Assessing the “Paris System”: Self-determination and Ethnic Violence in Alsace-Lorraine and Asia Minor, 1919–23

Abstract

The Alsatian capital Strasbourg is a long way from Smyrna (today's Izmir), the main seaport of western Asia Minor (Anatolia). Yet in the wake of the First World War, both cities were gripped by the same, powerful new historical force that tied national selfdetermination and minority rights to interstate conflict and ethnic violence. Across Europe and in several parts of Europe's colonial sphere, the quest for sovereignty and self-determination wound up with looting, deportations, massacres, and mass expulsions of minorities. 1 Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, and others have placed the violence following the armistice of November 1918 in the context of a "Greater War" that stretched from 1913 to 1923. 2 If seen from this perspective, the rhetoric of national self-determination had both a stabilizing and a destabilizing effect. On the one hand, it mobilized Allied forces and populations to bring the fighting to a successful end. But on the other, it infused international politics and nationalist movements with a powerful new idea with which to challenge the territorial status quo beyond the end of the war. As the cases of Alsace-Lorraine and Asia Minor indicate, the resulting dynamics of violence and political strife between 1918 and 1923 cut across simple divisions of a civic, politically unified, and peaceful "West" versus an ethnically fragmented and violent "East. " 3 Despite the growing number of studies on postwar violence and the "Greater War, " we still lack a systematic comparative framework to assess and explain why the "Paris system" caused such regionally diverse dynamics. 4 Most of the above-cited studies focus on a single case, loosely placed in a wider postwar setting. While there are a few insightful works juxtaposing two regions affected by conflicts involving minorities, these are predominantly concerned with the cases at hand and only in passing, if at all, allude to more general factors, patterns, or mechanisms driving these conflicts. 5 Recent French and German accounts of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and its repercussions highlight the complexity, contradictions, and multiple limitations of the emerging international order; yet they offer little by way of analytical guidance and systematic comparison of different regional settings. 6 More recently, Roberta Pergher and Marcus Payk have provided an excellent and concise survey of territorial 5

The Paris System in Western Europe: Minorities, Self-Determination, and the Management of Difference in the “Civilized West”

“…The resulting multi-level analysis of interwar minority politics helps better assess and explain both the fragility and the (at least temporary) resilience of the interwar international order. Furthermore, we suggest that the comparative study of Western European cases as presented here can be applied to other interwar regional settings, helping us overcome continuing divisions between "East" and "West" (Prott 2023). But this article could also prove to be a useful analytical tool for scholars working on ethnic conflict and minority issues in other global regions and historical eras.…”