
1922. This made reference to a single political ‘nation of Latvia’
(Latvijas tauta), while stating that ethnic Latvians (Latviešu tauta)
were only one of a number of sovereign and autonomous ethnic
communities entitled to preserve their distinct cultural heritage,
religion and language.16 However, the second part of the constitu-
tion, elaborating in detail civic and other rights, failed to secure a
majority in the Latvian parliament. As a result there was no
formal constitutional basis for the exercise of minority cultural
autonomy.
National minorities thus had to content themselves for the
moment with the 1919 schooling law. Even so, because this was a
framework law it gave considerable scope for autonomous cul-
tural development. According to its terms minority schools were
essentially under the supervision of their own separate administra-
tion, physically located within Latvia’s ministry of education. The
heads of these administrations, although in effect civil servants,
were actually chosen by the parliamentary delegates of the minor-
ity in question and simply put forward for approval by the gov-
ernment.17 For a number of reasons, not least the demands of
building up a Latvian language educational system virtually from
scratch, subsequent governments during the 1920s generally
allowed leeway to minority representatives, particularly in matters
of curriculum development and inspection.18
An even greater degree of latitude was afforded to national
minorities in Estonia where the early government honoured the
founding commitment to respect the cultural rights of all peoples
living within the new state. Accordingly, regulations on elemen-
tary schooling embraced the principle of instruction in the
mother tongue, as did the corresponding law on secondary
schooling adopted in December 1922. In districts where there
were 20 or more pupils belonging to a particular linguistic
minority the state was obliged to provide schooling in the rele-
vant language.19 Despite the bitterness caused by the actions of
the Baltic German Landeswehr during 1919, the Estonian con-
stituent assembly convened in that year narrowly reaffirmed the
right of all national minorities to establish institutions for cul-
tural self-­government.20
32   The Baltic arena
The promises enshrined in the 1920 Constitution were finally
honoured in February 1925 with the passage of the law on cul-
tural autonomy for national minorities. This allowed representa-
tives of Estonia’s largest minorities (Germans, Russians, Swedes)
and of any other group numbering more than 3,000 to establish
their own corporations at public law and, on this basis, to set up
self-­governments with responsibility for schooling and other cul-
tural matters.
The view that Lithuania’s corresponding provisions for the
Jewish minority brought to ‘the modern national state . . . the
archaic principle of corporate autonomy for social and religious
groups, characteristic in western medieval Christendom’ has been
echoed in the case of Estonia’s 1925 law.21 Certainly, conservative
notions of ständische Gesellschaft dear to the Baltic Germans
were perpetuated after 1918.22 However, while long-­standing tra-
ditions clearly did guide the thinking of some of the leading pro-
ponents of Estonia’s cultural autonomy, the provisions of the
1925 law appear more consistent with the more progressive,
liberal individualist vision previously articulated by Renner and
Bauer.
This is apparent above all in the emphasis on one’s national
identity being a matter of free choice. The choice operated at two
levels. First, the 1920 Constitution stipulated the right of each
individual citizen to choose and, if so desired, to change the eth-
nicity recorded in his or her passport. However, under the provi-
sions of the law of 1925, declaring a particular ethnicity did not
in itself entail commitment to membership of the public corpora-
tion established in the name of the relevant group. Rather, such a
corporation could only be established on the basis of 50 per cent
of the citizens belonging to the relevant minority consenting to
have their names included on an electoral register. Once this was
drawn up, elections could take place to a cultural council. This
would constitute the legislative arm of minority self-­government.
Even then, a cultural council could only be established if half of
the registered voters participated in the elections. Only at that
point would the newly elected council be in a position to imple-
ment cultural autonomy, providing that at least two-­thirds of its
members voted in favour.
It is the pronounced emphasis on personal choice that distin-
guishes Estonia’s legislation from the corresponding Lithuanian
law on Jewish autonomy. In the latter case there was no formal
 The Baltic arena   33
requirement to enrol on a national register; everyone of Jewish
nationality within a relevant district could take part in elections
to the local Jewish kehilla. Moreover, once this had been consti-
tuted all local Jews automatically became liable to pay taxes for
cultural purposes, regardless of whether or not they had actually
voted for setting up a kehilla.23 The only possible escape from this
obligation was formally to renounce Jewish nationality. In
Estonia, by contrast, only those voluntarily enrolled on the
national register were liable to pay taxes to the cultural self-­
government after it had been established. Avoiding this obligation
required no more than a written declaration of intent to leave the
national register, albeit on the understanding that all benefits of
membership were relinquished in so doing. The constituency of
minority cultural self-­government in Estonia thus derived very
much from acts of ‘deliberate personal will of individual nationals
living within the state territory’.24
As in Latvia, the initial impetus behind Estonia’s cultural
autonomy came primarily from the ranks of the minorities them-
selves. Indeed, ethnic German representatives brought detailed
proposals to the 1919–1920 constituent assembly, where they
worked alongside Swedish and Russian representatives to secure
the constitutional stipulation that ‘members of national minorities
living in Estonia may establish their own autonomous institutions
in the interests of their national culture and welfare, in so far as
this does not go against the interests of the state’.25
Estonia’s numerically small Jewish community was unable to
secure representation in the constituent assembly. A congress of
Jewish communities held in Tallinn in May 1919 nevertheless
endorsed the principle of non-­territorial cultural autonomy. At
this meeting, delegate Sergei Eisenstadt, in particular, conveyed
eloquently the ideas of Renner and Bauer, stressing as key princi-
ples the belonging of an autonomous minority to the state in
which it resides and the ‘inviolable’ unity of the citizen body.26
Jewish representatives subsequently liaised with the Deutsch-­
Baltische Partei in Estland (hereinafter DBP), the sole parliament-
ary voice of Baltic Germans in Estonia, as it prepared to present
an initial bill on cultural autonomy to Estonia’s first Riigikogu
(parliament) in the spring of 1921.27
The architects of Estonia’s 1925 law were, however, far from
confined to the ranks of the minorities. Leading Estonian public
figures also threw their weight behind the initial proposals. By far
34   The Baltic arena
the most prominent of these was Konstantin Päts, leader of Esto-
nia’s Agrarian Party and previously head of the Estonian provi-
sional government of November 1918 to May 1919. Some
authors even see Päts as the true father of the Estonian cultural
autonomy law.28 Already within the constituent assembly Päts had
defended the Baltic German proposals against the now familiar
cry that they would create a ‘state within a state’.29 He also
endorsed the initial bill presented to the Riigikogu in April 1921.
As the main representative of the Estonian conservative right,
Päts was the least ill disposed to the German former ruling class.
In this respect he was also inclined to see political nationhood not
as an amalgam of individual citizens, but as deriving from a state
of equilibrium between different social groups. This was a view
that had been impressed upon him by the example of Finland’s
estates-­based Diet during the period 1863–1906.30 It also seems
likely, however, that Päts became conversant with the ideas of
Renner and Bauer through conversations with Baltic German
liberal Heinrich Pantenius during the early 1900s when Päts was
inclined politically towards the radical left.31
Admittedly, Päts’ thinking on autonomy was also partly dic-
tated by considerations of realpolitik. Having characterized Esto-
nia’s agrarian laws of 1919 as geopolitically naïve, he would later
assert that ethnic Germans and Russians living in Estonia were
not simply members of a minority but extended representatives of
neighbouring ‘great nations’ who had to be accommodated within
the Estonian state.32 In a similar vein, many Estonian politicians
no doubt saw cultural autonomy as a means of deflecting interna-
tional propaganda by dispossessed German landowners who
sought to blacken Estonia’s reputation at the League of Nations
and amongst European opinion more broadly.33
Cultivating a positive international image remained a crucial
factor even after Estonia’s entry to the League of Nations. However,
there was nothing in the League stipulations on minority rights that
obliged Estonia to adopt such far-­reaching provisions for cultural
autonomy. Such arrangements actually ran counter to the prevailing
thinking on minority rights within League circles, where cultural
autonomy was still seen in terms of creating states within states.34
Thus, realpolitik alone does not offer a sufficient explanation for
the developments of the early 1920s.
It is difficult then to deny that genuine conviction lay at the heart
of the commitment to cultural autonomy during the formative
 The Baltic arena   35
years of the Estonian Republic. The source of that conviction can
be found in the ideas of one of the nineteenth-­century founding
fathers of the Estonian national movement, Jakob Hurt. His
maxim, that since Estonians could never be great in number they
should aspire to greatness through their culture, finds striking
echoes in the later Riigikogu debates on whether or not to pass a
law on cultural autonomy. Even those Estonian social democrats
most hostile to the Baltic German former privileged elite could
still recognize that the passage of the law would put Estonia
ahead ‘of the biggest democratic states and the entire world’.35
The attempt to overcome past grievances and look towards the
future is a striking feature of the Riigikogu debates over cultural
autonomy. Responding to repeated reminders of 700 years of ser-
vitude under the Baltic Germans, parliamentary rapporteur Ado
Anderkopp observed that ‘we do not produce laws with an eye to
proving how much we have suffered in the past, but in order to
give to others the freedoms we wish to enjoy ourselves’.36 In
saying this, Anderkopp was responding to claims by social demo-
crat Karl Ast that the former German overlords had not yet rec-
onciled themselves to the existence of an independent Estonia. Yet
even Ast was alive to the historic significance of what was being
proposed:

The Social Democrats are pleased that this law has been put
forward since it derives from the work of Springer (Renner)
and Bauer. We would be happy to see Estonia become a
modern democracy which in its approach to the national
question applies a set of principles wholly different to those
employed by the old democracies. We already know that the
latter offer no cause for celebration as far as the development
of the national question is concerned. Despite everything that
was said before and during the Versailles treaty, European
democracy has done nothing as far as peoples’ rights to self-­
determination are concerned; rather, old methods still prevail
to the same extent.37

While cultural autonomy by its nature found advocates on both

the left and the right of the political spectrum, there was no
­unanimity within any of Estonia’s main political parties. That
much can be seen from the fact that it took fully four years from
the initial Baltic German proposal to the final passage of the law.
36   The Baltic arena
Opposition was most pronounced within the ranks of the Esto-
nian People’s Party, headed by Jaan Tõnisson, which had become
the successor to the radical anti-­German wing of the late-­
nineteenth-century national movement. Telling in this regard is
Tõnisson’s allegation that:

Ruling circles [amongst the Germans] seem bent on setting up

German colonies as most of the German elements in the Baltic
lands have always been. They have always been keen to
prevent encroachment from outside; in a way this has been
our good fortune, since it has prevented our assimilation.38

For Tõnisson these archaic forms now had to give way to a new
and unitary nation state. Equally, many social democrats, while
sympathetic to cultural autonomy as we saw above, were just as
suspicious of the motives of the Baltic German community.
Indeed, many if not most Baltic Germans found it difficult to
come to terms with their ascribed status as but one of several
minorities within an Estonian dominated state. During the auton-
omy debates German representatives repeatedly insisted that their
community’s importance could not be measured numerically, but
rather had to reflect its historic role in the Baltic provinces. In the
words of former estate owner Baron von Stackelberg: ‘We never
should nor will be measurable according to our number.’39 No
lovers of the new democratic parliamentary republic, Stackelberg
and others remained at heart wedded to the hierarchical, corpo-
rate structures that had served their caste so well over centuries.
Stackelberg was thus far from untypical in viewing autonomy as a
means of recreating a corporate organic community amongst the
Baltic Germans, while at the same time bitterly regretting having
to adopt ‘sterile democratic, mechanistic’ methods of administra-
tion to achieve this goal.40
The initial proposals put forward by Baltic German leaders in
January 1921 tried in vain to circumvent parliamentary pro­
cedures entirely, arguing that the cultural autonomy promised in
Article 21 of Estonia’s Constitution could and should be imple-
mented simply on the basis of governmental decree.41 The German
draft bill presented three months later to the Riigikogu was drawn
up by a committee chaired by Eduard von Bodisco, a man who
also headed the association of expropriated German landowners.
This initial draft accepted the principle of free choice of nationality
 The Baltic arena   37
but envisaged that cultural autonomy would not be established on
the basis of voluntary enrolment to a register; rather, it would
automatically encompass all Germans living in Estonia. The draft
also expressed a strong preference for the competencies of minor-
ity self-­government being extended beyond culture to encompass,
among other things, social welfare.42
Such thinking was hardly calculated to appease Estonian oppo-
nents of cultural autonomy. The Baltic German proposal quickly
became bogged down in a series of parliamentary committees and
was condemned as inimical to the democratic spirit of the new
Estonia. It was to rebut this charge that the DBP chairman August
Spindler composed a long memorandum for members of the
Riigikogu. Depicting cultural autonomy as a logical outcome of
liberal democratic thinking, Spindler now conceded that the com-
petencies of the proposed self-­governments should be confined
strictly to matters of culture. Furthermore, he rebutted suggestions
that autonomy would lead to states within states by reminding the
Riigikogu that powers were to be delegated to cultural self-­
governments by the state itself. The state would also retain broad
supervisory powers, as well as providing the bulk of the funding
for autonomous minority institutions.43
Spindler’s overall argument was that there need be no inherent
conflict of interest between the proposed autonomous national
bodies and the central state authorities. Those who did not grasp
this reality, he suggested, simply failed to understand the proper
functions of the state.44 Echoing Renner and Bauer, Spindler
stressed that majoritarian democracy was appropriate when it
concerned matters of common interest to the entire population of
a state. Yet the same spirit of democracy precluded coercing indi-
viduals or groups in those spheres concerning them alone.
Culture, like religion, was an obvious example of this. Acknowl-
edging this reality through the medium of cultural autonomy, far
from engendering irredentism, would reduce the risk of national
groups aspiring to form states within states.45 Punctuating his
analysis with references to Renner and Bauer and other key figures
from the liberal–socialist camp, Spindler recalled the words of the
German Independent Socialist Lebedour to the Reichstag in
October 1918: ‘The principle of cultural autonomy must once and
for all apply in all countries.’46
How representative Spindler’s views were among Estonia’s
Germans is obviously open to debate, given the views of people
38   The Baltic arena
like Stackelberg. Nevertheless, Ewald Ammende’s activities within
the Verband der deutschen Minderheiten in Europa had already
proved the existence of liberal elements more willing to accept the
new realities of the post-­war Europe, harsh as they seemed. One
such example was the Tartu-­based headmaster and political activ-
ist Heinrich Pantenius. Having already become familiar with the
ideas of Renner and Bauer during the early 1900s, Pantenius
declared in December 1920 that ‘naturally the Baltic Germans
have to renounce all forms of privilege and domination’.47 In such
quarters it was better understood that the only way to ensure the
long-­term survival of one’s culture was to accept national minor-
ity status, embrace and utilize democratic parliamentary pro­
cedures and work in this way for the overall good of the state
to which one had been consigned by history.
Ultimately, the case put forward in Spindler’s memorandum
failed to convince his Estonian opponents of the virtues of cul-
tural autonomy. In the very month he published his arguments,
March 1922, a sub-­commission of the Riigikogu concluded that it
was still not practicable to draft a definitive law regulating the
question of autonomy. Significantly, it was Konstantin Päts, by
now again prime minister, who intervened to break the impasse
by proposing in the first instance a loose framework law.48 With
interior minister Ado Anderkopp he then co-­authored a second
draft law, which was duly presented to an open session of parlia-
ment in March 1923. Unlike the original Baltic German project,
the Päts/Anderkopp proposals provided for voluntary enrolment
on a national register and tried as far as possible formally to
delimit the competencies of the institutions and their relationship
to the state.49
One obvious objection to the new bill was that its clauses
were still too vague. In response its authors reminded their par-
liamentary colleagues of the sheer novelty of the enterprise,
which made this inevitably a step into the unknown. Other
arguments against the bill’s passage barely concealed more fun-
damental concerns. In particular, the government’s desire to get
the legislation through was seen as yielding to external pressures
generated by the Berlin-­based lawyer Baron von Heyking and
other former Baltic German landowners who were bent on inter-
nationalizing the question of land reform and making the case
for this being an infringement of minority rights rather than a
question of social justice.50
 The Baltic arena   39
On the other hand, there were opponents of the bill who
accepted the need for minority schooling but disputed placing this
under the control of a cultural self-­government. They justified their
position by pointing to the already existing network of minority-­
language schools operating in Estonia on the basis of the general
education law. The fact that Estonian-­language schools often had
many more pupils per class than their German-­language counter-
parts understandably also fuelled popular resentment. Jaan Tõnis-
son, in particular, seized on this point to warn that granting
cultural autonomy would consolidate the gulf between German-
and Estonian-­language schools, bringing with it the risk that ethnic
Estonian parents would favour the former over the latter.51
Tõnisson’s claim has some foundation, in that funding for
schools was contingent upon the number of classes rather than
upon student numbers. At the same time, this objection signally
failed to take account of the geographically dispersed nature of
Baltic German settlements, which made it impossible in many dis-
tricts to find the required number of pupils to justify establishing
a class. Protests of this sort, railing at extra rights for minorities,
also overlooked the crucially important point that under cultural
autonomy such rights carried additional duties. Not the least of
these was the requirement to pay extra taxation for the cultural
and schooling needs of the relevant national community.
The debates on the revised autonomy bill of 1923, presented in
the dying days of the first Riigikogu, were both intense and pro-
longed. Although the law was eventually passed at first reading,
the parliamentary deputies voted against putting it forward for
the second and third readings necessary to get it onto the statute
book. Instead the bill was referred back to the committee level for
further elaboration. The delays that this strategy occasioned gen-
erated great bitterness among minority representatives, who
stressed, above all, the urgent need to start rebuilding their school-
ing networks.52 Despite this there were further disappointments
during the remaining months of 1923. After the second Riigikogu
convened, Tõnisson’s People’s Party resumed its efforts to
obstruct the passage of the law. Its tactic in this instance was to
propose that instead of allowing one centralized body of cultural
self-­government for each eligible minority, cultural autonomy
should be organized locally under the supervision of existing
municipal governments. From a minority point of view, however,
this threatened to defeat the entire purpose of the exercise.53
40   The Baltic arena
These and other differences were only resolved after a key
meeting in March 1924 between Tõnisson and the Baltic German
representatives Ewald Ammende and Werner Hasselblatt. The
outcome was broad agreement that the competencies of the
autonomous organizations had to be strictly confined to the cul-
tural sphere, thus excluding not only social welfare, but also
church affairs, which many Baltic Germans had felt should be
included within the framework of cultural autonomy. In return,
Tõnisson consented to the establishment of centralized cultural
self-­governments, albeit democratically elected on the basis of
local constituencies. A number of practical issues, including that
of the national register, remained to be resolved, but even the
Baltic German press now acknowledged that Tõnisson and his
party were ready to resolve the autonomy issue quickly. The
March 1924 meeting, which rounded off with an agreed written
communication, can thus be regarded as the critical turning point
in the passage of legislation on cultural autonomy.54 Not even the
fall of Konstantin Päts’ latest government, which had again
thrown its weight behind the new legislation, could disrupt the
more measured tone of the debate that became apparent after
March 1924. Ambiguities were removed from the text of a new
bill and it passed its first reading on 7 June 1924 with an over-
whelming majority55
In rebuking the new government for devoting only one sentence
of its programme to the question of cultural autonomy, Agrarian
Party parliamentarian and former interior minister Karl Einbund
had reminded incoming Prime Minister Friedrich Akel that the
nationality question would only be solved by fostering a common
civic identity on the part of all Estonia’s residents.56 When in June
1924 the social democrat Juhan Jans characterized Baltic Germans
as déclassé nobles rather than a national minority, and equated
them with communists as a threat to the Estonian state, Werner
Hasselblatt rebuked Jans for his ‘spiteful and suspicious’ com-
ments. Hasselblatt emphasized that nourishing the diverse ethnic
cultures within Estonia’s population was essential to the welfare
of the new state and of its citizens. Recalling his own experiences
in late Tsarist Russia, Hasselblatt asked how many of those
assembled, be they German or Estonian, had like him been denied
the ‘privilege’ of education in their mother tongue.57
More immediately, Hasselblatt reminded his opponent of Baltic
Germans’ service in fighting the Soviet invasion of 1918, thereby
 The Baltic arena   41

Figure 3.1 Werner Hasselblatt.

eliciting cheers from the parliamentary floor. One thing that

undoubtedly bound most Estonian and Baltic German politicians
was a profound aversion to Bolshevism. Their commonalty on
this subject was soon confirmed beyond all doubt by the solidarity
shown to the state by Germans on 1 December 1924 when several
hundred well-­armed communist insurgents mounted a failed
putsch in Tallinn. There could hardly have been a more timely
reminder of the importance of bringing all citizens of Estonia
together. The episode therefore provided the final impetus for the
adoption of the law on cultural autonomy, which quickly passed
its second and third readings in February 1925.58
The abortive communist putsch in Tallinn was not without
effect on the parallel struggle for cultural autonomy then taking
place in Latvia. In agreeing to support emergency legislation
tabled by the new government of Hugo Celmiŋš, Paul Schiemann
and the German fraction which he headed secured in return a
promise to support the cultural autonomy projects that had been
elaborated by Latvia’s various minority groups during the preced-
ing four years. While Baltic Germans in particular had profited
from the 1919 law on minority schooling, their leaders had
42   The Baltic arena
retained a desire for a full law on cultural autonomy, albeit for
different motives. In this respect the liberal/conservative divide
already noted in Estonia was far more apparent among the Baltic
Germans of Latvia, where most viewed cultural autonomy not
primarily in terms of minority rights but rather as a vehicle for
preserving their own exclusivity and indeed perceived superiority
vis-­à-vis other national groups.59
At the other end of the political spectrum, Paul Schiemann
argued for cultural autonomy on liberal grounds, treating Baltic
Germans as but one of the national groups who had to work for
the good of the new Latvia.60 In contrast to the situation in
Estonia, divisions within Latvian Germandom had to be accom-
modated in no fewer than six political parties. That it was possi-
ble to set differences aside, at least in the parliamentary arena,
owed much to Schiemann’s charismatic leadership, though many
on the right in particular saw him as an unavoidable evil in the
new and to them unwelcome parliamentary era.61 The attitude of
the old Baltic German elites was best exemplified by their insist-
ence on separate autonomy laws for each minority group living in
Latvia. Between 1921 and 1925 this remained the formal position
of the German fraction, although it did communicate regularly
with other minority representatives and each group promised
mutual support for their respective projects. Cooperation was
particularly close between Baltic German and Jewish political rep-
resentatives.62 However, the Jewish minority was itself by no
means immune to the kind of internal political differences that
were so readily apparent within the German camp.
Latvia’s Jewish community had begun to discuss the question
of cultural autonomy as early as 1919. Represented as it also was
by six different political parties within the constituent assembly,
the Jewish political elite was riddled with factional disagreements.
Broadly speaking, these pitted the Zionist camp – itself subdivided
along religious–secular and left–right lines – and the socialist
Bund (a subdivision of the Latvian Social Democratic Party)
against the religiously orthodox Agudat Israel. The different
groups all supported the principle of Jewish autonomy, and
further agreed that this should be administered by means of a
public corporation. How to define the boundaries of the Jewish
national community, however, was the subject of intense debate.
All agreed that autonomous institutions could not embrace
anyone of another religious faith, and yet, as in Lithuania, there
 The Baltic arena   43
was disagreement over whether a Jewish national register should
automatically encompass everyone born into the Jewish faith, or
rather be constituted on the basis of voluntary adhesion. The
question was, of course, linked to the issue of whether the corpo-
ration should levy compulsory taxation on its members, or alter-
natively whether to rely on voluntary donations to supplement
state and municipal funding.63
Mirroring the Baltic German predicament, there were also dis­
agreements between Jewish groups over the scope of autonomy.
Following the line of Renner and Bauer, the socialist Bund advo-
cated a purely cultural autonomy, arguing that other aspects of
the national question would be solved through the creation of a
socialist order. Other parties argued that autonomous institutions
should have a more extensive range of competences. Obviously of
great relevance to the Jewish minority was the issue of religion.
Whereas the Bund and a section of the Zionist camp argued for a
purely secular autonomy, Agudat Israel threatened to withdraw
support and establish its own register unless autonomy also incor-
porated Jewish religious institutions.64
Especially contentious, however, was the question of which
language or languages should serve as the medium of instruction
in Jewish schools. Whereas Zionist parties argued for education
in Hebrew – or at least for parity between Hebrew and the
Yiddish vernacular – the Bund adopted a resolutely pro-­Yiddish
stance. By contrast, the National Democrats, representing the
more assimilated Jewish middle class, argued that German and
Russian – hitherto the main languages of Jewish education in the
territories of the new Latvia – should continue to be media of
instruction in Jewish schools.65
Such differences within and between the various nationality
groups also impeded the efforts of Schiemann and others to forge
a united front of minority parliamentarians in favour of cultural
autonomy. Advocates of autonomy were thus greatly disadvan-
taged once various legislative drafts began to go through the par-
liamentary and committee process from 1921 onwards. Indeed,
by 1923 Schiemann had all but accepted that there was no imme-
diate prospect of securing parliamentary support for cultural
autonomy. Disappointment within the German community was
alleviated at least partly by the creation in that same year of a
new organization devoted exclusively to social, cultural and other
non-­political activities, the Deutsch–Baltische Zentrale. Although
44   The Baltic arena
a private corporation rather than the public body advocated by
Renner and Bauer, the new organization promised to give much
needed experience in managing national minority affairs.66
Schiemann and the German fraction nevertheless continued the
struggle to gain parliamentary approval for a separate German
autonomy project of the kind adopted in Estonia in February
1925, the passage of which gave the liberal camp additional lever-
age in their dealings with Baltic German conservatives in Latvia.
This much is clear from the emotionally charged meeting between
the German faction leaders on 20 November 1925, a mere few
days after the Estonian Germans held the inaugural meeting of
their newly established cultural council (see Chapter 4). Among
the reasons Schiemann advanced for concentrating on a similar
general law for all of Latvia’s minorities was the resistance of the
Latvian Social Democrat Party to any separate German law. The
social democratic stance was also supported by Jewish groups,
anxious that otherwise the German community might secure pref-
erential treatment.67 In any case, Schiemann’s advocacy for a
general law was met by a heated outburst from the leader of the
German conservative faction Baron Wilhelm Fircks, who voiced
his distaste for receiving autonomy as the ‘gift of those [left]
Latvian groups with which we are unable to work in the long
run’. Fircks also referred to the ‘odium’ of inclusion with the Rus-
sians and Jews.68 Karl Keller, who headed the German schooling
section within Latvia’s ministry of education, voiced his own dis-
taste at the prospect of being ‘tossed in the same barrel with the
others’.69 Schiemann for his part doggedly insisted that the recent
death of the well-­disposed Latvian minister Zigfrı-ds Meierovics,
together with the fact that no law would make it through parlia-
ment without the support of the social democrats, rendered the
prospect of any separate German project impossible for the fore-
seeable future.70
Schiemann’s strategy had the virtue of keeping open the option
of a general law on cultural autonomy, which in turn helped to
head off more serious divisions within the Latvian German com-
munity. Although parliamentary opposition continued to prevent
the passage of any such legislation, the position of Latvia’s minor-
ities remained far more favourable than in any of the other suc-
cessor states of the region except Estonia. The situation owed
much to the far-­reaching implications of the 1919 law on minor-
ity schooling with its provisions for German and other minority
 The Baltic arena   45

Figure 3.2 Paul Schiemann.

representatives to be consulted on all cultural matters particular

to their community. Equally, the frustration of Latvia’s Germans
at not being allowed to form a public law corporation did not
prevent them from replicating on a private basis through the Zen-
trale many of the features of the experiment in cultural self-­
government upon which Estonia’s Germans embarked in the
autumn of 1925.71
4 The practice of autonomy

