Abstrakt
The seminar is devoted to exploring and revisiting the legacies of a 100-year-old crucial landmark development - the inception of the post-WWI minority regime. 1919 is the year of the Paris Peace Conference which gave birth to the League of Nations and Minority Treaties. The latter partly embodied the Wilsonian ideas of national self-determination and established the first comprehensive multilateral system of minority protection.
In particular, the principles and guidelines for national minority policies including non-discrimination, territorial autonomy and equitable distribution of public resources were set up in the first two treaties concerning minority issues signed in 1919 - with Poland and Czechoslovakia. Along with this, the post-Versailles development demonstrated the force of minority nationalism and the destructive potential of trans-border kin-state policies.