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Missing footnotes strike again, still I think one can get the gist without them.
So it ends in a Soviet invasion, well it was never going to end well and this at least has the glimmer of a positive ending. Sure everything on the mainland will end up under Stalin's thumb, but at least the Soviet Navy is (1) insignificant and (2) thousands of miles away so Japan might be able to avoid utter defeat and disaster. They probably wont, but it is at least possible.
So it ends in a Soviet invasion, well it was never going to end well and this at least has the glimmer of a positive ending. Sure everything on the mainland will end up under Stalin's thumb, but at least the Soviet Navy is (1) insignificant and (2) thousands of miles away so Japan might be able to avoid utter defeat and disaster. They probably wont, but it is at least possible.
This was painful to write. I really, really wanted an unstable, evil Japanese Empire ruling Manchukuo in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But every damn negotiation they ever took part in revolved around "give us everything we want and we won't attack. For now. Probably."
As late as May 1945, the Japanese thought they could get a peace deal where they'd keep Taiwan, Korea, and Saipan, leaving Manchuria "independent."
I mean, really? When your cities are being firebombed and you've lost your entire fleet, maybe thinking you can walk out with your empire is unrealistic.
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That seems to have been an overall stragety for the Axis Powers: become delusional in the face of the unpleasant fact that you are losing the war.
Peacemakers
The removal of national minorities and their uniqueness from the life of a state must bring with it cultural deprivation for that state; the elimination of small peoples from the life of the European states must lead ultimately to the arrest and paralysis of European cultural life. Nationalism will silence the the astonishingly rich-sounding orchestra of Western intellectual life, breaking one instrument after another, until finally one piercing and dissonant trumpet of war shrieks through a gigantic barracks.-Paul Schiemann, 1939
The reaction of most of Europe to reports of a downed Italian plane in Southeastern Austria ranged from "Oh Christ, what have they done now?" to loathing and contempt for Italy. La Rocque, who had just brokered a European-settlement, had no desire to go to war to Italian adventurism in the ruins of a French ally. Attlee was no friend of the fascists, and Italy's failure in Spain, along with its humiliation during the Abyssinian Crisis, illustrated that their bark was worst than their bite. The most people would say is that Mussolini would have never been dumb enough to bog down in the Balkans. Still, this was one more crisis for a bruised and battered world. Fortunately, there were those who recognized that it had to stop. The removal of national minorities and their uniqueness from the life of a state must bring with it cultural deprivation for that state; the elimination of small peoples from the life of the European states must lead ultimately to the arrest and paralysis of European cultural life. Nationalism will silence the the astonishingly rich-sounding orchestra of Western intellectual life, breaking one instrument after another, until finally one piercing and dissonant trumpet of war shrieks through a gigantic barracks.-Paul Schiemann, 1939
While Yugoslavia burned and German-Polish strife threatened to set Europe ablaze, in three nations along the Baltic, unnoticed to most of Europe, another way was shown. Perhaps not being riven with delusions of grandeur and great power status, the Estonians, Latvians (and to a lesser extent Lithuanians) spent the period building up civil societies that tolerated and embraced their minority populations while undergoing economic expansion. It was here that a German from Jelgava, was born, and was first pushed towards the thoughts that led to the European Declaration of Human Rights.
Paul Schiemann was a German born in Jelgava in 1876, as the German elite in the Baltic provinces faced a threat from Russification. Schiemann completed a Doctorate at Griefswald in 1902, drawing on materials from the Foreign Office through his uncle, Theodor Schiemann (a prominent historian) had with Kaiser Wilhelm. Despite this, Schiemann returned home to the Baltic Provinces, where he hoped to work for greater autonomy for the Estonians, Latvians, and Germans.
Schiemann's initial plans were a failure, as most Baltic Peoples still associated the Germans (the Ritterschaften) with the autocratic Tsarist regime. [1] Schiemann was critical of the Tsarist-German collaboration, warning " 'So far revolution has deprived us only of material wealth. But our cultural inheritance has always been threatened most fiercely and brutishly by reaction." Such radical talk earned him the title "Red Schiemann", but despite his opposition to the Tsar's autocracy he fought for Russia in the Great War [2], spent a brief period in 1917 advocating for an independent Latvia in Berlin, and then returned home to help the German minority in Latvia make its way in a strange, new world.
Schiemann's thinking crystallized over the 1920s, and thanks in no small part to him the German position in Latvia was secured. German ministers served in the Latvian cabinet; at one point in the 1920s, Schiemann himself was considered to head a coalition government. Buoyed by such success, in 1926 Schiemann, along with other European minorities, hosted Europe's first minorities Congress in Geneva.
