11 - The Minorities Question at the Paris Peace Conference: The Polish Minority Treaty, June 28, 1919

Summary

On June 28, 1919, shortly after Germany signed its treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the two Polish delegates, Ignacy Paderewski and Roman Dmowski, were ushered into an adjoining room. There they signed an agreement with the Allied and Associated Powers that ostensibly heralded a new era in the history of minority rights. The Polish Minority Treaty, one of the notable accomplishments of the Paris Peace Conference, has received mixed reviews from publicists and historians over the past seventy-five years. Proclaimed at the time a “new bill of rights” for minorities, it rapidly lost stature during the ambiguous 1920s and the violent 1930s and 1940s and was buried during the Cold War era, only to be exhumed, with more affirmative assessments, in the ethnically volatile atmosphere of recent years.

In order to appraise the Polish Minority Treaty on its own terms - and not by way of its misuse and the lackluster system of implementation that developed afterward - one must examine how it was constructed at the peace conference. This “little Versailles,” as the Poles still term their imposed obligation, although decidedly not one of the major undertakings of the Paris Peace Conference, was more than a side show.