Interwar East Central Europe, 1918-1941

The Failure of Democracy-building, the Fate of Minorities

Sabrina Ramet, Sabrina P. Ramet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429648700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This monograph focuses on the challenges that interwar regimes faced and how they coped with them in the aftermath of World War One, focusing especially on the failure to establish and stabilize democratic regimes, as well as on the fate of ethnic and religious minorities. Topics explored include the political systems and how they changed during the two decades under review, land reform, Church–state relations, and culture. Countries studied include Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania.

" S abrina Ramet has assembled a team of highly respectable country specialists to offer a fresh and historiographically updated reading of interwar developments in East Central Europe. The volume is bookended by two excellent comparative and theoretically informed essays carefully weighing the multiplicity of factors contributing to the instability of the interwar regimes. As a result this survey succeeds admirably in producing a nuanced narrative and analysis." - Maria Todorova, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Sabrina Ramet, together with a roster of other eminent scholars, has produced an exciting new history of interwar East Central Europe. The volume has a clear focus on the failure of democracy (1918 to 1941), and on the bedeviling issues of ethnic minorities and of peasants; the latter made up an overwhelming majority of much of the region's population. The book will be of great interest to political scientists and historians of East Central Europe, and of Europe more generally, and it is perfect for classroom use. - Irina Livezeanu, University of Pittsburgh, USA

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Interwar East Central Europe, 1918–1941

The failure of democracy-building, the fate of minorities – an Introduction

Sabrina P. Ramet¹

In examining the failure of democracy-building in interwar East Central Europe, the primary questions are: How far back in time should we trace the origins of the failure? and What were the primary causes of failure? One could, if one wished, trace the problems back to the Ottoman conquests in the Balkans beginning in the fourteenth century and to the three partitions of Poland in the years 1772–1795. As a result of these conquests and the hasty break-up of Austria-Hungary in the course of 1918, the East Central European states entered the interwar era with little or no recent experience of independent statehood, but with very recent experience of wartime trauma. The trauma of World War One also accelerated (though it did not originate) far-right tendencies, especially in countries where more nationalist-oriented persons felt that their country had been unjustly treated in the course of the war and subsequent peace treaties. But the foregoing considerations notwithstanding, all seven countries that comprised interwar East Central Europe entered the third decade of the twentieth century with one or another version of parliamentarism and having agreed to protect the interests of local ethnic and religious minorities. Thus, our collective investigation must necessarily focus on what went wrong (and what went right) after 1918. As for the causes of the failure of democracy-building per se, the chief factors to be considered are (1) domestic issues, (2) the region-wide depression that began with the stock market crash of 29 October 1929, and (3) external factors, especially the role of Nazi Germany. The collapse of parliamentary systems (or, perhaps, “quasi-parliamentary regimes”²) taking place prior to October 1929 should be traced primarily, if not solely, to domestic issues, whether corruption, or interethnic frictions, or some other cause. After the stock market crash, the economies in the entire region were impacted to one extent or another; and after the Nazi Machtergreifung in March 1933, the Third Reich also played a destructive role in the region. The annexation of Austria (the Anschluss) left Czechoslovakia surrounded by Nazi Germany on three sides, placing enormous stress on that republic, even before the appeasement of German Führer Adolf Hitler at Czechoslovakia’s expense by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier in September 1938. By that point, German preparation for war was well underway and political leaders across Europe realized that, in the absence of some deus ex machina, war seemed to have become unavoidable.

The countries included in this survey of interwar East Central Europe are those traditionally included in this set.³ From time to time scholars have suggested including other states in what we have called East Central (or Eastern) Europe– such as the Baltic states,⁴ or Austria. Although one might identify some commonalities between the states conventionally understood as constituting “East Central Europe” and these others, nonetheless, there are factors that, in combination, define the region uniquely– long suppression within larger empires, high levels of illiteracy as of 1919 (with some exceptions, such as in Czechoslovakia), widespread poverty at the dawn of the interwar era, and high levels of political instability in the interwar years).

At the dawn of the interwar era

In 1914, just before the outbreak of World War One on 28 July 1914, much of the region known variously as Eastern Europe, East Central Europe, or Central and Southeastern Europe, was divided between Hohenzollern Germany, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, and Romanov Russia, with the Ottoman Empire holding onto a region surrounding Istanbul. The other countries in the region– Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Greece– were smaller than the three empires in expanse, population, wealth, resources, and military strength. The war pitted Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria against Great Britain, France, and Russia, who were later joined by Italy, Romania, and the United States. Germany and its allies lost the war, and at the war’s end, 8,528,831 soldiers lay dead, with total casualties across the continent estimated at more than 37 million. Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were broken up, with Russia losing Ukraine, Belorussia, and Transcaucasia briefly, and Finland and the Baltic states for the duration. Germany lost its African colonies, which were seized by Britain and France, and also lost land to France, Belgium, Denmark, Poland, and Lithuania, with the city of Danzig taken from Germany and set up as a free city.

