Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 18781938 [Hardcover]

This study of the period from 1878 to 1938 explores international minority protections.International minority protection, which began in the late 19th century, was aimed at bringing stability to the new and expanded states in Eastern Europe. This first historical study of the sixty-year period between 1878 and 1938 examines the policies of the Great Powers, which devised these arrangements; of Jewish leaders who sought to defend their endangered kindred people; of the fledgling governments, which fiercely resisted outside interference; of the League of Nations, which developed a unique system for minority protection; and of Germany, which between 1919 and 1933 went from a minorities champion to a persecutor and aggressor.International minority protection, which began in the late 19th century, was aimed at bringing stability to the new and expanded states in Eastern Europe. This first historical study of the sixty-year period between 1878 and 1938 examines the policies of the Great Powers, which devised these arrangements; of Jewish leaders who sought to defend their endangered kindred people; of the fledgling governments, which fiercely resisted outside interference; of the League of Nations, which developed a unique system for minority protection; and of Germany, which between 1919 and 1933 went from a minorities champion to a persecutor and aggressor.Statesmen and scholars were inspired by a period after World War I (when the victors devised Minority Treaties for the new and expanded states of Eastern Europe) at the time that the Cold War ended between 1989-1991. This book is the first study of that period--between 1878 and 1938--when the Great Powers established a system of external supervision to reduce the threats in Europe's most volatile regions of Irredentism, persecution, and uncontrolled waves of westward migration. It is a study of the strengths and weaknesses of an early state of international human rights diplomacy as practiced by rival and often-unil7