Capitulations Redux: The Imperial Genealogy of the Post–World War I “Minority” Regimes

Abstract

The 1919 peace talks at Paris saw the introduction of a new term to the lexicon of international diplomacy: minority rights. With the advent of a series of “minorities treaties” with various Balkan, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern states, the concept of collective rights for national, religious, or ethnic minorities in majoritarian nation-states instantly became a major feature of the postwar political order. The first minority treaty, with Poland, served as a model for more than a dozen other such agreements over the next few years; the League of Nations came to house a “Minorities Section” to monitor and implement them. In the 1920s the new League’s (theoretical) role as enforcer of the terms of these treaties became one of its most important public raisons d’être. Minority rights, in fact, became so central to interwar internationalist thinking that the League’s painfully evident failure to protect minority communities from Nazi depredations in the mid-1930s is often said to have marked the beginning of the end for this first experiment in supranational political authority.

There is a great deal about the emergence of this interwar minorities regime that begs explanation, beginning with the word itself. Until the First World War, the term “minority” was used mainly to describe political parties’ positions in legislative assemblies—not ethnic, national, religious, or linguistic groups in a position of demographic weakness vis-à-vis an equally identifiable “majority.”¹ The idea had little meaning in the multinational Habsburg, German, or Russian Empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, despite the presence of many ethnoreligious communities differentiated from their rulers by ethnic, religious, or linguistic markers, or a combination thereof. These communities identified as distinct, but not as demographic “minorities”—just as no one thought of dominant ethnic, religious, or linguistic groups as deriving their power from some kind of “majority” status.² In the Ottoman sphere, such communities were referred to as millets (nations) and understood as an established if sometimes disputed part of the body politic; in the Arabic-speaking Ottoman provinces, the modern term for minority (ʿaqaliyya) did not appear in political discourse until the 1920s.³ The concept was similarly absent from British and French imperial vocabulary, despite equally pluralistic populations and a high consciousness of ethnic, communal, and (especially) racial divides in their empires. Nor did the word “minority” appear in the American context, where African American, immigrant, and indigenous populations were categorized in quite other ways.⁴ In other words, not one of the major players present at the peace talks and involved in the founding of the League of Nations had a history of describing national, ethnic, religious, or racial communities within their polities as minorities—or, for that matter, as majorities. Why and how, then, did this concept of minority emerge so suddenly at the 1919 peace talks and so quickly become one of the central principles of the postwar era?

The historiographical consensus on the genesis of the minorities regimes has been twofold. Scholars have suggested, first, that the Western European powers from the eighteenth century onward actively though unevenly committed themselves to exporting Enlightenment principles of equality among religions (and to a lesser degree ethnicities and nationalisms), via their treaties with the old empires to the east.⁵ Second, they have argued, the total, irrevocable, and abrupt breakup of the old Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian Empires in the First World War resulted in a violently and suddenly ethnonationalized landscape, forcing immediate Allied intervention to protect communities trapped in places that had virtually overnight been defined as someone else’s country.⁶ Both these interpretations converge into a single basic narrative: that the minorities treaties that came out of the 1919 peace accords represented a well-intentioned but ultimately weak attempt to protect religious and ethnic minorities from discrimination and violence at the hands of newly constituted state authorities in Eastern Europe and Anatolia—with the goal of maintaining stability in the fragile nation-states emerging out of the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman shatterzones, to be sure, but also with an ethical mandate of protection for beleaguered communities. But because the mechanisms of enforcement were so weak, the story goes, the League could not in fact guarantee its wards’ safety. Moreover, because the countries subject to the treaties regarded them as infringing on their sovereignty, they actually ended up worsening the situation of many such communities who suffered continued (and in some places heightened) indignities under the minorities regime. This failure of enforcement became more and more evident with the rise of the Nazis after 1933 and the League’s ever more apparent inability to protect the minorities within its purview—and so the idea of minority protection lost credibility, and was essentially abandoned after the Second World War in favor of a new individual human rights regime delineated and guaranteed by the new United Nations and its key member states.⁷

Twenty years after its first expression, this interpretation remains the most widespread understanding, both popular and scholarly, of the League’s minority protection regime.⁸ But it is fundamentally mistaken, both in its explanation of why “minorities” suddenly came to the fore as an international issue and in its analysis of how minority rights became a major locus of international politics for the next two decades. Bringing the vibrant literature on the late Ottoman Empire into conversation with the largely European historiography of the minorities treaties reveals that the interwar minorities regime had quite another origin that has gone totally unrecognized: the series of agreements known as the “capitulations.” These were a political and economic regime that had long guaranteed British, French, and Russian economic and political advantages in the Ottoman sphere including the Balkans, and that over two centuries legally enshrined non-Muslim Ottoman communities as sites of European economic, political, and military intervention. In the immediate postwar era, as the Ottoman Empire vanished along with the capitulatory privileges it had granted, the British and French postwar administrations sought another scheme to maintain them, preferably one that would not appear too imperial. The capitulations had already created identifiable ethnocommunal populations associated with British and French interests. Now, these same populations would be labeled “minorities” and declared wards of a newly constituted form of international authority—conveniently comprising the same membership as the old imperial powers and demanding precisely the same kinds of economic access to former Ottoman spaces—alongside the same carefully constructed public concern for beleaguered ethnoreligious communities from Macedonia to Bulgaria to Iraq. It was the nineteenth-century iteration of the Ottoman capitulations—not Enlightenment political principles—that served as the strategic and discursive backdrop for the international minorities protection regime that emerged from the postwar agreements.

