Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938

Statesmen and scholars were inspired by a period after World War I (when the victors devised Minority Treaties for the new and expanded states of Eastern Europe) at the time that the Cold War ended between 1989-1991. This book is the first study of that period--between 1878 and 1938--when the Great Powers established a system of external supervision to reduce the threats in Europe's most volatile regions of Irredentism, persecution, and uncontrolled waves of westward migration. It is a study of the strengths and weaknesses of an early state of international human rights diplomacy as practiced by rival and often-uninformed Western political leaders, ardent but divided Jewish advocates, and aggressive state minority champions, in the tumultuous age of nationalism and imperialism, Bolshevism and fascism between Bismarck and Hitler.