Minority Controversies across the Bulgarian-Greek Border: Population Exchange, Minority Rights, and Definitions of Minorities in the Interwar Balkans

This paper seeks to address evolving definitions of "minority" in the context of the new Bulgarian-Greek border and the two countries' security concerns after World War One. After the dubious success of the voluntary population exchange between Bulgaria and Greece from 1919, both countries still had to deal with large minority populations within their territories. Why did the population exchange fail to unmix each country? What were the allegiances of these individuals who chose to remain minorities? What made one a Bulgarian in Greece? Or a Greek in Bulgaria? What was the best way to map these people, monitor them, and render them harmless to the majority? These are some of the questions that Bulgarian and Greek politicians were trying to solve in the interwar years. 
When the League of Nations proposed to implement a population exchange between Bulgaria and Greece in 1919, it believed that a voluntary convention would both solve urgent security concerns and respect individual rights. However, a voluntary exchange proved to be impossible to implement, and large minority groups remained in both countries. The League of Nations saw a minority protection treaty as the next step for solving the continuing tensions, but the problem was how to define minority individuals. The remaining minorities in Bulgaria and Greece were both bilingual and Eastern Orthodox, and thus criteria for mapping a minority were difficult to enforce. The controversy escalated with a Greek proposal to approve a primer for its Bulgarian minority that adopted a dialect different from the official Bulgarian language. Ultimately, the minority protection protocol between the two countries failed. Alternatively, both countries experimented with different definitions of minority to end up with vague and ambiguous categories for classifying people.