HUMAN MOSAIC.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue LXIX, 21 September 1938, Page 10

HUMAN MOSAIC.

CENTRAL EUROPE PEOPLES.

MINORITIES PROBLEM INSOLUBLE. (By F.CJ.) Some emphasi* hae been Taid in the past few weeks, eince the development of the Czechoslovakia!, erteis. on what is called the minorities problem. This problem has been .riven particular point by the belated admission that the Sudeten Hermans, as a minority, have a real grievance against the State in which, after the treaties of Versailles, they hamu-ned to find themselves—Czechoslovakia, The point to consider is the origin of these minorities as a political problem, and whether that problem could have been obviated by wiser and hmjrei-ighted statesmen. Whether more could have been done to lessen tno political significance of these minorities by the larger State conceding more 1* a moot point; but let it be said briefly and straightlv that a* far as Central Europe i« concerned, the a-ctURI problem could not hav* been avoided, however boundaries had been juggled. To svnipatbiee with the Sudeten*, simply because they are a minority, therefore, js so much waste of time. The origin of this problem, which sroes hack to the dawn of European history, shows this beyond doubt. It must be remembered that this area wn« one meeting place of the barbarian hordes of the Kast and the more civilised ,>coples of the West. jr*t about the time of the fall of the Roman Empire. It is not necessary to delve back so far in inucJi detail; but 'to understand the matter it necessary to state that when the unity and the order for which Rome stood showed sign* of breaking after the death of Theodoehie ill 30."> \ D the barbarian* from the great niveterioue plain* beyond the Danube and the Rhine swept into the old Roman Empire Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome itself in 410 \ D., and such names as Oenseric the Vandal or Genghis Khan the Tartar have remained, a memory down the centuries of rapine and conquest. The Debatable Lands. Tn the centuries which followed down to the early Middle Ages, the eastern boundaries of those lands which Charlemagne brought under his control bermno. as it were, the (debatable hinds between the East and the Wist. In paa<l iig it is interesting to note that on a map showing Europe at the time of the death of Charlemagne In 814 there appears the name Bohemia, peopled by a race called the "Czeciii." The barbarians, so-called, were of many tribes, and in those debatable land* they gradually settled, not a« settled communities. not as embryonic rational State* in the same way as the' old Frankish Empire became loiighlv France and Germany, but as a nomadirpcoiile, part of which was always in a state of flu.x.

That is also part explanation of the minorities problem to-day. The area over which there is trouble now remained part of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire until its fßll a thousand years later nt the time M Xapoleon. They were part of the empire which took its place. Austro-Hiinsiai y. until its fall after the f.'reat War —and that brings 'i* back to the peace treaties.

Nowhere was the mixing of races more confused than in that entire. It was a mosaic of peoples, each with its own culture, language, and. to a lesser extent, national ideal. Some of them were the Magyars, the Poles, the Croats, the Czechs, the Slovenes, the Ruthe.nes. the Slavs, the Tartars. And there are others.

But that is not the worst. It is not as though all these races had conveniently arranged to live in separate little entities or communities, all the Slovenes here, all-'the Czechs there, and so on. It was just as though some giant hand had shaken a vast human pepper pot over the area, and thp human grains bad floated down haphazard.

Statistic* perhri|kft are rightly treated with suspicion when adduced as proof; but those do not need any explanation. They show how large the minorities are. In Oermany it«elf — exclusive of Austria—there are 30.000 Czechs. Tn Austria (now rart of the realms of Ho it Hitler) there were »S.OOO Czechs and Slovaks, 4.3,000 Slovenes, 44,700 Serbo-Croats. Lot of Sudeten Germans. Xor has the lot of the Sudeten Germans been over-harsh. Tn fact Professor R. W. SetonWatson. the eminent authority on Central Europe, in a book. "Britain and the Dictators," published this year, goes so far as to eay: "But it is essential that foreign opinion should realise that of the minorities in Europe, the Germans of Czechoslovakia have the fewest grievances (though their economic situation ae an over-industrialised area even under Austrian rule has been more than usually difficult since the world <7opret?eion). To take the most striking field of education, in the year JO.Vi they possessed their own university, three high schools, an academy of music, 80 secondary schools with 800 classes. 10 training colleges. 52 agrarian schools, 447 higher and 3298 lower primary schools, and 501 kindergartens. In the face of such figures the charge of Czechisation becomes simply grotesque."

To regard the present situation with a fair perspective, it is well to realise these facts, because there aro who would try to blame the treaty-makers of Versailles for the present criei* as well as much else.