The Dominion TUESDAY, JANUARY 27, 1931. EUROPE’S RESTIVE MINORITIES

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 104, 27 January 1931, Page 8

The Dominion TUESDAY, JANUARY 27, 1931. EUROPE’S RESTIVE MINORITIES

One of the most difficult of many difficult responsibilities entrusted to the League of Nations by the Treaty of Versailles is the custodianship of the guaranteed rights of the European minorities. There is hardly one of the minority populations in Europe winch has not considered, or does not consider itself, as having grievances against its particular Government on the ground of some major or minor infringement of these guaranteed rights. _ The unrest o these minorities, in fact, is a constant source of anxiety to European statesmen. . , An instance of this is afforded in the cabled decision of League Council against Poland in respect of allegations made against her of acts of terrorism committed upon German people in Polish Silesia. The League has no authority to alter the boundaries defined by the Peace Conference. . All it can do is to investigate complaints and make recommendations to the Governments concerned for the removal of grievances. The minority, populations in Europe number 30,000,000, and include such a variety of peoples as German, Polish, Magyar, Rumanian, Slovak, Albanian, Jewish, and others. Hence it is easily understood that the League must have plenty to do in soothing the feelings of racial groups who have been arbitrarily forced to accept the authority of Governments of alien nationalities by the decree of a Peace Council sitting in Paris. , The Peace Conference found this no easy matter, and compromised by elaborating a system of treaties which specifically secured to the minorities their rights of citizenship, religion, education, and language. The best thing that can be said about this arrangement is that it replaced a worse pre-war distribution of peoples under which the aggregate number of minorities was five times as great, with no guaranteed rights whatsoever. The real trouble, howevei, is that whereas under the old system their aspirations were rigorously, if unfairly, suppressed, under the new they have been allowed, under shelter of the guarantees, to become irrepressibly vocal. Actually the effect of the Minorities Treaties has been to encourage these racial groups to constitute themselves permanent and irreconcilable political parties, agitating not merely for their. Treaty rights, but for subversive political changes. Thus the main hope of the Peace Conference, that in time these groups would be assimilated by the peoples with whom they were artificially associated has been defeated. ’ The mischief of it is that the minority peoples under alien rule have a vote. In March, 1926, for example, it was estimated that there were 59 different Polish party groups working to secure representatives in Parliament. No fewer than 33 of these were racial groups representing Ukrainians, White Ruthenians, Germans and Jews. In 1922 they had 89 representatives out of 444. In 1928 they had 94. From the resulting incessant political turmoil was evolved the dictatorship of Marshal Pilsudski and his "Cabinet of Colonels.”

The’general result is a state of disaffection in Europe seriously prejudicing political stability and economic rehabilitation. The onlj remedy, as suggested by one writer on the subject, is to insist thal pretexts for strife shall be removed by the only adequate methods—• those of impartial fact-finding in concert (as the' League Council has just done with Poland), and of resolute action in the light of the facts thus elicited. “Propaganda, of attempts to gain acceptance for interested distortions of the truth,” he urges, "should be barred as an offence against peace.”