Like the capitulations, the minority treaties identified specific nonmajoritarian communities as possessing certain externally guaranteed political, economic, cultural, and social rights, and formally entangled such “minority” rights with the provision of European economic access to ex-Ottoman spaces from the Balkans to the Mashriq. Like the capitulations, they premised the sovereignty and independence of certain states on the provision of these minority rights and threatened Great Power political and military intervention should treaty conditions not be met. Like the capitulations, they were intended to preserve a European influence and presence in the crucial ring of territories separating Western and Central Europe from Asia, and to delineate a hierarchy of sovereignty that would leave intact the European empires’ position at the top of a pyramid of global powers. And finally, of course, like the capitulations, they proclaimed mandatory state protections for minorities that would not apply in the enforcing countries. In other words, the minorities agreements constituted a new version of the old capitulatory regime, now shrouded in a language of rights and protection designed to preempt objections from the many anti-imperialisms coming to the fore across the globe in this postwar moment.⁹ As was true for so many other new systems of international law and humanitarian assistance in the interwar period, the minorities agreements represented little more than a discursive reformulation of older British, French, and Russian modes of imperial control over Balkan, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern territory.¹⁰

The story of how the capitulations came to have anything to do with minorities is far from straightforward. Though the two phenomena eventually came to be closely related, the capitulation agreements’ entanglement with the ever-present question of the rights and privileges of non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire and its successor states was a gradual and mostly unintentional process, unfolding slowly over the course of two centuries and not fully evident until the empire was facing serious challenges from all sides.¹¹

The earliest forms of the capitulations treaties—the ahdnames—had nothing to do with the rights of non-Muslims in the Ottoman sphere. They originated as a way of both regulating and encouraging European trade with the Ottoman state, and were initially a freely given (and potentially revocable) privilege bestowed on a European political entity by the sultan: for instance, in an early example of a “capitulation” agreement, the trade benefits Mehmed the Conqueror allowed to Genoa after his conquest of Constantinople in 1453.¹² As the system expanded over the subsequent two centuries, this initial understanding of the capitulations as a privilege to be bestowed at will by a powerful Ottoman state gave way to something with more ominous implications for Ottoman political power. Venice, France, England, and the Dutch Republic had already been awarded capitulations by the early seventeenth century, and were now joined by the Habsburgs, Sweden, Sicily, Tuscany, Denmark, Prussia, Spain, and Russia, with a significant extension of French rights in 1740. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the capitulations had become concessions, extracted from an increasingly militarily disadvantaged Ottoman state that no longer had the political, economic, or military capacity to withhold or withdraw the privileges it extended via these ahdnames.¹³

It was in this context that the capitulations started to shape the relationships between Muslims and non-Muslim Ottomans and to become relevant to conversations about communities later to be labeled “minorities.” As the balance of power shifted from the Ottoman to the European side, one particular aspect of the capitulations treaties began to take on new meaning: the right of foreigners in the Ottoman sphere to extend their economic and political privileges to their interpreters, known as dragomans. These translators were usually recruited from non-Muslim Ottoman merchant communities. Many came from an emerging Greek Orthodox elite known as the Phanariots, who between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries came to represent a powerful political and economic force in the Ottoman state through their increasing dominance of the empire’s myriad dragoman positions.¹⁴ The highest-up Phanariot functionaries bore responsibility not only for diplomatic exchange and negotiation but also for tax collection, provincial governance, and military administration.¹⁵ Such jobs offered considerable political access and authority; they also came with diplomatic immunity and tax breaks, and non-Muslim merchants of all stripes—fluent in the various tongues now emerging as languages of trade, from Bulgarian to Armenian to French—were eager to sign up.

During the eighteenth century, the lines between Christian merchant classes and officially employed dragomans of the Ottoman state became quite blurry. As historian Christine Philliou notes, “given these interlinked patronage networks, there were few degrees of separation between monks on Mt. Sinai, merchants in Anatolia, diplomats in Istanbul, soldiers on the Danube, sailors in the Aegean islands, administrators at the imperial arsenal and mint, and scribes in Bucharest . . . networks [that] could be mobilised for an exceptionally wide range of pursuits, whether for personal profit or state gain.”¹⁶ By the early nineteenth century, European consulates—recognizing the power inherent in these exemptions from both Ottoman law and Ottoman taxation, and confident that the Ottoman state no longer had the capacity to withdraw their privileges—were beginning to offer (and sometimes to sell) capitulatory privileges to merchants who were not actually employed as dragomans.¹⁷ This development benefited Ottoman Christians and Jews at the expense of Muslims; only non-Muslims were routinely employed by European consulates and allowed to participate in or purchase capitulatory privileges, and foreign-owned companies tended to hire and involve mainly non-Muslim commercial partners.

This new version of the capitulations thus transformed relations between Ottoman Muslims and non-Muslims. Ottoman communal relations had been historically negotiated via a highly contingent and variable system under which the sultanate bestowed certain non-Muslim communities—not minorities but millets—with some authority to govern themselves, in return for certain limitations on their civic participation and obligations to pay special taxes.¹⁸ But now these new capitulatory interpretations rendered many Ottoman Christians and Jews newly privileged vis-à-vis their Muslim compatriots. “In a short time,” one historian notes, “non-Muslim subjects of the Sultan who bought such appointments were excused from all Ottoman taxes and were entitled to pay the same low customs duties charged to foreigners under the various Capitulations treaties.”¹⁹ The increasing entanglement of local Ottoman Christians with foreign European commercial and political entities was further reflected in the growing numbers of Ottoman Christians being educated in European-run mission schools in places from Istanbul to Aleppo to Cairo, where they learned European languages and prepared for careers in European-dominated commercial enterprises.²⁰ In some places these new capitulatory opportunities actually brought new non-Muslim populations into Ottoman cities—for instance, eighteenth-century Salonika, where a community of Jews from Livorno migrated to the city under European consular protection and quickly emerged as a new economic and social elite labeled “Francos.”²¹ By the late nineteenth century this had become a demographically significant trend, with large numbers of European merchants and settlers—and their local Greek, Armenian, and Jewish associates—relocating to Eastern Mediterranean cities to take advantage of the new economic landscape.²² Ottoman attempts to restore the original intent of the capitulations by making it illegal for Ottoman subjects, Muslim or otherwise, to pursue the protection of another state were largely unsuccessful.²³ And although foreign-guaranteed economic and political privileges for Ottoman Christians had not been an intent of the original capitulatory agreements, the European powers now began to see enormous political opportunity in folding the two phenomena together.

