Ricerc@Sapienza

The article focuses on the main aspects of economic policies in
Eastern Europe after the Peace Treaty of Versailles, when the whole region witnessed
the collapse of the old multinational empires and their replacement with national states
that were theoretically built according to the principle of national self­determination,
though they were in many cases as ethnically mixed as the old empires. As a matter of
fact, the new frontiers did not perfectly correspond to the ethnic divisions among the

By providing theoretical, juridical and geolinguistic evidence, the article accounts for the constitutive plurilingual reality of Italy and Europe, and the long difficult journey of linguistic rights: from the historical origin of a strenuous resistance to their effective enforcement. It also indicates an effective path for language education policy geared towards multilingualism and respect for linguistic diversity, capable of bringing together old and new minorities.