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.

List of maps; List of photographs; Preface; Abbreviations; A note on place and personal names; Part I. From Empires to New States: 1. Prologue: the Congress of Berlin; 2. Bucharest, August 1913; 3. The Great War; 4. Lemberg; Part II. The Minority Treaties: 5. Paris; 6. Pinsk; 7. May; 8. The 'Little Versailles'; Part III. A New Era of Minority Rights?: 9. Geneva; 10. Berlin; 11. Epilogue: the road to Munich; Conclusions; Bibliography; Index.

Carole Fink is the Professor of European History at the Ohio State University. She has written several books, including The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy, 1921-22 (1984), which was awarded the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association, and Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge University Press, 1989), which has been translated into five languages.