As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, with its increased domestic franchises, its challenges to empire, and its new languages of humanitarianism and racial hierarchy, the idea of placing European “protection” of non-Muslims at the center of European-Ottoman relations emerged as a way to cast political, economic, and military intervention in Ottoman affairs as a form of assistance to fellow Christians and become explicitly central to the capitulations regime. British officialdom, in particular, was now beginning to construct a carefully sculpted narrative about Muslim nationhood and Muslim violence intended to serve as a legitimization of political and military intervention across the Ottoman sphere. “The situation became worse in the age of imperialism,” historian Feroz Ahmad writes, “when the European Powers adopted an attitude of racial and moral superiority towards the Turks, and justified the capitulations on the grounds that Europeans [and, we might add, Christians more generally] simply could not live under Turkish-Islamic law.”²⁴ Thus, in defense of intervention in the Ottoman Empire, British prime minister William Gladstone declared in 1877 that “Mohammedanism now appears . . . to be radically incapable of establishing a good or tolerable government over civilised and Christian races.”²⁵

As a notional solicitude for the position of Christians under Muslim rule began to offer an entry point for political intervention, territorial acquisition, and economic assertion in the Ottoman sphere, public concern for Jews living under Orthodox tsarist rule now also became a frequent mode of asserting a Western European right to intervene in the Russian borderlands.²⁶ In the nineteenth century, both the British and the French approach to diplomatic negotiations in Eastern Europe increasingly premised the acknowledgment of states’ sovereignty on a public commitment to Jewish protection. This language of Jewish rights was lent considerable legitimacy by the support of Western European Jewish intellectuals and political movers—Moses Montefiore, Adolphe-Isaac Cremieux, the Rothschild family—vocally advocating for protective interventions on behalf of their Eastern European coreligionists.²⁷ France further encouraged the idea of Western “protection” of and ties with Middle Eastern and North African Jews via an elaborate program of mission schools and institutions like the Alliance Israélite universelle, intended to create pockets of “native” Jews devoted to French concepts of citizenship and rights across Ottoman North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Balkans.²⁸

Over the course of the nineteenth century, then, European states began to develop new mechanisms for political, economic, and military intervention in Ottoman territory premised on capitulations-related “protection” for Ottoman Christians—a rhetoric and practice that bore a strong resemblance to an emerging language and policy of “protecting” Eastern European Jews in the Ottoman and Russian spheres. Under the sway of these new ideas, France and Britain began to take a more aggressively interventionist approach both to establishing non-Muslim client communities in the Ottoman Empire and to establishing themselves as guarantors of the rights of Eastern European Jews.²⁹ As early as 1815, the Congress of Vienna supported the principle of national “preservation” for Polish populations living in Austrian, Russian, and Prussian territory and called for Jewish rights in the Bund, backed by the threat of Western European intervention.³⁰ In the Ottoman sphere, the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Treaty gave Britain complete and unmediated access to the Ottoman market and abolished remaining Ottoman monopolies—an economic policy designed to coexist with financial and political support for local Ottoman Christian communities who would act as their local representatives.³¹

In the Ottoman sphere, the effects of such policies on the actual non-Muslim communities they involved were decidedly mixed. On the one hand, enthusiasm among merchants for the privileges the capitulations afforded was high. Commercial associations with European consulates and companies were profitable, and in some places the capitulations gave rise to a new kind of Christian political power resting on their new emergence as wealthy elites and their association with increasingly prominent European institutions. Demand for European mission education also rose substantially during this period, and the benefits it conferred (which did not normally require conversion or even interest in the religious aspects of the curriculum) were impressive enough that some elite Muslim families in Ottoman territories from Egypt to Lebanon to Iraq began to enroll their children in private mission schools by the late nineteenth century.³² But it was also clear that the capitulations, and the aggressive intrusion of European institutions more generally, were beginning to erode the communal tolerance on which Ottoman life had relied for centuries. Outbreaks of sectarian conflict in mid-nineteenth-century Lebanon and Syria arose from new disputes about the political and economic backing some Christian communities were receiving from France and Russia. Such violence actively targeted Christians as outsiders—even foreigners—in their local communities, a new charge against communities long considered integral, if secondary, parts of the Ottoman body politic.³³ This became an especial problem for Ottoman Armenians, who emerged as a pet cause of European and American mission organizations promoting the defense of Armenian national rights against Ottoman tyranny—not, it should be noted, a narrative that had much purchase in the Ottoman Armenian provinces themselves until considerably later, but which philo-Armenian charities in the United Kingdom and France deployed to considerable public interest throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.³⁴

Britain and France were not alone in this new commitment to creating non-Muslim client communities in the Ottoman sphere. The Russian Empire—drawing on longstanding Russian interest in the institutions of the Ottoman Orthodox churches—was also beginning to sense the possibilities inherent in Russian promotion of Orthodox Christians in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Beginning in the late 1840s, Russia sought to expand its influence in Ottoman territory via claims of protection over the Orthodox Church and defense of Orthodox access to sites of worship in Palestine—an approach that raised alarms in the United Kingdom and France. “The Porte,” one British official noted in 1852, “has heard this assertion of Russian protection of the religious interest of ten or eleven millions of her subjects with unmingled dissatisfaction . . . a promise of the Porte to protect the Christian religion and churches, does not bear out the Russian Representative in saying that Russia has a right to protect the Greek Turkish Church.”³⁵ Thus, as the contest between Britain, France, and Russia for influence over Ottoman territory intensified, the rights of Ottoman Christians became the supposed issue over which the European powers were clashing.