The timing was auspicious. The Locarno Treaties had raised hopes of a European-wide peace, and Germany's entry into the League heralded a chance to use the League's minority apparatus for the German minorities of Eastern Europe. Yet the first years of the League had illustrated significant shortcomings, with the League convinced that minority rights were a privilege, not a right; and that any undue pressure or violation of sovereignty was forbidden. But how, Schumann asked, could the great nations ignore the forty million minorities across the continent?[3] As he declared in 1934, "The Minority Problem is a European Problem. No country's fate can be independent of Europe's as a whole."
What was the solution? Schiemann's own approach was liberal; one might almost call it libertarian. Culture was a private affair where the state had no more right to interfere than religion. [4] Within Latvia, this meant that each community should handle its own schooling [5], Schiemann was a proponent of European unity; but to Schiemann European unity would only come when Europe consisted of states of nations, not nation-states.
Schiemann photographed before the 1933 Minorities Congress
The early 1930s were a nadir for Schiemann, as the League failed to alleviate minority concerns in Poland or Efforts to build an international organization to monitor minority rights failed because no nations were able, or willing, to cede control of their internal affairs to an international organization. And Schumann became perturbed by Stresemann's turn to the right, and his effort to leverage the German minorities of Europe for political gain. But he never gave up, and Schiemann's writings (including some directed to the German Foreign Office) were influential in the Prague Settlement, which ceded Czechoslovak Germans substantial cultural autonomy, were in a large part modeled on his ideals, and the Latvian example.
Then came the Vilnus Crisis. Schiemann and the Minorities Congress were active in calling for a lasting solution to the European problem, and it was thanks in no small part to their efforts that Poland and Germany agreed to a Treaty pledging to respect each other's minority rights. [6] But there was still no overarching framework. That would not come until 1941, as League peacekeepers rolled into Belgrade.
Although historians would cite the League's deployment of peacekeepers as a turning point for the League of Nations, this overstates the change. The League had deployed peacekeepers in the past, notably during the 1920 plebiscites in Silesia, Allenstein, and Schleswig[7], and during the Colombian-Peruvian crisis of 1933 [8], but these had always been to monitor international disputes, reflecting the League's original focus on preserving international peace. The decision of the League Council (Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy) [9] to offer Yugoslavia's government forces to "assist in promoting internal stability" was thus a marked shift, but, under the circumstances, the only one plausible. The League peacekeeping forces consisted of approximately thirteen thousand troops, from France, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, and Holland. Notably not included were Romania, Hungary, or Bulgaria, nations whose troops, it was felt, would only exacerbate tendencies. The first League troops arrived in February of 1941. What they found shocked a continent.
Europe's attention was painfully focused on a part of the continent it had hitherto ignored. [10] What were they going to do with the place? You couldn't simply divide up the region along national lines; the population was too evenly mixed by centuries of living together, and creating another five backwards states with irredentist demands and engaging in economic warfare would hardly improve the region. But the pre-existing order had (no thanks to the Italians) led to fighting far bloodier and more atrocious than anything the Continent had seen. [11]
Some proposals called for population transfers, abolishing communities to end conflict and breaking apart Yugoslavia. This had the unfortunate result of breaking unleashing a host of new problems and rewarding the Italians for promoting the breakup of their neighbors. Would the Macedonians be an independent nation? Or would they be given to the Bulgarians? Maybe the Greeks? What about the Hungarian population of Yugoslavia? Furthermore, breaking across Yugoslavia would pretty much give the Italians what they wanted. So, a breakup was off the table, at least for now.
Nor were people willing to just walk away and leave Yugoslavia to collapse again. Only the relative sanity of its neighbors prevented the crisis from escalating. Wouldn't it just occur as soon as everyone left?
The Yugoslav left, dominated by the Communists, had its own vision for Yugoslavia's future, who had taken advantage of the vacuum to become a powerful force in Bosnia-Hergeviza and parts of Croatia, led by veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Under Josip Tito, the Yugoslav Communist Party became a darling of Europe's left by advocating a worker's federation which would protect minority rights, and earned praise for combating attempts at ethnic cleansing by both sides during the war. On more than one occasion Schumacher speculated that Germany's workers had expelled their monarch after losing a war, and that Yugoslavia could be served by the example. But the Yugoslav Communists could never triumph over the other factions, and even Schumacher had no desire to see Yugoslavia end up radicalized through a civil war like Spain.
The only plan that could work, and would work, was a constitutional reform, placing the peoples of Yugoslavia on a clean (or at least slightly less dirty) slate. "And if it doesn't work," Schumacher quipped, "German presidents will be thanking German boys in Serbia for the important work they're doing for the next thirty years."
