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Following the creation of Czechoslovakia’s border security zone, adjacent settlements lay in ruins. For their former Sudeten German residents, the area’s dismal condition was a precondition for the “prayer wall,” expected to compensate for the losses. This chapter interprets their documentation of Eastern-bloc destruction as an attempt to validate new construction to the border’s west. It posits that photography, a medium essential for the task, faced a major challenge. Images of Cold War debris ran up against the formidable pictorial rubble legacies of World War II and the postwar period. Photography’s ability to point to a clear referent—its indexicality—verged on collapse. The chapter details how the aspiring chroniclers of Cold War ruins tackled this predicament.

Many recent commentators have seen the League of Nations as a ‘golden age’ of international minority rights commitments. This chapter argues, however, that the 1919–24 decisions of international diplomats were motivated less by a principled commitment to justice for minorities than by a particular conception of world order. This conception saw selective international supervision of minority protection as necessary to prevent interstate war and respond to the exigencies of a civilizational and power hierarchy amongst peoples and states, while also advancing the particular politico-economic interests of the Principal Allied Powers. The result was support for internationally guaranteed territorial autonomy for a few minorities, but rejection of the claims of others and of the entrenchment of universal minority rights in the League Covenant. The early years of the League minority protection system has lessons for today’s debates about the place of minority rights within the post-cold-war order.

Neville Chamberlain addressed the people of Britain a few days before he flew to Munich to meet Adolf Hitler in 1938. The subject of the prime minister was the dispute between the government of Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten German minority in that country. This dispute threatened to lead to a German invasion of Czechoslovakia and to engulf Europe in a war. Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as Britain, became members of the European Union (EU). These three, along with the other members of the EU, started to have a voice in British domestic policy. The member states of the EU now form a basic part of the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom.