¿Autodeterminación o autonomía cultural? Debates ideológicos en el Congreso de Nacionalidades Europeas (1925-1939)

Abstract

With the establishment of the Minorities Treaties in the Peace Conference of Versailles (1919), a system of protection of minorities was created within the framework of the League of Nations. The political and intellectual representatives of different national minorities all over East-Central Europe merged from 1925 on into a joint organisation to bring their views to the attention of the international public opinion, and to attempt to play a mediating role before the League of Nations: this was the Congress of European Nationalities. Through its annual conferences (1925-38) and its reports and publications, the Congress became a discussion forum for all possible theories and models to solve the minorities question. To achieve this end, a common programme was elaborated, which focused on the separation of Nation and State, and also on the differentiation of the cultural sphere from the political one, in order to make it possible for different ethnic groups to coexist within the same state. The solution was to implement a formula of cultural autonomy, which emerged as a combination of different traditions of political thought existing in East-Central Europe from the end of the 19th century —from the models proposed by Austrian socialdemocracy to the corporative autonomy of German minorities in the Baltic area—. But the Cultural Autonomy Law passed by the Estonian Parliament in 1925 made it the model to be generalised to other countries. Nevertheless, within the Congress two different interpretations emerged about how to put into practice cultural autonomy, as expressed through the theories of the Baltic Germans Paul Schiemann and Werner Hasselblatt.