East Central Europe between the Two World Wars

Joseph Rothschild

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295803647
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kommunismus, Postkommunismus & Sozialismus

East Central Europe Between The Two World Wars is a sophisticated political history of East Central Europe in the interwar years. Written by an eminent scholar in the field, it is an original contribution to the literature on the political cultures of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and the Baltic states.

· Chapter One ·

INTRODUCTORY SURVEY

1

AT THE beginning of the nineteenth century, East Central Europe contained no sovereign national states. Rather, it was organized into, and divided among, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian supranational empires and the Prussian kingdom, whose population was binational (German and Polish) but whose political image was specifically German. In the century between the peace conferences of Vienna (1815) and Paris (1919), the supranational empires succumbed and were replaced in East Central Europe by a dozen sovereign states, all of which were established in recognition and partial fulfillment of the principle of nationality. Even with the creation of these states, a number of the area’s nations had still not received political recognition in the form of independent statehood. The principle of nationalism had thus proved a powerful but ambiguous lever for the political reorganization of this geographic zone. In other parts of Europe during this time span, the national principle had promoted the consolidation of numerous small political units into a lesser number of larger states, e.g., the unifications of Germany and Italy and the solidification of the Swiss federation. In East Central Europe it had tended to have the opposite effect, to fragment a few large units into many smaller ones. This tendency may well prove prophetic of the dominant effect of nationalism in twentieth-century Europe in general, as the Basque, Catalan, Breton, Provençal, Flemish, Scottish, Ukrainian, and other peoples also assert their various claims to national distinctiveness and perhaps to separate statehood. In East Central Europe, the ultimate thrust to this process was provided by the generally unanticipated military and political collapse of the area’s four partitioning but mutually warring empires—Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German—in the closing phases of World War I.

The political and economic problems ensuing from this fragmentation-effect of East Central European nationalism later induced among many conservative observers of the interwar scene, and especially among the revisionist apologists for the losers of World War I, a real or pretended nostalgia for the vanished prewar imperial order. They would repeatedly allege that the territorial settlements of 1919-21 had simply and cynically reversed the prewar roles of master and subject peoples without any greater distribution of “ethnic justice.” Indeed, the dubious corollary to this argument was that since the new master nations were politically and culturally less experienced and sophisticated than their predecessors, and since East Central Europe was ethnically too variegated and mixed ever to be organized into neat and viable nation-states, therefore the interwar arrangements allegedly were, on balance, pragmatically worse than the prewar ones and morally no better.

If, however, one acknowledges the national principle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as embodying a valid concept of political justice—indeed, it was probably the dominant such concept during this historical epoch—then the above argument is defective even on statistical grounds. The interwar territorial settlements, for all their weaknesses, freed three times as many people from nationally alien rule as they subjected to such rule. Furthermore, the new subjection, while deplorable, was usually committed not arbitrarily but in the considered interest of other, economic or strategic, priorities. These priorities were, alas, incompatible with the general one of nationalism. Ignorance and revisionist propaganda should not be allowed to obscure these facts, especially as the moralistic rhetoric of most revisionist propagandists was a red herring and they were more interested in geopolitical domination than in the fate of minorities.

The real failure of the interwar territorial settlements lay not in any alleged hypocrisy in applying the principle of ethnic justice, but rather in the impossibility of reconciling this principle with the other major political aims of the peacemakers: the permanent diminution of German and containment of Russian power, and the restoration of international order in Europe. This general, continental failure was, in turn, exacerbated by the failure of the new or restored states of interwar East Central Europe to instill a sense of political nationality, such as the Swiss had, in their linguistically and religiously heterogeneous ethnic groups. Thus the settlements of 1919-21 have become the classic exemplar both of the triumph of nationalism and of its political limitations. Their strength lay in their acknowledgment of its legitimacy; their weakness, in the discrepancy between the resultant arrangements and the real distribution of power in Europe.