The Constitution for the Federated Kingdom of Yugoslavia was hammered out over the course of 1941, and was only approved, in part, because of a lack of a better alternative. Many of its features were impractical, the product of academics who thought the first constitution failed due to poor legalese, and not because Yugoslavia had failed to construct a civil society. But its key, defining features helped mitigate many of the worst excesses of the previous kingdom. Drawing upon Schiemann's influence and the Czech and Baltic examples, it promised the kingdom a new start; one that would, it was hoped, end the population transfers and regicide.
In place of the kingdom's centralized government, there were six federal provinces (or banovinas): Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Kosovo and Vojvodina, although not given their own provincial status, were given autonomyw ithin Serbia and their own representation in the national legislature. Within each province, all individuals had the right to list themselves as whatever ethnicity they pleased, and to attend primary schooling which was funded on a pro rata basis (adjusted decennially for each census). The new constitution reiterated support for freedom of assembly and speech; but unlike in the old kingdom, the communists were allowed to operate freely. [12] Finally, King Alexander, at the age of 18, assumed the throne, promising a new start for the peoples of the kingdom.
Yugoslavia's new king was supposed to promise a fresh start and a break from the Serbian chauvinism that had dominated the state
It wasn't loved; but it might be better than the piercing shrieks of war. For now, that would do.
_______________________________________
One of the other consequences to flow from the war was French support for something liberals and Pan-Europeans had long aspired: A European Charter of Human Rights. This was a revolutionary development, and deserves some discussion. There had been advocates of a united Europe since the days of Napoleon, but fairly few had given much thought to its government. Even Aristide Briand, who proposed a European Union in 1929 in response to the threat posing by economic troubles and German rearmament, focused on respect for inter-state borders, not the rights of the rights of the individual. Even the 1930s proponents of European integration spent more time extolling the opportunities that would spring from continent-wide planning, and saw no problem with Fascist Italy being a member.
To a large extent, this can be traced to Schiemann's observation that minorities faced the greatest danger in dictatorships and illiberal regimes. Belgium was a nation of two minorities, but nobody worried that Walloons would be exterminated. Switzerland, where Schiemann vacationed to cure his tuberculosis was a mélange of Italians, Germans, and Frenchmen who bought into the notion that they were all Swiss. And in Eastern Europe itself, it was in Czechloslovakia that minority rights were most respected. As a rising tide of autocracy swept across the continent, he could not help but note that minority rights seemed to be a consequence, not a predecessor, to a civil society.
But how to promote these values? The same way the League of Nations sought to abolish war: thought international pressure and making the alternative infeasible. In other words, there had to be consequences towards not respecting the rights of man; and even if a dictatorship could buy stability temporarily, Yugoslavia showed that when the regime collapsed the underlying problems were only exacerbated. By 1940, Schiemann's argument had gained weight on the left and among the continent's liberal parties.
Yet the policy would only be adopted thanks to Paul Reynaud, President of the French Republic. Horrified by tales from Spain and Yugoslavia, hoping to improve ties with Germany, and worried that France was adrift in a world dominated by the Anglo-Saxons and Russians, he pushed for a treaty of European human rights; something to show that Europe, too, stood for more than war and killings.
Considering that Europe is the birthplace of freedom of thought, and rule of law, and that the achievement of greater unity between its peoples is the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms;
Reaffirming their profound belief in those fundamental freedoms which are the foundation of justice and peace in the world and are best maintained on the one hand by an effective political democracy and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the human rights upon which they depend;
Being resolved, as the governments of European countries which are like-minded and have a common heritage of political traditions, ideals, freedom and the rule of law, to take the first steps for the collective enforcement of certain rights....-European Declaration of Human Rights, 1943
Reaffirming their profound belief in those fundamental freedoms which are the foundation of justice and peace in the world and are best maintained on the one hand by an effective political democracy and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the human rights upon which they depend;
Being resolved, as the governments of European countries which are like-minded and have a common heritage of political traditions, ideals, freedom and the rule of law, to take the first steps for the collective enforcement of certain rights....-European Declaration of Human Rights, 1943
[1] Indeed, after the Duma was dissolved on June 3, 1907, the German elite welcomed the news.
[2] His brother fought for the Kaiser, which oddly enough didn't break apart the family.
[3] As OTL showed, easily!
[4] Or healthcare.
[5] Although Schiemann supported joint post-primary schooling, to encourage intermingling.