Baron von Stackelberg’s distaste at having to follow what he

termed the ‘sterile democratic mechanistic’ route to corporate
organization under Estonia’s 1925 autonomy law tacitly recog-
nized the divisions that existed within his own small and formerly
exclusive Baltic German community. Even those Germans in
favour of cultural autonomy can have had no illusions about the
scale of the task involved in setting up a cultural self-­government.
Whatever reservations there were did not prevent the leaders of
the Estonian Germans from moving promptly to implement the
provisions of the law following its final ratification by parliament
on 12 February 1925. Just three days later, a delegate meeting of
the Deutsch-­Baltische Partei (DBP) resolved to seek official
approval for the establishment of German cultural self-­
government. To this end, various party members, including
August Spindler, Heinrich Pantenius and Harry Koch, formed a
preparatory commission to consider the many practical issues that
were bound to arise.1 Realizing that many if not most Estonian
Germans were unclear about the process, commission members
offered to make themselves available to give talks and lectures to
the wider public.2
Once German leaders had presented their application and
gained governmental approval, the first major challenge they
faced was to draw up an accurate register of those entitled to vote
in elections for a German cultural council. Ironically, this task fell
to Werner Hasselblatt, whose preference was for compulsory
rather than voluntary affiliation to a German national register.3
Hasselblatt joined interior ministry representative Eugen Madis-
son and Estonian court official H. Siimer in an electoral commis-
sion set up for the purpose.4
 The practice of autonomy   47
The law on cultural autonomy stipulated that a list of those cit-
izens already registered as having German nationality (taken from
records held by the police) be made available for public scrutiny
for a period of two months. During this time anyone not wishing
to be included on a national register could apply to have his or
her name struck from the list. Conversely, it was open to individ-
ual citizens to opt for German nationality and to request
inclusion.5
The start of the statutory period of public scrutiny quickly gave
rise to a discussion around who could legitimately claim belong-
ing to a German national group in the Estonia of the 1920s. The
terms of the 1925 law were not always immediately clear even to
those charged with drawing up the national register. This, it has
to be said, was a highly complex undertaking involving the collec-
tion of data by numerous sub-­committees working at the local
level. Thus, an official of the electoral commission had to explain
to one local committee that ‘we do not wish to register . . .
[Jews] . . ., since we are only recording Germans [i.e. persons who
had indicated German nationality], irrespective of whether a per-
son’s children attend German schools’.6
Other observers feared that not everyone recorded on the initial
list of those with German nationality actually considered them-
selves German. One newspaper report from July 1925 claimed
that as many as 2,000 people on the list of German voters were
actually Estonian, Russian or Finnish but held German nationality
because their identity documents dated from the period of occu-
pation by the Reich during 1918.7 By the same token, in the
fraught atmosphere of the immediate post-­independence years,
not all citizens of Estonia who were culturally German necessarily
wished to advertise the fact.8
From the point of view of realizing cultural autonomy it was
imperative to maximize the number of individuals on the list who
were actively committed to this goal and who could, therefore, be
relied upon to vote in elections to a cultural council; achieving the
participation rate of over 50 per cent demanded by the law was
paramount. All those who did not consider themselves culturally
German – passport nationality notwithstanding – were, therefore,
urged to strike their names from the list during the two-­month
period of scrutiny. Equally, those who favoured autonomy but
were not officially German by nationality were encouraged to
amend their personal identity documents so as to allow for their
48   The practice of autonomy
inclusion on the electoral list. Ultimately, as one internal memo-
randum noted, it did not matter whether people on the list were
‘Estonian’ or ‘half-­Russian’: what mattered was a willingness to
participate and to assume a ‘responsibility for our future’.9
Maximizing the number of those actively committed to German
culture was all the more important given that the names on the
electoral list would form the basis of the national register. This
would in turn be used to determine who paid taxes to the German
cultural self-­government. Not surprisingly, encouraging people to
adopt German nationality was a contentious issue for many Esto-
nian state officials. For instance, Johannes Beermann, head of the
German schools section within Estonia’s education ministry, first
advised applicants for German nationality to go through his
office, to bypass difficulties in registering with the local police.
Soon afterwards, however, he felt obliged to withdraw this advice
on the grounds that a large number of applicants might attract
adverse comment.10
As it transpired, registering the requisite number of persons did
not prove to be difficult. Already by 7 June 1925, Werner Hassel-
blatt could record with satisfaction that the ‘overwhelming major-
ity of our people unanimously embrace the idea of cultural
autonomy’.11 The 1922 census had recorded 18,319 people as
having German nationality. Of these, 11,989 were of voting age.
To meet the 50 per cent enrolment requirement of the 1925 law,
the electoral commission was, therefore, obliged to enlist just less
than 6,000 individuals to the electoral register. Between May and
September 1925 it was actually able to collect 11,562 names,
equivalent to 97 per cent of eligible ethnic Germans registered
under the census.12 One list compiled by the Estonian ministry of
the interior contains details of 170 persons who adopted German
nationality within the specified time. Of these, the majority (122)
had previously indicated Estonian nationality, with the remainder
being Latvian (19), Swedish (12), ‘Baltic’ (four), Russian (two),
Danish (four), Polish (two), Lithuanian (one), French (two), Swiss
(one) and ‘unknown’.13 In early August 1925, the Estonian news-
paper Vaba Maa claimed that over 600 people in Tallinn alone
had applied to have their names added to the German electoral
list, and pointedly remarked on the high number of Estonian sur-
names to be found thereon.14
With the register in place, elections to a German cultural
council (Kulturrat) were held on 3–5 October 1925. There were
 The practice of autonomy   49
ten electoral constituencies based on existing county (Maakond)
boundaries, subdivided into a total of 67 smaller electoral dis-
tricts. The overall number of mandates per constituency was
dependent upon the size of the local German population. This
provision meant that Tallinn and its surrounding county of Har-
jumaa provided more than one-­third (16) of the 41 deputies to the
cultural council, whereas Tartu elected eight, Virumaa and Pärnu
three, Järvamaa, Läänemaa, Viljandimaa, Saaremaa, Võrumaa
and Petserimaa two each and Valgamaa one.15
The electoral system adopted in 1925 was bewildering in its
complexity. Candidates were arranged into lists of three, some of
which represented identifiable groupings, each with their own
electoral platform, others of which consisted of independent can-
didates. Individual candidates could appear on more than one list.
Voters in larger constituencies had several lists to choose from –
too many according to some critics – while in some smaller con-
stituencies there was only one list available. Having opted for a
particular list, voters then had to rank the three candidates, their
first choice receiving one vote, the second half a vote and the third
one-­third of a vote. Votes for individual candidates were then
added up and seats on the council allocated according to the final
ranking. In sum, as one local journalist later observed, the system
was neither a normal list system nor a procedure for choosing an
individual, but a mixture of both, combining the deficiencies of
both.16 Despite this, 67 per cent of eligible voters turned out at the
start of October 1925 to elect from 64 separate candidate lists the
first German cultural council.17
The council convened on 1 November 1925 in the House of
the Blackheads on Pikk Street in Tallinn, one of the traditional
symbols of past Baltic German dominion. Between 12.00 and
1.30, 38 council members together with invited guests took their
seats in the so-­called White Room. Present at the opening cere-
mony were Prime Minister Konstantin Päts as well as Interior
Minister Karl Einbund, Foreign Minister Ado Birk and Education
Minister August Rei. They were joined by the German ambassa-
dor and various journalists.18 All present acknowledged the pro-
found historic significance of the event. Einbund for his part
underlined the importance of this ‘big idea’ for ‘the internal devel-
opment of our state’. As to the wider international resonance of
implementing cultural autonomy ‘for the first time in the history
of the world’, Foreign minister Birk went so far as to describe the
50   The practice of autonomy
example set by the German minority as vital to maintaining peace
in Europe.19 More prosaically, August Rei reminded the audience
of the real reason for setting up the cultural council. ‘I see among
the members of the cultural council’, he said, ‘a large number of
worthy schoolmen whom the education ministry has learned to
value.’20 Teachers were indeed prominent, alongside lawyers and
other professionals.
Once the state officials had left the room, the assembled
German council had to vote formally on whether to implement
cultural autonomy. It quickly became clear that for all concerned
this was still a huge step into the unknown. Stackelberg, speaking
for the more conservative element, reiterated his concern that the
new arrangements would be no more than a pale imitation of the
old corporate structures which had provided the basis for Baltic
German hegemony during the Tsarist era. He, therefore, argued
that in opting for cultural autonomy the German community
should emphasize that throughout history Germans had been the
sole ‘mediator, bearer and representative’ of Western European
culture in the Baltic area.21 Most telling perhaps was Baron Grein-
ert’s claim that if the council really went ahead with cultural
autonomy, future generations would feel themselves not as Baltic
Germans but merely as part of a minority!22
For all this, pragmatism, not to say hard realism, won the day.
The majority, albeit with obvious reluctance on the part of some,
acknowledged having to adapt to radically changed sociopolitical
circumstances. At this stage of the proceedings the main concern
of those present focused on the ambiguous nature of the frame-
work law. It left unresolved, among other things, the crucial ques-
tion of the nature and extent of state funding for German schools.
Without further state legislation in such key areas, it was felt that
the autonomy project might even now prove unworkable.23
The decisive voice proved to be that of Werner Hasselblatt.
He reminded the assembled council that the law was wholly
unprecedented; it was the first attempt to put into practice an
ideal ‘for which all Germans had struggled’. The Estonian state,
he maintained, recognized the need to advance the work of the
cultural council, and thus its members had no reason to doubt
that continued collaboration with the authorities would give rise
to positive results. Hasselblatt also urged his fellow representa-
tives to have faith in the ‘internal essence’ of their community
and in its ability to secure continued ‘organic growth’, even
 The practice of autonomy   51
under changed circumstances.24 Ultimately, members of the
assembled Kulturrat took the plunge and voted unanimously to
adopt cultural autonomy.
The decision opened the way to the formal election of a five-­
member cultural government (Kulturverwaltung) as the executive
arm of autonomy. This comprised a series of administrative depart-
ments, reflecting its principal areas of activity, namely, education,
culture, sport and youth affairs, and finance. A permanent secretar-
iat was also set up, responsible, among other things, for supervision
of the cultural curatoria (Kulturkuratorium) established in each of
the nine electoral constituencies outside Tallinn in order to oversee
the operation of cultural autonomy at the local level.25 Housed in a
handsome building with its own courtyard on Kohtu Street, close to
the seat of government on Toompea, the physical location of the
German cultural government underlined the fact that it was
working on behalf of the state rather than in opposition to it. Nev-
ertheless, the operation of cultural self-­government entailed complex
interactions with key ministries as well as local authorities, which
inevitably took time to work out in practice.

Figure 4.1 The building housing the Baltic German Cultural Self-Government

in Estonia.
52   The practice of autonomy
The immediate priority of the cultural government was to ensure
that every German child in Estonia had the opportunity to receive a
formal education in his or her mother tongue within a coherent and
unified network of German schools. Ideally, both private and public
schools were to be included and would offer free elementary educa-
tion to all pupils.26 Estonia’s existing law on primary schooling
already obliged local authorities to provide education in the mother
tongue wherever there were 20 school-­age children belonging to a
particular linguistic minority who could be taught by one teacher.
Depending on numbers, minority-­language education took place
either in separate schools or in dedicated classes based within exist-
ing institutions.27 Only in three locations – Tallinn, Tartu and
Mustjas, close to Võru – were Germans sufficiently numerous to be
guaranteed automatic access to state-­funded schooling. The six
public schools in these towns accounted for 36 per cent of the 3,739
pupils receiving German-­language education in Estonia as of 1925.
The remainder were in private schools (19 in total by 1925), funded
by voluntary contributions from within the German community
(under the terms of the so-­called Schulhilfe) and augmented by offi-
cial subsidies from Germany and by school fees. Nevertheless,
private German-­language schools remained chronically under-
funded during the early post-­independence years, despite charging
high fees in many cases.28
The introduction of cultural autonomy now offered at last the
possibility for the rationalization of German education under the
auspices of the cultural government. The transfer of private
German-­language schools to its jurisdiction was relatively unprob-
lematic, and took place at the start of 1926. However, when it
came to handing over control of publicly funded schools, local
authorities in Tallinn, Tartu and Mustjas proved reluctant to
maintain the levels of financial support hitherto provided for these
institutions. Moreover, the German cultural government had
assumed that funding would be calculated on the basis of the
number of pupils enrolled in individual schools. Tallinn city
council, on the other hand, insisted that the proportion of the
education budget falling to German-­minority schools had to be
worked out not on the basis of pupil numbers, but rather accord-
ing to the ratio between those Germans enrolled on the national
register and the overall population of the city. This obviously
threatened to reduce the number of publicly funded classes for the
German minority.29 Although Estonia’s ministry of education
 The practice of autonomy   53
formally handed over control of publicly funded German-­
language schools to the cultural government at the start of the
1926–1927 school year, the local authorities concerned had still
failed to agree on the amount of funds to be allocated by the
required deadline of December 1926.30
Against this background the German cultural government faced
an uphill struggle in its effort to reduce its costs by bringing some
of the German-­language private schools into the public sector.
Not until 1928 was there any real resolution of issues surround-
ing public funding for German-­language schools. Continued
private contributions and increased cultural subsidies from
Germany helped to cover any shortfall. Most significantly,
however, the onset of cultural autonomy enabled the cultural gov-
ernment to supplement state support through the introduction of
a system of self-­taxation. This involved a compulsory levy on all
adult members of the national register who were in employment.
Defaulters were to be liable to legal action, enforced by the state.
The tax, which was graduated according to income tax category,
was to be fixed annually by the German cultural council.31 As was
the case with the upkeep of the national register, the actual collec-
tion of taxes was handled at the local and regional level by the
curatoria. These filed tax returns to the central organs of cultural
autonomy and had to account for non-­payment on the part of
individuals. Logically, the local bodies also dealt with requests for
exemption from or reduction of the tax burden.32
A minute of the German cultural council from November 1927
indicates that evasion rates were relatively low, with 84 per cent
of the tax having been collected on time. Overall, figures for
1926–1930 showed three successive annual rises in the amount of
tax collected, followed by only a modest decline.33 Werner Has-
selblatt’s perception in May 1928 that there had not been signifi-
cant defections from the national register simply in order to avoid
paying tax was thereby confirmed.34 A later annual report for
1929 by the head of the cultural government recorded only 321
removals from the adult register during that year. Of these, 232
were due to deaths and there were only 89 cases of people actively
requesting to be struck from the list. In the same period there
were 416 new entrants. Adults signing up for the first time num-
bered 163. The remainder transferred from the youth register,
having reached the age of eighteen. Overall, therefore, there had
54   The practice of autonomy
been an increase of 95 persons during the year, suggesting broad
acceptance of the structures built since 1925.35
The success of a system that was ultimately founded on per-
sonal choice contrasts markedly with the approach to cultural
taxation adopted under the 1920 Jewish autonomy law in Lithua-
nia, which did not allow for opt-­outs. As a result, taxation
became a huge source of collective dissatisfaction and evasion was
widespread. The resultant tensions within local Jewish communi-
ties made it even harder for leaders to maintain autonomy in the
increasingly nationalistic atmosphere of early 1920s Lithuania.36
Interestingly enough in parenthesis, this lesson appears to have
been lost on Werner Hasselblatt who personally remained wedded
to the coercive approach when it came to self-­taxation, the chief
secure source of income for cultural self-­government.37
Once a comparatively firm financial base had been secured, the
German cultural government could begin the practical task of con-
structing a single, integrated German school network. A unified
system of management for all schools under the auspices of the cul-
tural government allowed for immediate financial rationalization,
producing an annual saving of up to half a million Estonian marks.
In several cases, small rural elementary classes were now merged
into a single unit (Klassenkomplex) for group teaching.38 Elsewhere,
however, funding was now also available to support new elemen-
tary schools in Elwa, Kersell, Sangla and Eidapere, as well as the
expansion of boarding facilities at existing German-­language
schools. In addition, small grants could now be provided to enable
children from remote areas to attend German-­language schools.39
Supplementary funding continued to come from private sources
even after the introduction of compulsory taxation. One promi-
nent organization involved in this was the Union of German Asso-
ciations (Bund der deutschen Vereine).40 Another private initiative
was the establishment of a separate German girls’ school in Tartu,
managed and partly funded through the efforts of a locally formed
organization. The cultural government on the whole welcomed
such initiatives, providing they did not undermine its overall
control of the direction and content of schooling. Inevitably, the
formation of a German school network was accompanied by
extensive and sometimes acrimonious debates over the nature and
balance of educational provision.
Ewald Ammende might well have spoken of the need for
German schools to teach ‘in a German spirit’.41 What this meant
 The practice of autonomy   55
in practice, however, was less than clear. Did it imply retaining
the classical gymnasium route leading to higher education and the
professions? Or would the loss of Baltic Germans’ privileged
status put a premium on more practical and technical forms of
education, thereby enabling school leavers more readily to hold
their own within the society of independent Estonia? This was
one of the central questions dividing the Baltic German commu-
nity. On the one hand, German parents’ associations had already
been complaining for some time that there were too many second-
ary schools of the traditional type and that more emphasis should
be placed on developing technical education.42 Their objection
was in turn contested after November 1925 by influential voices
within the German cultural council who saw the gymnasium as
the best way of preserving the German language and the sense of
Germandom.43 Inevitably, however, the wider debate over princi-
ples could hardly be divorced from practical questions of cost,
notably, for example, the need to increase salaries in order to
attract the best-­qualified teachers. Long-­term financial stability
therefore required continuous monitoring of the school network
as it evolved.
Remarkably, none of these problems prevented the emergence
of a unified school network by the start of the 1927–1928 aca-
demic year. Its financial base was further consolidated in the
course of 1928 through the transfer of 27 private German-­
language classes into the public school system.44 With these devel-
opments came the capacity to offer free elementary education to
all German-­language pupils. Private schools forming part of the
network provided the first four years of schooling free of charge
to pupils whose parents were enrolled on the national register. In
place of the fee income thus forfeited, private schools received an
equivalent sum in the form of subventions from the cultural gov-
ernment. The cultural government also determined the level of the
fees that became payable when pupils entered the fifth year of
private schooling. At that point, parents enrolled on the national
register paid reduced fees, although the same benefits could be
enjoyed by non-­members who made a contribution equivalent to
the appropriate rate of cultural self-­taxation.45
A report from 1928 suggests that even after payment of taxes
to the cultural government was taken into account, parents who
belonged to the national register still made an overall financial
saving under this system.46 Prior to the abolition of fees for
56   The practice of autonomy
elementary schooling, the cost of educating a child over 11 years
stood at 68,000 Estonian marks. Following the rationalization
under cultural government auspices, the amount fell to only
55,200 marks – a saving of 12,800 marks. The overall annual
saving for German schooling was estimated at between one and
two million marks.47
For all this, German cultural self-­government found itself under
significantly increased financial pressure by the turn of the decade.
A major factor was the declining birth rate in Estonia during and
after the First World War. The attendant generalized fall in
primary and secondary school enrolment brought with it cuts in
both state funding and fee income. How serious this was could be
seen from the 1930–1931 budget of the cultural government,
which, despite a 12 per cent reduction in equipment and teaching
aids, was still showing a probable deficit of some 11,000 Estonian
crowns.48
The shortfall in income inevitably meant that some sacrifices
would have to be made in order to maintain the integrity of the
school network. One interesting illustration of the tensions at the
heart of autonomous schooling is provided by an ongoing dispute
between the cultural government and Alfred Walter, director of
the private German gymnasium in Tartu. Walter had opened
primary classes in his school without the approval of the cultural
government, which naturally saw these classes as a potential rival
to the German-­language public primary school in the town.
Wilhelm von Wrangell, who took over from Harry Koch as head
of the cultural government in 1932 following the latter’s illness,
conceded that his organization had no formal legal right to ban
these classes. He nevertheless insisted that ‘a common school
policy, which is vital in the present difficult time, is only possible
if individual groups heed the will of the cultural council even
when there is no legal obligation to do so’.49
As it became apparent that a still more fundamental restructur-
ing of the school network could no longer be delayed, the unity of
the German minority was to be tested further over the coming
year. The budgetary proposals put by the cultural government to
the cultural council on 23 November 1930 envisaged no change
to existing arrangements for Tallinn, but called for cuts to
secondary school provision in Tartu, Fellin, Narva and Weissen-
stein. The alternative – maintaining the status quo – would have
meant significant increases in cultural taxation for an already
 The practice of autonomy   57
overstretched German community, something that the cultural
council ruled unacceptable.50
The cultural council eventually gave its broad assent to the pro-
posed budgetary cuts albeit with some modifications, such as the
proviso that those secondary classes under threat could continue
to operate if additional funding could be secured from elsewhere.
Inevitably, however, where issues continued to arise about the
extent and nature of schooling provision, there was still contro-
versy. This in turn brought into focus widespread dissatisfaction
within the German community regarding the procedures for elect-
ing the cultural council. The previous elections of 1925 and 1928
had provoked much criticism among voters in Tallinn and Tartu,
the two towns accounting for three-­quarters of the total German
electorate. Many objected to the similarity of too many of the lists
and the restrictions this placed upon voter choice. There was also
a widespread perception that the electoral process itself was far
too complex.51
As a result, Wilhelm von Wrangell, at that time still vice presi-
dent of the German cultural government, prepared draft propos-
als addressing both issues. Essentially, he envisaged longer
combined lists in which each competing group within the German
community included all of its candidates. In order to counter local
patriotism and to emphasize that the elections were about advanc-
ing the interests of the German community as a whole, candidates
could appear on several lists and in several electoral districts,
rather than being confined to a specific locality.52
The principle was broadly agreed, with some modifications
based on a draft by Dr H. von Zedelmann from Tartu. This
retained the principle of drawing up longer electoral lists, while
also allowing electors to give supplementary votes to three
favoured candidates (two in the case of smaller districts). Subse-
quently, every basic vote for each candidate plus every supplemen-
tary vote would be allocated to the list on which he/she stood.
The candidates within the list were to be ranked according to the
number of votes received, and the seats distributed to the various
lists on the basis of the total share of the vote received by each.
The Revalsche Zeitung optimistically reported that this draft
struck a suitable balance between local concerns and the overall
needs of the German minority.53
Another major aim in bringing German-­language public and
private schools into a single network had been to achieve broad
58   The practice of autonomy
control over issues such as staff selection, school inspections and
curriculum development, which German representatives had pre-
viously highlighted as essential to the preservation of German cul-
tural identity. For instance, it was noted that prior to the
introduction of cultural autonomy, the 1,300 German-­language
pupils studying in Estonian public schools (more than one-­third
of the total) had not had the benefits of a link to any ‘cultural
organization of our people’.54
The report books of the German schools inspectorate certainly
indicate that inculcating a ‘German spirit’, to use Ewald
Ammende’s phrase, was by no means always an easy matter, even
after autonomy had been introduced. When school counsellor
Emil Musso inspected the Walter school in Tartu on 12 December
1928, pupils told him that one of the teachers, Mr Lepp, listed
Estonia’s internal enemies as: 1. Communists, 2. Russian monar-
chists, and 3. Baltic Germans. Musso planned to raise this matter
with Lepp at a second lesson due to take place on Wednesday 12
December. However, Lepp failed to attend, having submitted a
doctor’s note saying he was ill. Both Walter and Musso confirmed
with the pupils that the remark had indeed been made, and then
visited Lepp at his home in the afternoon. The latter admitted
making the comment, but claimed he was acting according to an
instruction containing materials which he used as the basis for his
teaching.55
In his annual report for 1927, Johannes Beermann, now secre-
tary to the cultural council, had also alluded to continued gripes
within the German community over what was perceived as a lack
of genuine autonomy due to excessive regulation by the ministry
of education.56 In Beermann’s view, this was because initial expec-
tations had been too high, with many regarding cultural auton-
omy as a sort of magic wand making anything possible. Second,
the term cultural autonomy had confused people who overlooked
the fact that ‘we received self-­government on the same basis as
[existing] local authorities, in no way full autonomy, that is to say
an administration completely independent of the state’.57
As suggested in the previous chapter, German minority control
over the structure and content of schooling proved in practice to
be more comprehensive in neighbouring Latvia during the late
1920s, albeit by dint of considerable effort by, and despite com-
parable misgivings within, the community. Admittedly, the pros-
pect of a general autonomy law for Latvia’s minorities had all but
 The practice of autonomy   59
vanished by the end of 1925, and with it any chance of constitut-
ing a national minority as a public corporation. Instead, from
1923, Latvia’s Germans made use of the Zentrale deutsch-­
baltischer Arbeit through which they were able to introduce a
system of voluntary self-­taxation in 1926. The arrangement
helped to consolidate the advances in German-­language education
already made on the basis of the 1919 law on minority schooling.
With the exception of one ill-­disposed incumbent during 1923,
successive education ministers in Latvia had refrained from undue
direct interference in the running of German schools. Such was
certainly the view of Wolfgang Wachtsmuth, who headed the
German school authority in the Latvian ministry of education
from 1928 until 1934.58
Under both the Estonian and the Latvian systems, national
minorities were defined on the basis of language. While this was
on the whole unproblematic for Baltic Germans, it was much less
so in the case of the Jewish minority for which language remained
a major bone of political contention throughout the 1920s. In
Latvia the terms of the 1919 education law at least partly miti-
gated linguistically based conflicts: the fact that the state arranged
schooling on the basis of declared family language opened up the
possibility of offering classes in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Despite
ongoing disputes between the Yiddish and Hebrew camps, both
languages were ultimately accommodated within the Jewish
section of the ministry of education. Although Yiddish remained
the predominant language of instruction, Latvia’s only socialist
government of the democratic era granted parity to both lan-
guages during 1926.59
Many Jewish pupils undergoing schooling in German and –
especially – Russian initially came under other arrangements. In
February 1920, Jacob Landau, head of the Jewish section within
Latvia’s ministry of education, noted that in some of the schools
belonging to other minority sections no fewer than 90 per cent of
the pupils were of Jewish origin.60 Data from the Russian section
of the ministry in the mid-­1920s confirms that of 2,159 studying
at 16 private Russian-­language secondary schools, some 1,318
were of Jewish origin. Indeed, only 390 were Russian by national-
ity. The Jewish presence within private Russian-­language elemen-
tary schools was even more striking.61 On this basis, Jewish
education officials within the ministry demanded at the very least
a consultative role in the running of the schools in question,
60   The practice of autonomy
which were expected to incorporate the study of Hebrew and of
Jewish history and culture into their curriculum.62
Zionist political forces within the council of the Jewish section
had a more radical agenda, arguing that such schools should also
be required to increase significantly the number of hours devoted
to Jewish religion and culture at the expense of Russian grammar,
history and literature. Furthermore, this was envisaged as a purely
temporary expedient, pending the formal transfer of the schools
to the Jewish section and a long-­term shift towards a unified
Jewish school system teaching in a ‘single national language’ –
Hebrew.63 Section head Jacob Landau, however, was wary of agi-
tating for a transfer of schools from the Russian to the Jewish
section. Citing the ‘imprecise nature’ of the 1919 law on minority
schooling, he was concerned that the ministry might not take the
Jewish side in this matter. Were it to rule that the affiliation of a
school ought to be a question for the owner or for the school
council, then the Jewish section might lose any possibility of
exerting influence over those schools that were of most interest to
it.64
In the course of his remarks Landau also reminded his col-
leagues that the language of instruction in particular schools was
a matter for parents and children who were free to determine their
own family language under the terms of the 1919 legislation. Fol-
lowing the line of the National Democratic Party to which he
belonged, Landau also argued that it was simply not practical to
contemplate a system of Jewish education delivered entirely in
Hebrew. While underlining his commitment to promoting Jewish
national identity, Landau nevertheless insisted that cultural
advancement was also contingent on the material well-­being of
the community. Hitherto, Jewish families had habitually sent their
children to Russian-­language schools not because they considered
Russian to be their ‘national’ language, but so as to give the pupil
better opportunities to attend university or find work in Russia.
Any attempt to abolish or even limit further the teaching of
Russian (or other languages) in Jewish schools would simply
result in a loss of pupils. As long as every Jewish child could be
taught ‘Jewish subjects’, this would be more than sufficient to
forestall the risk of ‘denationalization’.65
Landau’s National Democratic Party never again won seats in
parliament after Latvia’s first Saiema. Nevertheless he was able to
retain his position as head of the Jewish section right through to
 The practice of autonomy   61
1934, despite pressure from within those circles advocating
greater use of Hebrew and Yiddish in Jewish schools. Landau’s
longevity in office was due in no small part to the endorsement of
Mordechai Dubin, Latvia’s most influential Jewish politician,
whose Agudat Israel party opposed the Zionist project of trans-
forming the old Jewish liturgical language into a modern vernacu-
lar. As a conservative religious party, Agudat also voted
consistently with Latvia’s (mainly Agrarian Party-­led) right-­of-
centre ruling coalitions during the years 1922–1934.66
Efforts by the Jewish education section to bring all Jewish
pupils within its ambit were finally rewarded in the mid-­1920s
when the Russian section of the education ministry reversed its
previous opposition and consented to the transfer of the disputed
schools under its jurisdiction (see below). This decision appears
consistent with a new line on national affiliation emanating from
the education ministry, which issued a directive stating that all
schools in which 60 per cent of pupils belonged to a particular
minority (in this case, the Jewish) should come under the appro-
priate national authority.67
Progress towards the consolidation of a Jewish minority iden-
tity was also discernible at that time in neighbouring Estonia
where the small Jewish community followed the German lead by
electing its own 27-member cultural council in May 1926. This
duly voted in favour of implementing cultural autonomy and
appointed a cultural government consisting of seven members, as
well as establishing local curatoria in Tartu, Narva, Pärnu,
Rakvere, Viljandi and Valga.68 What followed during the course
of the next few years has been described as a form of Jewish
national awakening, evidenced by the establishment of new
schools and a plethora of clubs and societies. Tallinn’s existing
Jewish school was quickly integrated into the state network and a
new secondary school set up in Tartu (1926) and a new primary
school in Valga (1928).69 Between 1923 and 1935 the proportion
of Jewish students studying in Jewish schools rose from 33 to 56
per cent.70
Such advances did not prevent continued debate within the
Jewish cultural council among different political groupings,
further underlining the complexity of defining Jewish identity and
raising additional thorny questions concerning the respective juris-
dictions of minority cultural self-­governments on the one hand
and, on the other, Estonia’s existing local authorities. One of the
62   The practice of autonomy
Jewish cultural council’s first rulings was that teaching at the
Jewish school in Tallinn should be in Hebrew. Although this deci-
sion reflected majority opinion within the cultural council, it nev-
ertheless proved controversial amongst the wider Jewish public.71
Continued demands for Yiddish-­language education coming from
the Jewish population in the capital ultimately prompted the crea-
tion of a separate private school, which the cultural government
refused to incorporate into the new autonomous Jewish school
network.
In a letter to Estonia’s education ministry in September 1926
the Tallinn local educational authority (koolivalitsus) also noted
that several Jewish parents had requested permission to send their
children to a non-­Jewish school on the grounds that no one in the
family spoke Hebrew, only Yiddish, Russian or German.72 A full
12 months later the ministry sent a reply confirming that a child
who did not speak Hebrew at home could not be compelled to
attend a Hebrew-­language school. Citing the law on primary
schooling, the ministry ruled that the children in question were
entitled to receive education at home or at a school teaching in
another language. In this case, moreover, the choice of school was
entirely down to the parents: the permission of the local educa-
tional authority was required only where the district already con-
tained a school teaching in the relevant mother tongue.73
The Jewish cultural government objected strongly to this ruling,
insisting on its sole right to decide whether Jewish parents be
allowed to send their children to a non-­Jewish school. The same
law on education also stipulated that the mother tongue of a child
was to be determined according to his or her nationality. On this
basis the Jewish authorities argued somewhat disingenuously that
the national language had to be considered the mother tongue.
Since Hebrew and Yiddish were both Jewish national languages,
it followed that the Hebrew-­language primary school had the
status of a mother-­tongue school. Therefore, all Jewish children
were obliged to study in it unless the Jewish cultural government
decided otherwise.74
After further deliberation, Estonia’s ministry of education came
round to the viewpoint of the Jewish cultural government. In a
later exchange of correspondence with the Tallinn local educa-
tional authority in June and July 1928, it was stated that under
the terms of the law on cultural self-­government, local authorities
no longer had any obligations towards members of national
 The practice of autonomy   63
minorities as far as educational matters were concerned. Hence-
forth, in cases where a child belonged to a minority group that
had opted for cultural autonomy, permission to study in a non-­
native language school could only be granted by the relevant
minority self-­government.75
The requirement to seek such permission did not, however,
apply to those parents of Jewish nationality who were not
enrolled on the national register. Faced with the new regulations,
many Jewish parents who had initially opted for membership
simply struck their names from the list and sought to place their
children in non-­Jewish schools. The Jewish cultural government
then maintained that for local education authorities to accede to
these demands would threaten the very existence of Jewish educa-
tion in Estonia, given the small numbers of pupils involved. The
Russification or Germanization of the Jewish minority, it argued,
did not conform to the principles of a healthy state and nationali-
ties policy. For reasons of state prestige (Estonia having been the
first country to give its minorities cultural autonomy), the Jewish
cultural government should have the sole right to grant permis-
sion to study in non-­Jewish schools, regardless of whether or not
a person belonged to the Jewish national register. The ministry of
education, however, ruled quite correctly that this would contra-
dict the terms and guiding principles of the 1925 autonomy law.76
If the German and Jewish minorities of Estonia and Latvia
exhibited different profiles and preoccupations during the 1920s,
the degree of dissimilarity between these two groups on the one
hand and, on the other, the local Russian population was even
more striking. By far the largest of the minority nationalities in
interwar Estonia and Latvia, ethnic Russians also presented the
biggest challenges in terms of societal integration. In both coun-
tries the Russian minority was predominantly rural, poor and illit-
erate, concentrated mainly in eastern border districts that had for
the most part never belonged to the pre-­war Baltic provinces and
were thus only incorporated into Estonia and Latvia as a result of
the 1920 peace treaties with Soviet Russia. The communal system
of agriculture inherited from the Tsarist period was gradually
abolished in the course of the 1920s, but most local residents were
left to eke out a living on small rented plots of land in areas where
birth rates and population density remained significantly higher
than the national average. Land hunger was compounded by the
loss of traditional markets in the Russian hinterland, not least for
64   The practice of autonomy
the long-­established Russian fishing communities on the western
shores of Lake Peipsi in Estonia.77
As far as cultural recognition was concerned, the compactly
settled Russian population of eastern Estonia was able to utilize
the territorially based provisions for minority rights established
under the 1918 school law and the constitution of 1920. By the
end of the first decade of independence there were over 100
Russian-­language primary schools in Estonia, with over 9,000
pupils. A further 1,000 were studying in Russian-­language sec-
ondary schools.78 The progress made in developing Russian-­
language education during these years owed much to the work of
Aleksei Janson, who served as Russian national secretary within
Estonia’s ministry of education from 1922 to 1927. In 1923,
Janson also helped to establish the Union of Russian Educational
and Charitable Societies, which he chaired for the first four years
of its existence.79
A man of both cultures – Estonian and Russian – and a tireless
champion of minority cultural rights in Russia during the last
years of Tsarist rule, Janson was also a committed socialist. For
him, developing Russian-­language school-­age and adult educa-
tion was central to improving the economic lot of the rural
Russian population and to integrating the eastern borderlands
more thoroughly into the new framework of the Republic of
Estonia. Quickly disillusioned by what he saw as the state’s lack
of support for these areas, he urged local Russians to organize
themselves more effectively in order to maximize their political
influence.80
Janson’s call for the establishment of Russian cultural auton-
omy was echoed by elements of the right-­of-centre Russian
National Union (RNU) founded in Estonia during 1920. While
describing the existing educational provisions for the Russian
minority as the most generous in Europe, commentators from
within RNU still alluded to ‘unwanted difficulties’ that could
sometimes arise in a system that remained wholly under the aus-
pices of central state government.81 Full cultural autonomy, it was
argued, would give Russian representatives a far greater say in
areas such as staff recruitment and curriculum design, while
allowing the Russian minority to claim a larger share of the cul-
tural funding disbursed by the Estonian state.
The most prominent exponent of this view was the Tartu
University professor and RNU politician Mikhail Kurchinskii,
 The practice of autonomy   65
whose previous research on municipal government and finances
left him well placed to grapple with the complexities of the 1925
law on cultural autonomy. With a network of state-­administered
Russian-­language schools already in place many local Russian
commentators baulked at an autonomy scheme that would entail
the payment of additional taxes to a Russian cultural self-­
government. By contrast, in a series of articles published during
the late 1920s and early 1930s, Kurchinskii emphatically denied
that autonomy would impose an undue financial burden for the
already straitened Russian community. According to his calcula-
tions, fully 65 per cent of the 325,000 Estonian Crowns spent
annually by the German cultural self-­government came from state
and municipal subsidies, and only 75,000 from cultural taxation.
If 18,000 Germans could collect this sum, argued Kurchinskii,
surely 90,000 Russians could do the same? With a progressive
system of taxation, less well-­off members of the community would
be required to contribute less than one crown per year, far below,
he claimed, what the average person spent annually on vodka!82
While the size of the Russian minority could be construed as
advantageous in terms of implementing cultural autonomy, it also

Figure 4.2 Professor Mikhail Kurchinskii.

