NTAutonomy’s goal is to provide a new understanding of how the protection of national minorities was thought and implemented in the era of nationalism. Since the mid of the 19th century we have seen three different approaches to manage national diversity: First, national rights can be organised around the individual and equal citizen. Second, national rights can be granted to autonomous territorial units, where a national minority might form the local majority population. And third, minority rights can be granted to collective bodies, which unite persons of a common ethno-national affiliation, wherever they might live in the country. This means, that the legal entity is neither the individual nor a territory but the national group per se. These collective bodies manage the cultural affairs of their group autonomously. As this third approach is based on a person’s belonging to a collectivity, and not on a person’s place of residence, it has been labelled non-territorial autonomy.
NTA’s first objective was to trace the idea and practices of non-territorial autonomy to its origins in the multi-ethnic Habsburg and Russian Empires. We investigated the interrelations, continuities and adaptations of theoretical and practical approaches within the empires. When the concept started travelling at the turn of the twentieth century, in particular the Austro-Marxist model of non-territorial autonomy was largely received in Russia and was built into pre-existing Russian concepts of state reform. It turned out that the Russian adaptations and understandings of non-territorial autonomy left longer lasting imprints on how this concept was conceived of during the interwar period up to the present day.
The second objective was to examine how the idea of non-territorial autonomy was translated to the new political circumstances of the interwar period. Our research discovered that this concept was flexible enough to be adapted to warring ideological currents: communist, socialist, liberal and far right. Minority activists of the 1920s and 1930s, including Bolsheviks, Jewish Bundists, Baltic German aristocrats or Sudeten German extremists, explicitly and implicitly referred to practical and theoretical experiences of the Habsburg and Russian Empires. Our project thus emphasised these transtemporal and transnational connections in order to explain the different translations of the concept of non-territorial autonomy, and to demonstrate its applications.
Our third objective was to analyse the treatment of non-territorial autonomy within international systems of minority protection through the present day. While minority lobby groups like the interwar Congress of European Nationalities, or the contemporary Federal Union of European Nationalities, have advocated and continue to show support for the concept, international law making institutions like the League of Nations or the United Nations have been far more hesitant about it because they have focused on individual rights. The non-territorial autonomy model was omnipresent among interwar minority activists who sought to gain agency over their own national future. The knowledge of the concept did not necessarily imply that those who discussed it were in favour of this form of collective minority protection. Critics throughout time and space pointed in particular to the problems of distributing rights and duties to national groups as corporate bodies, because this makes it necessary to define who belongs to the group and who not, which interferes with the highly subjective nature of national identity.