[6] Of course, since Germany had been doing this since the 1920s, this was less of a big deal. For many in Poland this grated more than Danzig's restoration to Germany, since it as an attack on Poland's hard-won sovereignty. The German minority in Poland is pretty much gone by 1939, alas.
I can't find a place to mention it, but in OTL he and his wife hid a Jewish girl in their house during the Nazi occupation of Riga, at a time when he himself was under house arrest. But he's less cool than Rommel and Stauffenberg, who get a medal for being the nicest guys on Hitler's team.
[7] In OTL France actually deployed 11,500 troops to Silesia; the Italians deployed 2,000, and the British deployed either 11,500, or 2,000.
[8] The Peruvian-Colombian border crisis also marked the first (and in OTL only time that peackeepers wore League armbands and deployed under the League flag.
[9] I don't think Mussolini would have left the League. Italy goes along at this point because it has no choice in the matter.
[10] Still, there were bright spots. The conflict did not end entirely after the deployment of peacekeepers, and one of the more famous incidents of the peacekeeping operation as the Battle of Macek, where French and German forces ended up deployed as a buffer region. Local Croat forces, acting on reports that the French and German peacekeepers were unwilling to engage, planned to assault a vulnerable Serb position. Lieutenant Colonel Camille d'Ornano would later become the first Frenchmen to receive an Iron Cross " for continuous bravery before the enemy or excellence in commanding troops."
[11] Seen in a relative term. Nobody really remembers what went down in the Balkan Wars outside of the, err, Balkans.
[12] Anything that will glue the kingdom together, after all.
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A good update Faeelin, but two parts struck me as awkward-looking.
In this one sentence, you mentioned "1926" three times. Here's a helpful suggestion for making the sentence flow better:
Here's the other part of the update that struck me as odd.
If there is a proposal for breaking apart Yugoslavia, why say that "this had the unfortunate appearance of breaking apart Yugoslavia" if that is the idea to begin with?
In this one sentence, you mentioned "1926" three times. Here's a helpful suggestion for making the sentence flow better:
Here's the other part of the update that struck me as odd.
If there is a proposal for breaking apart Yugoslavia, why say that "this had the unfortunate appearance of breaking apart Yugoslavia" if that is the idea to begin with?
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You are joking right? Without total balkanization (What? The term is there for a reason) orf Yugoslavia we are only postphoning it all. Better to get it over with before accumulated hatred of decades turns everyone into a genocidal maniac.
EDIT: I am of course not serious. What I am serious about are my doubts this will hold any longer than the OTL FRY.
Hrmm. While I'm agnostic on the future of Yugoslavia...
70 years ago, Germans were busy conquering Europe as part of a bid for totalitarian global supremacy. 30 years ago, Martin Luther King was shot in the city I'm typing this from preaching that nobody should have to ride at the back of a bus. And for several decades, the Northern Irish were bombing cities throughout the UK to pursue their ends.
The Civil Rights movement was messy, but the United States has managed to (if not completely) come to terms with the actual enslavement of a significant fraction of its populace without violence.
(But we are getting very close to the board's verboten topics).
I see your point Faeelin, but the cynical side of me believes that some things are too messed up.
For that I have watched far too much Star Trek in my past.
To bring it back on track and what I originally meant to say: I can't see this working out long term.
I have to agree with trek, this is not going to end well.
Given the Serbs are the biggest losers in this by quite some way (their 'rightful' lands, political power, control of the Army, etc) they will not be happy and have always tended to be quite expressive in their unhappiness. Of course its possible that the Serbs were so convinced of a civil war, and that they would lose it, that they accept getting the short stick on everything and keep quiet. It's also possible to win the lottery every week, its just not likely.
Obviously the Serbs will have to give up a great deal to create a stable system, the status quo was grossly unfair and very unstable, I just can't see the Serb leadership making the necessary concessions unless absolutely forced to. Once the League clears out it will all kick off, and the League will struggle to raise enthusiasm for getting involved in peace keeping a bloody ethnic civil war.
Given the Serbs are the biggest losers in this by quite some way (their 'rightful' lands, political power, control of the Army, etc) they will not be happy and have always tended to be quite expressive in their unhappiness. Of course its possible that the Serbs were so convinced of a civil war, and that they would lose it, that they accept getting the short stick on everything and keep quiet. It's also possible to win the lottery every week, its just not likely.
Obviously the Serbs will have to give up a great deal to create a stable system, the status quo was grossly unfair and very unstable, I just can't see the Serb leadership making the necessary concessions unless absolutely forced to. Once the League clears out it will all kick off, and the League will struggle to raise enthusiasm for getting involved in peace keeping a bloody ethnic civil war.