66   The practice of autonomy
presented considerable practical obstacles. Registering 12,000
Germans in the course of 1925 had been a significant feat even for
a community that was largely urban and comparatively socially
cohesive. Russian advocates of cultural autonomy would have
been required to garner some three times that number and this
from amongst a population that displayed high levels of illiteracy
as well as living mostly in isolated rural settlements.83 In the polit-
ical context of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Kurchinskii’s care-
fully crafted rational arguments in favour of autonomy failed to
carry the Russian elite. In the view of his detractors, the Tartu
academic was insufficiently versed in the realities of a rural
Russian ‘periphery’ that had little interest in secondary schooling
and was content to leave responsibility for primary education in
the hands of central government.84
Kurchinskii did in fact come to appreciate the scale of these
obstacles. He nonetheless continued to insist that the preparatory
work to establish cultural autonomy would in itself serve as a
‘sociopolitical school’ for a Russian population that could hardly
be described as ‘a single united national whole’.85 In his view, the
main barrier to autonomy lay in the existence of a host of ‘mutu-
ally antagonistic . . . organizations’, many of which feared a loss of
influence should control of Russian cultural affairs pass to a single
elected self-­government body.86 Here, Kurchinskii was obviously
referring first and foremost to the Union of Russian Educational
and Charitable Societies headed by his bitter political rival Aleksei
Janson.
The Russian population in Latvia was similarly beset by politi-
cal divisions, and this state of affairs ultimately proved detrimen-
tal not just to specifically Russian interests, but also to the
political influence of Latvia’s minorities as a whole. The National
Democratic Union of Russian Citizens of Latvia (NDU), formed
prior to Latvia’s independence, actively discussed a law on
Russian national–cultural autonomy during the early 1920s, but
its endeavours were undermined by the failure of Russians to
unite and cooperate effectively.87 The NDU quickly lost any pre-
tensions as a broad-­based national organization, splitting into a
liberal democratic nationalist fraction (Russkoe Obshchestvo v
Latvii), which advocated close cooperation with all national
groups inhabiting Latvia, and a more rightist nationalist grouping
(the Russian National Union) adhering to the principles of ethnic
exclusivity.88 It can only be presumed that the latter tendency
 The practice of autonomy   67
concurred with the July 1925 ministry of education ruling on
those Russian-­language schools with a preponderance of Jewish
pupils, paving the way for the transfer of ten private Russian-­
language schools to the Jewish minority section. Even so, the
action elicited vigorous debates amongst Russian officials within
the ministry.89
There were also divisions between the mainly urban-­based
Russian leadership in western Latvia and representatives from
rural Latgale, where a significant minority of Russian-­speaking
inhabitants were also religious Old Believers and thus adhered to
their own specific cultural practices. Latgalian representatives
such as Saiema deputy MA Kallistratov complained that the views
and concerns of his constituents were insufficiently represented
within the Russian section of Latvia’s education ministry.90
Russian organizations at least briefly managed to set aside their
differences, uniting behind the candidacy of Professor I. F.
Yupatov, who in December 1923 was appointed head of the
Russian section within the education ministry.91 As noted earlier,
the National Democratic Union also initiated discussions on a
draft cultural autonomy law for the Russian minority, but such
efforts were undermined by in-­fighting between the various
Russian parties and factions represented in parliament, as well as
by a failure to cooperate effectively with representatives of other
minority groups. By November 1926, the Russian parliamentary
faction had collapsed, and with it the entire minority bloc within
the Saiema.92
Advocates of Russian cultural autonomy could nevertheless
draw comfort from the fact that nine out of ten ethnic Russian
children in Latvia were receiving primary education in their native
language by the end of the 1920s.93 This was despite the covert
agenda pursued from 1924 by a secret committee of bureaucrat
nationalists, drawn from the key departments of central govern-
ment. This body was committed to nationalizing the eastern bor-
derlands of Latvia by drawing non-­ethnically Latvian pupils out
of minority-­language schools and into those teaching in Latvian.
As part of this strategy, Latvian-­language primary schools
received extra funding towards the provision of free school meals,
a major enticement for poor rural families in particular. Whereas
schools controlled by the German and Jewish sections were able
to compete in the lunch stakes by raising additional private
funding, Russian-­language schools were considerably more
68   The practice of autonomy
vulnerable in this regard.94 Such illegal practices during the 1920s
once again demonstrate how choice of nationality or language of
schooling were not always determined solely by the personal pref-
erence of the individual, but were contingent on a whole range of
constraints and incentives. In the final analysis, however, the
lunch initiative does not appear to have met with great success,
given the proportion of Russian-­language pupils still attending
Russian schools at the end of the decade.
In a more general review of a decade of autonomous schooling
in Latvia, the outgoing head of the German education authority,
Karl Keller, reported in 1929 that irrespective of political differ-
ences between the political parties and some hostility from sec-
tions of the Latvian press, the idea of a minority having its own
cultural existence had been recognized as being to the general
good.95 Keller recalled the initial strong resistance among officials
and the wider public, which he ascribed partly to the legacy of a
Tsarist state alien to the concept of free national development.
Ultimately, however, the early clashes between minority repre-
sentatives and the bureaucracy over aspects of the legislation had
given way to a situation where autonomous schooling was
accepted in official circles and was gaining support from public
opinion, albeit sometimes as a necessary evil. In this respect, what
seemed to bother Latvians, as it plainly did many Estonians, was
the idea that minority schools might be superior to those catering
for the ethnic majority. Keller found it difficult to assess the
response of the mass of Latvians, but believed that difficulties in
setting up new minority schools reflected concern about the likely
fiscal burden to the local authority rather than hostility towards
the idea as such.96
German officials in Estonia were similarly encouraged by the
initial experience of cultural autonomy during the late 1920s. In
his final report to the first German cultural council in 1928, Harry
Koch claimed that despite continuing difficulties and uncertainties
the risk had been well worth taking.97 His understanding seems to
have been shared by other observers at the turn of the 1930s, who
claimed that earlier fears of autonomy giving rise to states within
states had now been conclusively dispelled. Revaler Bote editor
Axel de Vries, for instance, in reviewing the previous five years
recorded a positive view of cultural autonomy (now embracing
‘100 per cent of Germans’), despite shortcomings arising from the
framework nature of the 1925 law.98 His view was shared by
 The practice of autonomy   69
Eugen Madisson, one of the key Estonian state officials who
oversaw autonomy, as well as by no less a figure than Social Dem-
ocrat Party leader Mikhel Martna, who had been one of the most
vociferous opponents of cultural autonomy in the parliamentary
debates of the early 1920s.99
These upbeat assessments of the first post-­independence decade,
however, mask the continued resentment voiced by more nation-
alizing circles unhappy at the disproportionate influence of both
Germans and Jews within the urban economy. Claims of integra-
tion through cultural autonomy are also hard to sustain in the
case of the Russian minorities living in Latvia and Estonia, who
remained marginalized within the new socio-­economic order.
Contemporary accounts on the pages of the Riga-­based Russian-­
language daily Segodniia suggested that ethnicity remained the
primary basis for self-­identification amongst local Russians who
also continued to view themselves as part of a broader, transna-
tional cultural community. A decade on from independence, only
15 per cent of Latvia’s Russians were conversant with Latvian,
whereas Germans and Jews (along with half of ethnic Latvians)
were usually able to speak two, three or even four languages.100
While this trend was not in itself immediately threatening to
the integrity of the Latvian state, the failure to improve economic
conditions in Latgale – home to three-­quarters of Latvia’s Rus-
sians as well as to an ethnically Belorussian population – increased
the potential allure of propaganda from the neighbouring USSR.
Aleksei Janson voiced similar concerns with regard to the eastern
districts of neighbouring Estonia, claiming in 1925 that ‘here,
unlike in Soviet Russia, dreams of a socialist paradise remain very
much alive’.101
The likes of Paul Schiemann and Mikhail Kurchinskii often
reminded their ethnic compatriots in Latvia and Estonia of how
favoured their situation was in comparison with that of German
and Russian minorities elsewhere. Both politicians, however, also
appreciated that the progress made in their own countries could
be best secured in the long term by extending the campaign for
cultural autonomy beyond the Baltic states to the wider European
arena. Only through simultaneous work at this level, they rea-
soned, could the construction of prosperous and integrated state
communities be guaranteed.
5 Nationalities in congress

In a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung on 25 February

1925, Ewald Ammende hailed the adoption of Estonia’s cultural
autonomy law as ‘an important achievement for all minorities and
a decisive step towards national rapprochement’.1 Understand­
ably, there was much satisfaction on the part of Ammende, Schie­
mann, Kurchinskii and other minority activists with the way in
which fears of cultural autonomy as a harbinger of states within
states had been greatly reduced, at least within their own Baltic
homelands. Taking this message beyond the borders of their
respective countries, however, presented a more formidable
challenge.
In the first instance it meant having to convince the League of
Nations of the benefits of cultural autonomy for the protection of
all national minorities in Europe. Minority leaders were by now
thoroughly disillusioned with the opaque and ineffective proce­
dures put in place by the League. In a newspaper interview in
Geneva on 4 September 1926, Schiemann poured scorn on the
‘senseless remarks’ of the League rapporteur Afranio Mello
Franco, whom he charged with having ‘no idea at all’ of the Euro­
pean situation. Franco’s view, he added, may have been unduly
influenced by his Brazilian background and the very different set
of issues pertaining to immigration in South America.2 Two years
later, Schiemann reiterated his dismay by attacking the way in
which League committees were ‘swallowing’ minority petitions. In
this ‘shocking act’ he saw a cynical ‘reduction of the will to peace
to lip service to peace’.3
By the mid-­1920s, German minority leaders had already accu­
mulated considerable experience in organizing themselves across
borders through the Verband der deutschen Minderheiten in
 Nationalities in congress   71

Figure 5.1 Afranio Mello Franco.

Europa. To reiterate, the proclaimed mission of the Verband was,

first, to counter the prevailing sense of isolation and helplessness
amongst the scattered German communities of Eastern Europe. A
second objective was to campaign for cultural autonomy, initially
for German minorities, within Europe’s existing borders.
However, Ammende’s travels in Europe had convinced him that
the quest for cultural autonomy would be all the more effective if
non-­German minority representatives could be persuaded to make
common cause with the Verband in forming a new European-­
wide organization. Doubtless, Ammende’s search for a new area
of activity was also at least partly due to his disappointment at
not being offered the key post of secretary to the Verband. This
had gone to Carl Georg Bruns, a respected Berlin-­based specialist
in international law. More to the point, Bruns had good connec­
tions to the German foreign office, whose financial support was
essential to the Verband’s operation.4
Figure 5.2 Ewald Ammende.

Figure 5.3 Carl Bruns.

 Nationalities in congress   73
Ammende’s initiative to reach out to non-­German minorities
also has to be seen in the context of the expectations aroused by
German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann’s endorsement of
cultural autonomy for all European minorities in a memorandum
of 13 January 1925 entitled ‘The foreign policy imperative for a
regulation of minorities’ rights within the Reich corresponding to
the needs of German minorities in Europe’. Stresemann’s action
was based on advice from Bruns following a period of intensive
lobbying by German minority leaders. Their efforts had culmi­
nated in a Berlin conference in autumn 1924, which among other
things afforded an opportunity for personal contact between
German minority representatives and influential political figures
in Germany. Further impetus was given by the prospect of Ger­
many’s entry to the League of Nations and along with it the
opportunity for the Reich government to take the lead over
minority issues in Europe.5
Stresemann’s celebrated memorandum endorsing cultural
autonomy certainly recognized the advantages to Germany in

Figure 5.4 Gustav Stresemann.

74   Nationalities in congress
taking the lead in the quest for minority rights.6 Yet it clearly
betrays the influence of the arguments coming from Verband
circles. Hostile critics have seized on Stresemann’s oblique refer­
ence in his text to the ‘distant goal’ of ‘creating a state whose
political borders embrace all German groups inhabiting the
compact German settlement areas in Mitteleuropa who wish to be
part of the Reich’.7 However, at the heart of the document is an
extended defence of the need to establish a moral case for realiz­
ing this objective, one which by implication ruled out the use of
force. Not only that, but Stresemann insisted that Germany itself
set an example by according cultural autonomy to the national
minorities living within its own borders. In his own words:

Recognizing the existence of a natural right of every national

minority to cultural autonomy and above all to its own
schooling, is at the heart of what has to be fought for on
behalf of German minorities in Europe, and must therefore at
the same time be central to what has to be allowed and unas­
sailably guaranteed to the minorities in the Reich, before
Germany can represent before the world this necessity of life.8

The wording of Stresemann’s memorandum reflected his obvious

need to balance between different political factions inside
Germany. These divisions were replicated to a significant extent
within the ranks of the Verband der deutschen Minderheiten. For
Ewald Ammende a major consideration behind the campaign for
cultural autonomy was the need to counter Soviet propaganda
aimed at the disaffected minorities of central and Eastern Europe.9
He saw the reintegration of Germany into a united Western Euro­
pean bloc as the best means of doing so, acknowledging within
this the value of the League of Nations, however imperfect.
Werner Hasselblatt fully shared Ammende’s loathing of Bolshe­
vism, but at the same time viewed the West as inimical to the
interests of Germandom as a whole and as a barrier to the
increase of German influence within the international system.
Hassleblatt’s thinking comes out very clearly in a draft docu­
ment for the Deutsch-­Baltische Partei in Estland (DBP) dating
from the turn of 1924–1925. Essentially, his argument rests on
the contention that neither East nor West could provide a lasting
solution to nationality issues. With regard to the East he argued
that although the Soviet Union acknowledged the power of
 Nationalities in congress   75
national sentiment by allowing nationalities to have their own
schools, administration and use of their mother tongue, this was
exploited solely for the purposes of communist ideology. Thus the
approval of the national principle was accompanied by the
destruction of the intelligentsia and the elimination of the leading
bourgeois sectors.
Unlike Ammende, however, Hasselblatt saw no solution as
coming from the West, either. In his view, the peacemakers had
stirred up the nationalities movement, thereby initiating inter-­state
quarrels that could not be overcome between states, that is to say
in the first instance through the League of Nations. From this he
deduced that Germany, ‘the heart of Europe’, was best placed to
take up the minorities issue and to create a new legal instrument
which Germany would be better able to apply than its national
opponents. This instrument was culturally autonomous self-­
government (Kulturautonome Selbstverwaltung).10 To cut a long
story short, all Verband members, if from vastly differing motives,
were encouraged by Stresemann’s initiative.
Arrangements duly went ahead for the first-­ever truly
European-­wide meeting of minority leaders, scheduled to be held
in October 1925. As early as February of that same year,
Ammende had drafted his ‘reasons, principles and programme for
a conference of representatives of all national minorities in
Europe’. This became the basis for exploratory talks over the
months that followed, culminating in a so-­called invitation con­
ference in Dresden in August.11 The venue for the new Congress
of European Nationalities was to be Geneva, thereby taking
advantage of the media circus that attended meetings of the
League of Nations Council. On all but three occasions, subse­
quent annual meetings always took place in Geneva just ahead of
the League Council sessions.12
The 50 delegates at the inaugural autumn 1925 conference
were drawn from no fewer than 34 national groups belonging to
17 different states, mostly but not exclusively in central and
Eastern Europe. During the life of the Congress, some 219 dele­
gates took part in its annual meetings. Of these, Germans were
the most numerous (74) and, together with Jewish representatives
(25), made up just under half of the total membership. In terms of
country of origin, as opposed to ethnicity, 51 delegates came from
Poland, 29 each from Romania and Czechoslovakia, 23 from
Spain, 13 from Germany, 12 each from Latvia and Yugoslavia, 11
76   Nationalities in congress

Figure 5.5 European Nationalities Congress.

each from Estonia and Austria, nine each from Hungary and Italy,
four from Lithuania, three from Bulgaria, and one each from
Belgium and Denmark.13
The importance of the German element within the Congress
was reflected in the make-­up of its executive board and in Ewald
Ammende’s appointment as general secretary. It was, however,
far from being what its critics have regarded as a purely German
affair. The president of the Congress was the Slovene Josip
Wilfan, formerly a deputy in the Italian parliament. Estonian
Russian Mikhail Kurchinskii became vice-­president from 1927.
Furthermore, those German minority leaders that played the most
prominent role in the early years of the Congress were on the
liberal side of the political spectrum, the most notable example
being Paul Schiemann. It was the non-­German Wilfan who would
later describe Schiemann as ‘the thinker of the European minori­
ties movement’, thus implicitly placing him at the forefront of a
transnational as opposed to purely German endeavour.14
In its initial resolutions of October 1925 the Nationalities Con­
gress endorsed the League of Nations’ position that equal political
and economic rights must be given to all citizens of the states
 Nationalities in congress   77
created or enlarged under the peace settlement, irrespective of
nationality. For members of national minorities this included the
right and the opportunity to learn the language of the ethnic
majority, which the Nationalities Congress accepted would neces­
sarily be in most instances the sole official vehicle for state busi­
ness. At the same time, persons belonging to minority groups
should have the right to education in their own language, as well
as the possibility of using that language without restriction in
private intercourse between citizens and in the religious sphere. In
localities where minorities made up a predominant share of the
population, the relevant minority language should have official
status alongside that of the majority.15 In the view of Congress
members, however, these rights could only be fully guaranteed
through a system of non-­territorial cultural autonomy that
accorded minority groups the status of public legal corporations
with full control over education and culture. A resolution to this
effect was adopted at the close of the first Congress meeting.
In endorsing a non-­territorial approach to the question of
autonomy, the Nationalities Congress pointedly signalled its com­
mitment to working within the confines of Europe’s present
borders. When asked by a journalist why the Congress did not
criticize the lawless actions of some European governments, its
vice president Paul Schiemann stated emphatically that minority
representatives had gathered in Geneva not to make protests, but
to draw out general goals about how nationalities could live
together in the future. Some actions, he admitted, made silence
difficult: notably, Italy’s attempt to make Germans living in Süd-
Tyrol Italianize their names. The fact that Wilfan – himself a
Slovene deputy in the Italian parliament – had urged the Congress
not to respond aggressively to this provocation was, Schiemann
stressed, further proof of the essential moderation that reigned
within the new organization. When asked whether such modera­
tion would bring about a change in the attitude of European gov­
ernments, Schiemann glanced at Rudolf Brandsch, representative
of the Siebenburger Germans, and both replied ‘with a sigh’ that
they hoped so.16
The refusal to countenance any discussion of border disputes at
Congress meetings, coupled with an explicit stipulation that dele­
gates refrain from airing grievances against specific governments,
was in itself a riposte to the attitudes expressed by officials within
the League of Nations, many of whom had voiced some
78   Nationalities in congress
foreboding about the new international forum.17 Clearly, the Con­
gress stance was also intended to reduce anxiety amongst the new
and reconstituted states of Eastern Europe, particularly Poland
and its patron France. Naturally, Schiemann made clear, the Con­
gress resolutions would be made available to the League of
Nations Council. For the moment, however, the Congress was
most concerned with influencing public opinion more widely
within Europe.
Particularly energetic in this latter respect was the Congress
general secretary Ewald Ammende. He recognized only too well
just how much ‘hard work’ would be required if the Estonian
model of cultural autonomy was to be extended to other areas.18
In a battery of private letters sent to newspaper editors across
Europe in the aftermath of the first Congress meeting, Ammende
underlined the benefits for ‘our [i.e. German minority] cause’
that would accrue from having other minority groups on board.
This, he asserted, would help to counter charges that the
Nationalities Congress was a purely ‘German machination’.19
Ammende also pandered openly in his correspondence to right­
ist German elements, both within his own Baltic community
and more broadly. Thus, in the matter of German-­language
press coverage, he asserted that the initiative had to be pre­
sented ‘not as a democratic but rather a purely national affair’.20
Although Ammende was based in Vienna with the support of a
permanent Congress secretariat from 1927, he travelled contin­
uously in between annual Congress meetings, lobbying leading
figures in the field of nationality rights. In so doing, the Janus-­
faced general secretary frequently asserted that he was speaking
not just for German minorities, but on behalf of no fewer
than 40 million souls who fell into the category of national
minority.21
Efforts to encourage European states to embrace cultural
autonomy for their national minorities went hand in hand with an
intensified drive to secure reform of the League of Nations minor­
ity protection procedures. One obvious way of giving minorities
greater voice would have been to create a standing committee at
the League, devoted exclusively to the affairs of national minori­
ties. Such a proposition had already been advanced by the Inter-­
Parliamentary Union and the Union of League of Nations
Societies, and was endorsed by the Nationalities Congress in
1928.22 The advantage of such a standing committee was that it
 Nationalities in congress   79
would remove decisions on appeals from the hands of the League
Council, where state considerations too often prevailed. For this
reason Nationalities Congress representatives continued to be par­
ticularly incensed by the likes of Mello Franco and the Greek rep­
resentative Nikolaos Politis, whose statements appeared to shut
off any prospect of general national rights developing from the
minority treaties and instead implied the assimilation of minor­
ities in the longer term.23
As anticipated, increased pressure for reform of minority pro­
tection procedures came with Germany’s entry to the League of
Nations in March 1926. Minority leaders took particular heart
from Stresemann’s actions at the Lugano meeting of the League
Council in December 1928. Following a provocative remark by
the Polish delegate Ksawery Zalewski about the situation in Upper
Silesia, the German foreign minister angrily reminded the Council
about the League’s professed obligations towards minorities. His
point, that for the League not to fulfil its duties in this respect
would make it illusory, found broad acceptance from the audi­
ence. No less a figure than Aristide Briand admitted as much in
his closing remarks. In that respect Paul Schiemann rightly argued
that Stresemann’s intervention at Lugano had ‘brought the minor­
ities question into play once more’.24
Indeed, the discussions at Lugano gave rise to a review of
minority protection procedures and a series of suggested changes
aimed at bringing greater transparency to the petitioning process.
These were prepared by a League commission – chaired by Japan,
but including Britain and Spain as members – which presented its
findings to the Madrid meeting of the League Council on 12 June
1929. However, Stresemann’s key demand, namely for a perma­
nent minorities committee at the League, was refused, moving him
to write an impassioned defence of his actions in the Kölnische
Volkszeitung on 1 August 1929. Here, Stresemann accused his
detractors of ‘an insufficient or mistaken perception of the essence
of the minorities question’.25 For him, that question was not a
matter of preferential treatment, but of equal treatment. He
insisted that the issue could be only be properly understood if not
seen in a vacuum, but in the context of overall political develop­
ment. In what appears to be a strong echo of Schiemann’s think­
ing, Stresemann concluded that ‘this historically realized
incongruence between state and nation cannot be ended by any
drawing of boundaries’.26
80   Nationalities in congress
Not surprisingly for Ammende and his colleagues in the
Nationalities Congress, the Madrid episode confirmed beyond
doubt that recourse to existing League mechanisms could not in
itself bring about the psychological change that would be required
on the part of state governments and majority nationalities if the
Congress agenda was to be implemented.27 The only feasible alter­
native was to concentrate all efforts upon improving majority–
minority relations within states. At the 1931 meeting of the
Nationalities Congress, Ammende and other colleagues from
Estonia once again held up recent experiences in that country as
an example worthy of emulation elsewhere. The past five years, it
was claimed, had shown the fears previously voiced about cultural
autonomy to be completely unfounded. Far from creating states
within a state, German and Jewish cultural autonomy had actu­
ally contributed to a growing détente between titular and non-­
titular national groups. Rather than focusing solely on the
negative aspects of the minorities question, the League, it was sug­
gested, should examine Estonian cultural autonomy more thor­
oughly, with a view to ascertaining whether this model might
indeed advantageously be applied elsewhere.28
In making these claims Ammende was at the very least glossing
over some serious reservations that many representatives of Euro­
pean minorities had expressed with regard to the concept of non-­
territorial cultural autonomy. Resistance came in the first instance
from Polish quarters. The Polish minority within Germany
claimed to detect behind calls for cultural autonomy only the
desire for the interests of Germany to be advanced. By way of evi­
dence they cited the inclusion in the Nationalities Congress of
those German groups still demanding border changes. Leading
representatives of the Polish community in Germany, notably Jan
Skala, launched an attack along these lines in the journal of the
Association of Minorities in Germany, Kulturwehr.29 His article
prompted in turn a fierce defensive action by Schiemann and
others in the pages of Nation und Staat, which as it happened
became the official journal of the Nationalities Congress in 1931.
Schiemann freely acknowledged the presence of irredentist ele­
ments within the Nationalities Congress, but maintained that their
inclusion was premised on their readiness to accept Congress rules
and, therefore, to work towards a peaceful solution to nationality
disputes which would ultimately remove the basis for irredentism.
As he pointed out, had the Congress not tried to engage such
 Nationalities in congress   81
activists, it would have had little prospect of realizing its larger
goals. Schiemann also saw in the German–Polish dispute evidence
of a key difference in approach to minority issues on the part of
the two groups. What the Congress wanted, he insisted, was: first,
the exclusion of border issues from the nationalities movement;
second, the inclusion in the movement of all organized minorities
with their own culture; finally, the creation of internationally
acknowledged laws guaranteeing free national cultural develop­
ment irrespective of which state national groups belonged to. By
contrast, Schiemann maintained, the Polish-­led Association of
National Minorities in Germany was less interested in the pursuit
of minority rights than it was in trying to enforce the existing pro­
visions of the peace treaties and, therefore, to exclude those
minorities – chiefly German – whom it considered a threat to the
status quo. Damningly, from Schiemann’s viewpoint, the Poles in
Germany expected the state rather than minorities themselves to
take responsibility for culture.30
Despite Schiemann’s eloquent defence, the Association of
National Minorities in Germany precipitated the first major crisis
for the Nationalities Congress by withdrawing from it in 1927.
The immediate pretext for this action was the refusal by the Con­
gress leadership to admit the representatives of Germany’s Frie­
sian population. The Congress executive detected in the Polish
championing of Friesian membership a calculated manoeuvre to
fragment and weaken the organization by introducing what Schie­
mann termed ‘pseudo minorities’.31
Notwithstanding the political motivations behind this episode,
it raised several issues of principle related to cultural autonomy
that the Nationalities Congress would never satisfactorily resolve
over the next five years. Not least, the dispute highlighted the
perennial difficulty of agreeing what actually constitutes a
genuine national minority. The German group within the Con­
gress stood firmly by its so-­called Dresden Resolution which
made recognition of minority status contingent upon a clear dec­
laration of will by a majority of the group in question in those
cases where history and practice had not already established the
clear existence of such a minority. In this particular dispute it
was held that to embrace the 14,000 German Friesians within the
Congress, when 13,500 had ‘expressly’ made clear that they did
not want to be considered as belonging to a national minority,
would have been a ‘slap in the face’ for the minorities movement.
82   Nationalities in congress
Pending a better definition of minority, the German group was
reluctant to abandon its position.32
Renner and Bauer’s view of a national minority as something
constituted on the basis of free affiliation clearly favoured those
national communities that could draw upon a high level of socio­
political cohesion. A case in point was provided by Estonia’s
Germans, who were predominantly urban, highly educated and
relatively well-­off members of a former ruling elite.33 Other
national groups, however, could not realistically aspire to reach
such a position and with it the economic base necessary to imple­
ment and sustain what were after all highly complex arrange­
ments. This is illustrated not least by Mikhail Kurchinskii’s
aforementioned inability to persuade Estonia’s Russians of the
merits of embracing cultural autonomy.
The absence of the sort of collective national will of which
Schiemann and others spoke was further highlighted by the lack
of any effective Russian transnational association comparable to
the Verband der deutschen Minderheiten. Despite the creation of
a Russian Bureau in Geneva in 1927 it was not until August 1929,
ahead of the fifth Nationalities Congress, that Kurchinskii and
others were able to arrange a conference bringing together repre­
sentatives of Europe’s Russian minorities. Attending this were
representatives from the six East European countries in which
Russian minorities lived. The meeting adopted a declaration
endorsing the Nationalities Congress line on the reform of League
procedures and its call for cultural autonomy for all minority
groups. It nevertheless brought to light deep divisions within the
Russian camp.34
Mikhail Kurchinskii had particular cause to lament the refusal
by Latvian Russian representatives to attend meetings of the
Nationalities Congress. The fact that Russians living in Latvia
were, relatively speaking, quite privileged when it came to minor­
ity rights, Kurchinskii pointed out, made their participation all the
more important as an example to less advantaged minority
groups. In response, the Russian representatives from Latvia
expressed reservations about joining the Congress until such time
as their own organization was sufficiently strong. Otherwise they
feared being towed along by stronger national groups, German
above all.35 Talk of securing better representation for the seven-­
and-a-­half-million-­strong Russian minority in central and Eastern
Europe also appeared to overlook the fact that a sizeable
 Nationalities in congress   83
proportion of these ‘Russians’ were in fact ethnic Ukrainians,
many of whom aspired to their own separate nationhood and
who were already represented separately in the Nationalities Con­
gress on this basis.36
Despite claims of a German–Slavic divide within the Congress,
there were certain reservations regarding the practice of cultural
autonomy that were shared to some extent by representatives of
all minorities. One particular concern, already voiced in Estonia
in 1925, related to the establishment of national registers and
public corporations. Germans from Slesvig and Hungary were
apparently amongst those who expressed fears that the public reg­
istration of nationality by individual citizens risked those citizens
being branded as a caste apart and thereby made the object of dif­
ferential treatment by the state.37 Others suspected that the system
might even undermine rather than enhance minority national
identity by introducing dissension and legal differentiation within
the group. As the Estonian case had already shown to some
extent, these concerns were perhaps of greatest relevance for the
Jewish minorities of central and Eastern Europe, where a plurality
of cultural and political orientations and public opinion were
especially apparent.
However much Ewald Ammende might wish these reservations
away, they obviously undermined efforts by the Nationalities
Congress to persuade the League of the Nations of the merits of
non-­territorial cultural autonomy. In a comprehensive analysis of
the concept drafted in 1931, Ludvig Krabbe of the League Minor­
ities Secretariat was at least prepared to admit that this model was
deserving of serious scrutiny as a possible basis for reducing fric­
tions between majority and minority nationalities.38 In his exami­
nation, however, Krabbe claimed that the 1931 Nationalities
Congress had failed to engage in real debate on the wider applica­
bility of cultural autonomy beyond its Baltic heartland. What little
discussion did take place had, according to Krabbe, focused
uniquely on experiences in Estonia, a country where not all
­eligible minorities had actually seen fit to implement the 1925
­cultural autonomy law. Outlining the various reservations that
had already been voiced, not least in the context of the 1927
­German–Polish crisis within the Congress, Krabbe concluded that
Ammende and his colleagues had failed to make a convincing case
as to why the League should recommend a more general applica­
tion of cultural autonomy.39
84   Nationalities in congress
Krabbe’s analysis contains some pertinent reflections on the
autonomy concept and the problems inherent in implementing
this scheme. Interestingly, he suggested that alternative models of
minority rights that were not based on the principle of formal
enrolment and corporate organization might actually be more
appropriate. Here he cited, among others, the system of autono­
mous minority schooling in Latvia, where a child’s education was
determined not on the basis of nationality, but rather according
to the language most commonly spoken at home.
Ultimately, however, Krabbe’s assessment betrays the enduring
scepticism that League officials harboured towards what was still
for most an entirely novel concept of collective minority rights. In
Krabbe’s words, a ‘complete’ solution to the minorities problem
necessarily required:

the development, in countries of mixed population, of a spirit

of national tolerance and liberalism, a development which will
be no less long and painful than that which took place in the
sphere of religious tolerance, but which will become all the
more difficult if a system of separatism in certain branches of
the common life of the state becomes generalized.40

