Peak Event Report: Ljubljana group

The Paris Peace Conference changed the political map of Europe and concluded the process of replacing the centuries-old monarchies with modern nation-states, but which unsurprisingly opened the Pandora box of minority issues. It therefore shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Faculty of Law of the University of Ljubljana, where we come from, was founded on August 26th 1919. However, what might come as a surprise is that the first faculty meeting of its founding fathers was held in Paris as they were all members of the delegation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.Thus, Paris is not only the very city where the story of our faculty started, but also the very origin of the topic of our research, as the borders were redrawn at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. It was through the spirit of the city which sought to bring peace and freedom to all Europeans that we recognized what the next steps in our research will be.

As a group of student tutors for Legal History we were invited by professor Katja Škrubej to participate in the pilot project led by the EUTOPIA, namely the EUTOPIA learning communities for legal history. We were thrilled to had been invited to participate in an international learning community and to have an opportunity to work on such an interesting and multi-layered topic such as minorities with our fellow students across Europe. The Peak Event was a steppingstone towards deepening the ties with other students in the learning community, which has enabled us to share experiences and knowledge gained during the initial phase of our research. We are very glad to have attended the event and are looking forward to expanding our research on the Congress of the European Nationalities, as well as to enrich the blog together with our fellow EUTOPIANS!

Initially, all we were certain about was the fact that we are all interested in researching the topic in the time-frame proposed by Professor Škrubej, namely the status of the European minorities after the Treaty of Versailles. We were incredibly lucky that Professor Škrubej was aware of the existence of the estate of the late Slovenian jurist and politician from Trieste, dr. Josip Vilfan. Given that he was the spiritus agens of the Congress of the European Nationalities, we had an amazing opportunity to learn more about his work and the general climate regarding the policies of the European states towards national minorities within their territory after the First World War through studying his estate in the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, as well as building upon that knowledge base with secondary literature. The topic of the minority protection in the interwar period was quite vast, which made us direct the efforts of our research toward three sub-topics:

1. the very concept of the nation (as well as national self-determination) and its importance for the minority protection, 
2. the history of scientific institutes regarding the national minority rights, as well as the position of German minorities, with particular emphasis on the Gottschee German minority in Slovenian historic region of Carniola, 
3. the multifaceted perception of the question of the Carinthian Slovenes in the newly-founded Republic of Austria, inter alia, the connection of a specific minority with the genesis of the idea of a united Europe.

A 1921 German language map of Central Europe

URL:https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agdm/id/965

We consider the minority question to be of particular importance since we come from Slovenia, which is a country at the crossroads of the Alpine, Mediterranean, Dinarian and Pannonian regions of Europe. Each of us was interested in a different question regarding the minorities, yet we all managed to find more than enough material for our topics of interest in the extensive sources we examined. 

While the coronavirus situation made the transition to on-line learning faster and we were able to get to know some of our EUTOPIAN colleagues through coffee corner sessions on Microsoft Teams, meeting them at the Peak Event in Paris was a very pleasant experience, as the digital connected campus-learning still cannot replace in entirety the actual human contact. Using the positive feedback and different experiences from our fellow EUTOPIANS, we received at the Peak Event, we are now working on incorporating all of the above-mentioned themes into a coherent overview of the functioning of the Congress of the European Nationalities. The energy of the city which saw the map of Europe being changed after the First World War certainly gave an overwhelming feeling of responsibility intertwined with the poetic streets of the past, which made us turn inwards to come to a conclusion regarding our next steps. Concretely, we are expanding comprehensive picture of the state of the minority protection in the interwar Europe and the perception of the question of the minority rights by the intellectuals at the time.

We were also very grateful that Professor Škrubej helped us get in touch with dr. Grafenauer, an expert from the Slovenian Institute for Ethnic Studies, who also participated at the Peak Event via Microsoft Teams. This is of course very much beyond the standard curriculum activities, as we were able to deepen our knowledge on a topic that is interesting for us and involved different learning techniques, as well as multi-linguistic and transnational co-operation. What follows from the foregoing is the fact that this was a great opportunity for us to also expand our knowledge of foreign languages, as the documents from the dr. Vilfan’s estate that we analysed were written in English, French, German, Slovene, Italian, Russian and Serbian. What is more, we also learned more about the linguistic sensibility of other areas in Europe from our fellow EUTOPIANS, most notably our colleagues from the Vrije Universitet Brussel, who discussed the issue of Dutch language in Brussel throughout last two centuries. We are also looking forward to cooperating with EUTOPIAN colleagues in respect of better understanding of historical and social backgrounds of particular European minorities, as well as regards the potential uncertainties regarding the translation of ambiguous terms. We have, however, already learned from the EUTOPIAN colleagues of certain less-known themes which are not often discussed in history or legal history but are interesting examples of the examination of the minority question through time at the Peak Event.

Our research brought about a lot of insights into the issues arising from the position of ethnic minorities in the inter-war period. In the face of the crisis happening in Ukraine that began only a week after the EUTOPIA peak event, we are deeply struck how the studied issues which were explosive before the Second World War remain unresolved and continue to cast long shadows to the present day.

Authors: Aljoša Kalacanović, Kristjan Krapež and Vid Lobnik