ABSTRACT
Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States, knew why Europe had erupted into war in 1914. On 11 February 1918 he declared, ‘This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union and the force to make good their claim to determine their own allegiances and their own forms of political life.’1 Whether or not Wilson’s perception of the role of frustrated nationalisms accurately identified the causes of the First World War is irrelevant; his diagnosis came to dominate the Peace Conference agenda. There were many national minorities in 1914. About 60 per cent of the population of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires were not members of the dominant German, Magyar and Russian nationalities. Although the figure fell below 50 per cent in the new Balkan states carved from the declining Ottoman empire, the overall position in eastern Europe was that about half the population were minorities, a total of 60 million people, of whom nearly half (27.4 million) were in the Austro Hungarian empire.2 The position in the Ottoman empire was less clear; unreliable and partial though the pre-war figures produced by the multinational empires in Europe might be, there had been some attempt to calculate them. This did not happen in the Ottoman area but Arabs, Armenians and Kurds are obvious examples to add to the empire’s remaining European subjects.