The unspoken assumption behind Krabbe’s report was, therefore,

that successful state- and nation-­building in central and Castern
Europe would require, sooner rather than later, the assimilation
of minorities into Western-­style, one community nation states.
It is not without irony that Nationalities Congress activists had
drawn the same parallel between religious and national tolerance,
but had arrived at diametrically opposed conclusions. It was pre­
cisely the parallel between religious and cultural freedom that
fuelled Paul Schiemann’s vision of a Europe of multinational
states, in which national ties across borders would be an essential
component of enduring peace and greater unity. Symptomatically,
Krabbe was deaf to the essential thrust of Schiemann’s keynote
speech at the 1931 Nationalities Congress, dismissing it as ‘purely
theoretical and philosophical’.41 Yet in fact no message could have
been more relevant to the times than this so-­called philosophical
analysis. In Schiemann’s view the problems of Europe related to
politicians basing their policies on ‘fictions’. One such was that
each state could balance its own economy, when in fact policies
based on this assumption actually caused untold damage to
 Nationalities in congress   85
neighbouring states. The second was that each European state
could function as the bearer of a single national culture, which
could be applied to all inhabitants. In reality, ‘thousands, millions
have their own culture and if these are forced to bow to alien
beliefs then the state will be threatened; hatred will be born pre­
cluding peaceful coexistence within it’.42
It very much appeared as though the League of Nations and
the Nationalities Congress – both claiming commitment to realiz­
ing and upholding minority rights – were in reality locked in a
dialogue of the deaf. Two different visions of Europe’s future
underpinned their respective standpoints on minority rights. The
one treated the issue largely in terms of protecting the integrity of
the nation state and its borders by gradually assimilating minori­
ties to the majority societal culture; the other conceived of the
future Europe as a patchwork of national groups, wholly free like
religious groups to maintain cultural ties with their co-­nationals
across geographical borders, thereby greatly reducing the practical
significance of frontiers – a Europe of nations rather than indis­
solubly sovereign nation states.
For a brief period during the latter half of the 1920s, the
Nationalities Congress vision of a Europe where territorial
borders would in practice lose much of their significance could
take some encouragement from a number of political schemes
designed to reduce the risk of fresh conflict between European
governments. These included the 1928 project for world peace
launched by US secretary of state Frank Kellogg and French
Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, who in the following year also
elaborated his own proposals for European unity. Similar plans
were outlined by other prominent pan-­Europeanists, notably
Richard Coudenhove-­Kalergi and Karl Anton Prinz Rohan.
Despite their conviction that state-­led, top-­down approaches
could not in themselves achieve a lasting settlement of the national
question, Nationalities Congress leaders recognized how the new
debate on European unity might help to further their own cause
of advancing minority rights.43
Optimism, however, proved to be all too short-­lived. Instead of
European governments adopting a common approach to the
Great Depression of 1929, they reverted to more autarchic sover­
eign state solutions. Predictably, inter-­ethnic disputes within states
also sharpened as the economic situation worsened. By 1932 the
Nationalities Congress was increasingly preoccupied by evidence
86   Nationalities in congress
of forcible assimilation in several European states, as exemplified
by the ‘decimation’ of Slavic minorities in Italy and the violent
‘pacification’ of the Ukrainian minority in eastern Poland.44 These
disturbing trends were encapsulated in a speech entitled ‘The new
nationalist wave’ (Die neue nationalistische Welle) that Paul
Schiemann delivered to German minority leaders at Baden near
Vienna on 26 June 1932.45
In an impassioned defence and reassertion of the original prin­
ciples on which the Nationalities Congress had been founded,
Schiemann drew a sharp distinction between what he called
‘national sentiment’ and ‘nationalism’. In his exact words:

Since nationalism at all times could be and was used to rein­

force the citizen’s feeling for the state, it was natural that the
state showed itself concerned to nourish national sentiment
and to anchor it in mass consciousness as the supreme civic
virtue. Indeed, we in Europe today are universally prepared to
acknowledge nationalism as a virtue enhancing humans and
determining their inner being, without once asking what really
is the essence of this virtue, the substance of this moral value.
National sentiment is the feeling for the holiness of the ties
forged by the national community. National sentiment is the
recognition that only within the firm embrace of the culture of
origin can humankind develop intellectually soundly and nat­
urally. National sentiment is the individual’s sense of respon­
sibility for the fate of his people. National sentiment is a
devoutness of mind. But, just as religious piety is a virtue only
so long as it is a self-­evident fundamental quality of the
human spirit, manifesting itself in behaviour, but ceases to be
a virtue once it is labelled as such and demands reward, so
national sentiment also loses its moral worth once it ceases to
count as the self-­evident condition of human engagement in
public life. That happens, however, the moment national sen­
timent is torn from the service of the community and made
the basis of a party whose aim is the seizure of power within
another community.46

In Schiemann’s speech can be discerned a scarcely veiled attack on

national socialism and its growing band of adherents amongst
German minority groups across central and Eastern Europe.
Symptomatically, Schiemann was addressing the organization that
 Nationalities in congress   87
had originally called itself the Verband der deutschen Minder-
heiten [minorities] in Europa, but which by the end of the 1920s
had been rebranded the Verband der deutschen Volksgruppen
[ethnic groups] in Europa. Moreover, in another sign of the
nationalist shift within the German minorities organization,
Werner Hasselblatt assumed Carl-­Georg Bruns’ responsibilities in
Berlin following the latter’s death in 1931. The appointment was
made in the face of strong objections from Paul Schiemann but,
revealingly, with the full backing of Ewald Ammende.47
In the new nationalist wave speech, Schiemann lamented ‘the
unstoppable advance over all the peoples of Europe of the nation­
alist vision as a purported new ideology’.48 This was the main
reason, he contended, alongside the failure of League of Nations
policy and the economic crisis, for the present dangerous situation
of Europe. ‘The feeling for national justice amongst the majority
of people,’ he continued, ‘is deliberately undermined. The idea of
fairness is made laughable as a doctrine, perceived as a weakness
and as an unworthy sacrifice of nation state interests.’49 Nothing
exemplified this trend more dramatically than Hitler’s subsequent
assumption of power in Germany.
Most immediately, the Nazi policy of enforced dissimilation of
Germany’s Jews directly challenged what hitherto had been one
of the key tenets of the Nationalities Congress – namely, the right
of each individual freely to determine his/her own nationality. As
a result of Hitler’s actions, Leo Motzkin and other Jewish minor­
ity activists within the Nationalities Congress immediately
launched an extensive campaign publicizing what was happening
in Germany and trying to counter it. In the interests of impartial­
ity, speakers at Congress meetings were not supposed to bring up
specific grievances against individual state governments. In Motz­
kin’s view, however, the unprecedented nature of Hitler’s policy
made a change in rules imperative if the Nationalities Congress
was to retain any credibility as an organization defending minor­
ity rights.50 He, therefore, insisted that leading representatives of
the German minorities within the Congress join with other dele­
gates in taking a clear and resolute stand against the deprivation
of Jewish rights in Germany.51
While all German representatives were anxious for the Con­
gress to continue, Motzkin’s demand at once laid bare the deep
divisions that had by now become manifest within the German
minority movement. Paul Schiemann for his part tried to draft a
88   Nationalities in congress
resolution for the Congress condemning recent developments in
Germany. His proposed declaration, however, failed to attract
support from the majority of German representatives. A small
group of German delegates to the Verband and the Congress,
including the new Verband secretary Werner Hasselblatt, was
already working to promote the national socialist agenda. Most
of the remaining German delegates, including Ammende and
recently appointed Verband president Hans Otto Roth from
Romania, were reluctant to abandon entirely the founding princi­
ples of the Congress, but neither were they prepared to distance
themselves from a resurgent Germany, not least because Berlin
continued to provide the bulk of the funding for their
organization.52
With the German group unwilling to issue any expression of
solidarity with Jewish representatives about the persecutions in
Germany, Nationalities Congress president Josip Wilfan sought
desperately to paper over the cracks in an effort to keep the
organization afloat. One suggestion Wilfan made was that
German Jews should claim the status of national minority; in this
way they could make use of existing international law with its at
least nominal insistence upon equal rights and treatment for
members of national minority groups. In effect, this would have
entailed Jews long assimilated as Germans being forced to declare
Jewish nationality. Any such suggestion, Motzkin countered, was
‘degrading to humanity’, rightly reminding Wilfan of his own
words, spoken to stormy applause, the previous year: ‘the right to
assimilation, although we oppose this idea, we grant to anyone
who wishes to assimilate: the obligation to assimilation we
reject.’53
Wilfan’s reasoning implied that Germany could legitimately
reject Jewish claims to belong to a German Volksgemeinschaft,
provided it did not deny Jews equal rights as citizens of Germany.
This, of course, overlooks the fundamental fact that German Jews
were being refused civil rights precisely on the basis of their
ascribed ethnic, indeed purportedly racial, characteristics. Paul
Schiemann for his part claimed that while one could not deny an
ethnic group the right in certain circumstances to determine the
boundaries of its own community,

Volkszugehörigkeit [belonging to a people] rests not on a

physiological but on a psychological state of affairs. . . . The
 Nationalities in congress   89
Volksgemeinschaft bears responsibility for all its members,
tacitly or expressly a part of it, even when objective indicators
point to membership of another nationality [Volkstum].54

Schiemann had intended to pronounce these words at the ninth

meeting of the Nationalities Congress in Berne on 16–18 Septem­
ber 1933. However, since it was already clear before the Congress
opened that his resolution would not be accepted by the German
group, he opted not to attend the conference, citing grounds of
recent illness.55 Moreover, it was obvious by then that the Jewish
delegates would also not be attending. Motzkin had written to
Wilfan on 8 September from Geneva, where representatives of the
Jewish minorities of Poland, Romania, Latvia (speaking also on
behalf of Lithuania), Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, present at the
second World Jewish Congress, had agreed two resolutions. Since
they had not received a satisfactory answer from the Nationalities
Congress over the question of Jews in Germany, they resolved
only to attend on the following conditions: first, that Wilfan, in
agreement with the German group, put a resolution to the Con­
gress expressly mentioning Germany and condemning its actions
against Jews; second, that delegates be guaranteed in advance an
unrestricted discussion of the German situation.56
Motzkin went out of his way to stress that these two conditions
already represented a compromise, given that half of the Jewish
representatives wanted to boycott the Nationalities Congress
meeting outright. He demanded an answer by 13 September,
failing which Jewish minority representatives would not attend.
After subsequent exchanges by telegraph and letter between
Wilfan and Motzkin, the governing council of the Nationalities
Congress discussed the issue on the morning of 16 September. It
unanimously decided that the point put by the Jewish groups on
dissimilation and national rights, demanding an enlargement of
the discussion and the formulation of a resolution which was crit­
ical of measures taken by a named state, could only take place by
violating the established procedures of the Congress and, there­
fore, was not permissible.57
In his opening speech to the Congress, Wilfan was at great
pains to emphasize the delicacy and complexity of decision-­
making in an organization where representatives had to demon­
strate loyalty both to their own state and to their transborder
national community. Symptomatically, his address made reference
90   Nationalities in congress
not to German policies, but to recent developments ‘in a great
European state’. Despite this, the Congress meeting was quite pre­
pared to discuss the specific question of the Ukrainian famine and
the actions of the Soviet government in this regard. Mikhail
Kurchinskii gave a long speech on the issue, while Ukrainian dele­
gate Milena Rudnicka declared her hope:

that the congress will take the appropriate resolutions and

address an appeal to the whole civilized world so that human­
ity’s conscience does not have to be burdened with the dread­
ful complicity in the crime of the red Russian dictatorship in
the Ukraine.58

The applause that greeted Rudnicka’s remarks contrasted omi­

nously with the refusal of delegates to sanction corresponding
humanitarian initiatives in the case of Germany. This prompted
one Jewish politician from Latvia to complain with justification
that the sudden interest in nationality problems within the USSR
was little more than a device to draw attention away from the
growing influence of national socialism within the Nationalities
Congress.59
Ammende, Roth and others had in fact already raised the
Jewish question with the new regime in Berlin. In Ammende’s case
there was a meeting with Goebbels, although to judge from the
latter’s brief diary entry little progress was made. As to Roth, he
managed to have a session with Hitler himself. The latter tried to
give the impression that he had been forced to legislate and take
action because of Jewish propaganda and defamation. In the
course of his hour-­long monologue he made it quite plain that
everything was negotiable apart from the Jewish question. Decla­
rations by Roth during the Congress on behalf of the German
group duly followed the line that opposing assimilation necessar­
ily precluded condemning dissimilation, even though this could
‘sometimes be harsh’. Roth’s specious reasoning conveniently
glossed over the fact that the German government was removing
basic civil and human rights, both through legislation and through
force.60
The whole affair confirmed the impression that the Nationali­
ties Congress had indeed thoroughly succumbed to the influence
of the new German government. Any doubts on this score were
removed by the wording of the resolution eventually adopted by
 Nationalities in congress   91
delegates on the issue of national dissimilation and nationality
rights. Echoing Wilfan’s line, it cynically stated that, ‘in the event
of introducing national dissimilation the freedom and rights for
which the Congress of European Nationalities has interceded in
its procedures and resolutions since its founding remain invio­
late’.61 An additional declaration, put by Mikhail Kurchinskii on
behalf of the remaining non-­German minorities within the Con­
gress, stated that ‘the surge of expressly anti-­Semitic measures
currently to be seen in certain countries we regard as infringing
general human rights and contradicting the ideals of our con­
gress’. To this, Wilfan responded lamely that Kurchinskii had
surely voiced the opinion of all members of the Congress, and
wished to repeat his hope that Motzkin and other Jewish col­
leagues would continue their participation.62
Hardly surprisingly, Jewish representatives never again
attended sessions of the Nationalities Congress. That was also
true of Paul Schiemann, who for a while, alongside Josip Wilfan,
held private talks with Jewish representatives in an attempt to
keep Motzkin and his colleagues on board, the better to counter
the obvious growth in Nazi influence.63 This remained a vain
hope. Ewald Ammende, who as general gecretary of the Congress
had to be seen to be supportive of efforts at reconciliation,
revealed his true inclinations in a private letter to Schiemann
written from London on 10 June 1934. Casting doubt on the
prospect for any agreement, Ammende went on to claim that:
‘members of the German nation of Jewish religion who come here
have only one wish – to assimilate as soon as possible in England:
the majority does not think about preserving or fighting for its
own nationality rights’.64 It was also in this context that the
Verband der deutschen Volksgruppen chose not to re-­elect Schie­
mann to its board of management at its 1935 meeting in Gablenz
where the Sudeten German national socialist Konrad Henlein
assumed the leadership of the organization. At this point, Schie­
mann also wrote formally to Wilfan resigning his position in the
Nationalities Congress.65
6 The new nationalist wave

Himself a victim of the new nationalist wave now sweeping

Europe, Paul Schiemann had earlier predicted that in attacking
the Jews, Hitler was forging the very weapon that would ulti-
mately be used against the Auslandsdeutschen. The truth of this
was soon to be confirmed by events in Schiemann’s Baltic home-
land, where the onset of economic depression had already created
far more political space for those nationalist forces committed to
undermining, even eliminating foreign influence and thereby
building more ‘complete’ nation-­states.1
In a Rigasche Rundschau editorial penned at the start of 1932,
Schiemann had voiced his deep anxiety at the changes to Latvia’s
school system being proposed by Atis Ķe-ņiņš, recently appointed
minister of education.2 Hitherto national minority education in
Latvia had benefitted from the goodwill of the incumbent of this
office. Previous ministers had on the whole allowed considerable
latitude in interpreting the loose framework provisions of the
1919 law on minority schooling. Ķe-ņiņš, however, now pointedly
set about exploiting these very ambiguities in his pursuit of greater
cultural homogeneity, or as local German leaders termed it, Ein-
heitskultur.3 The tactics employed by Ķe-ņiņš included the use of
special emergency decrees during parliamentary breaks.
Ķe-ņiņš’ strategy targeted, first and foremost, minority primary
schools. By his own confession, the minister wished to turn all
such schools into Latvian primary schools in which German,
Russian and other minority languages served as mediums of
instruction and nothing more. Without any consultation with the
relevant minority sections within the ministry, Ķe-ņiņš decreed that
from 1 August 1932 all minority schools were to bring their cur-
ricula entirely into line with those of Latvian-­language schools.
 The new nationalist wave   93
Moreover, instruction in minority primary schools was to be
gradually transferred to teachers trained not in each nationality
group’s own institutions, but in the foreign language department
of the Latvian Pedagogical Institute. Funding to develop this insti-
tution was to be diverted away from the corresponding minority
training institutes under the 1932–1933 budget.4
A simultaneous decree stipulated that henceforth minority gym-
nasiums and professional schools could only be attended by pupils
whose parents’ ‘national language’ was that of the school in ques-
tion. In the case of the Jewish minority, only Hebrew and Yiddish
counted as national languages. Consequently, 25 Jewish schools
teaching in German or Russian faced the prospect either of adapting
their programmes or of closure.5 A League of Nations report noted,
however, that while Jewish schools were the most adversely affected
by this ruling, the strongest and most vigorous protests against the
new measures came from German minority representatives.6
Ironically, these changes were initiated under a coalition govern-
ment headed by Marg‘ers Skujenieks, a man who had played an
important role in advancing thinking on cultural autonomy among
Latvians before and after the First World War and who in the
1920s had praised the Baltic Germans for their historic contribution
to his country’s well-­being.7 Ķe-ņiņš, by contrast, now characterized
Latvia as an ‘Eldorado for minorities’, in which Latvian peasants
and workers were the objects of exploitation for the industry and
trade of non-­titular national groups.8 Residual anxiety within the
government about the possibly adverse impact of Ķe-ņiņš’ new
course on external opinion eventually forced his Democratic Centre
Party out of the ruling coalition, bringing about his own resigna-
tion. Nevertheless, the fact that his measures were not formally
rescinded confirmed the extent of the continuing shift away from
liberal minorities policy in the wake of the worldwide slump.
In neighbouring Estonia, state officials began even earlier to
push their own more restrictive interpretation of the 1925 frame-
work law on cultural autonomy. For example, it became apparent
in the course of 1929 that what the German cultural council saw
as its right to issue decrees for the management of German school-
ing could be frustrated by the minister of the interior. Although
the minister was not empowered to annul such decrees he could,
since cultural autonomy was exercised under his overall super­
vision, prevent their implementation on the grounds that they
clashed with other state laws.9
94   The new nationalist wave
Another pillar of Estonia’s minority autonomy, namely the
freedom to determine one’s own ethnic affiliation, was also under-
mined by new legislation in 1928, prohibiting ethnic Estonians
from adopting German nationality.10 A further law in 1931 stipu-
lated that henceforth only children holding German nationality
would be entitled to enrol in German-­language schools. Behind
such measures lay obvious resentment at the allegedly privileged
position enjoyed by German-­language schools, which among
other things had far smaller classes than their Estonian-­language
equivalents. It is little wonder that, under these conditions, ethnic
Estonian parents continued to view German schooling as an
attractive option for their children, particularly in the case of chil-
dren from mixed marriages. The continued presence of German-
ized Estonians (so-­called Kadakasakslased) within an independent
Estonia inevitably troubled more nationalistically minded political
forces. State policies adopted during the late 1920s and early
1930s were clearly intended to limit the scope for cultural
Germanization.
As Estonia’s overall education budget came under increasing
pressure at the start of the 1930s, the spotlight fell ever more on
the anomalous position of German-­language schools. In July
1931, education and social minister Jaan Piiskar announced uni-
versal cuts in secondary school provision. He envisaged an imme-
diate reduction in the number of classes in the current year; by the
end of the planned reform in 1934–1935 he expected only 895
secondary schools to remain, with an increase in the average
number of pupils per class from 30 to 35. Staff reductions in the
order of 70–75 posts were also anticipated.11 The proposed cuts
inevitably refocused attention on the budget allocation for
German-­language schools, which was calculated on the number
of classes rather than on the numerical size of the German minor-
ity. Accordingly, it became easier for the government to justify a
disproportionately high number of class closures in publicly
funded German-­language schools.12
By 1933, ministerial documents were also lamenting the large
number of children from mixed Estonian–German marriages
attending German-­language schools. A report on an inspection of
the Võru German-­language public primary school claimed that of
the 22 students enrolled, only 16 or 17 were German by national-
ity; of these, many were from mixed Estonian–German families,
and thereby – it was implied – not genuinely native speakers of
 The new nationalist wave   95
German. This was significant because the law on primary school-
ing obliged the state to support a minority class only in areas
where there were 20 pupils of the relevant nationality. In other
words, restricting the right of educational choice in mixed families
would at a stroke significantly reduce the number of German-­
language schools.13
The particularly close scrutiny of numbers in German-­language
schools was mirrored by closer ministerial oversight in the choice
of textbooks for minority-­language schools, especially notable
when it came to the teaching of history. Correspondence during
the summer of 1932 between the German cultural government
and the ministry of education betrayed increasing vexation on the
part of the latter. Officials expressed particular concern over a
work by one A. Spreckelsen, school director and member of the
German cultural council. Their complaint about his Geschichte
Estlands in Zusammenhang mit der Geschichte der Nachbar-
länder was that it said too much about the neighbouring coun-
tries, thus making Estonia look a poor relation. While they were
happy to note that the book did not go too deeply into the feats
of the Teutonic Knights, they were less pleased to find not one
single reference to General Johan Laidoner’s leadership during
Estonia’s 1918–1920 war of liberation.14 The list of books that
had to be submitted for approval by the ministry continued to
grow during the coming months.
The move away from liberal minority policy during 1931–1933
also reflected concern in Estonia and Latvia at a perceived
growing external influence of national socialism on the Baltic
Germans.15 The implications of this for minority autonomy in
Estonia can also be gleaned from the correspondence between the
German cultural government and the ministry of education during
the period. In one particular case the correspondence highlighted
the concerns of the police commissioner in the town of Paide at
the number of pupils from the local German school joining the
newly formed Baltic–German Friends of the Scouts. The uniform
of the organization, with its ‘epaulettes and shoulder strap’ was
taken to be modelled on that of the Hitler Youth.16 Similarly, the
aforementioned county government report on the Võru German-­
language public primary school focused upon press articles alleg-
ing a growing influence of ‘Hitlerism’ amongst pupils. School
director Fischmann felt impelled to formally deny that any of his
pupils had worn the swastika. The German cultural government
96   The new nationalist wave
was also moved to deny further press reports that one pupil had
entitled his essay on the anniversary of Võru’s liberation from the
Soviets, ‘The March of Germans into Estonia’, a claim that even
the official report had to acknowledge was actually false.17
The concern shown by Baltic governments about the influence
of national socialism amongst local ethnic Germans was under-
standably heightened once Hitler came to power in January 1933.
Within two weeks of the event, the most prominent Baltic German
critic of Nazism, Paul Schiemann, felt that he could no longer
continue as editor of the Rigasche Rundschau in the face of
growing interference from the German Foreign Office, which for
the first time used the paper’s financial dependence on it as a lever
to influence its editorial line.18 The new mood amongst far too
many Latvian Germans was exemplified by an article in the
Baltische Monatshefte by Erhard Kroeger, a key figure in the so-­
called Bewegung (movement) of the Baltic Germans. Under the
heading ‘Political Inversion’, Kroeger ridiculed the liberal minor-
ity policy pursued by Schiemann and others as ‘selling out’: ‘polit-
ical inversion’, he noted, ‘is a woman who appears in many
clothes. Her favourite costume is the rule of law.’ Instead, Kroeger
advocated struggle in political life and victory for the fittest.19

Figure 6.1 Drawing from Estonian ministry of education file comparing the

uniform of Baltic German Scouts with that of the Hitler Youth.
 The new nationalist wave   97
In the case of Estonia, Nazi sympathizers had less purchase on
the ethnic German population. Nevertheless, efforts by the Bewe-
gung and its local leader Viktor von zur Mühlen to assume
control of the Deutsch-­Baltische Partei in Estland (DBP) during
1933 had severe consequences for the entire community. Follow-
ing one failed bid at the DBP congress in April, von zur Mühlen
was able to secure a majority on the party’s ruling council and
have himself elected leader in November. His bombastic asser-
tion that ‘a German and a national socialist are one and the
same’ did less than justice to the known dislike of the Nazis by
such key Estonian German figures as Willhelm Von Wrangell,
who now headed the German cultural council. Despite Wrang-
ell’s protestations that the cultural council was not synonymous
with the DBP,20 some Estonian politicians nevertheless insisted
that the cultural council had become little more than a ‘depart-
ment of the German state within Estonia’.21 The Estonian govern-
ment was all too willing to exploit the occasion to remove von
zur Mühlen. It also took the unprecedented step of suspending
temporarily the activities of the German cultural council,
although elections to the latter did ultimately go ahead as sched-
uled in March 1934.
In reality, a more immediate threat to governmental authority
in both Estonia and Latvia came from home-­grown nationalist
extremism in the form of the Estonian League of Veterans of the
_
War of Independence and the P​e​rkonkrusts. From the start of the
1920s, far-­right extra-­parliamentary movements had condemned
the democracies of Estonia and Latvia as corrupt and weak, while
calling for a more vigorously nationalizing line in all areas of state
policy. These movements attracted more and more popular
support at the start of the 1930s, when seemingly the established
parties of the political centre were incapable of agreeing on effect-
ive measures to combat the economic depression.
Ultimately, the radical turn within these societies played into
the hands of the conservative right, whose leaders Konstantin Päts
and Ka-rlis Ulmanis had long advocated stronger, more centralized
rule for the states they had been instrumental in founding after
the First World War. With extremist movements on the point of
gaining power in Estonia and making significant advances in
Latvia, Päts and Ulmanis both ultimately seized the opportunity,
respectively in March and May 1934, to suspend parliament and
establish direct presidential rule.
98   The new nationalist wave
A quick overview of the actions of Päts and Ulmanis thereafter
belies the claim by both men that they had only ‘seized power in
defence of democracy’.22 In the case of Päts, what was supposed
to be a temporary six-­month state of emergency evolved into a
four-­year ‘era of silence’. This was followed by a constitutional
reform in 1938 reintroducing token parliamentary institutions
within what remained essentially a system of presidential, single-­
party rule. Ulmanis for his part never even bothered to initiate
any comprehensive constitutional reform, but simply continued to
rule by decree for the remainder of the decade.
The conservative peasant authoritarianism of Päts and Ulmanis
consciously prioritized the interests of the titular nationality –
embodied in their minds by the figure of the small private farmer
– over those of national minorities.23 While the minorities had
never been especially well represented within the state bureauc-
racy, they were all but excluded after 1934. Similarly, the policy
of concentrating more and more productive resources in the hands
of the (national) state inevitably impacted disproportionately
upon nationalities such as the Germans and the Jews. The rela-
tively strong position that these had managed to preserve in key
sectors of the economy during the 1920s was now seriously
threatened.24
Measures adopted in Latvia at the start of 1935 placed new
restrictions on the right of non-­ethnic Latvians to practise as
lawyers. Minorities were also effectively excluded from purchasing
real estate, which from February 1935 required the permission of
the justice minister. In the words of Ulmanis, the measure would
prevent the formation of any further ‘dead pockets’ of Germans
within Latvian society.25 The Latvian Credit Bank established in
April then made it much easier for the state to cut off the flow of
finance to enterprises owned by non-­ethnic Latvians; many of these
were now compulsorily nationalized.26 Finally, as part of the further
corporate restructuring under the so-­called Sylvester Laws of 31
December 1935, numerous private economic organizations were
closed, and the historic buildings of the Little and Great Guilds
confiscated by the state. The latter decision aroused unprecedented
animosity within local German circles.
Ulmanis’ reference to ‘dead pockets’ of Germans suggests a dis-
tinctly uncomfortable affinity with the sentiments expressed in the
journal of the radical right Pe-rkonkrusts movement in October
1933. The journal trumpeted that:
 The new nationalist wave   99
[I]t is up to us Latvians how we act in our country. We shall
decide your fate without you. You are a mere object in our
hands. We will do what we think right. Using the same
methods you used against us. Your time, you German people,
is over . . . In Latvia of the Latvians there is no room for you.27

