ABSTRACT
Nazi genocide was but the most extreme variant of the international experimentation in policy towards ethnic minorities that had begun with the disintegration of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Romanov empires in the maelstrom of World War I. In the interwar years, the international community proved strikingly reluctant to draw on the Greco-Turkish population exchange as a precedent. The idea of protecting minorities by law emerged rather belatedly during World War I. The sudden collapse of the great empires of Central and Eastern Europe caught most policymakers by surprise. The Polish Minorities Treaty was guaranteed by the League of Nations, which apparently meant that complaints could be brought to Geneva (though not directly by the minority concerned). At the same time, the minority’s treaties were bitterly resented as a humiliation by the countries concerned. They were particularly irritated by the fact that there was no universal minority-rights regime.
