East Central Europe between the Two World Wars. Joseph Rothschild

      · 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

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