From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions

The twentieth century was an epoch of extreme violence. Yet it was also the era of human rights and humanitarian protection of civilian populations, at least on the level of international conventions and a thick web of institutions designed to implement them. There is a common, perhaps universal, way of explaining this paradox. The commission of atrocities inspires a reaction that leads to the expansion of human rights and humanitarian measures. Stimulus, response. Point, counterpoint. The spraying of poison gas over the trenches in World War I resulted in the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning gas as a weapon of war; the Holocaust led to the Nuremberg Tribunal and the legal and moral consecration of the concept “crimes against humanity.” True enough—but also not deep enough. Inscribed in both the atrocities and the human rights columns of the ledger are two items that developed in tandem in the latter third of the nineteenth century and received full-blown articulation as part of the Paris peace settlement from 1919 to 1923: forced deportations and minority protection. These were, and are, two sides of the same coin (to change the metaphor)—an entirely new way of conceiving of politics focused on discrete populations and the ideal of national homogeneity under the state. The emergence of minority protection, with its quick slide into a concept of minority rights, was not just a reaction to various massacres and other atrocities that attracted increased public attention and the interests of the Great Powers over the course of the nineteenth century. Stimulus and response is not the appropriate metaphor, because deportations and protection ran together—they emerged chronologically at roughly the same point in time, the 1860s, and were both legitimized by bilateral and multilateral treaties that the Great Powers either signed or blessed. And they sit at the epicenter of an array of words and policies that also marked the shift to a politics focused on populations, both within Europe and in the larger European imperial world: civilizing mission, self-determination, minorities and majorities, mandates, and genocide.