smaller states were paralleled by economic opportunities.
Thus, the combination of Nazi Germany’s ideological, diplomatic, political, and economic drives paved the way for her military conquests. In one form or another all the states of the area eventually succumbed to her offensives, either as resisting victims (Poland, Yugoslavia), or as passive victims (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania), or as calculating satellites (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria), or as ephemerally “independent” dependencies (Slovakia, Croatia).
9
If the preceding discussion has emphasized interwar East Central Europe’s internal weaknesses and external vulnerabilities, and hence appears to signal a negative judgment, this would be an erroneous impression of the author’s intention and ultimate conclusion. That impression arises partly from the fact that the most positive political achievement of the area’s states during this interwar era is so obvious as easily to pass notice: they legitimated their sovereign existence in the world’s eyes beyond Nazi or Stalinist capacity to obliterate. (The three Baltic states are here an exception, but even they are granted distinct republican status within the Soviet Union.) Thus, contemporary Communist historians, otherwise highly critical of their countries’ interwar social and economic policies, join the “bourgeois” émigré scholars and politicians in valuing highly the sheer fact of interwar state-independence and judging it a historic advance over the area’s pre-World War I political status. (Here, again, the Baltic states are treated as a negative exception.) No Communist, Soviet or local, would any longer indulge in Molotov’s contemptuous dismissal of interwar Poland as “this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty” (speech of October 31, 1939). Nor do respectable German writers repeat their interwar predecessors’ persistent derision of the alleged Polish “Saisonstaat” or the Czechoslovak “staatliches Missgebilde.” Thus, despite major and avoidable failings (too little area-wide solidarity, too much over-politicization of human relations, too little strategic government intervention in the economy, too much petty government interference with the society), thanks to the political performance of the interwar era it is impossible today to conceive of East Central Europe without its at least formally independent states. In retrospect, one must assign greater responsibility for the catastrophes of 1939-41 to the malevolence, indifference, or incompetence of the Great Powers than to the admittedly costly mistakes of these states.
Furthermore, any reader’s mistaken impression of an overall negative judgment on the part of this author will hopefully be rectified by a perusal of the chapters on individual countries that follow. Finally, to the extent that political and economic history, being the least happy phases of the interwar East Central European experience, tend to leave a sorry impression, the survey of cultural achievements in Chapter 10 should serve as a felicitous corrective.
1. See, for example, Milan Hodža, Federation in Central Europe (London: Jarrolds, 1942), passim; David Mitrany, Marx against the Peasant (New York: Collier Books, 1961), passim; Ghiţa Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, eds., Populism (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1969), Ch. 4.
Map 2. Poland
· Chapter Two ·
POLAND
1
THE Polish Commonwealth, before its decline in the second half of the seventeenth century, had been one of the major European powers, second only to France in population and to Russia in territory. When her fortunes thereafter waned, she lacked the asset of a peripheral geographic position such as had permitted Spain and Sweden, for example, to withdraw into hard and relatively immune shells once their bids for expansion had been defeated. Poland’s location being more central and pivotal, she was doomed to obliteration as a state in the second half of the eighteenth century, rather than the gentler lot of a mere reduction in power and size.
Before its partition at the hands of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, this Polish Commonwealth had been a multiethnic state governed through quasi-federalistic and decentralistic constitutional arrangements by a nobility of Polish and polonized Lithuanian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, German, and even Tatar, Armenian, and apostate-Jewish stock. Its political principles had required neither linguistic nor ethnic uniformity: Latin was the language of state functions, and caste rather than race was the criterion of access into the ruling establishment. Indeed, even religious uniformity was not highly valued until the last century preceding the partitions. Thus, at a time when the rest of Europe had been convulsed by the post-Reformation religious wars and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Poland had enjoyed the widest degree of religious toleration and freedom of any state on the continent. Such latitudinarianism, while morally admirable and culturally interesting, may well have been a political hindrance in an age when language and religion were the mortar and bricks of nation-building.
Political life in the restored Polish state after 1918 was heavily colored by a craving to avoid repeating the errors that had weakened the old commonwealth; there was, however, no unanimity in identifying those errors. Did historic Poland’s mistake lie, for example, in having first tolerated wide religious dissent in an age when nationalism was closely tied to a specific religion, or in later having alienated her Eastern Orthodox and Protestant subjects through Roman Catholic exclusivism? Politically, had Poland been originally too generous, or subsequently too restrictive, toward her non-Polish populations? Was it a misjudgment to have contested the rise of Muscovy, or to have failed to smother her when she was still vulnerable? Did the Poles blunder in refusing to elect a Habsburg to their throne, which would have identified that dynasty’s interests with the fate of their commonwealth? Or did they err in saving Vienna from the Ottomans, which simply rescued and revived one of their own later partitioners? Interwar political and ideological stances were heavily influenced by the virtually universal Polish awareness of such historical problems and of their ambiguity. By and large, the parties of the Right and Center interpreted Polish history as validating their preference for an ethnically and religiously homogeneous modern society with a centralistic state apparatus and a foreign policy particularly alert to the assertedly primary threat of German eastward expansionism. The Left and the Piłsudskist movement, supported in part by the ethnic minorities, read that same history as a prescription for pluralism and federalism and as a lesson that Poland’s main external foe was Russia.
In the century and a quarter between independent Poland’s annihilation in 1795 and her restoration in 1918, the former gentry-nation had transformed itself into the Polish społeczeństwo, a term conventionally but inadequately translated as “society.” Społeczeństwo signified, in fact, the more complex notion of the organized, politicized, albeit still stateless, community of all Poles, led now by an intelligentsia that preserved, at the same time as it modified, the values and the style of the old szlachta, or gentry. Indeed, the new intelligentsia was not only psychologically strongly anchored to the former szlachta, but also heavily descended from it, as that class had protected itself from the degeneration that might otherwise have followed the loss of statehood by transforming itself into the leading fraction of the intelligentsia. Bourgeois and peasant sons who also entered the intelligentsia assimilated to its gentry-derived norms. Thus, whereas among the neighboring Czechs the native medieval nobility had vanished and a new bourgeoisie allied with a prospering peasantry furnished the political leadership, among the Poles the ancient szlachta lived on through the newly ascendant intelligentsia.
Though Polish economic and political patterns were to develop along different lines in the three partitioning empires among whom the nineteenth-century społeczeństwo was divided, the fact that the intelligentsia preserved a uniform code of values and style and a network of social connections across the partition-borders was to prove immensely important. It sustained Polish historical and political consciousness during the era of subjugation, and it also facilitated the eventual