2

Germany and Soviet Russia presented the two basic revisionist threats to the interwar territorial and social settlement. Though many East Central European governments were more mesmerized by the Bolshevik danger, Germany proved to be the primary menace and for that reason we focus on it first. The defeat of Germany in 1918 was deceptive. Neither in absolute nor in relative terms had Germany been weakened to anything like the extent that was often assumed in the 1920s. In absolute terms, Germany’s industrial and transportation resources had been left largely intact because World War I had not been fought on her territory. In relative terms, a territorial settlement predicated on the national principle, such as now ensued in 1919-21, ipso facto left Germany as Europe’s second largest country after Russia; outside Europe it insidiously undermined the British and French empires without comparable effect on a Germany now disencumbered of colonies. Indeed, relative to East Central Europe, Germany had gained through the replacement of the Habsburg Empire as a neighbor, which for all its debilities had still been a major power, by a large number of frail and mutually hostile successor states in the Danubian area to her southeast, and through the substitution of Poland and the Baltic states in lieu of Russia as her immediate eastern neighbors. Her own central continental position was only enhanced by these developments. The very existence of the newly independent but highly vulnerable states of East Central Europe, legitimated by the victorious Western Allies, proved on balance a political and diplomatic asset to Germany. It (a) initially buffered her against a spillover of the Bolshevik Revolution, (b) then tempted Soviet Russia to collaborate with her throughout the 1920s and again in the partition of this area in 1939-40, and (c) ultimately frustrated efforts at Soviet-Western cooperation to halt Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, as the West was then inhibited by its commitments to these states from paying the Soviet Union’s price for such cooperation, namely, the sacrifice of East Central Europe’s effective independence to Soviet hegemony.

The governments of Weimar Germany pursued a “Prussian” policy of directing the brunt of their revisionist pressure against interwar Poland, in the hope of recovering at least a substantial part, if not all, of the prewar Reich frontiers there. Hitler, on the other hand, contemptuously dismissed as inadequate such a limited program. Setting his sights on the conquest of all East Central and Eastern Europe, he temporarily froze the German-Polish revisionist issue with the bilateral Non-Aggression Statement of January 26, 1934, and launched his program of virtually limitless conquest by first following the “Austrian” pattern of establishing hegemony over the Danube Valley. Austria and Czechoslovakia, rather than Poland, thus became his initial international victims.

It has often, and correctly, been pointed out that the Nazi concept of race was politically incompatible with the existence of independent East Central and East European states. Less attention has, however, been given to the at least equally sinister concept of space in Hitler’s politico-ideological armory. While racial rhetoric was occasionally used by certain Nazis (other than Hitler) to flatter the supposedly “young” and “vigorous” peoples of East Central Europe into deserting their allegedly “decadent” and “enfeebled” Western allies and patrons, the political language of space always implied conquest and peonization of the peoples to Germany’s east and southeast. Indeed, the capacity for such spatial expansion was defined as the test and measure of racial vitality.

Given his maximalist program of expansion and conquest, Hitler was tactically correct in identifying Czechoslovakia, rather than Poland, as the keystone of Germany’s “encirclement” that would have to be dislodged first to collapse that arch. Territorial revisionism against Poland was likely to be more limited in its political effect since it would have to be coordinated with Soviet Russia; it implied shared influence rather than exclusive domination. Against Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s ally would be a Hungary conveniently revisionist but too weak to present a serious obstacle to further German expansion. Furthermore, the German officer corps, heavily “Prussian” in its political commitments and interests, might be satisfied with the defeat of Poland and thereafter reluctant to be used for further Danubian, Balkan, and Russian conquests toward which it was historically conditioned to be either indifferent or even unfriendly. Finally, Czechoslovakia, unlike Poland, could be conveniently tarred with the phony but propagandistically effective brush of serving as “Bolshevism’s Central European aircraft carrier” by virtue of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Pact of May 16, 1935, which supplemented the Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Treaty of May 2, 1935. Though this pair of agreements had been a response to Hitler’s reintroduction of German conscription on March 16 in violation of the Versailles Treaty, and though they were soon to be tested and found wanting by Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland on March 7, 1936—again in violation of treaty obligations—which rendered all of France’s military commitments to her several East Central European allies strategically worthless, nevertheless the German propaganda assault on Czechoslovakia proved successful. Its victim stood isolated, friendless, and shunned amidst all its neighbors at the time of the Munich tragedy in September, 1938.