The subsequent Crimean War became the first military encounter in which the entitlements of Ottoman Christians were cited as a casus belli. Its diplomatic aftermath further cemented the centrality of Ottoman Christians to European-Ottoman relations, with formal guarantees of “protection” for Christians living under Muslim rule serving as a proxy for continued European involvement in the Ottoman sphere.³⁶ Britain, in a demonstration of its informal power over the Ottoman state, forced a reform guaranteeing equal civil rights to all subjects regardless of religion just a week before the peace talks, largely as a way of preempting Russian claims of protection over Orthodox Ottoman subjects. Similarly, initial French proposals for the 1856 Treaty of Paris that ended the war featured calls for a public Romanian acknowledgment of full equality of religion and equality of civil rights among all religions—provisos targeted at Romania’s unsympathetic treatment of its Jewish population.³⁷ Although the British and French delegates withdrew this demand following furious objections from Romanian officials, they were increasingly aware of the possibilities for turning the Eastern European “Jewish question” to their own ends, alongside the Christian question in the Ottoman state. The five negotiating powers eventually disposed of the earlier Russo-Ottoman agreements of Kuchuk-Kainarji and Balta Liman and agreed on a collective “guardianship” of the rights of Ottoman Christians. The final treaty thus made use of non-Muslim populations both as an entry point for foreign economic activity and as public evidence of the limits of Ottoman sovereignty—a situation to which the Ottoman administration was highly alert.³⁸

By the 1870s, Russia’s tactics for territorial expansion had moved beyond claims of “protection” for Ottoman Orthodox Christians into an active encouragement of the forcible Christianization of the Balkans. The Balkan provinces were among the most pluralistic of the Ottoman Empire’s territories; nearly half the population was Muslim, and both rural and urban areas across Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Serbia, and Macedonia featured multilingual, multinational, multireligious populations whose communal, linguistic, and ethnic identifications could not be easily mapped onto conceptions of a nation-state.³⁹ During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, Muslims found themselves specifically targeted under a Russian-backed, Orthodox-supported plan to permanently change the demographics of the region in ways that would favor Russian control and force back Ottoman influence. An estimated three hundred thousand Muslims were murdered during the course of the war; nearly five million more would be driven out by 1900, setting the stage for the even more brutal mass expulsions of the coming Balkan conflicts.⁴⁰

The 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which renegotiated the terms of Ottoman surrender to Russia via British and French intervention, represented a crucial moment in the formal recasting of the capitulations as a protective regime for Ottoman Christians and Eastern European Jews. Its text neatly tied together the principle of externally guaranteed rights for non-Muslims and the old concept of protections for foreigners in one capitulatory frame, not just for the newly semi-autonomous Bulgarian territory of Rumelia but across the empire. “The Treaties, Conventions, and international arrangements of any kind whatsoever, concluded or to be concluded between the Porte and foreign Powers, shall apply in Eastern Eoumelia [sic] as in the whole Ottoman Empire,” its Article 20 declared. “The immunities and privileges acquired by foreigners, whatever their status, shall be respected in this province. The Sublime Porte undertakes to enforce there the general laws of the Empire on religious liberty in favour of all forms of worship.”⁴¹ Further, the treaty formally established the principle of external military intervention should these conditions be violated, with specific reference to a particular subset of Ottoman Christians: “The Sublime Porte undertakes to carry out, without further delay, the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians, and to guarantee their security against the Circassians and Kurds. It will periodically make known the steps taken to this effect to the Powers, who will superintend their application.”⁴²

As a number of scholars have noted, this was an utterly insincere effort aimed not at actually protecting Armenians but at legitimizing any future European military interventions on supposedly humanitarian grounds. Historian Michael Reynolds puts it clearly: “The principles embraced at Berlin heralded a death knell [for the Ottomans], since they stripped the polyethnic empire of its legitimacy as a state and authorized foreign intervention inside the empire on behalf of ethnonational causes.”⁴³ And such authorization of foreign intervention now extended beyond the empire as well. The treaty’s recognition of an independent Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania was likewise made dependent on assurances of “freedom and outward exercise of all forms of worship”—together with guarantees for foreign subjects, “traders or others.”⁴⁴ Contemporary observers well understood the cynicism involved in such a scheme; a French witness to the proceedings wrote of Salisbury (the British foreign secretary) that his “civilising fervour or sympathies for the oppressed races were always subordinated to British interests . . . [and] his eagerness to save remote Asiatic tribes from Russian rule fitted ill with his readiness to replace Macedonia and half Bulgaria under the discredited yoke of Turkey.”⁴⁵ For the reduced Ottoman Empire and its breakaway successor states, then, the treaty placed the rights of what would eventually come to be called “minorities” in the same frame as economic access for foreign commercial enterprises, and situated both as potential rationales for future Great Power political or military interventions.

By the beginning of the 1890s, these reimagined capitulations had not only dramatically changed the landscape of Ottoman communal relations, the millet system, and the legal landscape of Christian institutional power; they had also identified specific Christian populations within the Ottoman state whose “national” and religious interests could be used to advance British, French, and Russian imperial interests. Further, the architects of such agreements had now recognized that the resulting communal violence could itself further various kinds of external interventions. On the one hand, the mass expulsions of the Balkan wars—which disproportionately (though not exclusively) displaced Muslims—were helpful to the European project of reformulating the Balkans as a zone of Christian nationalism, and were therefore legitimized and formalized in the ethnically defined borders and states that emerged from the 1878 treaty. By contrast, just over a decade later, similar violence directed at Ottoman Christians—the Armenians of southeastern Anatolia—could be publicized as a rationale for ongoing British intervention in the Ottoman sphere and plans for some form of territorial intervention on their behalf. The violent consequences of such external support for non-Muslims in the Ottoman shatterzones were thus themselves useful, in a variety of ways, to the ongoing project of securing European imperial influence across the Balkan and Caucasian spheres.⁴⁶

