Mapping (Di)fference: The Paris Peace Conference and the (Un)making of National Minorities in the Carpatho-Ukraine

When scouring through the abundance of source material related to the Paris Peace Conference, the term “Protection of Minorities” seems to be omnipresent, particularly with regard to post-Habsburg East Central Europe. There was a consensus among the delegates at the Paris Conference that some kind of legal guarantee should be put in place to protect the many ethnolinguistic minorities against the titular nation; such as the right to use their own language, or the right to be aptly represented in the respective national parliaments. What the peacemakers failed to recognize, however, was that their own policies had created these minorities in the first place. By following what I call the “ethnographic paradigm”, i.e. the idea that the borders of the new nation states in East Central Europe should largely run along ethnographic boundaries, the peacemakers turned a blind eye to the complexities of the tightly interwoven fabric of linguistic, religious and ethnic diversity
that marked the former territories of the Habsburg Empire. The shortcomings of their approach are particularly striking when studying the example of the Carpatho-Ukraine. This polyethnic region on the Northeastern edges of the former Kingdom of Hungary was char-
acterized by interethnic coexistence and multilingualism was often a normality, even in the most remote mountain villages.
By using the example of the Carpatho-Ukraine, this paper is going to argue that ethnographic maps as visual markers of difference played an indispensable role in categorizing the people living on the ground into majority and minority groups. However, depending on the mapping technique used, certain groups were, often intentionally, overrepresented in comparison to others. The visible representation of Ruthenians on the ethnographic maps used by the peacemakers at Paris, for example, is significantly higher in comparison to Pál Teleki’s carte rouge, even though all of these maps were using the linguistic statistics of the 1910 census as their raw data. By the same token, the large Jewish minority in
the region remained completely invisible on all these maps alike, as Yiddish was not an officially recognized language throughout the Habsburg Empire and therefore does not show up in the 1910 data at all. These examples illustrate that the medium of the map played a key role in the making, or in other cases the unmaking, of ethnolinguistic minorities in East Central Europe. On a broader scale, this paper therefore wishes to explore thestill underappreciated potential of cartographic source material for scholars studying the history of national minorities after the First World War.