East Central European anti-Communism and fear of Soviet ambitions thus benefited and were manipulated by Germany—to such an extent, indeed, that the international politics of the 1930s were fatally skewed by fundamental misjudgments as to the source of the immediate threat to the area’s independence. A number of the local states owed all or much of their territory to Russia’s weakness in 1917-21; the ruling elites in all of them feared Communism. Hence, they were understandably reluctant on the eve of World War II to grant the Soviet army access to their territories as their contribution to collective security against Nazi Germany. Once in, it was feared the Soviets were unlikely ever to depart, least of all from territories that had once been parts of the Russian Empire. The Western governments, in turn, sharing many of these ideological and political anxieties and committed to the principle of the integrity of small states, were reluctant to press them into such a hazardous concession. Stalin, on the other hand, could scarcely be impressed by the West’s assertion against the Soviet Union in mid-1939 of a principle that it had indecently sacrificed to Hitler at Munich less than a year before.

A circular dilemma thus arose: the East Central European governments were unwilling to accept Soviet assistance against the Nazi threat lest it either provoke the German invasion that collective security was intended to deter or lest it simply become a Soviet occupation; the West now refused to cap its abandonment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 by coercing Poland and Romania into abdicating their sovereignty to the Soviet Union in 1939; Stalin was unwilling to expose his country to the risk of bearing the brunt of a war against Germany unless he could at least reduce that risk by forestalling Hitler in a military occupation of East Central Europe. Underlying the failure to resolve this dilemma were a set of interlocking misjudgments: Stalin was skeptical of the West’s readiness finally to stand up to Hitler, underestimated Britain’s military competence, and overestimated French military prowess. The Western governments, on the other hand, deprecated the Soviet Union’s military value and presumed that ideological incompatibility would prevent any Nazi-Soviet rapprochement. All miscalculated; the upshot of the unresolved dilemma was the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939 and World War II, in which the Wehrmacht quickly disposed of the Polish and French armies and thus destroyed that continental second front for which Stalin was to implore his allies when that same Wehrmacht was later turned against him. A moral of this sad tale is that the balance of power is never automatic but requires rationality, perceptiveness, and perhaps even wisdom for its proper recognition.

East Central European fears of Russia and of Communism persisted into the years of war and German occupation. Then, because of these fears, a number of the original resistance movements were eventually to compromise themselves by collaboration with the occupier.

3

The ease with which Germany, and later Russia, regained control over interwar East Central Europe was based on more than just ideological manipulation, important as that was. They also capitalized on the abdication of the other Great Powers and on the profound politico-demographic and socioeconomic weaknesses and conflicts within the area itself. On the morrow of the peace settlements the United States withdrew into isolation, the United Kingdom turned to a policy of encouraging the revival of Germany so as to “correct” a supposed, but actually illusory, French continental preponderance, Italy entertained her own dreams of hegemony in the Balkan Peninsula and the Danube Valley, and France adopted a self-contradictory stance of making far-ranging political and military commitments to several states in East Central Europe but simultaneously undermining these with defensive and isolationist strategic and economic postures. France, though granting them some loans, traded very little with her East Central European protégés, protected her own agriculture from their surpluses, and sought to veto their industrialization programs for refining their own mineral resources owned by French concessionaires. Simultaneously, her Maginot strategy—a function of the multiple trauma of having been bled white during the war and then deserted by one ally (the United States) and persistently restrained by the other (the United Kingdom) after its close—eroded the credibility of her alliance commitments in East Central Europe. That credibility was finally flushed away with her passive acceptance of Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, after which he could direct the bulk of the Wehrmacht against selected East Central European victims without fear of French counteraction in western Germany.

Thus, East Central European hopes of achieving security by bringing the weight of benevolent, if distant, Great Powers to bear against the area’s rapacious and immediate neighbors proved abortive. During the 1920s, only Germany’s and Russia’s temporary postwar and post-revolutionary exhaustion had provided East Central Europe with a respite despite their ominous diplomatic collaboration. In the 1930s, though both countries were rapidly reviving, their ideological and political enmity again gave a brief reprieve to the lands between them, until their fateful reconciliation at the area’s expense in 1939.

Given this constellation of predatory, indifferent, and ineffective Great Powers, a constellation that it could neither prevent nor even control, East Central Europe might nevertheless have achieved at least minimal power-credibility if it had been able to achieve internal regional solidarity and some system of mutual assistance. But this alternative, too, was negated by the multiple divisions and rivalries that were born of competing territorial claims, ethnic-minority tensions, socioeconomic poverty, mutually irritating national psychologies, and sheer political myopia. These factors transformed the area’s internal relations into a cockpit and facilitated Hitler’s program of conquest. It is scarcely an exaggeration to suggest that as a general rule in interwar East Central Europe, common borders entailed hostile relations. Thus, the “blame” for the demise of the region’s independence must be charged to its own fundamental weaknesses, the instability of its institutions, and its irresponsible governments, as well as to the active and passive faults of the Great Powers.