The following states (or empires) lost at least 400,000 lives each (in ascending order): Italy (466,000), the British Empire (908,000), Austria-Hungary (1,200,000), the French Empire (1,385,000), Russia (1,700,000), and Germany (1,718,000).⁵ Among the countries of East Central Europe, Romania suffered the largest losses (335,706).⁶ Poland is not listed since it regained its independence only at the end of war, but there were also significant Polish casualties included in the numbers reported for Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany.

Germany signed an armistice on 11 November 1918, but fighting continued on several fronts for a few years. The Russo-Polish War of 1919–1921 ended with Poland expanding its eastern border beyond what British diplomat Lord Curzon had suggested and, in the process, bringing large numbers of Belorussians and Ukrainians under Polish rule.⁷ In the south, the Belgrade regime was eager to bring Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo into the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, but encountered armed resistance in all three zones. Montenegro had been an independent state and fielded troops to resist the invading Serbian troops and paramilitary units; but by 1923 resistance had been crushed and Montenegro was annexed. Macedonia had been annexed by force in the course of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 but, with widespread pro-Bulgarian sentiment among Macedonians, the Belgrade regime considered it necessary to station 50,000 Serbian army troops and police in the province. And in Kosovo, Serbs remembered that some 150,000 Serbs had been driven out of Kosovo by armed Albanians between 1876 and 1912 and they were determined to consolidate their hold on the region. Local Albanians formed paramilitary units and attacked government buildings and trains and rustled cattle until 1924. Only then did Belgrade manage to establish order.⁸ Finally, in Russia, a civil war raged until 1921 (with the Red Army conquering Georgia in April of that year). The war pitted several groups of monarchist forces, supported by about 200,000 Allied troops and Japanese forces in the east, against the newly formed Bolshevik Red Army. Ultimately, the Bolsheviks won, with 1.5 million combatants dead, and with about 8 million citizens having died as a result of military action, famine, and disease.⁹

At the start of 1919, there were 13 new or revived states, only three of which remained on the map by 1941. These states were: Belarus and Ukraine, briefly in 1919; Armenia and Azerbaijan, until 1922; Georgia, until 1924; Czechoslovakia and Poland, until 1939; Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, until 1940 (although they regained their independence half a century later); and Finland, Ireland, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later known as Yugoslavia), which expired twice– once in 1941 and again in 1991. The war gave birth to fascism and Nazism, disrupted railway networks, which had been constructed with pre-1914 borders in mind, opened or reopened controversies about borders, including the so-called “Polish corridor,” which was populated mostly by Germans but assigned to Poland, and fueled challenges and crises of legitimation.

Following a brief section devoted to commonalities and patterns, this chapter will turn to assessing the factors that brought down parliamentary systems in the region, looking first at those countries where parliamentary systems were overthrown between 1919 and 1929, i.e., before the onset of the Great Depression and the creation of the Third Reich in Germany, followed by an examination of Romania and Czechoslovakia, in which democracy was undermined in 1930 and late 1938 respectively. In these two cases, the Great Depression was a major factor in bringing an end to parliamentary rule, although parliamentarism in Czechoslovakia might well have survived the Depression had Nazi Germany not cast its shadow over the country, backing Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party and annexing the German-inhabited regions of the Sudetenland, later annexing Bohemia and Moravia and setting up Slovakia as an Axis satellite.

Commonalities and patterns

What is immediately striking about the states of interwar East Central Europe is that not a single one of them could claim to have the same boundaries in 1919 as in 1875. Indeed, except for Romania and Bulgaria, none of the states of East Central Europe had even existed before 1878, although the Kingdom of Hungary had been an autonomous unit within the Austro-Hungarian Empire since the Ausgleich (Compromise) of 1867.¹⁰ Albania emerged as an independent state in 1913, Poland regained its independence at the end of 1918, Czechoslovakia was stitched together as a new state at the end of 1918, Hungary was recognized as an independent state under the Treaty of St. Germain (10 September 1919) but its borders were not finalized on paper until the Treaty of Trianon (4 June 1920), and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Sloven...