To be fair, Ulmanis cannot reasonably be accused of sharing

Pe-rkonkrusts’ anti-­Semitism, the public expression of which he
prohibited. Latvia also remained one of the few countries in
Europe that kept its doors open to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi
persecution during the 1930s. This, however, should not be taken
as any kind of indication that Latvia’s Jews enjoyed a privileged
position under the new regime. Jews were by no means exempt
from economic policies of nationalization, while politically
Ulmanis essentially practised a strategy of divide and rule, main-
taining his previously close relationship to Mordechai Dubin’s
Agudat Israel, the better to marginalize leftist and Zionist ele-
ments more ill disposed to the government.28
The political and economic changes from 1934 went hand-­in-
hand with a contraction of the cultural space previously afforded
to minorities during the era of parliamentary democracy. In the
crucial sphere of educational provision, the impact was immedi-
ate. On 12 July 1934, a mere two months after Ulmanis assumed
absolute power, the 1919 law on minority schooling was abol-
ished. Minority education now came under the terms of a general
education law, which appeared on the statute book a week later.29
The new arrangements abolished the separate minority-­school
administrations within Latvia’s ministry of education. In place of
the former education chiefs with their experienced staff, there
were now single advisors on minority education for each group.
They were ill placed to cope with a workload that had almost
overwhelmed the previous structures. In the case of the Jewish
minority, Agudat Israel’s assumption of control over autonomous
schooling prompted more secularly minded parents to remove
their children from Hebrew and Yiddish schools and send them to
establishments teaching in Latvian.30 The new law also removed
state and communal funding for separate minority pedagogical
institutes and for institutions such as the German-­run Riga Busi-
ness School.
In what amounted to a far more serious blow to minority edu-
cation in Latvia, the state was now only obliged to offer minority
100   The new nationalist wave
language education in those areas where there were 60 pupils
speaking a particular language, as opposed to 30 under the former
arrangements. Furthermore, pupils now had to be in the same
catchment area, whereas previously it had been possible to organ-
ize a school for children drawn from neighbouring districts.31 The
overall effect of these measures was, of course, to bring about a
further reduction in the number of minority-­language schools by
the middle of the 1930s. By 1935, for instance, the percentage of
Russians receiving an education in their native tongue had
declined from 90 to only 60 per cent.32
In Estonia, the German and Jewish cultural councils remained
in existence, albeit within the framework of Päts’ new non-­
democratic model of societal organization. In keeping with this,
the institutions of autonomy were brought ever more firmly under
the supervision of the ministry of education. As in Latvia, new
legislation had the practical effect of reducing the numbers of
those eligible to enrol in minority-­language schools, most notably
so by means of a decree of October 1934 stipulating that if one
parent in a family was ethnically Estonian, the child had to attend
an Estonian-­language school.33 The German cultural government
had already protested that the proposed new policy disregarded
the complexity of language use and national identity within ethni-
cally mixed families. In its violation of the principles of individual
choice contained in the 1920 Constitution, the latest step by the
government was depicted as analogous to the Orthodox conver-
sion campaigns conducted by the Tsarist Russian regime in the
Baltic provinces during the 1840s.34
Inevitably, the new measures were seized upon with great relish
by some local authorities within Estonia. A letter to the education
ministry in March 1935 from a representative of the Kuresaare
town council expressed distaste for previous ‘ultraliberal’ minor-
ity legislation that had allowed parents of Estonian origin to send
their children to German-­language schools at the expense of the
state. It had not been easy, the missive remarked, for ‘a nationally
minded city council to allocate sums that are being used for the
purpose of diverting children away from the nationality to which
they rightly belong’.35 Having examined public records, the
council was pleased to discover that, according to the letter of the
law, 20 out of 66 pupils attending the Kuresaare German-­
language public primary school were not entitled to be there.
Other pupils at the school were found to belong to national
 The new nationalist wave   101
minority groups that did not have cultural autonomy, and these
too, it was urged, should have been enrolled in Estonian-­language
schools under the terms of the October 1934 decree.36
The school department of the German cultural government dis-
puted this interpretation, claiming that the Kuresaare council was
in fact obliged to continue funding education for 58 of the pupils
currently at the school.37 The German case was accepted by the
ministry of education, suggesting that the cultural government
was still able to find at least some measure of understanding on
the part of central state institutions. As much is confirmed by
accounts of regular conversations that Wilhelm von Wrangell and
others had with President Päts.38 Ultimately, however, the overall
situation for Estonia’s minorities continued to worsen as time
wore on. A new language law adopted in October 1934 did not
entirely exclude minority languages; they retained formal parity
with Estonian within the courts. Yet their use was circumscribed
not only within local authorities and public places, but also in the
internal workings of the minority self-­governments.39 Another
feature of these years was an official campaign for the Estoniani-
zation of surnames, a step undertaken by almost 80,000 of the
country’s inhabitants. Although the process was supposedly vol-
untary, minority officials complained that a failure to Estonianize
one’s name could have grave consequences for employment
prospects.40
In a speech commemorating ten years of German cultural self-­
government in Estonia, Wilhelm von Wrangell underlined the
importance of ‘competent centralized representation’ for minority
interests, especially now at a time when ethnic communities faced
a constant struggle against unfriendly decrees emanating from the
state bureaucracy.41 Wrangell’s point applied to the German and
Jewish minorities, but not to the Russian, whose leaders now
began to regret the fact that they had not implemented cultural
autonomy during the period of democratic rule. Having ignored
Kurchinskii’s warning at the start of the decade, Russian repre-
sentatives belatedly redoubled their efforts to establish a national
cultural corporation following the shift to authoritarian rule.
Growing worries about enforced changes in state-­controlled
Russian schools, as well as increased official pressure to adopt
Estonian family names, were potent factors. In the words of the
Estonian daily Vaba Maa, the Pechory Russian ‘hitherto knew
only religious differences. Now he is learning about national
102   The new nationalist wave
differences and, therefore, begins to wish for cultural autonomy.’42
Additional urgency was given by the fact that only organized
minorities were to be allowed representation in the appointed
upper chamber of Estonia’s proposed new bicameral parliament,
due to come into being on 1 January 1938.
In October 1937 a delegation from the Union of Russian Edu-
cational and Charitable Societies formally asked for permission to
prepare for the introduction of Russian cultural autonomy.
Mikhail Kurchinskii was to oversee the committee charged with
establishing a national register and with organizing elections. It
took only a few days for the government to reject the application
on the grounds that a decision would have to await the introduc-
tion of new regulations for local self-­government under the forth-
coming new constitution. The promised new regulations for
cultural authorities were in fact never passed.43
The constitutional order introduced in January 1938 came as a
profound disappointment to all of Estonia’s minorities, regardless
of whether or not they had implemented cultural autonomy. The
fundamental principle that all nationalities were equal before the
law was retained. However, nationality was no longer deemed a
matter of free choice for the individual, but was rather to be
determined by law. Moreover, whereas the previous constitutions
of 1920 and 1933 had enshrined the right to cultural autonomy,
the new version spoke only of cultural self-­administration. Also
absent were guarantees of basic education in one’s mother tongue:
teaching in minority schools would be conducted both in the rele-
vant minority language and in Estonian ‘on the bases of and
within the limits prescribed by law’. This lack of guarantees
aroused particular concern within the German cultural govern-
ment, where the feeling was that every new law seemed to be
aimed at creating difficulties for national minorities.44
In terms of political representation, too, the new arrangements
were less than ideal from a minority perspective. The lower house
of parliament was popularly elected, but according to a first-­past-
the-­post principle rather than under the previous system of pro-
portional representation, which had benefited dispersed groups
such as the Germans. A request from the German cultural govern-
ment for special dispensation in the form of an extraterritorial
constituency was not granted.45 Moreover, the 1938 Constitution
stipulated that henceforth representation of minorities would be
entrusted to just a single deputy within the upper chamber of
 The new nationalist wave   103
parliament. In 1938–1939 this task fell to Dr Helmuth Weiss,
who acted as the representative of the German and Jewish
minorities.
Weiss’ role confirms that the control exerted by the Nazis over
the German community in Estonia was less pronounced than it
was in neighbouring Latvia.46 Here the Baltic German Volksge-
meinschaft fell increasingly under the influence of Erhard Kroeger
and his supporters, following Paul Schiemann’s departure for
Vienna in 1933 and the dissolution of Latvia’s political parties.
Despite the differences between Latvia and Estonia, ethnic
Germans in both countries were by this time increasingly looking
towards the Reich as their protector. In that respect the points
were being set that would lead eventually to the wholesale reset-
tlement of the Baltic German population to Polish lands con-
quered by Nazi Germany and cleared of their rightful inhabitants
following the start of the Second World War.
Similarly, as war again loomed over the lands between
Germany and the Soviet Union, many ethnic Russians living in
Latvia and Estonia were becoming increasingly disenchanted with
their situation. Their mood was beginning to feed a growth in
pro-­Soviet sentiments among sections of the Russian community,
notably the leftist intelligentsia as well as the peasantry in the
eastern districts of Estonia. Already at the start of 1939, Russian
members of the Estonian parliament and the leaders of the Union
of Russian Educational and Charitable Societies had signed an
appeal to President Päts protesting at the poor economic situation
of the Russian peasantry, as well as at the lack of opportunity for
social advancement and employment within the state apparatus.
They also complained of growing efforts to forcibly Estonianize
the Russian minority, especially those living in the borderlands.47
The appeal claimed that Estonia’s network of Russian-­language
schools was being destroyed, citing the fact that around a third of
such institutions in the Pechory and Prichuda districts were now
headed by Estonians, some of whom could barely speak Russian.
One example concerned a Russian primary school, again in
Pechory town, where out of seven teachers most were not prop-
erly qualified and only one was Russian. To make matters worse,
there had been a steady reduction in the number of subjects taught
in the Russian language. Even ethnic Russian conscripts for the
military, it was alleged, were being forced to endure verbal attacks
against their people and culture.48
104   The new nationalist wave
Claims of growing tensions were echoed by state officials, many
of whom were only too happy to witness the mass departure of
Baltic Germans from Estonia from mid-­October 1939 onwards.49
Similar jubilation was expressed by official circles in Latvia, where
the first resettlement ship sailed from Riga on 7 November 1939.
Latvia’s interior minister said of those people hitherto counted as
German who had not taken up the option of German citizenship
but chosen to remain in their homes at the cut off date of 15
December: ‘[T]hey were German neither by inclination nor blood,
for then they would not have remained here.’ After 15 December,
he insisted, there would be neither a German national group nor
Germans in Latvia. Those who decided not to leave ‘can no longer
call themselves Germans’.50 The pro-­Ulmanis newspaper Brı-va-
Zeme commented that: ‘Not everything is accomplished with the
departure of the Germans. Let this event move us at the same time
to free our country and people from the traces of German
culture.’51
Despite the triumphalist tone of official propaganda, many
Latvians and Estonians were only too aware that the so-­called
Umsiedlung (resettlement) of Baltic Germans portended the end
of the independent states established two decades earlier. Back in
1920, Paul Schiemann had warned that it would not be difficult
to destroy Latvia’s German minority. He added, however, that ‘at
the very moment when the last German ceases to feel himself a
Latvian citizen, when we have mentally to withdraw from the
society of our home, Latvia’s fate must and will be decided’.52
Two decades later, Schiemann justified his own personal decision
to reject the Umsiedlung and remain in the country where he had
struggled for so long to promote the coexistence of different eth-
nicities within a shared territorial space. In his view, this remained
the only viable option for the future of Europe. The Umsiedlung
itself, he argued, confirmed that the alternative of homogenizing
political space necessarily rested on force, in that some individuals
would always resist leaving through love of homeland. Ultimately
then, resettlement would mean that ‘all the unspeakable human
suffering that the Jewish laws have caused [in Germany] must be
increased tenfold throughout Europe’.53
As ever, the prescience of Schiemann’s words is striking. By the
time he penned these lines, at some point in the spring of 1940,
his homeland of Latvia was about to experience the apogee of
what has been termed Europe’s ‘age of extremes’.54 The Soviet
 The new nationalist wave   105
occupation in June of that year quickly exposed the country’s
inhabitants to brutal Stalinist policies of social cleansing. The
deportations and killings of 1940–1941 then gave way to the gen-
ocide against the Jews perpetrated by German forces and local
collaborators following the Nazi invasion of the Baltic area in
summer 1941.55 Paul Schiemann experienced both wartime occu-
pying regimes, albeit from the vantage point of his home in a Riga
suburb, to which he was by now confined both by debilitating
illness and – from 1941 – by a state of house arrest imposed by
the Nazi authorities.56
The events unfolding around Schiemann could hardly have
come as a greater blow to the ideals he had campaigned for within
the European nationalities movement. This was doubtless made
all the more painful by the knowledge that some of his Baltic
German former co-­workers were by now actively colluding in
Hitler’s plans to displace non-­German populations from occupied
Soviet territory in his quest to attain Lebensraum for the German
Volk. In particular, Schiemann’s earlier misgivings regarding
Werner Hasselblatt were amply confirmed. This former architect
of German cultural autonomy in democratic Estonia was at this
stage to be found writing memoranda for Alfred Rosenberg’s
Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.57
Paul Schiemann and his wife nevertheless remained wholly true
to their ideals by sheltering a young Jewish woman from Riga,
Valentina Freimane, following the murder of her family by the
Nazis. Freimane remained with the Schiemanns until Paul’s death
under Nazi occupation in June 1944. She survived the war and
continued to live in Latvia. She currently divides her time between
Riga and Berlin, and remains the last living witness to Schie-
mann’s final days. Her testimony confirms his enduring conviction
that his vision of a democratic and multicultural Europe would in
time prevail, despite the horrors then being visited upon the
continent.58
7 Cultural autonomy
A new chapter?

The Second World War is synonymous, particularly in Eastern

Europe, with genocide, ethnic cleansing and displacement of
peoples. Forced population movements in the region did not cease
in 1945, but were endorsed in the immediate post-­war period,
even by the Western democracies, as a solution to the nationality
conflicts that had proved so intractable between 1919 and 1939.
In the aftermath of the war, the Western victor powers subsumed
the concept of minority rights within that of individual human
rights, as promulgated most notably by the United Nations. In
1953, the recently established Council of Europe endorsed the
European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms. In affirming that the liberties secured by
the Convention were applicable to all, this document made no
specific provisions for belonging to a national minority, beyond
the obvious safeguards against differential treatment on the
grounds of ethnicity.1
Subsequently, within the context of the geopolitical stability
imposed by the Cold War, it was assumed on both sides of the
Iron Curtain that ethnicity would ultimately cease to be a signifi-
cant factor in public life. Ethnic diversity in varying degrees
remained a feature of all European states, both East and West,
but the dominant expectation in the immediate post-­war decades
was that such differences were likely to lose any meaning under
the inexorable onward march of modernization.2 As had been the
case after the First World War, the implication was that all minor-
ity ethnicities would ultimately be merged into homogenous
nation states.
The subsequent reality proved to be rather different. Writing in
2007, Will Kymlicka observed that:
 Cultural autonomy   107
In the last 40 years, we have witnessed a veritable revolution
around the world in the relations between states and ethno-­
cultural minorities. Older models of assimilationist and
homogenizing nation states are increasingly being contested,
and often displaced, by newer ‘multicultural’ models of the
state and citizenship. This is reflected, for example, in the
widespread adoption of cultural and religious accommodation
for immigrant groups, the acceptance of territorial autonomy
and language rights for national minorities, and the recogni-
tion of land claims and self-­government rights for indigenous
peoples.3

This multicultural turn was in the first instance a response to

growing immigration to Western Europe from the 1960s onwards,
as well as to the development or revival of ethno-­regionalist
movements in states such as Belgium and Spain. The process was
accelerated by the largely unanticipated political changes occur-
ring in Eastern Europe during the second half of the 1980s.
Here, developments within the USSR above all increasingly cast
doubt upon official proclamations by the Soviet regime that the
nationality question had been solved and distinct ethno-­national
identities definitively subsumed within a new overarching concept
of ‘Soviet people’. In reality, in the context of territorially institu-
tionalized multi-­ethnicity and undemocratic, centralized rule by
Moscow, many residents of the non-­Russian republics came to
view what was termed sovietization as synonymous with russifica-
tion.4 Growing emphasis on the public use of the Russian lan-
guage across all the Soviet republics, together with ongoing
migration of Russian-­speakers to the borderlands, heightened
fears that the federal structure of the USSR, with its long-­standing
cultural supports for non-­Russian nationalities, was set to disap-
pear. The prospect contributed to a visible rise in social tensions
in some regions by the 1980s, including the Baltic republics of
Estonia and Latvia, where sustained post-­war immigration had
increased the Russian-­speaking share of the population to 39 and
48 per cent respectively.
When Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and
democratization loosened political controls in the mid-­1980s, new
nationalist movements quickly developed across the USSR, greatly
hastened by the failure to reverse an ongoing decline of the Soviet
economy. Nationalist movements were at their most effective in
108   Cultural autonomy
the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where it was
possible to mobilize hundreds of thousands of local residents
behind a peaceful campaign in support of full independence. What
became known as the ‘singing revolution’ drew upon the collec-
tive memory of interwar statehood and its violent suppression, as
well as – in the case of the Estonian and Latvian movements –
notions of an existential threat to the language and societal
culture of the republics’ titular nationalities.
While support for ethno-­regionalism was at its most pro-
nounced in the Baltic area, the Soviet central government soon
had to contend with a parade of sovereignties by all republics,
including, from May 1990, the Russian Republic.5 As had previ-
ously been the case with the collapse of the Tsarist Russian
Empire, however, the subsequent demise of the USSR in 1991 did
not solve the nationality question, but merely recast it in a differ-
ent form.6 The legacy of territorially institutionalized multi-­
ethnicity ensured that tensions quickly emerged between new
nationalizing states, national minorities and external national
homelands. Here a particular focus of attention has been the esti-
mated 25 million ethnic Russians currently residing outside the
borders of the Russian Federation, itself home to 120 different
ethnic groups.
Similar dynamics manifested themselves within the Yugoslav
Federation at the turn of the 1990s, albeit with far more destruc-
tive consequences. In central Europe, post-­1989 processes of polit-
ical and social transformation occurred within what were
ostensibly more secure state borders. Yet here too, nationality
issues soon manifested themselves, as witnessed by the Czech–­
Slovak so-­called velvet divorce of 1993 and the renewed discus-
sions surrounding the status of the sizeable ethnic Hungarian
minorities living in Slovakia, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine, as
well as their relationship both to their states of residence and to
their putative external national homeland of Hungary.7
In a rather sudden and dramatic fashion, therefore, the eastern
part of Europe was again confronted with the dilemma of how to
accommodate political movements seeking cultural recognition for
particular ethnic groups without ‘[undermining] the already fragile
civic cohesion of multiethnic countries and [reinforcing] a parochial
approach to politics amongst their constituent nationalities’.8 The
demise of the USSR, and of Yugoslavia in particular, gave impetus
to renewed discussions on a European minority-­rights regime that
 Cultural autonomy   109
had finally begun in 1990 under the auspices of the Conference
(later Organization) for Security and Co-­operation in Europe
(henceforth OSCE).9 In what appeared to be a far reaching provi-
sion, the OSCE in 1992 created the post of High Commissioner
for National Minorities (HCNM), with the power to make pro-
nouncements and recommendations on the protection of minor­
ities within particular OSCE member states, regardless of the
relevant government’s wishes in the matter. Individual govern-
ments could also compel any other member state to admit fact-­
finding delegations and the establishment of longer term missions
to assess and regulate ethnic relations.
The vision informing this work at the outset was for a truly
universal minority-­rights regime embracing all sovereign states in
the zone stretching east from Vancouver to Vladivostok. The
practice, however, recalled the shortcomings of the League of
Nations in the aftermath of the First World War. Western govern-
ments, notably those of Britain, France, Spain, Turkey and indeed
the United States, were not only unwilling to countenance any
dilution of their sovereign rights, but in some cases even refused
to acknowledge the existence of national minorities within their
own borders, despite sometimes obvious evidence to the contrary.
In keeping with this the attentions of the OSCE High Commis-
sioner have focused firmly on the countries of Eastern Europe.
These have also had to demonstrate ‘respect for and protection of
minorities’ as one of the preconditions for entering the Council of
Europe and, most significantly of all, the European Union – a
state of affairs placing Western governments in a strong position
to dictate conditions to former communist states seeking EU
membership.
The heightened attention given to Eastern Europe has often
been justified by reference to the ethnic violence that broke out in
the former Yugoslavia and USSR during the early 1990s. Those
events also revived interest in the concept of non-­territorial cul-
tural autonomy as a possible model for managing ethnic diversity
in the region.10 From the point of view of international organiza-
tions and national governments alike, cultural autonomy has been
considered as a means of forestalling demands from national
minorities for the kind of territorial autonomy that previously
existed within Yugoslavia and the USSR, and which – more sub-
stantively – has been introduced in a number of Western Euro-
pean states over the past half-­century.11 From the point of view of
110   Cultural autonomy
national minority representatives, territorially based devolution
may be seen as a logical facet of post-­communist democratization.
Yet central governments and indeed external agencies have tended
rather to view it as potentially detrimental to state integrity. In
that respect, cultural autonomy has been held up as a less destabi-
lizing approach to addressing minority rights claims across central
and Eastern Europe.
Indeed, the constitutional accommodation of ethnic diversity
within existing borders has been a key preoccupation of the Euro-
pean Commission for Democracy through Law, better known as
the Venice Commission. Established in 1990, it has served as an
advisory body to the Council of Europe, which in 1995 adopted
its own Framework Convention for the Protection of National
Minorities (henceforth FCNM). In May 2007 the present authors
helped to organize one of the Venice Commission’s regular joint
academic–practitioner Universities for Democracy seminars in
Zagreb, Croatia, where they briefed participants on the historic
experience of cultural autonomy in the region.12
The Venice Commission’s interest in our work was stimulated
by an earlier briefing that we were invited to give to government
ministers in Romania at the start of 2005, when the country’s
parliament was drafting a new law on national minorities, ahead
of accession to the EU. The event was arranged at the behest of
the ethnic Hungarian party within Romania’s then ruling coali-
tion, the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (in Hun-
garian, UDMR). UDMR’s rationale for advocating non-­territorial
cultural autonomy as the basis for the legislation was to counter
Romanian nationalist claims that minority autonomy would open
the way to separatist demands on the part of the Hungarian
minority, specifically a revival of Hungarian claims to sovereignty
over the historically disputed territory of Transylvania.13
Similar concerns for preserving the territorial integrity of the
state lay behind the Russian Federation’s law on national-­cultural
autonomy, adopted in 1996. Its original purpose was to undercut
the inherited Soviet model of ethno-­territorial federalism as part
of an effort to instil a more cohesive concept of Russian (Rossi-
iskii) political community founded on the post-­1992 boundaries
of the Russian Federation.14 For Valerii Tishkov, chair of Russia’s
State Commission on Nationalities during the immediate post-­
Soviet era, a non-­territorial model of ethnic rights was considered
helpful in strengthening a popular sense of belonging to a single,
 Cultural autonomy   111
multi-­ethnic state community. The introduction of such a system
appeared all the more logical given that in the case of many of the
country’s larger non-­Russian nationalities, a considerable propor-
tion of the group in question actually resided outside the borders
of its designated territorial homeland; many smaller groups had
previously enjoyed no recognition at all.15
If institutional density is taken as a measure, the Russian law of
1996 can be counted as a success, with over 250 bodies of national
cultural autonomy established across the Russian Federation
during the period 1996–2000.16 Initial characterizations of the new
law as ‘Austro-­Marxism’s last laugh’, however, proved premature,
in so far as the powers and resources allocated to these new bodies
were extremely limited. Indeed, in practical terms there was little
to differentiate them from existing non-­governmental organiza-
tions.17 Under Tishkov’s original proposals developed in 1992, the
institutions of cultural autonomy were to have had a legal standing
equal to that of the national republics within the federation. What
emerged in reality was a much-­attenuated version of these propos-
als, whereby national cultural autonomy functioned as a supple-
ment to an essentially unchanged system of territorial autonomy.
In recent times, moreover, national autonomy in whatever form
has come under growing pressure due to the more centralizing and
nationalizing impulses increasingly evident since the start of
Vladimir Putin’s presidency in 2000.
In Estonia, where the celebrated interwar law on cultural
autonomy was revived to great fanfare in 1993, prospects for a
successful practical application of the legislation have also been
undermined by the nationalizing practices of the state. Post-­
independence, no automatic right to citizenship was extended to
the large Russian-­speaking speaking population of Soviet-­era set-
tlers and their descendents who made up 30 per cent of Estonia’s
total inhabitants in 1991. In the eyes of the restored Estonian
Republic, these settlers do not constitute a genuine national
minority, even though many have since obtained Estonian citizen-
ship through naturalization. It would, therefore, appear that the
reinstatement of the interwar cultural autonomy law was prima-
rily a symbolic gesture. Its main aim was to counter international
criticism of citizenship and other legislation and thus enhance
Estonia’s reputation in the eyes of its new Western partners,
thereby improving the country’s prospects for integration into
international structures.18
112   Cultural autonomy
Thus far the Estonian law has been implemented only by repre-
sentatives of the country’s Ingrian Finnish and Swedish minorities.
Both groups are numerically small and territorially dispersed.
Indeed, Estonia’s Swedish-­speaking minority was moved whole-
sale to Sweden in 1943, and most descendents of this group con-
tinue to live there.19 Members of other numerically small minority
nationalities in Estonia, such as the Belorussian community, have
actively discussed the possibility of cultural autonomy. Yet most
non-­titular nationalities living in Estonia remain subdivided into
citizens and non-­citizens. For this reason, smaller groups have
typically resorted to a law on non-­commercial organizations as a
basis for developing their own cultural societies and schools,
rather than opting for full cultural autonomy.20
At 25 per cent of the population, ethnic Russians constitute by
far and away the largest minority within today’s Estonia. In the
Soviet period, Russians, as the ‘first amongst equals’ of the Soviet
nationalities had uniquely enjoyed access to extraterritorial cul-
tural autonomy in the sphere of education and language use. The
Soviet system thus bequeathed a network of Russian-­language
primary and secondary schools alongside those teaching in Esto-
nian. While moves are currently afoot to shift to bilingual educa-
tion at the upper secondary level, Russian-­language schools have
continued to operate under local authority auspices since 1991.
Aside from the citizenship issue alluded to above, a reluctance to
put at risk what is already in place is a major factor behind the
reluctance of Russian-­minority leaders to take up the option of
cultural autonomy. As was the case between the wars, there are
also concerns about the prospect of paying additional taxation for
Russian schooling.21
The state of political marginalization occasioned by the citizen-
ship law means that cultural autonomy would not in itself resolve
current issues between the Estonian state and its Russian minor­
ities. Despite renewed consideration of this option, for example in
connection with current changes to state-­funded Russian-­language
schooling, the tone amongst many Russian political leaders
remains one of scepticism.22 As was the case with the Baltic
Germans between the wars, the Russian-­speaking political elite in
today’s Estonia divides into those who are ready to embrace
national minority status within a unitary state, and those who
argue for a return to the bilingual, binational model of statehood
of the Soviet-­era. The latter suggestion is anathema as far as the
 Cultural autonomy   113
majority of ethnic Estonian politicians is concerned; however,
even more conciliatory Russian advocates of the minority rights
model have struggled to make their voices heard, within a post-­
colonialist nation-­building project as yet preoccupied with revers-
ing perceived historical injustices perpetrated against the titular
nationality during the period of Soviet rule.
Historically conditioned distrust between ethnic majority and
minority also proved hard to overcome in the case of Romania,
where the cultural autonomy law presented to parliament in 2005
eventually foundered. In yet another echo of the interwar period,
it has to date proved impossible to settle disputes over the degree
of powers to be allocated to the proposed minority cultural self-­
governments and over the question of who is to appoint them –
the government or the minorities themselves. As an organic law,
the draft bill of 2005 required the assent of both houses of the
Romanian parliament and with only a slim overall majority the
government was unable to command this.23
Non-­territorial cultural autonomy has proved rather less con-
troversial in neighbouring Hungary. In 1993 it became the first
state to adopt a law on this basis following the fall of commu-
nism. A remarkable 96 per cent of Hungary’s parliamentarians
voted in favour of legislation that was adopted primarily with an
eye to championing the rights of ethnic Hungarians living in
neighbouring states.24 From the standpoint of the government in
Budapest, cultural autonomy could hardly be construed as threat-
ening to the integrity of the Hungarian state. The overall propor-
tion of national minorities within Hungary’s population is
numerically small and many of these are well integrated with the
majority culture. Moreover, the territorially dispersed nature of
minority settlement in Hungary has lent itself to a non-­territorial
model of autonomy.25
Once again, the existing literature has focused as often as not
on the deficiencies of Hungary’s 1993 law. Authors have noted
that due to memories of past persecution members of minorities,
such as the Roma and the Germans, were reluctant to declare
publicly their ethnicity by enrolling on a national register. Thus,
under the initial law of 1993, elections to minority self-­
governments were not conducted on the basis of national registers
but were instead open to all citizens residing in a particular
electoral district, regardless of ethnicity. Not surprisingly, this has
in a number of cases led to problems of representativeness and
114   Cultural autonomy
legitimacy of the elected minority bodies, including the phenome-
non of so-­called ethno-­business, whereby political entrepreneurs
have been able to pose as minority representatives simply in order
to gain access to public office and the entitlements that flow from
this.
As a result of such anomalies, Hungary’s cultural autonomy
law was eventually amended in 2005 and an obligatory system of
enrolment on national registers – for candidates and voters alike –
was introduced.26 Some critics, however, remain implacably
opposed to the concept of minority cultural autonomy per se,
regardless of how the bodies are elected. As regards the Roma
minority in particular, it is argued by some that granting auton-
omy is a lot easier and indeed less costly than getting to grips with
the most pressing problem facing this community, namely deep-­
seated discrimination and socio-­economic marginalization at the
hands of the state and the Magyar majority. Without parallel
action to deal with this issue, it is said, cultural autonomy runs
the risk of exacerbating the exclusion of the Roma, by entrench-
ing pre-­existing ethnicized boundaries within society. In some
cases Hungarian local authorities have stood accused of abrogat-
ing their social and economic responsibilities to Roma constitu-
ents, on the specious grounds that these now fall within the remit
of minority self-­government.27
Despite all such problems, cultural autonomy has almost cer-
tainly helped to boost both the cultural self-­awareness of Hunga-
ry’s minorities and their participation in public life, all the more
so given that autonomous bodies have possessed rights of advo-
cacy in relation to the state authorities. More than 1,200 minority
self-­governments have come into existence across Hungary since
the mid-­1990s, and it is notable that over half of these have been
established by representatives of the Roma, the country’s largest
minority group. To speak approvingly of cultural autonomy is not
to deny the very real problems of discrimination and social exclu-
sion still faced by the Roma minority; however, the fact that
growing numbers of people have apparently been willing to iden-
tify themselves as Roma in state census returns would seem to
suggest that their situation is more favourable than in some neigh-
bouring countries of the region.28
More generally, recent discussions of cultural autonomy within
central and Eastern Europe have dovetailed with contemporary
debates on European integration and the future of the nation
 Cultural autonomy   115
state. Here too, the discussions conducted within the 1920s
Nationalities Congress often appear startlingly relevant. Accord-
ing to some recent accounts, for instance, there is a possibility that
Europe’s Roma might be granted the status of a transnational
minority with its own targeted rights regime within the European
Union, thus resurrecting an idea propagated by Jewish representa-
tives from central and Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath
of the First World War.29
Yet, as the case of Hungarians in Romania illustrates very
clearly, there remains a high degree of political sensitivity regard-
ing any suggestion of enhanced cross-­border links between minor-
ities and their external national homelands. The continued climate
of mistrust in this regard was especially apparent during the dis-
cussions surrounding Hungary’s 2001 so-­called status law,
whereby the government in Budapest sought to extend certain
entitlements to ethnic Hungarians living in neighbouring coun-
tries. Once more echoing the Nationalities Congress debates of
the 1920s, the Hungarian prime minister and initiator of the legis-
lation, Viktor Orban, also expounded his vision of how a future
‘Europe of national communities’ might evolve within the overall
context of a deepening and widening European Union.30
Orban’s initial proposal met with a distinctly wary response
from the European Union and other relevant international bodies,
such as the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission and the
OSCE. All denounced Hungary’s pretensions as an external home-
land to its co-­nationals abroad. The main objection related to talk
of a trans-­sovereign Hungarian nation and to the inclusion within
the law of social welfare as well as cultural entitlements. In this
respect, international organizations insisted that persons belong-
ing to minorities have to be seen first and foremost as citizens of
their state of residence, and that this state must bear the primary
responsibility for their welfare. Furthermore, it was established
that the proposed status law violated the principle of equality by
discriminating on the basis of ethnic origin between citizens of
foreign states.31 This finding seemingly underlined the continued
primacy of the nation state concept within the European Union
and the international system more widely.
For all this, the idea of a Europe of nationalities still merits
closer scrutiny. The international deliberations on Hungary’s
status law may have refuted the concept of a trans-­sovereign
nation, but in doing so they did not entirely discount the notion
116   Cultural autonomy
that national governments can legitimately maintain ties with
ethnic kin minorities living beyond their borders.32 Under the
terms of the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on
National Minorities, Hungary is entitled, subject to bilateral trea-
ties with neighbouring states, to promote Hungarian language
and culture abroad. In as much as cultural and linguistic ties were
at the heart of the efforts by the Nationalities Congress to unite
ethnic communities across state borders, the relevant provisions
of the FCNM do not appear too far removed from the ideas
floated back in the late 1920s.
More broadly, the EU, Council of Europe and OSCE are all
today committed to working within existing state borders to
create a new multicultural understanding of shared territorial
space within central and Eastern Europe. This is an approach with
which the leaders of the 1920s minorities movement would
wholeheartedly concur. After all, the primary concern of Paul
Schiemann and others was not with state borders as such, but
with persuading each individual to work for the good of the place
that he or she inhabits. In this regard, the Congress programme
represented an effort to adapt Renner and Bauer’s original model
– coined in an age of multinational empires – to the new realities
of the modern nation state system.
Today, it is perhaps even more fanciful to posit (as Renner and
Bauer surely did a century ago) that the conceptual link between
ethnicity and territory can be broken entirely. Territorially based
devolution for minorities has become commonplace within the
longer established democracies of the Western world during the
last half a century. Therefore, it seems unlikely that larger and
more territorially concentrated minorities living in central and
Eastern Europe will be willing to eschew this model in favour of a
purely non-­territorial form of autonomy. Despite this, Karl Ren-
ner’s central contention – that territorial approaches alone cannot
definitively regulate the nationality question – remains as valid
today as ever. Ethnic and political boundaries in Europe will
never be completely congruent and some members of national
minorities will inevitably fall outside a territory ‘of their own’. In
this respect, non-­territorial cultural autonomy retains at the very
least the potential to complement other, territorially based models
of minority rights.
Minority rights remain a contentious, securitized issue within
the societies of central and Eastern Europe, where latent conflicts
 Cultural autonomy   117
between states, national minorities and external national home-
lands continue to exist both across the external EU frontier (in the
case, for example, of Russian minorities in the Baltic states) as
well as within the European Union itself (in the case of Hungarian
minorities in Slovakia and Romania). The central and East Euro-
pean situation and accompanying debates on cultural autonomy
in the region must also be viewed within the context of broader
European and global contemporary discussions of multicultural-
ism and societal cohesion. As Europe’s East and West converge
within common institutional frameworks, interesting questions
arise not simply about the capacity of the EU and other bodies to
advance post-­communist democratization, but also about the
potential relevance of home-­grown East European models of mul-
ticulturalism for Western Europe and, indeed, beyond.
There are in fact already a number of examples outside central
and Eastern Europe where the principles of non-­territorial cultural
autonomy have been applied during recent decades. One obvious
instance relates to indigenous peoples such as the Maori in New
Zealand and the Saami in the Nordic countries. Beyond this, non-­
territorial autonomy has been a facet of consociational political
systems of government in multinational states, perhaps most
notably the Belgian model operating since the 1970s. Of this it
has been said that ‘the plan to devolve power simultaneously to
three regions (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels) and to two com-
munities (the Dutch- and French-­speaking ones) is a close replica
of Renner’s original scheme for the Austrian Empire’.33 Even if –
as some now suggest – Flanders and Wallonia were to go their
separate ways in the near future, the system of communal cultural
autonomy would surely have to remain as part of the overall set-
tlement. One could also envisage further instances where cultural
autonomy might in future come into play, for example as part of
a longer term settlement of the Irish question.
Opinion remains more divided over whether the cultural auton-
omy model (or aspects thereof ) might have applicability to the
systems of immigrant multiculturalism developed in post-­war
Western Europe and north America.34 In this respect, it is perhaps
worth noting that the original model of Renner and Bauer was
inspired to a large extent by the vision of itinerant workers taking
their culture with them wherever they moved (albeit within the
shared territorial and political frame of the Habsburg state). Yet
subsequent academic and political discussions of minority rights
118   Cultural autonomy
(including those during the 1920s) have customarily drawn a dis-
tinction between historically rooted national minorities and indig-
enous peoples on the one hand and ‘immigrant’, ‘ethnic’ or ‘new’
minorities on the other. Substantial national-­cultural autonomy of
the kind envisaged by Renner and Bauer is generally deemed to be
the preserve of the former, whereas the latter typically seek (and
by implication are supposed to be content with) a more modest
level of recognition of their distinct identity.35
Traces of past reflections on national-­cultural autonomy can,
however, be discerned in recent and ongoing discussions in the
United Kingdom around what has been termed faith-­based multi-
culturalism. The past decade and a half in particular has seen a
number of policy initiatives, drawing on communitarian thinking,
that seek to bring together religion, community and social cohe-
sion.36 Against this background, former British Labour Party
member of parliament and onetime home secretary Charles Clarke
made a speech to the Royal Commonwealth Society in November
2006 in which he argued that ‘the left ought to be more sympa-
thetic to at least the practice of faith’. Clarke went on to describe
faith as ‘generally a force for good’, whose ‘general practice is to
respect other faiths and foster good relations and tolerance
between them’. In this respect, he continued:

I believe that the state ought to encourage a stronger formal

relationship with the main faith communities. For example we
should make it unequivocally clear that it is perfectly appro-
priate for faith-­led voluntary and community organizations to
receive support from public funds on the same basis as those
which are not faith-­led.37