Ottoman observers well understood that this emerging principle of capitulatory protection for Ottoman non-Muslims was specifically designed to legitimize economic, political, and military intervention by the European powers. The Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp put it clearly: “A nation condemned to every political interference by Capitulations is meant to be a nation outside European civilization.”⁴⁷ In the late Ottoman state, resentment of the capitulations in this new form ran deep. As the Young Turk movement—intent, among other things, on reversing the ever more evident European domination of Ottoman territory—gathered steam, its adherents began increasingly to understand the capitulations in specifically racial terms. “The humiliating treatment . . . of the dark-complexioned and black races by the people of Western Europe and especially by the English and the Americans is a well-known fact,” one Young Turk writer declared, adding, “although most of the Turks are racially European, it suits the desire of many powers to claim that the Turks do not belong to the white race and they are totally Asian, because in the future this claim would be employed as an argument to drive us totally out of Europe and to preclude our rule of Christian nations there.”⁴⁸ When the new Unionist government in Istanbul—on the verge of war with Western Europe and with little to lose—declared the unilateral abolition of the capitulations in September 1914, there was jubilation in the Ottoman press: “At last we are delivered . . . freed today from the nightmare and calamity that year by year grew darker.”⁴⁹

When the Ottoman Empire eventually collapsed, then, a question uppermost in the minds of both British and French officials was how to preserve their longstanding capitulatory privileges within the former Ottoman territories. Initially, the Allies had been determined simply to reimpose the capitulations following the armistice; as one historian noted long ago, “although they recognized that the piecemeal arrangements contained many anomalies, none of the Allies were willing to gratuitously divest themselves of the advantages which the Capitulations conferred.”⁵⁰ But as Mustafa Kemal gained ground in his military campaign to rid Anatolia of the Greek army and render moot the Treaty of Sèvres’s plans for partition of the old Ottoman metropole, it began to seem less and less likely that the capitulations could functionally be restored vis-à-vis either the remaining Ottoman territory or the fragile new states of Eastern Europe. Some other solution would have to be found, and quickly. As the economic section of the British delegation pointed out to the conference, “before the Treaties were signed it would be only prudent to impose by separate instruments on the new States and ceded territories, such obligations towards the Allies and also towards the enemy States as might be thought essential. If this opportunity were lost, it might never recur.”⁵¹

As we have seen, the Treaty of Berlin had already related the capitulations to an externally enforced religious rights regime in the ex-Ottoman territories by replacing the old capitulatory guarantees for Ottoman Christians (and similar interests in Eastern European Jews) with new “establishment of religious freedom” clauses tied to commercial and legal privileges for foreign subjects and companies.⁵² This idea now met up with the new concept of minorities—a term apparently first used in its modern sense by Austrian Marxists, advocating for a federalist system in Habsburg land, who in the late nineteenth century put forth the notion of a “minority” that might require special protections from a “majority.”⁵³ As the peace negotiations unfolded, the idea of replacing the capitulations with a minority rights regime resting on the principles of the Treaty of Berlin—that is, pairing guarantees of religious freedoms for “minorities” with guarantees of continued economic access for the Allied powers—quickly became one of the basic premises of an emerging interwar internationalism.

The new League of Nations Minorities Commission, convened in February 1919, formally defined the newly prominent term “minority” for its own purposes: “nationals belonging to racial, religious, or linguistic minorities,” an interpretation that redefined the longstanding British interest in Armenian and Jewish communities from the Balkans to Anatolia as a potential rationale for external intervention but denied Great Power sympathy with actual nationalist separatisms.⁵⁴ The commission made the determination that the “new or immature states of Eastern Europe or Western Asia” (eventually including Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia) would be subject, as a condition of their independence, to a set of agreements acknowledging the new League of Nations’s right to police their treatment of “minority” populations.⁵⁵

The architects of the scheme presented this idea quite explicitly as a continuation and redevelopment of past imperial practices that had long tied together minority protection and economic access. Harold Temperley, a historian attending the peace conference and serving as the British representative on the Albanian boundary commission, precisely articulated this claim of continuity:

In drawing up these treaties the Conference was not entering on any new path. It was deliberately pursuing a course of policy which had been consecrated by the established procedure of the last hundred years . . .

As a result of the gradual dissolution of the Turkish Empire, there had during the nineteenth century been established in Europe five new states—Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Montenegro. In each case the recognition of these States had been the subject of consultation between the Great Powers of Europe, and had been accompanied by certain conditions, the object of which was to insure [sic] religious freedom, and to prevent the newly established State from interfering unduly with the freedom of commercial intercourse.⁵⁶

Following on the capitulations model, then, the treaties sought to limit certain states’ sovereignty by establishing a right to external intervention on behalf of minority communities. This scheme was not to become general; one negotiator noted with horror that a more universal conception of minority rights would give the League “the right to protect the Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the French in Canada, quite apart from the more serious problems, such as the Irish.”⁵⁷ For the so-called Great Powers, the principle of national sovereignty would prevail. For the rest, as US secretary of state Robert Lansing put it, “considerations of national safety, historic rights, and economic interests” came first.⁵⁸

Such an explicit delimitation between sovereign and less sovereign powers naturally sparked fury in the targeted nations, who thoroughly understood the minority treaties’ capitulatory genesis and intent. The Romanian representative remonstrated against the “establishment of two categories of countries—countries of the first class, which, in spite of having small groups of minorities, were placed under no obligations; and countries of the second class, which had been obliged to assume extremely onerous obligations.”⁵⁹ In Greece, the government was even more explicit about the minority rights regime’s relationship to the old capitulations. The Greek ambassador in London Ioannis Gennadius protested vigorously, “You cannot ask us fairly or consistently to consider our Jewish fellow citizens differently than they are considered in England, nor has any other creed or nationality thought of requesting . . . a system of capitulations in Greece.”⁶⁰