Simply to list the area’s internal irredentist disputes may convey an impression of their cumulative complexity, though not of their bitter and well-nigh paralyzing intensity. Lithuania and Poland quarreled over Wilno (Vilnius, Vilna), which the former claimed on historical, the latter on ethnic-demographic and strategic grounds. Poland and Czechoslovakia were mutually alienated by: (a) their dispute over Teschen (Těšín, Cieszyn), where the former’s sounder ethnic-demographic claims clashed with the latter’s economic needs; (b) their contrasting perceptions of Russia’s and Hungary’s proper roles in the European balance, each regarding the other’s bête noire with some benevolence; (c) the conviction of each that the other had doomed itself by greedily incorporating too many unabsorbable, and hence inflammable, ethnic minorities; and (d) their contrasting social structures and national psychologies, namely, Polish gentry versus Czech bourgeois. Czechoslovakia was also under revisionist pressure on historical and ethnic-demographic grounds from Hungary. Hungary, in turn, as the biggest territorial loser of World War I, nursed territorial claims on historic and/or ethnic-demographic grounds against all four of her interwar neighbors: Czechoslovakia re Slovakia and Ruthenia; Romania re Transylvania; Yugoslavia re the Vojvodina and perhaps Croatia; Austria re the Burgenland (this last less intensely than the others). Yugoslavia herself coveted the Slovene-populated portion of Austria’s Carinthian province, and she and Romania were, in turn, also the objects of Bulgarian irredentist resentments respectively over Macedonia and Southern Dobruja. In addition, Bulgaria directed similar pressures against Greece over parts of Macedonia and Thrace. Bulgaria’s revisionist rationale was the characteristic combination of historical, ethnic-demographic, economic, and strategic arguments. As regards Albania and Austria, finally, the major problem was not so much irredentist aspirations harbored by and against them—though these, too, existed—but that their very existence was challenged and their survival seemed doubtful during the interwar era.

As though these quarrels within the region were not enough, a number of its states were under even more ominous pressures from the Great Powers. Weimar Germany remained unreconciled to the loss of the Pomeranian “Corridor” and of southeastern Silesia to Poland, and Hitler was to add to these revisionist grievances his further claims to Czechoslovakia’s highly strategic, German-populated, Sudeten perimeter and to all of Austria. Less pressing was Germany’s suit against Lithuania for the retrocession of the city and district of Klaipeda (Memel). The Soviet Union remained openly unreconciled to interwar Romania’s incorporation of Bessarabia and harbored designs on Poland’s eastern borderlands with their heavy Belorussian and Ukrainian ethnic concentrations; her attitude toward the Baltic states was more complex but still ambivalent. Italy craved Yugoslavia’s Dalmatian littoral on the Adriatic Sea, in particular, and schemed to fragment the entire Yugoslav state into its ethnic-regional components, in general. She also aspired to control Albania directly and to intimidate Greece into subservience. Indeed, Italy’s ambitions also included the establishment of diplomatic protectorates over Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria, to redouble the pressure on Yugoslavia. But, in contrast to Germany and the Soviet Union, she lacked the economic and military muscle to sustain her political designs.

Thus, each state of interwar East Central Europe had one or more enemies from within the area, and each of the “victor” states among them also had a Great Power enemy—Poland even had two. The numerous “internal” enmities, alas, rendered the region even weaker than it need have been with respect to the “external” ones, and all efforts at reconciling the former were aborted by rampant chauvinism; the spirit of the age was not supranational, as had been naively predicted during the war, but ultranational. Indeed, it appears that the only really potent internationalistic ideology in the area at that time was neither Marxism, on the left hand, nor dynastic loyalism, on the right, but anti-Semitism based on both conviction and expedience. This, in turn, provided an ideological bond and precondition for eventual collaboration with the Nazis, including the administration of wartime genocide.

Meanwhile, in the interwar era itself, efforts on the part of the newly victorious states to consolidate the international settlement of which they were the beneficiaries proved halting, partial, and unimpressive. Czechoslo...