3 - Sovereign Nations

Summary

In the aftermath of World War I, some politicians, scholars, and lawyers argued that peoples and nations (as distinct from states) ought to be subjects of international law and bear rights within the international order. However, the principle of “national self-determination” at the center of the rhetorical reconstruction of the postwar international order irrevocably confounded law and politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Treaties were signed guaranteeing the protection of minorities within the newly created states of Eastern Europe. But just who were those minorities? Would a Polish speaker who self-identified as German be considered a Polish or a German national? What about those who were both German and Pole? Similarly, as the League placed the former German colonial territories into Mandates, just what would the nationality of the inhabitants be? The problems of nationality continued to be unresolvable and the dream of having sovereign nations rather than states fell rapidly into disrepute with the annexation of Czechoslovakia and the onset of World War II.