They were enforced anyway. The first of the so-called minority treaties, signed with Poland in June 1919 and serving as the basis for all the others, required that the signatories would “not prohibit or interfere with the free exercise of any creed, religion or belief . . . and that no person within their respective jurisdictions shall be molested in life, liberty or pursuit of happiness by reason of his adherence to any creed, religion or belief.” This treaty and its later iterations all called for equal rights for all citizens, the free exercise of religion and cultural practice, including language, and some mechanisms for protecting cultural distinctiveness, without providing any form of political autonomy.⁶¹ Again following on the capitulations model, the appellation of “minority” applied to specific communities under particular conditions, not to all nonmajoritarian citizens of the affected states. The League’s Information Section specified that the treaties did not provide “a general jurisprudence applicable wherever racial, linguistic or religious minorities existed . . . [but would offer assistance where] owing to special circumstances, these problems might present particular difficulties.”⁶² Above all, these guarantees of religious freedom for “minorities” were paired, first in the Polish treaty and then in the dozen-plus formulations that followed, with economic guarantees benefiting the European powers: “What the Great Powers do is in the act of assigning new territories to an already existing State, or constituting a new State, to lay down conditions on which they transfer the territories to such State. These conditions are that all bona fide inhabitants of the territories in question shall receive full rights of citizenship and that in the future no distinction shall be made between citizens in consequence of difference of race, religion, or language . . . In addition to this we have provisions by which Poland undertakes not to make any discrimination against the commerce of any of the Allied and Associated Powers.”⁶³

French prime minister Georges Clemenceau’s claim that the new system had been “carefully drafted so as to make it clear that Poland will not be in any way under the tutelage of those Powers who are signatories to the Treaty” indicated the care taken, at some moments, to hide the continuity between the old capitulations and the new minority treaties.⁶⁴ But not all Allied officials were so circumspect. A British Foreign Office memo from 1922 on the subject of the capitulations noted, “Her Majesty’s Government decided in 1914 to recognise these annexations [by Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia, following the Balkan wars], provided that the annexing State acknowledged the binding force, in respect of the new territories, of those provisions of the Treaty of Berlin which ensured the equal rights of religious or national minorities . . . [implying] the termination of the capitulations.”⁶⁵ Woodrow Wilson himself was even more straightforward about the mechanisms of enforcement: “There underlies all of these transactions the expectation on the part, for example, of Rumania, and of Czecho-Slovakia, and of Serbia, that if any covenants of this settlement are not observed, the United States will send her armies and her navies to see that they are observed.”⁶⁶

As the League took over the administration of the minorities regime, it quite often explicitly presented them as a continuation of the capitulations. “The protection of minorities is not an entirely new question,” a League Information Section pamphlet declared in 1923. “A very interesting chapter . . . is supplied by the regime of the ‘capitulations’ which preserved for Christians in the Levant, who were subjects of Western States, the right of having recourse to the jurisdiction of their own countries as represented by the consular courts.”⁶⁷ It further noted the practice of “protection” for particular religious or ethnic groups that had emerged out of the capitulations, highlighting France’s demands of guaranteed rights for Catholics in Greece as a price of recognition of independence. Even more tellingly, the document attributed provenance to the two treaties that, as we have seen, had sought to reformulate capitulatory access as “protections” for certain communities: the Treaty of Paris of 1856, “by which the Sultan granted very extensive rights to the Christian or non-Moslem communities of the Ottoman Empire,” and the Berlin Congress of 1878, which “guaranteed freedom of religion to all nations of these States, as well as to foreigners.”⁶⁸

The capitulatory origins of the minority regime were, unsurprisingly, especially evident in their application to the new republic of Turkey. The Treaty of Lausanne that formally recognized the new Turkish state (and, infamously, established international support for the principle and practice of nation building via ethnic cleansing in Greece and Anatolia) included a series of minority protection clauses modeled after the Polish example that provoked even stronger resentment in Turkey than in Eastern Europe.⁶⁹ It declared that “Turkish nationals belonging to non-Moslem minorities will enjoy the same civil and political rights as Moslems. All the inhabitants of Turkey, without distinction of religion, shall be equal before the law.” It went on to clarify the international implications of such a commitment: “Turkey agrees that . . . these provisions constitute obligations of international concern and shall be placed under the guarantee of the League of Nations.”⁷⁰ In other words, just as under the capitulations, the rights of Turkish non-Muslims could serve as a site of external political and military intervention in the Turkish state.

Arguing against the inclusion of such minority protection clauses at Lausanne, Turkish foreign minister Ismet Inönü pointed out not only that the Ottoman state had long demonstrated an exponentially greater degree of religious toleration than Europe, but also that over the past two centuries Ottoman encounters with Europe had firmly enshrined an association between the “protection” of non-Muslims and unwelcome European intervention in Turkish territory. “In Turkey, for an average citizen,” he noted pointedly, “the best way to benefit from all the rights is not to have any suspicious ties with outside actors.”⁷¹ The Turkish envoy Riza Nur went further, outlining the political—and territorial—consequences of an interventionist minority rights regime for Turkey:

The West thinks that we have three kinds of minorities: ethnic minorities, linguistic minorities, and religious minorities. This is a great threat for us . . . [By defining minorities along] ethnic lines, they will put the Circassians, Bosnians, Kurds etc. side by side with the Greeks and Armenians. By language, they will make those Muslims who speak different languages minorities. By religion they will make two million Alevis who are real Turks, minorities. Hence, they want to divide us . . . If they strive a little harder they would make the ants in Turkey minorities as well.⁷²

Such objections had their roots in the long history of capitulatory intervention in the Ottoman sphere. As Inönü told the Lausanne negotiators, “an equitable solution of the question of the minorities in Turkey could not be found without a short recapitulation being made, in the first place, of the history of the Ottoman Empire,” adding bitterly, “the good understanding which had existed [between Muslims and non-Muslims] up to then began to give way to a mutual distrust and the unhappy events which resulted from it caused much suffering to the majority as well as to the minorities . . . [having] their origin in the first place in foreign instigations which aimed at working for the downfall of a great empire.”⁷³

And just as so many times before, these debates over international protection for minorities took place alongside paired conversations about imperial economic access to Anatolia. As British foreign secretary Lord George Curzon put it to the Lausanne delegation, in classically imperial language echoing Gladstone’s long ago declaration,

Ismet Pasha asked why any different system should be required in Turkey from that which is applied to the neighbouring countries. The answer is very simple: there is no analogy. In Turkey we are dealing with foreign colonies of great size and importance, established for centuries and deeply rooted in the soil, which have enjoyed a particular form of protection . . . It is indisputable that the prosperity of Turkey rests largely on the foundation of foreign trade. Great business houses—English, French, Greek, Armenian and no doubt others—have established commercial relations at Constantinople and invested large sums of money there. While they have made sufficient fortunes for themselves, they have contributed very largely to the prosperity and wealth of Turkey. If you decline to consider any revision of your judicial system and stand, as Ismet Pasha did this morning, on an absolute refusal, you will bring that system down with a crash.

