Politics of nationalization collided after the “Great War” with politics of
democratization in Europe's post-imperial states. Both politics were
inspired by US-President Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points. However,
democratic principles were in the interwar period gradually supplanted by
nationalist ones. In this analysis it is shown for three disputed border regions
(Upper Silesia, Teschen and Orava) on a broad source basis (central state
and regional authorities as well as journalism) how this already became
apparent in the first postwar years. Against the background of the
demographic constellation of national majorities and minorities in these
regions, we evaluate empirical material on processes and events, in which
the collision of these principles becomes particularly clear: in the
council movement of 1918/19, the censuses, plebiscites on border issues as
well as in the first democratic elections. It is outlined how the contradiction
between democratizing and nationalizing measures in these regions already
at the beginning of the 1920s stoked distrust of the new order and provided
fertile ground for the rise anti-democratic forces of “hybrid” authoritarian democracies.