More controversially, in February 2008 the Archbishop of Can-

terbury, Rowan Williams, delivered a lecture entitled Civil and
Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective. By his own
account, Williams was seeking ‘carefully to explore the limits of a
unitary and secular legal system in the presence of an increasingly
plural (including religiously plural) society and to see how such a
unitary system might be able to accommodate religious claims’.38
Citing existing Orthodox Jewish practice in relation to the juris-
diction of British courts, he suggested that under certain circum-
stances Sharia law might also serve as an ‘overlapping jurisdiction’
under which individuals might choose to seek justice. This was on
 Cultural autonomy   119
the understanding that ‘no supplementary jurisdiction could have
the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or
to punish its members for claiming those rights’.39
The relevance of Williams’ proposals to the original ideas of
Renner and Bauer (and the debates of the 1920s) is, of course,
open to question, both in relation to the faith-­based aspects and
the advocacy of multiple legal systems.40 There is, nevertheless, an
interesting point of comparison to be found in the Archbishop’s
opening contention that if the law fails to engage adequately with
particular communities, this can ‘[open] up real issues of power
by the majority over the minority, with potentially harmful effects
for community cohesion’.41 This basic point was, however, lost in
the media storm elicited by Williams’ lecture.42
The Williams furore indicated the extent to which public dis-
cussion of such themes in the UK has been adversely affected by
the ‘multiculturalism backlash’ evident in Western societies since
the mid-­1990s.43 Directed first and foremost at immigrant multi-
culturalism – and at Islamic minorities in particular – this reaction
has been largely driven by right-­wing political groups amongst the
majority population who assert that state multiculturalist policies
have gone too far and have begun to threaten what is termed the
majority way of life. Securitization of the issue and ‘othering’ of
Islamic communities have been given additional momentum by
the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and the subsequent
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, elements of the
centre-­left in Western democracies have also begun to question
the pre-­existing course of immigrant multiculturalism, arguing
that there has been a failure to properly address the sources of
minorities’ social, economic and political exclusion. Indeed, it is
claimed that these policies may inadvertently have contributed to
greater communal segregation and isolation.44
The core idioms of the multiculturalism backlash include the
notion that multicultural state policies foster separateness, reject
common values, support ‘culturally reprehensible’ practices and
even provide a haven for terrorism.45 A further staple of such think-
ing is the proposition that cultural relativism is inexorably under-
mining enlightenment universalism in the West. As far back as 1988,
for instance, French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut argued that:

The United Nations, founded to propagate the universalist

ideal of enlightened Europe, now speaks on behalf of every
120   Cultural autonomy
ethnic prejudice, believing that peoples, nations and cultures
have rights which outweigh the rights of man. The ‘multicul-
tural lobby’ dismisses the liberal values of Europe as ‘racist’,
while championing the narrow chauvinism of every minority
culture.46

Countering this attack in a recent study, Will Kymlicka rightly

retorts that it amounts to a fundamental misreading of the term
multiculturalism as defined in international law. ‘The rights of
minorities,’ Kymlicka insists, ‘are an inseparable part of a larger
human rights framework and operate within its limits.’47 Seen in
this light, the distinction between national and ethnic minorities is
arguably moot. In Kymlicka’s view, multiculturalism is about
democratization and ‘citizenization’ – that is to say framing iden-
tities within liberal democratic norms and a civil society. By this
understanding, giving greater recognition to particular minority
communities is a means of increasing their participation in public
life and, in so doing, drawing community leaders into fuller inter-
action with the state and the broader community of which they
form part.48
In sum, Kymlicka asserts that multiculturalism properly defined
challenges both majority and minority identities – it does not
entrench them. These are sentiments that Renner and Bauer and
the liberal activists of the interwar Nationalities Congress would
have enthusiastically endorsed. This remains broadly true also of
the bigger picture in today’s Europe. Between the wars, it has
been suggested, liberalism had the appearance of an ‘ailing third
way in European history’.49 More than 20 years on from the end
of the Cold War, liberalism appears far more entrenched than it
did in the late 1920s, even in the face of a pronounced economic
crisis that is today severely testing the cohesion and political will
of the European Union. Moreover, multiculturalism is presently a
far more established fixture on the European political agenda
despite the best attempts of various parties to engineer a backlash
against it.50
By the same token and despite current problems with the
common European currency, the contours of the nation state
appear less implacably sovereign and ‘selfish’ than they did in the
Europe of the interwar years. Within the EU Schengen area, at
least, it is perfectly possible to envisage a longer term scenario
whereby state borders do indeed lose much of their practical
 Cultural autonomy   121
significance, thereby reducing any perceived conflict of loyalty
between transnational ethnic groups and their various states of
residence. It is this state of affairs which, ultimately, the interwar
Nationalities Congress tried to bring about. In conclusion, while
contemporary developments can hardly be characterized as
‘Austro-­Marxism’s last laugh’, neither can the debates and prac-
tices of the 1920s simply be dismissed as an historical dead end –
there is much that can be usefully learned from revisiting them.
Notes

Preface
1 A. Cobban, The Nation State And National Self-­Determination, London:
Fontana, 1969, p. 23.
2 K. Renner, ‘State and nation’, in E. Nimni (ed.) National Cultural Auton-
omy and its Contemporary Critics, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 32.
3 See D. Christopher Decker, Enhancing Minority Governance in Romania.
Report on the Presentation on Cultural Autonomy to the Romanian
Government. ECMI Workshop, Bucharest, Romania, 3 February 2005,
ECMI Report #53. www.ecmi.de/uploads/tx_lfpubdb/Report_53.pdf (down-
loaded on 22 July 2011).
4 G. Buquicchio, ‘Introductory address’, in Venice Commission, The Partici-
pation of Minorities in Public Life, Collection Science and Technique of
Democracy, No. 45, Stasbourg, Council of Europe Publishing, 2008, p. 8.

1 Nation, state and minority in modern Europe

1 E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1990; E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1983; G. Schöpflin, Nations, Identity, Power: The
New Politics of Europe, London: Hurst, 2000; T. Kuzio, ‘ “Nationalising
states” or nation-­building? A critical review of the theoretical literature
and empirical evidence’, Nations and Nationalism 7, 2001, pp. 135–154.
2 Here it should be emphasized that the concepts of ‘nationhood’ and
‘national identity’ are neither perennial nor static, but historically con-
tingent and contested social and political constructs, the boundaries of
which are subject to varying degrees of continuous change and renegoti-
ation within the overall terms of social interaction. As we argue in
Chapter 2 of the present work, Karl Renner and Otto Bauer were
attuned to this present-­day, contingent understanding of the two con-
cepts, which also informs contemporary theories of multiculturalism (see
Chapter 7).
3 A. Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central
Europe, Russia & the Middle East, 1914–1923, London: Routledge,
2001; A. Webb, The Routledge Companion to Central and Eastern
Europe since 1919, London: Routledge, 2008.
 Notes   123
4 J. Jackson Preece, National Minorities and the European Nation-­States
System, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 100–101.
5 W. Kymlicka, ‘Nation-­building and minority rights: comparing West and
East’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 26, 2000, pp. 183–212.
6 A. Roshwald, ‘Between balkanisation and banalisation: dilemmas of ethno-­
cultural diversity’, in D. J. Smith and K. Cordell (eds) Cultural Autonomy
in Contemporary Europe, London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 29–42.
7 A. Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism, p. 5; M. Hroch, Social Preconditions
of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social
Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; R. Brubaker et al.,
Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 27–46.
8 ‘A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people,
formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and
psychological make-­up manifested in a common culture.’ From J. V.
Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’ in J. V. Stalin, Works,
volume 2, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954, p. 307;
J. Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–23, London:
Macmillan, 1999.
9 G. Smith et al., Nation-­Building in the Post-­Soviet Borderlands. The Poli-
tics of National Identities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998,
p. 4; T. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and National-
ism in the Soviet Union, 1923–39, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
10 R. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed. Nationhood and the National
Question in the New Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996, pp. 23–54.
11 For a general overview see ibid., pp. 79–106; R. Pearson, National
Minorities In Eastern Europe, 1848–1944, London: Macmillan, 1983;
Cobban, Nation State and National Self-­Determination; C. A. MacCart-
ney, National States and National Minorities, London: Oxford University
Press, 1934.
12 E. Berg, ‘Ethnic mobilisation in flux: revisiting peripherality and minority
discontent in Estonia’, Space and Polity, 5, 2001, pp. 5–26.
13 Jackson Preece, National Minorities, pp. 38–39.
14 For a good overview, see R. Bideleux and I. Jeffries, A History of Eastern
Europe: Crisis and Change, London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 489–503; Bru-
baker et al., Nationalist Politics, pp. 50–56.
15 Jackson Preece, National Minorities, pp. 38–39.
16 S. Bamberger-­Stemmann, Der europäische Nationalitätenkongress 1925
bis 1938, Marburg: Johann-­Gottfried Herder Institut, 2000; M. Rot-
barth, ‘Grenzrevision und Minderheitenfragen. Zur Funktion des
europäischen Minderheiten Kongresses in der Ostpolitik des deutschen
Imperialismus’, Studien zur Geschichte der deutsch-­polnischen Beziehun-
gen, 6, 1982, pp. 5–30; A. Czubinski, ‘La politique d’Allemagne par
rapport au minorités nationales allemandes dans les années 1918–1945’,
Polish Western Affairs, 24, 1983, pp. 40–64; R. Michaelson, Der
europäischer Nationalitätenkongress 1925–28. Aufbau, Krise und Konso-
lidierung, Frankfurt: Lang, 1984.
17 See especially E. Nimni (ed.), National Cultural Autonomy and its
­Contemporary Critics, London: Routledge, 2005; also K. Breen and
124   Notes
S. O’Neill (eds), After the Nation? Critical Reflections on Nationalism
and Post-­Nationalism, London: Palgrave, 2010.
18 See, for instance, the discussion in B. Schot, Nation oder Staat. Deutsch-
land und der Minderheitenschutz, Marburg: Johann-­Gottfried Herder
Institut, 1988, pp. 16–17.
19 J. Hiden, Defender of Minorities. Paul Schiemann, 1876–1944, London:
Hurst, 2004; D. J. Smith, ‘Retracing Estonia’s Russians: Mikhail Kurchin-
skii and interwar cultural autonomy’, Nationalities Papers 27, 1999, pp.
455–474; M. Housden, ‘Ewald Ammende and the organisation of
national minorities in inter-­war Europe’, German History 18, 2000, pp.
439–460; I. Ijabs, ‘Strange Baltic liberalism: Paul Schiemann’s political
thought revisited’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 40, 2009, pp. 495–515.
20 Bamberger-­Stemmann, Europäische Nationalitätenkongress.
21 The most substantial recent study dealing with the origins of cultural
autonomy in Estonia is K. Alenius, Ajan ihanteiden ja historian risittei-
den ristipaineissa: Viron etniset suhteet vuosina 1918–1925, Rovaniemi:
Pohjois-­Suomen historiallinen yhdistys, 2003. The main points of this
book are summarized in K. Alenius, ‘Under the conflicting pressures of
the ideals of the era and the burdens of history: ethnic relations in
Estonia, 1918–1925’, Journal of Baltic Studies 35, 2004, pp. 32–49.
The most comprehensive study in English remains K. Aun, On the Spirit
of the Estonian Minorities Law, Stockholm: Estonian Information
Centre, 1950. Other studies include O. Angelus, Die Kulturautonomie
in Estland, Detmold: Estnischen Zentralkommittee für Westdeutsch-
land, 1951; K. Aun, Der Völkerrechtliche Schutz nationaler Minder-
heiten in Estland von 1917–1940, Hamburg: Hansischer Gildenverlag,
1951.
22 M. Garleff, ‘Autonomiemodellen in den baltischen Staaten zur Zeit ihrer
Selbstständigkeit’, Jahrbuch des baltischen Deutschtums, 1980, pp.
150–156; W. Wachtsmuth, Von deutscher Arbeit in Lettland 1918–1934:
Ein Tätigkeitsbericht. Materialen zur Geschichte des baltischen Deutsch-
tums, Cologne: Comel Verlag, 1951–1953; Š. Liekis, A State within a
State? Jewish Autonomy in Lithuania 1918–1925, Vilnius: Versus
Aureus, 2003.
23 S. Isakov, Russkie v Estonii 1918–1940. Istoriko-­kul’turniie ocherki,
Tartu: Kompu, 1996; J. Šteimanis, History of Latvian Jews, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002; V. Volkovs, Krievi Latvija-, Rı-ga: Latvi-
jas Zina-tņu akade-mijas Filozofijas un socioloijas institu-ta Etnisko pe-tı-
jumu centrs, 1996; M. Bobe, Evrei v Latvii, Riga: Shamir, 2006; S. Isakov
(ed.), Russkoe national’noe men’shinstvo v Estonskoi Respublike
(1918–1940), Tartu: Kripta, 2000.
24 The most substantial study of the practice of autonomy can be found in
Kaido Laurits’ work on the German self-­government in Estonia during
1925–1940. See: K. Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus Eesti Vabariigis
1925–1940. Tallinn: Rahvusarhiiv, 2008.

2 Voices in the wilderness?

1 In this regard, see also A. Kogan ‘The social democrats and the conflict of
nationalities in the Habsburg monarchy’, The Journal Of Modern
History, 21, 1949, p. 216.
 Notes   125
2 Kogan, ‘The social democrats and the conflict of nationalities’, pp.
204–217.
3 E. J. Nimni, ‘Introduction for the English-­reading audience’, in O. Bauer,
The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. xxxv; see also: W. A.
Kemp, Nationalism and Communism in Eastern Europe and The Soviet
Union: A Basic Contradiction? Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, p. 36; S.
Berger and A. Smith, ‘Between Scylla and Charibdis: nationalism, labour
and ethnicity across five continents 1870–1939’, in S. Berger and A.
Smith (eds), Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity, 1870–1939, Manches-
ter: Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 10–15.
4 Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy,
pp. 100–102. Here, Bauer differentiates between nationality and class as
social categories: the English and German working classes, he argues, are
not part of a common ‘community of fate’, for although they experience
the same historical forces, they do not do so in a situation of common
reciprocal interaction.
5 Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, pp. 96–106.
In this regard, Bauer claimed that, for instance, German culture had
determined the character of the Czech nation at a fundamental level;
however, the adoption of elements of a foreign culture by a nation never
entirely eradicated the difference between the two cultures, it only
reduced these differences.
6 ‘Eine Studie von Dr A. Spindler über die kulturelle Autonomie der
völkischen Minoritäten für Vorarbeiten der Autonomie und über die
Frage der Volksgemeinschaft’, Eesti Riigiarhiiv (ERA) F.85, N.1, S.56.
7 Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, pp. 98–100.
8 This was the case even after the Ausgleich of 1867, which had weighted
the distribution of power in favour of the German, Magyar and Polish
‘historic nations’. Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social
Democracy, pp. 226–230.
9 Ibid., p. 252.
10 Ibid., p. 281.
11 Kogan, ‘The social democrats and the conflict of nationalities’, pp.
207–212.
12 K. Renner, ‘State and nation’.
13 Ibid., p. 20.
14 ‘Eine Studie von Dr A. Spindler’.
15 See the summary in Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social
Democracy, pp. 284–288. In drawing up this scheme, Renner recognized
that no territory was entirely ‘nationally homogenous’, especially in a
context of growing migration. In those instances where local minorities
were insufficiently numerous to establish autonomous national delegations,
they would be entitled to form autonomous ‘concurrences’ (Konkurrenzen),
based on national registers, that would maintain local elementary schools in
the relevant language and (in case of need) guarantee members legal assist-
ance when dealing with the local authorities of the canton in question.
16 Ibid.
17 R. Springer (pseudonym of K. Renner), Grundlagen und Entwicklungsziele
der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie, Vienna: 1906, p. 208. Cited in
Kogan, ‘The social democrats and the conflict of nationalities’, p. 214.
126   Notes
18 Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy,
pp. 287–288.
19 Kogan, ‘The social democrats and the conflict of nationalities’, p. 213.
20 Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy,
pp. 274–275.
21 Ibid., p. 290.
22 R. Bauböck, ‘Political autonomy or cultural minority rights? A concep-
tual critique of Renner’s model’, in E. J. Nimni (ed.), National Cultural
Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics, p. 99.
23 Kogan, ‘The social democrats and the conflict of nationalities’, p. 215.
24 J. King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohe-
mian Politics, 1848–1948, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2005, pp. 143–145.
25 Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy,
pp. 281–283. In this connection, a later author has also noted that ‘for all
its failings and imperfections, . . . the Moravian Compromise of 1905 con-
tributed to a considerable easing of the Czech-­German ethnic conflict in
this crown land’, J. Koralka, ‘Nationality representation in Bohemia,
Moravia and Austrian Silesia, 1848–1914’, in G. Alderman (ed.), Gov-
ernments, Ethnic Groups and Political Representation, London: Dart-
mouth, 1993. Cited in J. Coakley, ‘Approaches to the resolution of ethnic
conflict: the strategy of non-­territorial autonomy’, International Political
Science Review, 15, 1994, p. 312.
26 On Jewish politics within the Tsarist Empire see J. Robinson, ‘Die Juden
Osteuropas als nationaler Minderheit’, Nation und Staat, 1 1927, 98ff; E.
Mendelsohn, The Jews of East-­Central Europe between the Two World
Wars, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
27 For a recent study, see V. Petronis, Constructing Lithuania: Ethnic
Mapping in Tsarist Russia, ca. 1800–1914, Stockholm: Stockholm Uni-
versity Press, 2007.
28 K. Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus Eesti Vabariigis, p. 45.
29 V. Dohrn, ‘State and minorities: the first Lithuanian Republic and S. M.
Dubnov’s concept of cultural autonomy’, in A. Nikzentaitis, S. Schreiner
and D. Staliunas (eds), The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews, Amster-
dam, and New York: Rodopi, 2004, pp. 155–157; see also Dubnow’s
letter of 1901, ‘Autonomismus als Grundlage eines nationalen Pro-
gramms’, in Simon Dubnow (ed.), Buch des Lebens. Erinnerungen und
Gedanken. Materialien zur Geschichte meiner Zeit, vol. 1 1860–1903,
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004, pp. 387ff.
30 V. Dohrn, ‘State and minorities’, p. 157; A. Verschik, ‘The Yiddish lan-
guage in Estonia: past and present’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 30, 1999,
pp. 117–127; compare also: F. Nesemann, ‘Leo Motzkin (1867–1933).
Zionist engagement and minority diplomacy’, Central and East European
Review, 1, 2007, pp. 32–54; L. Motzkin, ‘Die Konferenz zum Schutz der
jüdischen Minderheitsrechte’, Nation und Staat 1, 1927, 144ff.
31 See the collection of articles in J. von Hehn, H. Von Rimscha and H.
Weiss (eds), Von den baltischen Provinzen zu den baltischen Staaten: Bei-
träge zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Republiken Estland und Lettland,
Marburg: Johan Gottfried Herder Institut, 1977.
32 E. Thaden (ed.), Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland
1855–1914, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. There was an
 Notes   127
analogous situation in Lithuania, where a polonized nobility had long
ruled over an ethnically Lithuanian and Belarussian peasantry and a sig-
nificant Jewish population. See D. Staliunas, Making Russians: Meaning
and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863,
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007.
33 G. Von Pistohlkors, ‘Führende Schicht oder nationale Minderheit’,
Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 21, 1972, pp. 601–618; A. Ezergailis & G.
Pistohlkors (eds), Die baltischen Provinzen Russlands zwischen den Rev-
olutionen von 1905 und 1917, Cologne: Boehlau, 1983.
34 P. Schiemann, ‘Schlechte Waffen’, Rigasche Rundschau 1 January 1907.
35 J. King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, pp. 143–145; W. A.
Kemp, Nationalism and Communism, p. 42.
36 J. King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, pp. 209–210.
37 P. Schiemann, ‘Die kollektivistische Gefahr’, Rigasche Rundschau, 18
January 1930.
38 J. V. Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, p. 307.
39 R. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, especially Part II.
40 Quotes from M. H. Boehm, Europa Irredenta, Berlin: Hobbing, 1923,
pp. 311–312.
41 D. Crols, ‘Old and new minorities on the international checkboard: from
League to union’, in D. J. Smith (ed.), The Baltic States and their Region:
New Europe or Old? Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005,
pp. 185–209.
42 R. Peters, ‘Baltic state diplomacy and the League of Nations minorities
system’, in J. Hiden and A. Loit (eds), The Baltic in International Relations
between the Two World Wars, Stockholm: Stockholm university, 1988,
pp. 281–302. See also M. Scheuermann, Minderheitenschutz contra Konf-
liktverhütung: Die Minderheitenpolitik des Völkerbundes in den zwanziger
Jahren, Marburg: Johann Gottfried Herder-­Institut, 2000, pp. 30–48.
43 T. H. Bagley, General Principles and Problems in the International Pro-
tection of Minorities, Geneva: Imprimeries Populaires, 1950, pp. 89–90.
44 R. Peters, ‘Baltic state diplomacy’, pp. 293–294.
45 A. Spindler, ‘Vähemusrahvuste kultuuriline autonoomia. Gesetzprojekte
betreffend die Autonomie deutscher Minderheitgemeinschaft in der
Republik Estland. ERA F.55, N.1, S.55 p. 30. On Laun see also S. Salz-
born, ‘The concept of ethnic minorities. International law and the
German-­Austrian response’, Behemoth. A Journal on Civilization 3,
2009, p. 66; G. von Rauch, The Baltic States. The Years of Independence
1917–1940, London: Hurst, 1995, p. 141.
46 Quote from Chamberlain’s speech to the Council on 9 December, 1925,
cited in B. Schot, Nation oder Staat, p. 169.
47 E. Ammende, ‘Gegen die Entnatsionalisierung – Die These Mello Franco
wiederlegt,’ Revaler Bote, 15 September 1927. Compare, in general, C.
Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews and
International Minority Protection 1878–1938, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004, pp. 296ff.
48 Biographical data from Ammende holdings at the Rossiiskii Gosudarst-
vennyi Voennyi Arkhiv (RGVA – Russian State Military Archive),
F.1502, O.1, D.30, p. 8.
49 ERA F.1000, N.1, S.137, Deutsch-­Baltische Partei in Estland. Organisation
und Schutz der nationalen Minoritäten. Ammende to Koch, 26 April 1922.
128   Notes
50 Ibid., p. 2.
51 RGVA F.1502, O.1, D.56. Articles and notes regarding the situation of
German minorities in Europe, undated.
52 ERA F.1000, S.137.
53 See for example Paul Schiemann’s later reflections on the term, ‘Zielset-
zung der Minderheiten’, in Der Deutsche in Polen, 28 June 1936.
54 For a fuller discussion of this difference, see M. Garleff, ‘Deutschbaltische
Publizisten: Ewald Ammende–Werner Hasselblatt–Paul Schiemann’, Jahr-
buch des Bundesinstituts für Ostdeutsche Kultur und Geschichte, 2,
1994, pp. 189–229.
55 Speech by P. Schiemann to the Congress of European Nationalities,
August 1926. Sitzungsbericht des Kongresses der Organisierten Nation-
alen Gruppen in den Staaten Europas, Genf, 25 bis 27 August 1926,
Vienna and Leipzig: Willhelm Braumüller, 1927, pp. 34–35.
56 W. Rüdiger, Aus dem letzten Kapitel deutsch-­baltischer Geschichte in
Lettland, 1919–1939, Hannover: Wülflfel, 1955, p. 62.
57 J. Hiden, Defender of Minorities, p. 127.
58 ‘Paul Schiemann scheidet von seinem Werk’, Der Deutsche in Polen, 29
September 1935. See also Chapter 7 of J. Hiden, Defender of
Minorities.

3 The Baltic arena

1 A. Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, Riga: Historical Institute of
Latvia, 1996, p. 3. Cf. discussion in L. Dribins, ‘Die Deutschbalten und
die Idee vom nationallettischen Staat 1918–1934’, Nordost-­Archiv, 5,
1996, pp. 277–299. Also V. Volkovs, Krievi Latvija-, p. 101.
2 A. Ezergailis, The Holocaust, p. 3.
3 B. Mann, Die baltischen Länder in der deutschen Kriegszielpublizistik
1914–1918, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965, pp. 121–126. See also V. G.
Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity
and German Occupation in World War 1, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2000, pp. 113–150.
4 J. Tauber and R. Tuchtenhagen, Vilnius. Kleine Geschichte der Stadt,
Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2008, pp. 149–152.
5 J. Tauber, ‘ “No allies”. The Lithuanian Taryba and the national minor­
ities 1916–1918’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 38, 2007, pp. 433–444.
6 See preface to Š. Liekis, A state within a State, pp.viii–xi.
7 Ibid., pp. 101–104.
8 See in general H-­E. Volkmann, Die deutsche Baltikumpolitik zwischen
Brest-­Litovsk und Compiègne, Cologne: Böhlau, 1970.
9 J. Hiden, The Baltic States and Weimar Ostpolitik, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1987, pp. 4–10.
10 P. Schiemann, Zwischen zwei Zeitaltern. Erinnerungen 1903–1919,
Lüneburg, Nordland-­Druck, 1979, pp. 146–149.
11 League of Nations Archive, Geneva (LONA), S.345, N.3, Minorities in
Latvia from November 1920 to July 1922.
12 J. Rothschild, East-­Central Europe between the Two World Wars,
Seattle: University of Washington, 1974, p. 377.
13 M. Bobe, Evrei v Latvii, p. 161.
 Notes   129
14 ‘Memorandum sur les droits de minorité des juifs en Lettonie addressé
au Conseil de la Socièté des Nations par le Comité des delegations
Juives’, 20 April 1922, LONA S.345, N.3, pp. 20–22.
15 J. Steimanis, History of Latvian Jews, p. 71.
16 A. Plakans, The Latvians. A Short History, Stanford: Hoover Institu-
tion Press, 1995, pp. 126–127.
17 Law for the schooling of minorities in Latvia, 8 December 1919, pub-
lished in Valdibas Vestnesis, Nr 89. See also W. Wachtsmuth, Von
deutscher Arbeit. Vol. 3, pp. 41ff.
18 See retrospective overview of German schooling by K. Keller, ‘Schulen
der Minoritäten in Lettland’, in Nachlass K. Keller, Das deutsche Bil-
dungswesen in Lettland 1919–1929, Johann-­Gottfried Herder Insitut,
Baltikum, Nr 285.
19 On the minority language provisions of Estonia’s schooling laws, see
E. Müüripeal, ‘Kultuurautonoomia: Eesti Vabariigi vähemusrahvuste
haridus- ja keelepoliitika aastail 1981–1940’, Magistritöö [master’s
dissertation], Tallinn: Tallinna Pedagoogikaülikool, 1999, pp. 20–21.
20 K. Alenius, ‘Under the conflicting pressures’, pp. 35–37.
21 Š. Liekis, State within a State, p. 26.
22 J. Hackmann, ‘Civil society against the state? Historical experiences of
eastern Europe’, in J. Hackmann & N. Goetz (eds), Civil Society in the
Baltic Sea Region, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, pp. 57–58.
23 Š. Liekis, A State within a State, pp. 131–135.
24 K. Aun, On the Spirit of the Estonian Minorities Law, 1949, p. 241.
25 K. Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus Eesti Vabariigis, p. 47.
26 Protocol zasedaniia mandatnoi kommissii S’ezda Evreiskikh Obshchin
Estonii, 2 May 1919. ERA F.2297, N.1, S.5.
27 22 March 1921 Letter from the Jewish group to the Deutsch-­Baltische
Partei in Estland, ERA F.2297, N.1, S.5.
28 K. Alenius, Ajan ihanteiden ja historian risitteiden ristipaineissa,
p. 335.
29 K. Laurits Saksa kultuuromavalitsus Eesti Vabariigis, p. 47.
30 T. Karjahärm and V. Sirk, Vaim ja võim: Eesti haritlaskond
1917–1940, Tallinn: Argo, 2001, p. 304.
31 G. von Rauch, The Baltic States, p. 141.
32 T. Karjahärm and V. Sirk, Vaim ja võim, pp. 304–305.
33 See the intervention by Ado Anderkopp to the parliamentary debate on
cultural autonomy in 1923. Cited in I Riigikogu Protokollid 9
istungjärk 1923a., protokollid Nr 185–221 (Tallinn: kirjatuse o-­u "
“täht” tru"kk Tallinnas), p. 2075.
34 K. Alenius, Ajan ihanteiden ja historian risitteiden ristipaineissa,
pp. 329–330.
35 Speech by Riigikogu member W. Ernits (Social Democrat) on 1 January
1923, I Riigikogu Protokollid 9 istungjärk 1923a., protokollid Nr
185–221, p. 2053.
36 Ibid., p. 2068.
37 Ibid., p. 2062.
38 Ibid., p. 2046–2047.
39 ‘Die Debatten im Kulturrat über die Frage der Verwirklichung der kul-
turellen Selbstverwaltung’, Revaler Bote, 5 November 1925.
130   Notes
40 Stackelberg to Hasselblatt, 27 December 1924, ERA F.1000, N.1, S.172.
Deutsch-­Baltische Partei in Estland. Korrespondenz des Abgeordneten W.
Hasselblatt November 1921 to January 1925.
41 M. Garleff, Deutschbaltische Politik zwischen den Weltkriegen, Bonn-­
Bad Godesburg: wissenschaftliche Archiv, 1976, p. 106.
42 Ibid., pp. 106–107; Revaler Bote, 13 December 1921.
43 Eine Studie von Dr A. Spindler über die kulturelle Autonomie der
völkischen Minoritäten.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Cited in K. Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus Eesti Vabariigis, p. 30.
48 M. Garleff, Deutschbaltische Politik, p. 107.
49 ‘Gesetz-­Projekt über die zeitweilige Ordnung der Selbstverwaltung der
nationalen Minderheiten’, Revaler Bote, 2 March 1923.
50 LONA, R 1665–27181, ‘Discussion au parlement Esthonien sur le projet
de loi relative à l’autonomie des minorités en Esthonie; A. Heyking, The
Main Issues Confronting the Minorities of Latvia and Estonia, London:
1922.
51 I Riigikogu Protokollid 9 istungjärk 1923a, protokollid Nr 185–221,
pp. 2050–2052.
52 For one example, ‘Deutsche Schulhilfe in Estland im Jahre 1924’, in
Baltische Blätter, 24 February 1924. See also deputy Max Bock’s remark
on the subject, I Riigikogu Protokollid 9 istungjärk 1923a., protokollid
Nr 185–221, pp. 2076–2077.
53 K. Alenius, Ajan ihanteiden ja historian risitteiden ristipaineissa, p. 334.
54 ‘Auf dem Wege zur Kulturautonomie’, Revaler Bote, 22 March 1924; see
also K. Alenius, Ajan ihanteiden ja historian risitteiden ristipaineissa,
p. 335.
55 ‘Die erste Lesung des Autonomie-­Gesestzes’, Revaler Bote, 7 June 1924.
56 ‘Staatsversammlung’, Revaler Bote, 5 April 1924.
57 I Riigikogu protokollid 9 istungjärk protokol Nr 114 (17), pp. 951ff.
58 Avtonomia natsional’nykh men’shinstv’, Posledniia Izvestiia, 18 January
1925.
59 See the arguments in J. Hiden, Defender of Minorities, pp. 99ff.
60 In a recent analysis of Schiemann’s political thought, Ivars Ijabs argues
that his liberalism was derived from German romanticism rather than
from the Western Enlightenment currents embodied by the likes of Locke
and Bentham. In this regard, Ijabs maintains, Schiemann remained con-
vinced of the superiority of German culture and the importance of a
German cultural mission in the Baltic (Ijabs, ‘Strange Baltic liberalism’,
p. 502). The fact remains, however, that throughout his career Schiemann
was a staunch advocate both of the Republic of Latvia and of the national
rights not only of Latvians, but of all other ethnic groups living within
the country’s borders.
61 Paul Schiemann to Nikolai von Berg, 14 January 1923, Schiemann Nach-
lass. Nikolai von Berg 1922–1936, Baltijas Centrala Biblioteka, Riga.
62 For a general overview, see P. Schiemann, ‘Die nationalen Minderheiten
in Lettland’, Zeitschrift für Politik, 14, 1925, 276–281.
63 In general, see M. Bobe, Evrei v Latvii, pp. 200–201; E. Mendelsohn, The
Jews of East-­Central Europe, pp. 241ff; M. Garleff, ‘Ethnic minorities in
 Notes   131
the Estonian and Latvian parliaments: the politics of coalition’, in V. S.
Vardys and R. J. Misiunas (eds), The Baltic States in Peace and War
1917–1945, Philadelphia and London: The Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1978, pp. 81–94.
64 M. Bobe, Evrei v Latvii, pp. 200–201.
65 Ibid., p. 219.
66 J. Hiden, Defender of Minorities, pp. 97ff.
67 Protocol of the meeting_
of the German
_
Democratic Party, 1 December
1925. Latvijas Valsts V​e​sture Arch​ı​vs (LVVA) F.4985, A.1, L.4.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 In general, see W. Wachtsmuth, Von deutscher Arbeit in Lettland
1918–1934. Vol. 1.