He added, unconvincingly, “the Turkish delegation may think that I have been pleading on behalf of British and foreign traders, but I am doing nothing of the sort.”⁷⁴

Legal scholar Umut Özsu has noted that the Ottoman Empire had long served as a kind of laboratory for experiments in new kinds of external intervention, which could then be deployed in other semi-imperial zones across the globe.⁷⁵ With the Lausanne Treaty’s application of minority protection clauses to the new Turkish state alongside intertwined guarantees of foreign access to Turkish resources and markets, the path of these capitulatory experiments in the Ottoman sphere—from Anatolia to the Balkans, to Eastern Europe to the Balkans again, and back to republican Turkey—had come full circle. As historian Lerna Ekmekçioğlu perceptively notes in her recounting of this episode, “minority rights threatened the new Turkey because they signaled the political repetition of the past.”⁷⁶

In Anatolia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe, the minorities treaties did not finally manage to provide the kind of opportunity for influence that their precursors had offered to the so-called Great Powers. In the absence of the United States and its muscular vision of enforcement, the League’s powers were simply too limited to be meaningful. It set up a petitions system designating a “committee of three” to receive and process complaints relating to minority rights. If the committee judged a petition valid, it would forward the document to the state involved and request corrective action. If the state refused or dissented, the case would go to a further committee review. Beyond that, it was not clear what recourse the League might have. The committee—presumably trying to tamp down expectations—declared preemptively in 1922 that its role would normally be limited to “benevolent and informal communications” with the relevant authorities, and warned minorities that they, too, had responsibilities: to “co-operate as loyal fellow citizens with the nations to which they now belong.”⁷⁷ In other words, where the capitulations had operated in a context of potential (and often actual) military action, the minority treaties could normally threaten little more than a strongly worded letter.⁷⁸

Unsurprisingly, then, the places where British and French imperial officials found the most active use for the postwar concept of “minority rights” were in a sphere of direct military control: the mandate states of the Eastern Mediterranean. Susan Pedersen has famously described the mandates—the formal designation for the colony-lite arrangements, overseen by the League of Nations, under which the British and French took possession of the old Ottoman Arab provinces after 1920—as primarily “mechanisms for generating talk . . . [requiring] the imperial powers to engage in a protracted, wearisome, and public debate about how undemocratic rule over alien populations (accepted before the Wilsonian era as an entirely normal state of affairs) could be justified.”⁷⁹ This understanding is not entirely wrong, but it is strikingly incomplete. The mandates were mechanisms for not only justifying but formalizing the translation of older modes of imperial intervention into new forms of internationalism, particularly an imperialist-internationalist economic order. They were mechanisms for not just discussing but enforcing, by military means, a more or less permanent racial hierarchy of political rights enshrined in international law. And above all, they were mechanisms for deliberately provoking precisely the kind of local violent reactions that could continue to justify Western colonial oversight. As such, the idea of mandatory “protection” for minorities from Lebanon to Iraq came to play an important role in the ongoing rationalization of the brutal League-supported European colonial occupation of much of the Arab Eastern Mediterranean.

Many of the ideas of the minorities treaties—the rights of minorities to civil status, cultural institutions, and religious and linguistic freedom of expression—made their way into the governing documents of the mandatory system and into the elaborate discursive legitimizations of ongoing British and French colonial rule over Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine.⁸⁰ In Syria, French concerns for the status and rights of “minorities” came to constitute a major governing principle and remained a legitimization of French colonial rule into the Second World War.⁸¹ In Lebanon, the idea of “minorities” and the protections they required came to form a fundamental principle of the colonial state structure.⁸² In Iraq, the British made use of the principle of minority rights to make territorial claims for the British-controlled Iraqi state, claiming that the safety of the Assyrian “minority”—many relatively new arrivals whom the British had introduced into Iraq as refugees in the last stages of the war—could not be guaranteed in the event of the (oil-rich) province of Mosul being assigned to the new state of Turkey.⁸³ In Palestine, the idea of minority rights provided an important and increasingly thoroughly conceived legitimization of the political and economic privileges granted to the European Jewish settler community, which over the course of the mandate was more and more frequently described as a “minority” requiring special protection by the state and the international community.⁸⁴ (It is further worth noting the parallels between the petitions system of the Minorities Commission and the one set up for the Permanent Mandates Commission, both of which broadly sought to dismiss petitioners’ capacities to participate in international political and legal discourse, casting them as uncomprehending of the terms of the mandatory or minority system, impossible to address because of their claims of nationality for minorities or mandatory subjects, or simply angry in tone.⁸⁵) In all these places, such claims of concern for minority rights was notably paired with the imposition of a set of liberal tariff regimes intended to benefit the many British and French companies—most of whose presence dated from the period of the capitulations—that continued to operate in the mandatory states.⁸⁶ The mandates system thus represented a mode of formalizing long-term and exceptionally violent military occupations in service of continued European commercial extraction, with the pretense of “minority protection” serving an important justificatory purpose.

