Two Cheers for Europe’s Forgotten Plebiscites - by Marcus Tanner
When the inhabitants of Crna in Slovenia want to indulge their passion for skiing - and don’t fancy using the small slope in their own village - they drive across the border into Austria. While one half of Mount Peca, which overlooks Crna, lies in Slovenia, the other half, including the ski centre, is in Austria. It takes all of a minute to cross the sleepy checkpoint. No one has given it a thought for years. Even back in the 1960s, when Yugoslavia was a communist state, villagers routinely took the bus to Austria to shop.
But over 80 years ago, it was a very different story. Then the border in Carinthia between Austrians and Slovenes was a burning issue and armed partisans on both sides fought local skirmishes.
the Austrian-Slovene border was solved by a plebiscite, and this once fashionable device for resolving territorial issues has long since vanished from polite diplomatic discussion. The Carinthian plebiscite of October was not a unique event. After the end of the First World War, the powers frequently used local votes to adjust borders and tidy up the status of some of the bigger “enclaves”. The Polish-German borders in Silesia and in East Prussia were settled in just this way, as were the borders between Austria and Hungary and in Schleswig between Germany and Denmark.
Only two border plebiscites took place in Europe after 1945, in the Saarland in 1955, when, to the disappointment of France, the local population voted heavily for reunion with Germany and in Northern Ireland in 1973. Even to mention the word plebiscite today in connection with Kosovo - and with the fate of the northern enclave of Serbs in the territory - is to court the immediate disapproval of international policy-makers. For one thing, the very principle behind the votes of the 1920s, namely the desirability of creating ethnically homogeneous states, contradicts the different contemporary goal of encouraging multiculturalism.
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