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

Abstract

Scholars have long considered the post–World War I minorities regime—defined and encompassed by a series of “minorities treaties” with various Balkan, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern states and the construction of a “Minorities Commission” in the new League of Nations to enforce them—as a basically well-intentioned, if ultimately misguided, first step toward the concept of internationally guaranteed human rights. In fact, the minorities treaties had vanishingly little to do with European concern for actual minority populations anywhere. Rather, they represented a new iteration of an imperial vision that had marked relations between the Ottoman Empire and the European powers of Britain, France, and Russia since the late eighteenth century: the idea, enshrined in the so-called capitulations agreements, that non-Muslim communities within the Ottoman sphere could represent a site of European economic, political, and military intervention and redefine the Ottoman state—and now the emerging nation-states of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant—as possessing a lesser form of sovereignty.

Introduction: Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Quest for Homogeneity in Interwar Europe

“…18 The decision to limit minority protection to some countries also offered ground for Great Power intervention into the domestic affairs of the states forced to sign minority treaties, a practice that some scholars have directly linked to the privileges offered to Western citizens and Christian minorities by the capitulations system in the Ottoman Empire. 19 The unequal application of the treaties reflected both new and old understandings of sovereignty shared among European political elites. Nineteenth-century conceptions of sovereignty had emphasized the absolute power of the state.…”