A similar situation emerged in the nonmandatory but still semicolonized territory of Egypt, where the “protection” of the Coptic community had long served as a rationalization of British military and political rule.⁸⁷ The question of minority rights now reemerged as a rationale for continued imperial dominance as the British negotiated the specifics of its ongoing involvement in a theoretically independent Egypt, in the face of mass demonstrations and international condemnation.⁸⁸ A key question for the British was how to protect their capitulatory privileges in the era of independence, an especially fraught issue in a place where many other countries possessed similar claims. “By the system of the Capitulations,” one observer wrote, “fifteen states had secured extra-territorial rights of a very extensive character. These included not only certain commercial concessions, but exemption from courts of local jurisdiction, inviolability of domicile and protection from arrest, and most important of all—immunity from personal taxation without assent of their Government.”⁸⁹ By the end of the First World War, then, there were fifteen mostly European “centres of extra-territorial jurisdiction” within Egypt’s borders.⁹⁰

As the negotiations proceeded, Britain sought simultaneously to abolish or limit the capitulatory advantages enjoyed by other countries in Egypt while recasting its own such privileges as aspects of Egypt’s freely chosen commitment to the international community, tied above all to the protection of minorities. General Edmund Allenby outlined the British plan for Egypt in a proposal to the Egyptian government in late 1921, which specified that martial law would be lifted only once specific rights of British intervention in Egypt had been secured: “(a) security of communications of British Empire; (b) defence of Egypt against all foreign aggression or interference direct or indirect; (c) protection of foreign interests in Egypt and protection of minorities; (d) the Sudan.”⁹¹ Three months later, the unilateral British declaration of Egyptian independence made use of precisely the same language. The British witness and chronicler Harold Temperley understood clearly what was taking place in postwar Egypt: “Both the Capitulatory regime or its substitute . . . seem hardly reconcilable with ‘independence’ or ‘sovereignty’ as normally understood.”⁹²

The struggle to recast the capitulations in Egypt in terms sufficiently beneficial to not only Britain but the other European powers went on for nearly two decades, ending only with the eventual signing of the Montreaux Convention in 1937. By now the Americans—who had long enjoyed capitulatory privileges in Egypt as elsewhere—were on board as well. A subcommittee chair on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations described the situation in 1938: “This convention fulfills the plan for relinquishment of capitulatory rights which . . . are out of accord with the spirit of the times, and they exist now, outside of Egypt, only in China and, to a limited extent, in Morocco and Muscat,” adding, “they are suspended in Syria and Palestine, pending the mandate.”⁹³ In other words, the capitulations in the old Ottoman Arab provinces could formally end only when other devices similarly protective of Western economic interests—the minorities regime and the mandates system, sometimes in combination—had successfully replaced them.

There is a further historical irony here. In its formalization of “minority protection” as a mode of neo-imperial intervention across the ex-Ottoman territories, the interwar minorities regime contributed to a profound sectarianization of the post-Ottoman political landscape and substantially weakened the position of the very communities they were notionally intended to protect. From Anatolia to Egypt to the Mashriq, already extant trends of viewing non-Muslim Ottoman communities as venues for foreign influence intensified substantially in the two decades following the First World War. As the architects of the postwar agreements doubled down on defining postwar Middle Eastern and Balkan states in majoritarian terms and establishing special externally guaranteed protections for their “minorities,” they ushered in a new era of segregation and isolation for communities that had been long integrated into the social, cultural, and economic—if not necessarily the political—fabric of the Ottoman sphere.⁹⁴ Neither did the threat of foreign intervention on behalf of newly designated minorities do much to improve their position in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where the longstanding imperial strategy of identifying and backing particular ethnic or religious client communities eventually helped to create a toxic postwar stew of zero-sum ethnonationalisms—tensions further inflamed by the minorities treaties’ echoes of capitulatory intervention and the reminders they provided of the reach of European empire even in the era of the theoretically sovereign nation-state.

In a recent broad assessment of Western humanitarianism since the eighteenth century, historian Davide Rodogno offers a damning analysis of the phenomenon. “In different epochs,” he writes, “I kept observing humanitarians who needed chaos to harbinger order. They needed anarchy to govern, the needy to rescue, and war and horror to exist … Humanitarians arrogantly interpret who is and who is not a victim, or they decide the ranking of victims according to their priorities.”⁹⁵ The same could be said of those who invented the category of minority victims for the purposes of inviting their protection. Certainly, humanitarian feeling for the plight of Jews in Poland and Germans in Hungary, and worry for what might happen if these new states fell apart, played a role at the peace conference and its aftermath.⁹⁶ But far more fundamental to the minorities regime was the long-established British, French, and Russian traditions of treating the Christian and Jewish communities now being labeled “minorities” as a strategic entry point for European imperial influence in the Ottoman sphere, from the Balkans to North Africa to the Eastern Mediterranean. In the final analysis, Inönü was right: the minorities treaties had vanishingly little to do with European concern for actual minority populations. Rather, they were designed to enshrine the idea that minority communities represented a legitimate site of external intervention into the affairs of the newly defined postwar European and Middle Eastern nations that housed so many Allied economic interests. As Lithuanian-born jurist Jacob Robinson put it with unusual candor in 1943, “the minorities provisions constituted a corollary and corrective to the principle of national self-determination”—not in Western Europe, of course, but across the newly colonized and semi-colonized territories of the former Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires.⁹⁷

Perhaps, then, the minorities regime was not after all a failure. In the end, it did precisely what it was designed to do—which was not to protect the increasingly beleaguered minority communities for whose welfare the League declared itself responsible, but rather to plausibly recast old-fashioned capitulatory intervention in Eastern Europe and the Middle East as a new form of well-intentioned humanitarian internationalism. By this measure, the minorities regime succeeded resoundingly, even brilliantly: for more than twenty years it went on collecting praise for its altruistic intentions, even as the actual communities now saddled with the novel label of “minority” faced newly existential threats. A reckoning with the realities of their ever more perilous position would, it seemed, have to wait for another war.

Laura Robson is the Oliver-McCourtney Professor of History at Penn State University. She is the author or editor of five books, most recently The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the collected volume Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth Century Territorial Separatism, coedited with Arie Dubnov (Stanford University Press, 2019). She is currently working on a history of global refugee resettlement schemes in the twentieth century.

I presented early versions of this article at workshops at the German Historical Society in Washington, DC, the School of International Service at American University, and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki; I thank the organizers and the other participants of all these events for their valuable feedback. I am also very grateful to Ramazan Hakkı Öztan and Georgios Giannakopoulos for their careful and incisive readings of earlier drafts. Finally, I would like to offer my thanks to the editors and the anonymous readers at the American Historical Review, whose many helpful suggestions much strengthened the article.

Notes