Group Rights and Preferential Policies: Inclusion and Exclusion in Western Europe between Two Global Wars

Wars and revolutions played a crucial role in the redefinition of national and imperial conceptions of citizenship and in the way in which rights (political, civil, and social) were acknowledged, allocated, or redistributed. This paper analyzes how some European states, namely Italy, France, Germany, and Austria, redefined the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the interwar period. It addresses changes in conceptions and practices of citizenship in those countries and identifies the main dilemmas and challenges raised by the different politics of inclusion and exclusion that they implemented in times of crisis and reconstruction. Concentrating on the aftermath of the war and, in particular, on the 1920s and 1930s, the paper focuses on the emergence of new rights regimes concerning both individuals and groups/minorities with the aims of investigating the prehistory and the historical background of collective rights and preferential policies in Western Europe (including positive measures, positive discriminations, reservation policies, compensatory action, quotas, preferential treatment, etc.) and to understand how group preferences impacted citizenship in societies committed to universalism and equality of individuals before the law. The paper explores on the one hand, citizenship options, naturalization and denaturalization policies, and the way in which they affected linguistic and ethnic minorities in border regions; and on the other hand, the emergence of national minority rights (related primarily to language and education) and of group rights related to specific categories identified according to single identity markers (wounded veterans, war widows, orphans, etc.). Political, legal, and cultural debates, parliamentary ones, constitutional texts, laws, rulings, court cases, administrative measures, and statistics will provide the primary sources for the investigation.