On the Viability of Mixed States: Nazi Germany’s Allies Debate Minorities and Statehood

During the Second World War, Nazi Germany’s allies in East-Central and Southeastern Europe engaged in a series of discussions about the viability of ethnically mixed states and “correct” policy toward national minorities. Croat diplomats compared Hungary to defunct multinational Yugoslavia, and Romanian statesmen compared the threat to Romania’s sovereignty they saw in the Hungarian minority to the threat posed by Italians in Croatia. Slovak and Croat lawmakers and diplomats exchanged information on the reforms they had made to their legal codes, especially laws that sought to codify aspirations for national renewal and privilege their respective ethnic majority populations (largely at the expense of minorities). Meanwhile Hungarian and Bulgarian statesmen, scholars and intellectuals tested each other’s strategies for achieving territorial revision and national consolidation on the basis of absorbing their ethnic kin in neighboring states. These multilateral exchanges and interactions indicate that our tendency to view Nazi Germany as the sole or primary ideological and practical influence on its allies’ minority policy and ideas about statehood is misleading. They also point to a wartime regional dynamic between small states that yielded a particular set of beliefs about whether and how ethnically mixed states can be considered viable, beliefs that have played themselves out over the course of the second half of the twentieth century up until today.