4 The practice of autonomy

   1 K. Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus, p. 70.
   2 Revaler Bote, 6 May 1925.
   3 See undated memorandum by Hasselblatt ‘Leitsätze zum Referat über
innere Organisationsprobleme des Deutschtums’. RGVA F.1502, O.1,
D.111, p. 59.
   4 K. Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus, pp. 70–71.
   5 ‘Saksa wähemusrahvuse kultuur-­autonoomia’, Vaba Maa, 8 August
1925; Vorbereitender Arbeitsausschuss f. die deutsche Kulturautonomie
-Wählen zum 1 Deutsch-­Estländischen Kulturrat. ERA F.85, N.1, S.2.
   6 Nottbeck to Schultz 2 May 1925. ERA F. 85, N.1, S.4.
   7 ‘Endised “kadakad” wälja’, Vaba Maa, 23 July 1925.
   8 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats 1 November 1925–22 October
1928 Nr 13 21/22 October 1928. F.85, N.1, S.66.
   9 Vorbereitender Arbeitsausschuss f. die deutsche Kulturautonomie
-Wählen zum 1 Deutsch-­Estländischen Kulturrat. ERA F.85, N.1, S.2.
10 Nottbeck to Krueger, 5 May 1925 and Nottbeck letter of 14 May 1925.
Vorbereitender Arbeitsausschuss f. die deutsche Kulturautonomie,
Wählen zum 1 Deutsch-­Estländischen Kulturrat. ERA F.85, N.1, S.4.
11 Circular from Hasselblatt. Vorbereitender Arbeitsausschuss f. die deut-
sche Kulturautonomie – Wählen zum 1 Deutsch-­Estländischen Kultur-
rat. F85, N.1, S.4.
12 Note by Nottbeck, early August 1925. ERA F.85, N.1, S.4; see also K.
Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus pp. 27, 71–72. In their response to
the questionnaire distributed to them by Ewald Ammende, German
leaders insisted that the findings of the 1922 census did not correspond
to reality, in so far as 16,000 people had voted for the Deutsch-­Baltische
Partei in Estland in the May 1923 elections. By this reckoning they esti-
mated the real German population to be as high as 30,000 Fragebogen
IV. RGVA F.1502, O.1, D.63, p. 64.
13 Kirjavahetus isikutega rahvuse muutmise kohta. ERA F.14., N.1, S.1127.
14 ‘Saksa wähemusrahvuse kultuur-­autonoomia’, Nottbeck to Schultz 2
May 1925. ERA F. 85, N.1, S.4..
15 K. Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus, p. 71, citing E. Madisson, Die
nationalen Minderheiten Estlands und ihre Rechte, Tallinn: Tallinna
132   Notes
Eesti Kirjastus-­Ühisuse trükikoda, 1926, p. 21. Undated memo early
1925. Vortbereitender Arbeitsausschuss f. die deutsche Kulturauton-
omie -Wählen zum 1 Deutsch-­Estländischen Kulturrat. ERA F.85,
N.1, S.2.
16 O. Hartger, ‘Brauchen wir ein neues Wahlsystem für die Kulturrat-
swahlen?’ Revaler Bote 8 August 1929; see also S. Klau, ‘Der Entwurf
des neuen Kulturratswahlrechts’, Revalsche Zeitung, 14 November
1930.
17 K. Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus, p. 72.
18 ‘Die kulturelle Selbstverwaltung wird werwirklicht’, Baltische Blätter,
15 November 1925.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Estnische Übersetzungen der Protokolle des I Kulturrats. 1 Nov.
1925–22 Okt 1928: I. Eesti saksa kultuurnõukogu avamise koosoleku 1
Nov 1925 mustapeade klubis Tallinnas. Protokoll no. 1. ERA F.85,
N.1, S.67.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats 1 November 1925–22 October
1928 Nr 3, 10 November 1925. ERA F.85, N.1, S.66.
26 ‘Die Arbeit der Deutschenkulturverwaltung im Jahre 1925–26’, Revaler
Bote, 20 November 1926.
27 Riigi Teataja (1918, 75/76: 593).
28 See report by Harry Koch appended to Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kul-
turrats 1 November 1925–22 October 1928 Nr 13 21/22 October 1928.
ERA F.85, N.1, S.66.
29 ‘Stellungnahme der Stadt zum Unterhalt der deutschen Schulen,’ Revaler
Bote, 4 November 1926.
30 Report by Koch in Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats 1 November
1925–22 October 1928, Nr 9. ERA F.85, N.1, S.66.
31 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats 1 November 1925–22 October
1928 Nr 3, 10 November 1925. ERA F.85, N.1, S.66; see also ‘Zur
Steuer der Deutschenkulturselbstverwaltung’, Revaler Bote, 22 October
1926.
32 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats 1 November 1925–22 October
1928 Nr 5, 14 March 1926. ERA F.85, N.1, S.66.
33 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats 1 November 1925–22 October
1928. Meeting of 28–29 November 1927; ERA F.85, N.1, S.66, p. 142.
34 Hasselblatt to Bruns, 11 April 1928. Deutsch-­Baltische Partei in Estland.
Briefe von Dr Bruns 1924–9. ERA F.1000, N.1, S.170.
35 Protokolle des II Deutschen kulturrats 9 Dec. 1928–13 Sept. 1931. ERA
F.85, N.1, S.78, p. 142.
36 Š. Liekis, A State within a State?, pp. 135–136.
37 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats, 1 November 1925–22 October
1928, Nr 3, 10–11 November 1925. F.85, N.1, S.66.
38 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats, 1 November 1925–22 October
1928, Nr 10, 4 July 1927. F.85, N.1, S.66, p. 10.
39 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats, 1 November 1925–22 October
1928, Nr 12, 25 June 1928. F.85, N.1, S.66.
 Notes   133
40 See, for instance, A. de Vries ‘Zehn Jahre Verband Deutscher Vereine in
Estland,’ Revalsche Zeitung, 27 September 1930.
41 Denkschrift zur Frage der Behandlung der Nationalitäten in Deutsch-
land mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Rückwirkung auf das bodenstän-
dige europäische Auslandsdeutschum, 28 October 1924. RGVA F.1502,
O.1, D.110.
42 ‘Von der Tätigkeit der Gesellschaft “Deutsche Schulhilfe” in Estland’,
Revaler Bote, 23 April 1924.
43 Revaler Bote, 17 March 1926; ‘Herbsttagung des deutschen Kulturrats
in Estland’, Baltische Blätter, 3 July 1927; H. Pantenius, ‘Zur Frage
eines Netzes unserer deutschen Schulen’, Revaler Bote, 21 July 1927.
44 Protokolle des 2 deutschen Kulturrats 9 Dec. 1928–13 Sept. 1931, Pro-
tokoll Nr 1, 9–10 December 1928. ERA F.85, N.1, S.78.
45 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats, 1 November 1925–22 October
1928, Nr 12, 25 June 1928. F.85, N.1, S.66.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Protokolle des 2 deutschen Kulturrats, 9 Dec. 1928–13 Sept. 1931, Nr
5, 16 March 1930. ERA F.85, N.1, S.78.
49 Protokolle des 2 deutschen Kulturrats, 9 Dec. 1928–13 Sept. 1931, Nr
8, 13 September 1931. ERA F.85, N.1, S.78.
50 Protokolle des 2 deutschen Kulturrats, 9 Dec. 1928–13 Sept. 1931, Nr
6, 23 November 1930. ERA F.85, N.1, S.78; see also ‘Zu den bevorste-
henden Veränderung im deutschen Schulwesen’, Revalsche Zeitung, 14
November 1930.
51 S. Klau, ‘Der Entwurf des neuen Kulturratwahlrechts’.
52 Ibid.
53 The new arrangements were duly accepted at the spring meeting of the
second German Cultural Council on 22 March 1931. See ‘Zur Tagung
des deutschen Kulturrats’, Revalsche Zeitung, 20 March 1931.
54 ‘Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats, 1 November 1925–22 October
1928’, Nr 13, 22 October 1928. ERA F.85, N.1, S.66. See also the con-
cerns expressed in the responses to Ammende’s earlier questionnaire.
RGVA F.1502, O.1, D.63.
55 Tagebuch des Schulrats no. 2 1928–1929. ERA F.85, N.2, S.685.
56 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats, 1 November 1925–22 October
1928, Nr 13, 22 October 1928, Nr 10, 4 July 1927. ERA F.85, N.1,
S.66.
57 Ibid.
58 See Denkschriften und Berichten, W. Wachtsmuth, ‘Die rechtlichen
Grundlagen des deutschen Schulwesens in Lettland.’ Undated memo
probably written early 1933. LVVA F.2125, A.2, L.12.
59 J. Šteimanis, History of Latvian Jews, p. 184; M. Bobe, Evrei v Latvii,
pp. 218–226.
60 Izglitibas Ministrija Ebreju Izglitibas Parvalde Fonda 1920–1934g. Par-
valdes padomes sežu protokoli 1920.g. (Ministry of Education Jewish
Section 1920–1934. Minutes of meetings of the Council of the Section
1920), LVVA F.2125, A.4, L.29.
61 Minutes of meetings of the Council of the Russian Section of the Minis-
try of Education 24 January 1924 to 2 September 1932. LVVA, F.2125,
A.1, L.45, pp. 25–26. Of the remaining pupils in the secondary schools,
134   Notes
214 were Latvian, 124 German and the rest a combination of Belorussian,
Polish, Lithuanian, Estonian and other nationalities. Of 1,403 pupils at 18
private elementary schools, meanwhile, 799 were Jewish, 431 Russian, 80
Latvian, 44 German, 21 Polish and 28 of other nationalities.
62 LVVA F.2125, A.4, L.29, p. 4.
63 Minutes of meetings on 26 April 1920 and 29 August 1920. LVVA
F.2125, A.4, L.29, pp. 8, 14.
64 Minutes of meeting of 26 April 1920. LVVA F.2125, A.4, L.29, p. 8.
65 Ibid. In this regard it is perhaps significant that Landau himself ran a
Russian-­language school in Riga.
66 M. Bobe, Evrei v Latvii, p. 197.
67 Ibid., p. 224.
68 K. Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus, p. 67.
69 A. Verschik, ‘The Yiddish language in Estonia: past and present’,
pp. 119–120.
70 Ibid., p. 121.
71 Kirjavahetus Juudi Kultuurvalitsuse ja koolivalitsustega õppekeele
valiku küsimuses juudi koolides, tunnikavade kinnitamise ja välismaist-
ele õppejõududele elamis- ja teenistusloa saamise, koolide toetuste
saamise, õppealalistes, koolide Juudi Vähemusrahvuse Kultuuromavalit-
suse Koolivalitsusele. ERA F.1108, N.3, S.616, p. 99.
72 Ibid., p. 32.
73 Ibid., p. 46.
74 Ibid., p. 76.
75 Ibid., p. 66.
76 Ibid., p. 141.
77 For an overview, see S. Isakov, Russkie v Estonii 1918–1940; V.
Volkovs, Krievi Latvija-; D. J. Smith, ‘Retracing Estonia’s Russians’; S.
Isakov (ed.), Russkoe National’noe Men’shinstvo v Estonskoi
Respublike.
78 D. J. Smith, ‘Retracing Estonia’s Russians’, p. 461.
79 Ibid., pp. 465–466.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., p. 461.
82 Ibid., p. 462; see also Ü. Rajasalu, ‘Russkie v Estonii 1918–1940. Obsh-
chii obzor’, in S. Isakov (ed.), Russkoe National’noe Men’shinstvo v
Estonskoi Respublike, pp. 21–61.
83 M. Krabbe, ‘L’autonomie culturelle comme solution du problème des
minorités. Note de M.Krabbe au date du 18 Nov 1931’. LONA
R.2175–4–32835; see also Posledniie Izvestiia, 10 May 1925.
84 V. Boikov, S. Isakov and Ü. Rajasalu ‘Politicheskaia Zhizn’, in S. Isakov,
Russkoe National’noe Men’shinstvo v Estonskoi Respublike, p. 69.
85 D. J. Smith, ‘Retracing Estonia’s Russians’, p. 465.
86 Ibid.
87 Minutes and circulars of the National Democratic Union. LVVA F.5645,
A.1, L.3. The National Democratic Union was renamed the Russkoe
Natsional’noe Ob’edinenie from the start of 1924.
88 V. Volkovs, Krievi Latvija-, pp. 104–105.
89 Minutes of meetings of the Council of the Russian Section of the Minis-
try of Education, 24 January 1924–2September 1932. LVVA F.2125, A.
1, L.45, p. 19.
 Notes   135
90 Ibid., p. 45.
91 LVVA F.5645, A.1, L.3, pp. 62–65.
92 See P. Schiemann ‘Die vereitelte Minderheitenfront’, Rigasche Rund-
schau, 30 October 1926.
93 V. Volkovs, Krievi Latvija-, p. 102.
94 A. Purs, ‘The price of free lunches: making the frontier Latvian in the
interwar years,’ Global Review of Ethnopolitics 1, 2002, pp. 60–73.
95 ‘Antwort auf die Fragen, wie sich das Mehrheitsvolk zu der Minderheiten-
frage gestellt hat, und welchen Standpunkt die vershiedenen Minderheiten
zu ihr einnehmen’ Nachlass K. Keller. Das deutsche Bildungswesen in Let-
tland 1919–1929. Herder Institut Baltikum Nr 285.
96 Ibid.
97 Protokolle des 1 deutschen Kulturrats, 1 November 1925–22 October
1928, Nr 13, 22 October 1928. ERA F.85, N.1, S.66; see also H. Koch,
‘Das Estlandische Deutschtum 1918–1930’, Revalsche Zeitung, 29 Sep-
tember 1930.
98 A. de Vries, ‘Fünf Jahre Deutsche Kulturselbstverwaltung,’ Revalsche
Zeitung, 22 November 1930; Ewald Ammende’s opening remarks to the
VII Congress of European Nationalities, Geneva, 29th–31st August
1931, LONA R2161–4–31096–3817.
99 Ewald Ammende’s opening remarks.
100 V. Volkovs, Krievi Latvija-, pp. 102–104.
101 Cited in D. J. Smith, ‘Retracing Estonia’s Russians,’ 466.

5 Nationalities in congress
1 RGVA F.1502, O.1, D.22.
2 ‘Die Minderheiten. P. Schiemann über die Ergebnisse des Genfer-­
Kongresses,’ Rigasche Rundschau, 4 September 1926.
3 Sitzungsbericht des Kongresses der Organisierten Nationalen Gruppen in
den Staaten Europas, Genf, 29 bis 31. August 1928, Vienna and Leipzig:
Willhelm Braumüller, 1928, pp. 29–31.
4 S. Bamberger-­Stemmann, Der europäische Nationalitätenkongress,
p. 86ff.
5 J. Hiden, Defender of Minorities, pp. 110ff.
6 Memorandum cited in B. Schot, Nation oder Staat, p. 147.
7 Ibid.; on critics of Stresemann compare B. Schot, Stresemann, der deut-
sche Osten und der Völkerbund, Wiesbaden: Zabern, 1984, and M. Rot-
barth, ‘Grenzrevision und Minderheitenfragen’, 10ff.
8 B. Schot, Nation oder Staat, p. 147.
9 Compare the discussion at the Verband conference of 21 July 1924.
‘Deutsch-­Baltische Partei in Estland. Völkerbund und Minderheitenfra-
gen. ERA F., N.1, S.142.
10 Entwurf W. H. 1924/5 Deutsch-­Baltische Partei in Estland. Briefe von Dr
Bruns 1924–9. ERA F.1000, N.1, S.170.
11 S. Bamberger-­Stemmann, Der europäische Nationalitätenkongress, p. 91ff.
For Ammende’s account of the origins of the Congress, see: letter from E.
Ammende to Marckutti 22 December 1925, RGVA F.1502, O.1, D.26,
pp. 147–152.
12 One was held in Vienna (1932), one in London (1937) and one in Stock-
holm (1938).
136   Notes
13 S. Bamberger-­Stemmann, Der europäischen Nationalitätenkongress,
p. 111.
14 M. Garleff, ‘Baltische Minderheitenvertreter auf den europäischen
Nationalitätenkongressen 1925–1938’, Jahrbuch des baltischen Deutsch-
tums, 1986, p. 119.
15 Resolutions of the European Nationalities Congress. RGVA F.1502, O.1,
D.113, pp. 34–35.
16 Interview between George Popoff, Geneva correspondent of the Rigasche
Rundschau and P. Schiemann, ‘Die Minderheiten. P. Schiemann über die
Ergeibnisse des Genfer-­Kongresses,’ Rigasche Rundschau, 4 September
1926.
17 Minutes of the Committee of German Balt Parties 5 November 1925,
LVVA F.4985, A.1, L.4.
18 From file of Ammende’s post-­Congress correspondence with newspaper
editors. RGVA F.1502, O.1, D.27, p. 5.
19 Ibid., p. 8.
20 Ibid., p. 2.
21 See for example E. Ammende, ‘Die Sprache der Zahlen,’ Nation und Staat
10/11, 1931, pp. 650–656.
22 S. Bamberger-­Stemman, Der Europäische Nationalitätenkongress,
pp. 421–422; see also ‘Minderheiten und interparlamentarische Union’,
Revalsche Zeitung, 26 July 1930.
23 Cf. P. Schiemann, ‘Minoritätenschutz und Nationalitätenrecht’, Rigasche
Rundschau, 20 February 1926.
24 P. Schiemann, ‘Heilige Rechte’, Rigasche Rundschau, 22 December
1928.
25 G. Stresemann, ‘Die Minderheitenfrage als Friedensproblem’, Kölnische
Volkszeitung. Sonderbeilage, 1 August 1929.
26 Ibid.
27 Report on 1931 Minorities Congress, 29–31 August, LONA R2161–4–
31096–3817, p. 5.
28 LONA R2175–4–32835, p. 1.
29 See discussion in C.-G. Bruns ‘Genfer Nationalitätenkongress’, Auslands-
warte 17–18, 1927. Nachlass Bruns, Herder Institut Marburg DSHI 100
Bruns.
30 P. Schiemann, ‘Die Spaltung im Nationalitätenkongress’, Nation und
Staat 1, 3 (1927/8), pp. 158–70.
31 P. Schiemann, ‘Nationalitäten-kongress’, Rigasche Rundschau, 12 Sep-
tember 1931.
32 P. Schiemann, ‘Streitfragen der Nationalitätenkongress’, Rigasche Rund-
schau, 1 October 1927.
33 S. Bamberger-­Stemman, Der europäischer Nationalitätenkongress,
pp. 176–177.
34 ‘Soveshchanie predstavitelei russkikh men’shinstv’ 6 goudarstv’ v rige’,
Segodnia 232, 22 August 1929; ‘Die erstmalige Tagung der russischen
Minderheiten’, Nation und Staat, 1 Oktober 1929, pp. 73–74;
‘Deiatel’nost’ russkago natsional’nago soyuza za 1929 goda (otchet’)’
LVVA F.2666, A.1, L.3, pp. 93–96.
35 ‘Die erstmalige Tagung der russischen Minderheiten’; ‘Soveshchanie pred-
stavitelei russkikh men’shinstv’ ’.
36 Ibid.
 Notes   137
37 L. Krabbe, ‘L’autonomie culturelle’.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 ‘Pessimismus und Optimismus. Rede von Dr. P. Schiemann, gehalten auf
dem Nationalitätenkongress in Genf,’ Rigasche Rundschau, 5 September
1931.
43 P. Schiemann, ‘Coudenhove und Rohan,’ Nation und Staat, 10/11, 1930,
pp. 630–636; M. Kurchinskii, Soedinennie shtati Evropy: ekonomicheskie
I politicheskie perspektivy etoi idei, Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli toimetused,
1930.
44 See Ludvig Krabbe’s report on the 8th Congress of European Nationali-
ties, 29 June 1932, LONA R2161–37541.
45 P. Schiemann, ‘Die neue nationalistische Welle’. The original manu-
script for this is in the Schiemann Nachlass, Baltijas Centrale Biblioteka,
Riga. Drei Manuskripte 1932–1939, no. 1. For an English-­language
translation, see Central and East European Review, 1, 2007 http://
spaces.brad.ac.uk:8080/display/ssishistoryjournal (downloaded on 6
July 2010).
46 Ibid.
47 See letters Ammende to Schiemann on 6, 14 and 19 March 1931 in Schie-
mann Nachlass: Volksgr ENK korresp. 1929–30.
48 P. Schiemann, ‘Die neue nationalistische Welle’.
49 Ibid.
50 A full account of the controversy is contained in S. Bamberger-­Stemmann,
Der europäische Nationalitätenkongress, pp. 278 ff. H. Glass, ‘Die
Deutsch-­judische Kontroverse auf dem europäischen Nationalitätenkon-
gress,’ unpublished paper presented at the Simon Dubnow Institute,
Leipzig, 2005 as part of the project ‘Jewish diplomacy, minority rights
and human rights – the exertion of Jewish influence and the formation of
international law 1919–1948’; see also F. Nesemann, ‘Leo Motzkin
(1867–1933): Zionist engagement and minority diplomacy’.
51 S. Bamberger-­Stemmann, Der europäische Nationalitätenkongress,
pp. 275 ff.
52 Ibid.
53 H. Glass, ‘Die Deutsch-­Jüdische Kontoverse’.
54 P. Schiemann, ‘Dissimilation und Nationalitätenrechte’ Dokumente aus
dem politischen Nachlass von Hans Otto Roth 1919–1951. Nr 232
pp. 420–424. Draft text of speech that Schiemann had intended to deliver
at the Berne meeting of the Nationalities Congress on 16–19 September
1933. Kindly made available to the authors by Dr Hildrun Glass.
55 H. Glass, ‘Die Deutsch-­Jüdische Kontoverse’.
56 Ibid; S. Bamberger-­Stemmann, Der europäische Nationalitätenkongress,
pp. 275–278.
57 H. Glass, ‘Die Deutsch-­Jüdische Kontoverse’.
58 Sitzungsbericht des Kongresses der Organisierten Nationalen Gruppen in
den Staaten Europas, Bern, 16 bis 18. September 1933 (Vienna and
Leipzig: Willhelm Braumüller, 1934), p. 23; ‘Men’shinstvennyi kongress
trebuet organizatsii mezhdunarodnoi pomoshchi golodayushchim v
SSSR’, Segodniia, September 1933.
138   Notes
59 ‘Nechego razgovarivat’ ob uchastii v men’shinstvennom kongresse –
zayavlyaet dep M. Dubin’, Segodniia, September 1933.
60 H. Glass, ‘Die Deutsch-­Jüdische Kontoverse’.
61 Sitzungsbericht des Kongresses der Organisierten Nationalen Gruppen in
den Staaten Europas, Bern, 16 bis 18. September 1933, p. 98.
62 Ibid., pp. 70–71. Different interpretations could be placed upon Kurchin-
skii’s intervention in this debate. On the one hand, the declaration is sug-
gestive of a commitment to upholding the rights of all minorities. However,
the refusal to name Nazi Germany is at odds with his earlier willingness to
explicitly condemn the policies of the USSR in Ukraine, which contravened
the rules of the Congress. Also, unlike Paul Schiemann, Kurchinskii contin-
ued to participate in the Congress after 1933, at a time when the organiza-
tion was quite obviously under the sway of national socialism. Was then
the 1933 declaration simply a tokenistic one, on the part of an individual
for whom anti-­communism was the paramount motivating force? For a
fuller comparison of Schiemann, Kurchinkii and Ammende, see M.
Housden and D. J. Smith, ‘A matter of uniqueness? Paul Schiemann, Ewald
Ammende and Mikhail Kurchinskii compared’, in M. Housden and D. J.
Smith, Forgotten Pages in Baltic History. Diversity and Inclusion, Amster-
dam and New York: Rodopi, 2011, pp. 161–86.
63 Wilfan to Schiemann, 20 February 1934. Nachlass Schiemann. Volks-
gruppen 1933–1935.
64 Ammende to Schiemann 10 July 1934. Nachlass Schiemann. Volksgrup-
pen 1933–1935.
65 ‘Paul Schiemann scheidet von seinem Werk’, Der Deutsche in Polen, 29
September 1935.

6 The new nationalist wave

1 P. Schiemann, ‘Das Herr in Lettland’, Rigasche Rundschau, 1 August 1931.
2 P. Schiemann, ‘Einheitskultur’, Rigasche Rundschau, 9 January 1932.
3 Schiemann’s report to Deutschbaltische Demokratische Partei, 9 February
1932, LVVA F.4985, A.1, L.5.
4 W. Wachtsmuth, ‘Eine Bilanz der Schulpolitik des Ministers Kehnisch’,
LVVA F.2125, A.2, L.12, Denkschriften und Berichte; Minutes of Meet-
ings of the Council of the Russian Dept of the Ministry of Education
from 24 January 1924 to 2 September 1932 LVVA F.2125, A.1, L.45.
5 ‘Minorités en Lettonie 1932’, LONA S.345, No. 532 (10).
6 Ibid.
7 L. Dribins, ‘Die Deutschbalten und die Idee vom nationallettischen Staat’.
8 P. Schiemann, ‘Hüben und Drüben,’ Rigasche Rundschau, 30 January 1932.
9 ‘Die Unvollkommenheit unserer Kulturselbstverwaltung’, Revaler Bote, 5
April 1929.
10 ‘Estland. Gesetz uber Änderung der Nationalität’, Nation und Staat, 2
November 1928, p. 142.
11 ‘Abbau im Mittelschulnetz’, Revalsche Zeitung, 23 July 1931.
12 Kirjavahetus Saksa Kultuurvalitsusega ja isikutega saksa vähemusrahvuse
koolide õppejõudude koosseisu, õpperaamatute kirjastamise loa
muretsemise, segaabieludest sündinud laste koolitamise asjus ja teistes
õppealalisis küsimusis; õppekavad ja õpilaste nimestikud 02.05.1932–
11.12.1936, ERA F.1108, N.3, S.202, pp. 116–117.
 Notes   139
13 A further five pupils at the school were Russian by nationality. Ibid.,
p. 140.
14 ERA F.1108, N.3, S.202, pp. 23, 94.
15 Schiemann to Nikolai von Berg 21 December 1931, Nachlass Schiemann.
Nikolai von Berg-­Paul Schiemann 1922–1936.
16 ERA F.1108, N.3, S.202, p. 340.
17 ERA F.1108, N.3, S.202, 2 May 1932–11 December 1936.
18 Schiemann to Winkler 9 February 1933. Nachlass Schiemann. Rigasche
Rundschau Briefe no. 221–48.
19 Baltische Monatshefte, February 1933.
20 Die Lage – Estland, Nation und Staat, Heft 8, May 1934, pp. 521–523.
21 K. Laurits, Saksa kultuuromavalitsus, pp. 87–88.
22 G. von Rauch, The Baltic States, p. 154.
23 A.-M. Köll, Peasants on the World Market: Agricultural Experience of
Independent Estonia, 1919–1939, Stockholm: University of Stockholm,
1994, p. 111.
24 On minority ownership of businesses see T. Pärming, ‘The Jewish com-
munity. Inter-­ethnic relations in Estonia, 1918–1940’, Journal of Baltic
Studies, 10, 1979, pp. 241–262.
25 Cited by I. Feldmanis, ‘Die Deutschbalten: ihre Einstellung zum National-
sozialismus und ihr Verhältnis zum Staat Lettlands 1933–1939’, Nordost-
Archiv 5, 1996, p. 383.
26 On credit restrictions in Latvia, cf. Bank of England Report of 13 Novem-
ber 1933: ‘Latvia’. Bank of England Archive OV118/Latvia.
27 Cited in I. Butulis, ‘Die Deutschbalten in der Lettischen Presse in den
Jahren 1930–1934’, Nordost-­Archiv 5, 1996, pp. 315–316.
28 See J. Šteimanis, History of Latvian Jews.
29 See for example the overview of Karl Keller, ‘Die deutsche Parlaments-
fraktion’ (Juli 1919–Mai 1934), Nachlass Keller, Herder Institute, Balti-
kum 288.
30 Ibid., p. 177.
31 Memorandum of 18 July 1934, Die Auswirkungen des neuen Volsbil-
dungsgesetzes auf das deutsche Schulwesen in Lettland. LVVA F.2125,
A.2, L.12, Denkschriften und Berichte.
32 V. Volkovs, Krievi Latvija-, p. 102.
33 ERA F.1108, N.3, S.202, p. 301, citing Riigi Teataja, 105, 1934.
34 Letter from the German cultural government to the Riigivanem, 24 April
1934, ERA F.1108, N.3, S.202, p. 207.
35 ERA F.1108, N.3, S.202, p. 301.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 See G. von Rauch, The Baltic States, p. 170.
39 Ü. Rajasalu, ‘Russkie v Estonii 1918–1940’, p. 40.
40 Ibid., p. 42.
41 ‘Zehn Jahre deutsche Kulturselbstverwaltung’, Nation und Staat, January
1936, pp. 222–226.
42 ‘Die Lage. Estland. Die neue Verfassung-­Vorbereitungen zu den Wahlen’,
Nation und Staat, Jan. 1938, pp. 9, 240ff.
43 Ibid. Also, Ü. Rajasalu, ‘Russkie v Estonii 1918–1940’, p. 47.
44 Estnische Übersetzungen der Protokolle des IV Kulturrats 8 April 1934–26
March 1939, p. 27, meeting of 7 November 1937, ERA F.85, N.1, S.96.
140   Notes
45 Estnische Übersetzungen der Protokolle des IV Kulturrats 8 April
1934–26 March 1939 appendix 1 to minutes of meeting on 29/3/36,
pp. 67–68, ERA F.85, N.1, S.96.
46 G. von Rauch, The Baltic States, p. 171.
47 Ü. Rajasalu, ‘Russkie v Estonii 1918–1940’, pp. 42–43.
48 Ibid., p. 42.
49 In this respect see M. Ketola, The Nationality Question in the Estonian
Evangelical Lutheran Church, 1918–1939, Helsinki: Finnish Society of
Church History, 2000.
50 Cited in J. von Hehn, Die Umsiedlung der baltischen Deutschen – das
letzte Kapitel baltish-­deutscher Geschichte, Marburg/Lahn: Herder-­
Institut, 1982, p. 167.
51 Ibid., p. 166.
52 P. Schiemann, ‘Ich warne’, Rigasche Rundschau, 12 March 1920.
53 P. Schiemann, Die Umsiedlung 1939 und die europäischer Minderheiten-
politik, unpublished manuscript written in Riga in spring 1940. Subse-
quently reprinted in Jahrbuch des baltischen Deutschtums 21, 1974, p. 105.
54 E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century,
1914–1991, London: Michael Joseph, 1994. On the demise of democracy
and emergence of ethnic violence in interwar Eastern Europe see also: A.
Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands,
1870–1992, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
55 On these events, see O. Mertelsmann with A. Rahi-­Tamm, ‘Soviet mass
violence in Estonia revisited,’ Journal of Genocide Research 11, 2009, pp.
307–322.
56 J. Hiden, Defender of Minorities, pp. 240–251.
57 J. Hackmann, ‘Werner Hasselblatt. Von der estländischen Kulturautonomie
zur nationalsozialistischen Bevölkerungspolitik’, in M. Garleff (ed.), Deut-
schbalten, Weimarer Republik und Drittes Reich, Cologne, Weimar and
Vienna: Böhlau, 2008, pp. 71–107. The extent to which Ewald Ammende
might have colluded with the actions of the Nazi regime in occupied Eastern
Europe can only be guessed at, as the Nationalities Congress general secre-
tary – long in poor health – died of a stroke in 1936 during a trip to China.
Similarly, Mikhail Kurchinskii died of a heart attack in Estonia in June
1939, just a couple of months before he would have been confronted with
the dilemma of whether to join the Baltic German Umsiedlung. See
Housden and Smith, ‘A matter of uniqueness?’.
58 See V. Freimane, Ardievu Atlantı-da! Riga: Ate-na, 2011; V. Freimane
‘Remembering Paul Schiemann,’ Journal of Baltic Studies, 31, 2000, pp.
432–437. Compare Schiemann’s reaction to the prospect of war in asking
‘Ende der Nationalitätenbewegung?’ in Der Deutsche in Polen, 9 April
1939, where he reaffirms the need for maintaining the principles of the
European nationalities movement.

