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. Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia formed an alliance termed the Little Entente. This alliance was directed exclusively against a Hungary that, while admittedly stridently revisionist, was nevertheless weaker than any of the three members singly, but it was inoperative against the three Great Powers, each of which threatened one of the alliance partners. The Little Entente thus was a case of “overkill” against a shared secondary danger and “every man for himself” vis-à-vis each of the primary ones. Furthermore, by ostracizing Hungary, it made her more receptive to collaboration with Germany and Italy in their maneuvers to fragment seriatim the member states of the Little Entente and thus the interwar East Central European settlement in general. Similarly, the Balkan Entente, formed by Greece, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, provided only for mutual defense against revisionist Bulgaria and also ignored Great Power claims on individual partners. Though the two alliances were linked through two of their members, Romania and Yugloslavia, they contributed little to the coherence or unity of East Central Europe.
It is, of course, psychologically understandable that the several partners were reluctant to pull each other’s chestnuts out of Great Power fires if they were not directly burned themselves. Thus, for example, Romania and Yugoslavia were unwilling to irritate a powerful Germany by supporting Czechoslovakia in a quarrel that was not theirs, and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia refused to underwrite Romania’s possession of Bessarabia against Soviet objections. Yet such behavior could scarcely impress anyone. Nevertheless, while deprecating this deliberate impotence of these small-state alliances under the pressure of the revisionist Great Powers, one does well to recall that the real culprits of appeasement were not these small states, but the other Great Powers, whose abdication was the more culpable as their responsibility was greater.
It is, parenthetically, of some interest and relevance that foreign economic relations and foreign political relations often failed to synchronize in these several interwar East Central European constellations. Just as France, as noted above, traded little with her political protégés, Poland and the Little Entente states, so the Little Entente partners traded more with their Hungarian enemy and with Austria than with each other, and two of them, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, traded far more with their respective Great Power nemeses, Germany and Italy, than with their allies. The economies of Romania and Yugoslavia were too similar to stimulate much exchange between them; each exported agricultural surpluses and mineral resources. Industrial Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, though in theory complementary to their economies, in practice imported little of Romania’s and Yugoslavia’s agricultural produce in order to protect and mollify her own politically potent peasantry. Romania and Yugoslavia, in turn, refused her their mineral exports, in which Czechoslovakia was interested, and favored free currency countries and later Germany, which was prepared to absorb their agricultural surpluses as well as their ores and oils. Similarly, Italy’s foreign trade did not correspond with her diplomatic preferences, being less with her clients Austria, Bulgaria, and Hungary than with their Little and Balkan Entente enemies, until the mid-1930s. Then the latter abided by the League of Nations’ sanctions against Italy for her invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, and the former together with Germany filled the resultant trade gaps.
Nazi Germany, which pursued the politically most adept foreign trade policy of any Great Power, was the chief beneficiary of this sanctions episode as she stepped in to rescue, to her own and their benefit, the economies of those Balkan states which had loyally abided by Anglo-French political wishes to interrupt their trade with Italy and had then been left in the economic lurch by these Western Powers. The entire affair suffused East Central Europe with a feeling that the West regarded Germany’s economic hegemony over the area as inevitable and natural, and this feeling accelerated the decision of a number of the local regimes to accommodate themselves accordingly to the German drive.
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