Who's Afraid of Violent Language?

Abstract

The peace treaties following the Great War dictated that certain nation-states accept, as the price of international recognition, agreements to protect the rights of their minority populations. Responsibility to 'guarantee' and 'supervise' the minority treaties fell to a novel and untried international institution, the League of Nations. It established the 'minority petition procedure', an unprecedented innovation within international relations that initiated transnational claims-making. Focusing on the supervision of agreements pertaining to the Macedonian region, I examine how the Minorities Section of the League of Nations Secretariat handled 'minority petitions' alleging state infractions of minority treaties. I consider, in particular, a preoccupation among both bureaucrats and states with 'violent language' in petitions. I argue that this preoccupation signalled anxieties about honour, sovereignty and legitimacy, about the ambiguous position of 'minority states' and about the potentially explosive effects of popular energies in the post-war international order.

Transnational Collaborations among Women’s Organizations and Questions of Minorities and Macedonia, 1925–30

“…Referring to language that was either passionate or critical, or both, "violent language" was a kind of "unruly" linguistic behavior that transgressed codes of diplomacy, but also codes of class and race hierarchy cultivated within the League of Nations' institutional space. 59 Significantly, governments of treaty-bound or "minority states" were particularly prickly about such language. Already facing the humiliating challenge to their sovereign authority in having to submit to minority treaty supervision in the first place, they repeatedly insisted that they would not tolerate what they perceived as provocative and insulting challenges to their rule from their own subjects.…”