7 Cultural autonomy – a new chapter?

1 For full text see www.conventions.coe.int (downloaded on 13 September
2010).
2 See for instance the introduction to R. G. Suny and T. Martin (eds), A
State of Nations: Empire and Nation Making in the Age of Lenin and
Stalin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
 Notes   141
3 W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International
Politics of Diversity, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2007, p. 3.
4 See R. Kaiser, ‘Nationalism and identity’, in M. Bradshaw (ed.), Geogra-
phy and Transition in the Post-­Soviet Republics, Chichester: J. Wiley &
Sons, 1997, pp. 9–30.
5 See G. Smith (ed.), The Nationalities Question in the Post-­Soviet States,
London: Longman, 1996.
6 In general see R. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed.
7 See O. Ieda (ed.), Beyond Sovereignty: from Status Law to Transnational
Citizenship, Sapporo: Hokkaido University, 2006.
8 A. Roshwald, ‘Between balkanization and banalization’, p. 31.
9 D. Chandler, ‘The OSCE and the internationalisation of national minor-
ity rights’, in K. Cordell (ed.), Ethnicity and Democratisation in the New
Europe, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 61–76.
10 Witness the claim in 1999 by then OSCE High Commissioner Max van
der Stoel that ‘insufficient attention has been given to the possibilities of
cultural autonomy.’ M. Van der Stoel, Peace and Stability through
Human and Minority Rights: Speeches by the OSCE High Commissioner
on National Minorities, Baden Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1999,
p. 172.
11 W. Kymlicka, ‘National cultural autonomy and international minority
rights norms’, in D. Smith and K. Cordell (eds), Cultural Autonomy,
pp. 43–57; also W. Kymlicka, ‘Nation building and minority rights’.
12 See the report on the proceedings of the Venice Commission, The Partici-
pation of Minorities in Public Life. Collection science and technique of
democracy, Number 45, Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2008.
13 On Smith and Hiden’s briefing see D. C. Decker, ‘Enhancing minority
governance in Romania: Report on the presentation on cultural auton-
omy to the Romanian government’, European Centre for Minority Issues
Report, Number 53, March 2005. http://www/ecmi.de/download/
Report_53.pdf (downloaded 13 September 2010).
14 C. Codagnone and V. Filippov, ‘Equity, exit and national identity in a
multi-­national federation: “the multi-­cultural consitutional patriotism”
project in Russia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 26, 2000, pp.
263–288. Also V. Tolz, Russia: Inventing the Nation, London: Arnold,
2001, pp. 249–256.
15 Tolz, Russia: Inventing the Nation, p. 251.
16 B. Bowring, ‘Burial and resurrection: Karl Renner’s controversial influ-
ence on the “national question” in Russia’, in E. Nimni (ed.), National
Cultural Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics, London: Routledge,
2005, p. 201.
17 Ibid., p. 203. See also B. Bowring, ‘Austro-­Marxism’s last laugh? The
struggle for recognition of national cultural autonomy for Rossians and
Russians’, Europe Asia Studies 54, 2002, pp. 229–250.
18 D. J. Smith, ‘Cultural autonomy in Estonia. A relevant paradigm for the
post-­Soviet era?’ ESRC One Europe or Several? Working paper 19/01,
2001.
19 ‘Eestirootslased taastavad kultuurilise omavalitsuse’, Postimees, 2 Febru-
ary 2007.
20 D. J. Smith, ‘Cultural autonomy in Estonia’.
142   Notes
21 E. Kekelidze, ‘Eto budet estonskii variant’, Estoniia, 18 September 1992.
22 See for instance, I. Katz, ‘Avtonomiia – delo dobrovol’noe’, Stolitsa, 1
December 2008. Also, ‘Seifulen: venelaste kultuurilise autoonomia teket
pärsivad omavahelised erimeelsused’, Eesti Päevaleht, 29 December
2009.
23 D. C. Decker, ‘The use of cultural autonomy to prevent conflict and meet
the Copenhagen criteria: the case of Romania’, in D. Smith and K.
Cordell (eds), Cultural Autonomy, pp. 101–114.
24 A. Krizsán, ‘The Hungarian minority protection system: a flexible
approach to the adjudication of ethnic claims’, Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies 26, 2000, pp. 247–62. See also A. Pap, ‘Minority rights
and diaspora claims: collision, interdependence and loss of orientation’,
in O. Ieda (ed.), Beyond Sovereignty, pp. 243–248.
25 B. Dobos, ‘The development of cultural autonomy in Hungary’, Ethnop-
olitics 6, 2007, pp. 451–469.
26 Ibid. See also A. Krizsán, ‘The Hungarian minority protection system’.
27 M. Kovacs, ‘The good, the bad and the ugly: three faces of “dialogue” –
the development of Roma politics in Hungary’, Contemporary Politics 3,
1997, pp. 55–71; M. Kovacs, ‘The political significance of the first
national gypsy minority self-­government in Hungary’, Contemporary
Politics 6, 2000, pp. 247–262.
28 B. Dobos, ‘The development of cultural autonomy in Hungary’.
29 I. Klimova-­Alexander, ‘Transnational Romani and indigenous non-­
territorial self-­determination claims’, in D. J. Smith and K. Cordell (eds),
Cultural Autonomy, pp. 59–80.
30 S. Deets, ‘Pulling back from neo-­medievalism: the domestic and interna-
tional politics of the Hungarian status law’, in O. Ieda, Beyond Sover-
eignty, pp. 17–36.
31 Ibid.
32 B. Majtény, ‘Utilitarianism in minority protection? Status laws and inter-
national organizations’, in O. Ieda (ed.), Beyond Sovereignty, pp. 3–16.
33 J. Coakley, ‘Approaches to the resolution of ethnic conflict’, p. 310; on
the Belgian model, see also J.-C. Scholsem, ‘Personal autonomy through
the “communities system”: does the example of Belgium suggest that
forms of non-­territorial autonomy can make a difference in terms of
minority participation?” in Venice Commission, The Participation of
Minorities in Public Life, pp. 101–118.
34 On immigrant multiculturalism, see inter alia W. Kymlicka, Politics in the
Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship, Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
35 Kymlicka, ‘National cultural autonomy and international minority rights
norms’, p. 46.
36 See in this regard S. Vertovec and S.Wessendorf, ‘Introduction: assessing
the backlash against multiculturalism in Europe’, in S. Vertovec and S.
Wessendorf (eds), The Multiculturalism Backlash, London and New
York: Routledge, 2010, p. 23, where it is noted how ‘since the 1950s, the
construction of difference and diversity in Britain has moved from con-
cerns with “race” during the 1950s and 1960s, to discussions surround-
ing “ethnicity”, then “culture” and then “faith” ’. This is discussed more
fully by R. Grillo, ‘Britain and others: from “race” to “faith” ’ in the
same volume, pp. 50–71.
 Notes   143
37 C. Clarke, ‘Royal Commonwealth Society speech November 15th, 2006’,
copy supplied to the authors by Charles Clarke.
38 Taken from www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1135/sharia-­
law-what-­did-the-­archbishop-actually-­say (downloaded 26 July 2011).
39 Ibid. For full text, see www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.
php/1137/archbishops-­lecture-civil-­and-religious-­law-in-­england-a-­
religious-perspective (downloaded 26 July 2011).
40 See, in this respect, the vigorous debate engendered on the discussion
website Socialist Unity by Andy Newman’s article ‘Otto Bauer and con-
temporary questions of multiculturalism’, which sought to link the Wil-
liams debate to the earlier ideas of the Austro-­Marxists. www.
socialistunity.com/?p=1874 (downloaded 23 March 2011).
41 www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1135/sharia-­law-what-­did-
the-­archbishop-actually-­say (downloaded 26 July 2011).
42 See the discussion in Grillo, ‘British and others: from “race” to “faith” ’,
pp. 61–2.
43 See Vertovec and Wessendorf (eds), The Multiculturalism Backlash.
44 W. Kymlicka, ‘The rise and fall of multiculturalism?: New debates on
inclusion and accommodation in diverse societies’, in S. Vertovec and S.
Wessendorf (eds), The Multiculturalism Backlash, pp. 32–33.
45 S. Vertovec and S. Wessendorf, ‘Introduction: assessing the backlash
against multiculturalism in Europe’, in S. Vertovec and S. Wessendorf
(eds), The Multiculturalism Backlash, London and New York: Routledge,
2010.
46 A. Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought, London: Claridge Press, 1998,
cited in W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, p. 6.
47 W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, p. 7.
48 W. Kymlicka, ‘The rise and fall of multiculturalism?’, pp. 32–49.
49 N. Davies, Europe East and West, London: Pimlico, 2007, p. 19.
50 W. Kymlicka, ‘The rise and fall of multiculturalism?’, pp. 40–43.
Archival references

Estonian State Archive (testi Riigiarhiiv ERA)

F.14, N.1, S.1127: Kirjavahetus isikutega rahvuse muutmise kohta.
F.55, N.1, S.55: Vähemusrahvuste kultuuriline autonoomia. Gesetzprojekte
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lik Estland.
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F.85, N.1, S.78: Protokolle des 2 deutschen Kulturrats, 9 Dec. 1928–13 Sept.
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F.85, N.1, S.96: Estnische Übersetzungen der Protokolle des IV Kulturrats 8
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F.1000, N.1, S.137: Deutsch-­Baltische Partei in Estland. Organisation und
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 Archival references   145
välismaistele õppejõududele elamis- ja teenistusloa saamise, koolide toe-
tuste saamise, õppealalistes, koolide Juudi Vähemusrahvuse Kultuuromav-
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League of Nations Archive, Geneva (LONA)

S.345, N.3: Minorities in Latvia from November 1920 to July 1922.
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Russian State Military Archive – Moscow (Rossiiskii

Gosudarstvennyi Voennyi Arkhiv – RGVA)
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minorities in Europe, undated.
F.1502, O.1, D.63: Fragebogen IV.
F.1502, O.1, D.111: Undated memorandum by Hasselblatt ‘Leitsätze zum
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F.1502, O.1, D.110: Denkschrift zur Frage der Behandlung der National-
itäten in Deutschland mit besonderer Rücksicht auf der Rückwirkung auf
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F.1502, O.1, D.113: Resolutions of the European Nationalities Congress.

Johann-­Gottfried Herder Institut – Marburg

Baltikum, Nr 285: Nachlass K. Keller. Das deutsche Bildungswesen in Lett-
land 1919–1929: Schulen der Minoritäten in Lettland.
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DSHI 100 Bruns. Nachlass Bruns. Genfer Nationalitätenkongress (1927).

_
Latvian State History Archive (Latvijas Valsts V​e​stures
_
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of the Ministry of Education 24 January 1924 to 2 September 1932.
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Baltijas Centra-la- Bibliote-ka, Riga

Schiemann Nachlass. Nikolai von Berg 1922–1936.
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Schiemann Nachlass. Volksgr ENK Korresp. 1929–30.

Bank of England Archive

OV118/Latvia
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Index

Afghanistan 119 German Cultural Self Government

agrarian reforms 21, 29, 34, 38 in Estonia 45, 46, 48, 51, 54, 56,
Agudat Israel 42, 43, 61, 99 65, 101; and German Cultural
Akel, Friedrich 40 Curatoria 51, 53; and German
Allied and Associated Powers 4, 20 schooling in Estonia 52, 54, 55,
Ammende, Ewald xvi, 6, 23, 25, 38, 56, 57, 58, 93, 94, 95; and
40, 54, 58, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, German schooling in Latvia 41,
76, 78, 80, 83, 87, 88, 90, 91, 44, 59, 68, 129n18
131n12, 133n54, 135n11, Baltic provinces 20, 28, 36, 63, 100
138n62, 140n57 Baltic region xiv, 50, 105, 108
Anderkopp, Ado 35, 38, 129n33 Baltic states ix, xiv, 6, 7, 14, 15, 26,
Armenia xv 69, 117; deportations from 105;
armistice 1918 28 see also Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania
assimilation 1, 4, 5, 14, 16, 22, 24, Baltische Konstitutionelle Partei 18
36, 43, 79, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, Baltische Monatshefte 96
106, 107 Basque country viii
Association of National Minorities Bauer, Otto ix, x, xiii, xiv, xv, 6, 10,
in Germany 81 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 24, 26,
Ast, Karl 16, 35 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 43, 44, 82,
Austria 76 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122n2,
Austro-Hungarian Empire ix, xiii, 125n4, 125n5, 143n40
xiv, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 19, 117 Beermann, Johannes 48, 58
Austro-Marxism xiii, 10, 12, 15, 16, Belfast xvii
18, 111, 117, 121, 143n40 Belgium viii, 107, 142n33
Belorussians 27, 69, 112, 134n61
Baltenregiment 29 Berlin 26, 28, 38, 71, 73, 87, 88, 90,
Baltic Germans 6, 17, 18, 23, 24, 105; Treaty of (1918) 28
25, 28, 29, 31, 42, 43, 46, 59, 93, Berne 22, 89, 137n54
95, 96, 103, 104, 105, 112, Birk, Ado 16, 49
140n57; Bewegung in Latvia 96, Bodisco, Eduard von 36
97; and Estonia’s legislation on Bohemia 15, 18
cultural autonomy 26, 32, 33, 34, Bolsheviks and Bolshevism 2, 18, 27,
35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41; and 29, 41, 74
German Cultural Council in Bradford 1, 17
Estonia 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, Brandsch, Rudolf 23, 77
53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 133n53; and Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918) 28
160   Index
Briand,
_ _
Aristide 79, 85 Habsburg Empire xiv, xv; in
​ Zeme 104
Br​ı​va​ Hungary xv, 113, 114; in Latvia
Brünn (Brno) 12 7, 26, 31, 41, 42, 43, 44, 59, 60,
Bruns, Carl Georg 71, 72, 73, 87 66, 67, 68, 69, 84, 92, 93, 99,
Brussels 117 129n7; and League of Nations 34,
Bucharest xv 70, 78, 80, 82, 83; and
Budapest 113, 115 Nationalities Congress 77, 78, 80,
Budweis (Budvar) 15 82, 83; and taxation 13, 14, 27,
Buquicchio, Gianni 15 33, 39, 43, 48, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59,
Bulgaria 76, 89 65, 112; in Romania xv, 110, 113;
Bund 16, 42, 43 in Russian Federation xv, 110,
Bund der deutschen Vereine 54 111; in Tsarist Russia xvi
culture compared with religion 12,
Catalonia viii 14, 37, 118, 119, 142n36
Celmiŋš, Hugo 41 Czechoslovakia/Czechs 11, 12, 14,
central and Eastern Europe viii, ix, 15, 18, 75, 89, 108, 125n5,
xii, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 126n25
9, 23, 74, 75, 82, 83, 84, 86, 108,
110, 114, 115, 116, 117 Democratic Centre Party in Latvia
Chamberlain, Austen 22, 127n46 93
Clarke, Charles xi, 118, 143n37 Democratic Union of Hungarians in
Cold War 8, 106, 120 Romania (UDMR) 110
Comité des délégations juives auprès Denmark 76
de la Conférence de la Paix 27, 30 Deutsch-Baltische Partei in Estland
Committee for Protection of (DBP) 46, 74, 97, 131n12
Emancipation of Russian Jews Deutsch–Baltische Zentrale in Latvia
(Soyuz Polnopraviia) 17 43, 45
Communism xii, xv, 2, 8, 113, dissimilation 5, 87, 89, 90, 91, 114
138n62 Dresden 75, 81
Conference for Security and Dubin, Mordechai 61, 99
Cooperation in Europe see Dubnow, Simon 16, 17, 26, 126n29,
Organization for Security and 137n50
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)
Corsica viii education see schooling
Council of Europe xv, xvi, 4, 106, Eenpalu, Karel see Einbund, Karl
109, 110, 115, 116; see also Einbund, Karl 40, 49
Venice Commission Eisenstadt, Sergei 33
Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard 85 England 91, 118; see also United
Croatia xv, 110 Kingdom
cultural autonomy ix, xi, xiii, xiv, Estonia/Estonians ix, x, xiv, xv, 6,
xv, xvi, xvii, 7, 14, 15, 19, 22, 23, 7, 16, 17, 18, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29,
24, 25, 69, 71, 74, 109, 110, 114, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
116, 117, 118, 141n10; in Baltic 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47,
states 6, 7, 26, 70; in Belgium xv, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 59,
117; in Estonia xv, 6, 7, 28, 32, 61, 62, 64, 68, 69, 70, 76, 80,
33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 82, 83, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100,
46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 58, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107,
61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 80, 108, 111, 112, 124n21, 124n24,
82, 83, 93, 101, 102, 105, 111, 129n19, 134n61, 140n57; law
112, 124n21, 129n33; in on cultural autonomy; (1925) ix,
Germany 37, 73, 74, 80, 81; in 6, 7, 32, 33, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47,
 Index   161
48, 63, 65, 68, 70, 83, 93; law Protection of Minorities (FCNM)
on cultural autonomy (1993) 110, 116
111–13 France viii, xii, 78, 109
Estonian League of Veterans of the Frankfurter Zeitung 70
War of Independence 97 Freimane, Valentia 105
Estonian National Council 28 Friesians 81
ethnicity, role of personal choice in
xi, 10, 12, 19, 32, 36, 48, 54, 88, Gablenz 91
62, 68, 94, 95, 100, 113, 114 Geneva vi, 7, 70, 75, 77, 82, 89,
ethnic conflict xii, 4, 11, 20, 85–6, 136n16
106, 109, 113 Germanization 17, 63, 94
ethno-cultural diversity ix, xii, xiii, German minorities 5, 23, 24, 25, 70,
1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 26, 28, 71, 73, 74, 78, 82, 86, 87, 128n51
31, 40, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, Germany viii, xv, xvi, 3, 4, 5, 7, 20,
110, 111 28, 29, 52, 53, 73, 74, 75, 79, 80,
ethno-national identity ix, xiii, 1, 2, 81, 87, 88, 89, 90, 103, 104,
3, 8, 10, 11, 69, 107 139n62
ethno-regionalism 16, 19, 107, 108, German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges
110, 116 Amt) 71, 96
European Centre for Minority Issues Glasgow xv, xvi, xvii
xv, 141n13 glasnost 107
European Convention for the Goebbels, Josef 90
Protection of Human Rights and Gorbachev, Mikhail 107
Fundamental Freedoms 106 Great Depression 4, 85, 92, 97
European integration xii, xv, 5, 114 Great Britain see United Kingdom
European Nationalities Congress x, Greinert, Baron 50
xiv, xv, 5, 6, 7, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81,
82, 83, 86, 87, 115, 116, 120, Habsburg Empire see Austro-
121, 135n11, 136n18; German Hungarian Empire
influence over 5, 7, 76, 78, 87, 88, Hasselblatt, Werner 40, 41, 46, 48,
89, 90, 91, 138n62; Jewish 50, 54, 74, 75, 87, 88, 105, 131n2
minorities in 75, 87, 88, 89, 90, Henlein, Konrad 91
91; and League of Nations 5, 6, Heyking, Baron von 38
78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85; split in Hiden, John ix, x, xi, 110
(1927) 81, 83, 140n57 Hildebert-Boehm, Max 20, 22, 24
European Union 109, 115, 117, 120; Hitler, Adolf 4, 87, 90, 92, 95, 96,
concepts of xiv, 6, 74, 84, 85, 105
109, 115–16 Hitler Youth 95, 96
Hohenzollerns 19
federalism xiii, 3, 6, 11, 12, 16, 18, Holocaust 4, 105
107, 110 House of the Blackheads 49
Fellin 56 human rights 4, 90, 91, 106, 120
Finland 34, 47 Hungary xv, 19, 76, 83, 108, 113,
Finnish minority in Estonia 112; see 114, 115, 116; Status Law (2001)
also Ingrians 115; law on cultural autonomy
Fircks, Baron Wilhelm 44 (1993) 113–14
First World War x, xiv, 3, 5, 6, 9, Hungarian minorities 108, 110, 117
15, 20, 28, 56, 93, 97, 106, 109, Hurt, Jakob 35
115
Flanders 117 Ingrians see Finnish minority in
Framework Convention for the Estonia
162   Index
Inter Parliamentary Union 78 Kulturwehr 80
Iraq 119 Kurchinskii, Mikhail 6, 64, 65, 66,
Ireland viii, 117 69, 70, 76, 82, 90, 91, 101, 102,
irredentism 5, 22, 37, 80 138n62, 140n57
Islamic minorities 119 Kuresaare town council 100, 101
Italy 8, 11, 76, 77, 86
Landeswehr 29, 31
Jans, Juhan 40 Land Oberost 26
Jansen, Aleksei 64, 66, 69 Lebedour, Georg 37
Japan 79 Läänemaa 49
Järvamaa 49 Laidoner, Johan 95
Jewish Chronicle ix Landau, Jacob 59, 60, 61, 134n65
Jews 16, 17, 83, 92, 104, 115; and Latgale 67, 69
Jewish Cultural Council in Estonia Latvia ix, xiv, xvi, 6, 7, 16, 17, 18,
ix, 61, 62; and Jewish Cultural 21, 22, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 41,
Government in Estonia 61, 63; 42, 43, 44, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 66,
and Jewish Cultural Government 67, 68, 69, 75, 82, 84, 89, 90, 92,
in Latvia 59, 60, 61, 67; and 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104,
Jewish Cultural Government in 105, 107, 108
Lithuania 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 54, Latvian Credit Bank 98
59; and language issues (Hebrew/ Laun, Rudolf 22, 127n45
Yiddish) 43, 59, 60, 62, 63, 83, League of Nations ix, xiv, xvi, 4, 7,
93 (see also Zionism); in Baltic 22, 30, 34, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77,
states 7, 26; in Estonia ix, x, 33, 78, 79, 85, 87 (see also European
42, 47, 61, 63, 69, 80, 98, 100, Nationalities Congress; League of
101, 103; in Germany 87, 88, 89, Nations); and Committees of
90; in Latvia 30, 42, 43, 44, 61, Three 21; and Council 21, 22, 75,
67, 69, 90, 93, 98, 99, 105, 78, 79; and idea of standing
134n61; in Lithuania 16, 27, 29, commission for minorities 6, 24,
30, 54, 127n32; in Tsarist Russia 78–9; and minority protection
16, 17, 126n26; in USSR 3 procedures xiv, 4, 5, 20, 24, 78,
Jürgenstein, Ardo 16 79, 93, 109
Lebensraum 105
kadakasakslased 94 Lenin, Vladimir 3, 29
Kallistratov, M.A. 67 Lithuania iv, ix, 6, 7, 16, 17, 26, 27,
Kautsky, Karl 10 29, 30, 42, 54, 76, 108, 127n32,
Keller, Karl 44, 68, 129n18, 139n29 134n61; Grand Duchy of 27;
Kellogg, Frank 85 National Council of (Taryba) 26,
Ķēņiņš, Atis 92–3 27
Klaipeda (Memel) xvii, 29 Litvaks 16
Koch, Harry 46, 56, 68, 132n28, London xvii, 91, 136n12
132n30 Lugano 79
Kölnische Volkszeitung 79 Lüneburg xvi, 7
Krabbe, Ludvig 83, 84, 137n44
Kroeger, Erhard 96, 103 Madisson, Eugen 46, 69
Kulturrat see Baltic Germans, Madrid 79, 80
German Cultural Council in Maoris 117
Estonia Maramaa, August x
Kulturverwaltung see Baltic Marburg xvi, xvii, 7
Germans, German Cultural Martna, Mikhel 69_
Government in Estonia Meierovics, Zigfr​ı​ds 44
 Index   163
Mello Franco, Afrania 22, 23, 70, Narva 56, 61
71, 79 ‘New Europe’, concept of xiv, 20,
Memel see Klaipeda 24, 71
migration and migrants xii, 1, 11, New Zealand 117
70, 107, 117, 118, 119, 125n15, Nordic countries 117
142n34 North America xii, xv, 117
Mitteleuropa 74 Northern Ireland viii; see also United
Moravia 18; and Compromise of Kingdom
(1905) 15, 126n25
Moscow xvi, 107 Old Believers 67
Motzkin, Leo 27, 87, 88, 89, 91 Orban, Viktor 115
Mühlen, Viktor von zur 97 Organization for Security and
multiculturalism xiii, xv, xvi, 2, 6, Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)
105, 107, 116, 117, 118, 119, xv, 4, 115, 116; High
120, 122, 142n34, 142n36, Commissioner for National
143n40 Minorities (HCNM) 209, 141n10
multinational statehood xiii, xiv, 3, Ottoman Empire 19
6, 9, 10, 12, 18, 84, 104, 116, 117
Musso, Emil 58 Palestine 16
Mustjas 52 Pantenius, Heinrich 34, 38, 46
Päts, Konstantin 34, 38, 40, 49, 97,
National Democratic Union of 98, 100, 101, 103
Russian Citizens of Latvia (NDU) peace settlement (1919–1921) xiv, 4,
66, 67, 134n87 5, 9, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 75,
National Democratic Party 60 77, 81
national minority: concept of xiv, 1, Pechory 101, 103
5, 11, 17, 19, 20, 22, 38, 40, 59, Perkonkrusts 97, 98, 99
74, 77, 78, 81, 82, 88, 107, 108, Pärnu (Pernau) 23, 49, 61
109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, Petserimaa 49
116, 117, 118; language usage x, Piiskar, Jaan 94
xiii, 2, 5, 6, 10, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, Poland 20, 27, 29, 75, 78, 79, 80,
23, 26, 31, 39, 43, 52, 53, 55, 56, 86, 89, 103, 125n8
57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
67, 68, 69, 77, 84, 92, 93, 94, 95, 11, 16
100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, Polish minorities 27, 48, 80, 81, 83,
112, 116, 123n8, 125n15, 134n61
129n19, 134n65; rights of 20, 26, Politis, Nikolaos 79
30, 31, 33, 44, 59, 70, 75, 77, 78, Popoff, George 136n16
88, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110, 116 Prichuda 103
nationalism viii, xiii, 1, 2, 4, 9, 10, Putin, Vladimir 111
14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 24, 29, 30, 54,
66, 67, 69, 80, 86, 87, 92, 94, 97, Rakvere 61
106, 107, 108, 110, 111 Rei, August 49, 50
national self-determination 2, 3, 19, Reich Ministry for the Occupied
28, 35 Territories 105
National Socialism 4, 5, 86, 88, 90, Reichstag 37
91, 95, 96, 97, 99, 103, 105, Renner, Karl ix, x, xiii, xiv, xv, 6,
138n62, 140n7 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
nation state viii, ix, x, xii, xiii, xiv, 22, 24, 26, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38,
1, 5, 6, 9, 19, 22, 36, 84, 85, 87, 43, 44, 82, 116, 117, 118, 119,
92, 106, 107, 115, 116, 120 120, 122n2, 125n15; and
164   Index
Renner, Karl continued 25, 28, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 69, 70,
personality principle 11, 12, 13, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 86,
14, 15, 18, 22 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 96, 103, 104,
resettlement 3, 103, 104, 140n57 105, 116, 128n53, 128n54,
Revaler Bote 68 130n60, 136n16, 137n45,
Revalsche Zeitung 57 137n54, 138n62, 140n58
Riga xvi, 69, 99, 104, 105 schooling xiii, 6, 7, 12, 15, 17, 20,
Riga Business School 99 23, 30, 31, 32, 39, 41, 44, 52, 54,
Rigasche Rundschau 23, 24, 92, 96, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 66, 68,
136n16 74, 84, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 112,
Riigikogu 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 129n18, 129n19
129n35 Schulhilfe 52
Ritterschaften 28 Scotland viii; see also United
Rohan, Karl Anton Prinz 85 Kingdom
Roma minorities 113, 114, 115 Second World War viii, x, 4, 103,
Romania xv, 23, 75, 88, 89, 108, 106
110, 113, 115, 117 singing revolution 108
Rosenberg, Alfred 105 Skala, Jan 80
Roth, Hans Otto 88, 90 Skujenieks, Marģers 93
Rudnicka, Milena 90 Slovakia 75, 89, 108, 117; see also
Russia, Tsarist and pre-Soviet viii, Czechoslovakia
ix, xiv, 16, 17, 26, 40, 50, 60, 63, Slovenes 11, 76, 77
64, 68, 100, 126n26; and Smetona, Antanas 30
revolution of 1905 9, 17; and Smith, David J. ix, x, xi, xvii, 110
revolution of 1917 2, 16, 18, 19, socialism 3, 4, 10, 11, 16, 19, 37,
23, 108 42, 43, 59, 64, 69, 143n40
Russia, Soviet 3, 29, 40, 63, 69, 96; social democracy: in Austria ix, xiii,
see also USSR 10, 12, 18; in Estonia x, 35, 36,
Russian Bureau in Geneva 82 40, 69, 129n35
Russian Federation xv, xvi, 7, 108, in Latvia 42, 44
110, 1996 law on national South America 70
cultural autonomy 110, 111 Soviet Union see Union of Soviet
Russian National Union 64 Socialist Republics
Russian minorities in Europe 82, 83 Spain 75, 79, 107, 109
Russians: in Estonia 6, 7, 32, 33, 34, Spindler, August 37, 38, 46
47, 48, 58, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 82, Spreckelsen, Arthur 95
101, 102, 103, 111, 112, 113, Springer, Rudolf see Renner, Karl
117, 139n13; in Latvia 44, 59, 61, Stackelberg, Eduard von 36, 38, 46,
63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 100, 103, 111, 50
117, 134n61; in Lithuania 27; in Stalin, Josef x, 2, 3, 19, 105, 123n8
USSR 3, 107, 108, 112 Stockholm 136n12
Russification 17, 63, 107 Stoel, Max van der 141n10
Russkoe Obshchestvo v Latvii 66 Strandman, Otto 16
Ruthenians 11 Stresemann, Gustav 73, 74, 75, 79,
135n7
Saami 117 successor states (post-First World
Saaremaa 49 War) 3, 19, 20, 44
Saiema 60, 67 Süd-Tyrol 77
Saint Germain, Treaty of (1919) 22 Sweden 112
Schengen Accord 120 Swedish minority in Estonia 32, 33,
Schiemann, Paul 6, 18, 19, 23, 24, 48, 112
 Index   165
Switzerland xvi Venice Commission (Council of
Sylvester laws, Latvia (1935) 98 Europe) xv, xvi, 110, 115, 141n12
Verband der deutschen Minderheiten
Tallinn ix, xvi, 33, 41, 48, 49, 51, in Europa 23, 24, 25, 38, 70, 71,
52, 56, 57, 61, 62; attempted 74, 75, 82, 87, 135n9
communist putsch in (1924) 41 Verband der deutschen
Tartu vii, 38, 49, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, Volksgruppen in Europa 87, 88,
61, 64; University of 64, 66 91
territorial autonomy xiii, 2, 3, 9, 11, Vienna 23, 78, 86, 103, 136n12
12, 14, 16, 19, 27, 64, 107, 108, Viljandi 61
109, 110, 111, 116 Viljandimaa 49
Teutonic Knights 95 Vilnius 17, 27, 29
Tishkov, Valerii 110, 111 Virumaa 49
Tõnisson, Jaan 36, 39, 40 Voldemaras, Augustinas 27, 29
Transylvania 77, 110 Volksgemeinschaft 88, 89, 103
Turkey 109 Võru 52, 94, 95, 96
Võrumaa 49
Ukraine 90, 108, 138n62 Vries, Axel de 68, 133n40
Ukrainian minorities
_
83, 86, 90, 108
Ulmanis, K​a​rlis 97, 98, 99, 104 Wachtsmuth, Wolfgang 59, 133n58
Union of League of Nations Societies Wales viii; see also United Kingdom
78 Wallonia 117
Union of Russian Educational and Walter, Alfred 56, 58
Charitable Societies 64, 66, 102, Weiss, Helmuth 103
103 Weissenstein 56
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Wilfan, Josip 76, 77, 88, 89, 91
(USSR) viii, 4, 69, 74, 90, 103, Williams, Rowan Archbishop of
105, 138n62; demise of 8, 107, Canterbury 118, 119
108; former republics of 3, 8, 109, World Jewish Congress (1933) 89
110, 111, 112, 113; nationality World War I see First World War
rights in 2, 3, 18, 19, 74–5, 107, World War II see Second World War
110, 112; occupation of the Baltic Wrangell, Wilhelm von 56, 57, 97,
states (1940) ix, 104–5 101
United Kingdom viii, xii, xvii, 22,
79, 91, 109, 118, 142n36; see also Yugoslavia 75, 108, 109
England; Northern Ireland; Yupatov, I.F. 67
Scotland; Wales
United Nations 4, 106, 119 Zagreb xv, xvi, 110
United States of America 109 Zalewski, Ksawery 79
Upper Silesia 79 Zedelmann, H. von 57
Zentrale deutsch-baltischer Arbeit
Vaba Maa 48, 101 43, 45, 59
Valga 61 zionism 16, 27, 42, 43, 60, 61, 99
Valgamaa 49