Christian Pippan, St. Germain und der Minderheitenschutz, in Andreas Raffeiner (ed.), 100 Jahre Staatsvertrag von St. Germain – Der Rest ist Österreich! (Vienna: Facultas 2020) 135–150.
On 16 July 1920 the Treaty of St. Germain between Austria and 27 Allied and Associated States finally entered into force. It was one of the Paris Peace Treaties, which formally ended the First Word War. Like all other treaties between the Allied and Associated Powers and the former Central Powers that emerged from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919/20, the Treaty of St. Germain contained important and, at the time, novel provisions on the protection of persons belonging to minorities. A particularly innovative feature of the Treaty’s minority protection regime was the so-called “guarantee clause”, which was to be executed by the League of Nations. As Christian Pippan explains in his contribution to the recently published collection „100 Jahre Staatsvertrag von St. Germain“ (Facultas), adherence to traditional notions of state sovereignty mostly prevented the effective implementation of the clause during the subsequent inter-war period. For more information on the volume (edited by A. Raffeiner), please click here!