important, and often the main, component of the several revisionist-irredentist territorial disputes in interwar East Central Europe was the ethnic one: specifically, one state’s interest in politically “redeeming,” or at least culturally sustaining, a minority of its own nationality that happened to be geographically located in another state, and, on the other hand, that host state’s indignant repudiation of what it chose to regard as illicit pressures upon its territorial integrity or internal sovereignty. Admittedly, the existence of ethnic minorities was nothing new in the region. But as the interwar states, unlike the Austrian half of the old Habsburg Empire, preferred to regard themselves as explicit and specific national states, the lot of the numerous and vocal interwar ethnic minorities was emotionally more demeaning and politically more hopeless than had formerly been the case. Thus, for example, the Czechs or Poles or Slovenes of the old Habsburg Empire had not been obliged to view themselves as minorities in an explicitly German state. Though they might have felt ethnically aggrieved at particular times, they could always quite realistically anticipate a future imperial government’s reversal of its schedule of ethnic favoritism. Even the more consistently excluded minorities of the empire’s Hungarian half awaited a change with the next royal succession. But in the nation-states of the interwar era, a minority seemed fated, short of a war and a redrawing of frontiers, to remain a minority forever, not simply in the neutral statistical sense, but also in terms of political if not civil deprivation. Hence it tended to seek succor from its ethnic and cultural “mother country” against the pressures of the “host” state, and thus the dispute was internationalized. The Jews, of course, being without a state of their own, lacked this option and hence felt particularly exposed politically.
The “host” government, in turn, was committed to the cultivation of the specific national culture of its state-nation throughout its territory; otherwise, it reasoned, the achievement of national independence would have been purposeless. Its apprehensions of “subversion” tended quickly to become as exaggerated, albeit sincere, as the minority’s fears of “extinction.” The resultant reciprocal recriminations would become particularly truculent, the protagonists’ respective stances particularly rigid, and the quarrel particularly dangerous if, as was often the case, the minority and the interested “mother country” to which it appealed represented one of the region’s prewar dominant powers—Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria (Macedonia), Russia (Ukraine)—still unreconciled to its recent defeat and loss.
The determination of a newly independent state to “nation-ize” not only its cultural and political patrimonies but also its economic wealth was often a key motive behind such seemingly social and “class” programs as land reform and etatist industrialization. These were politically easiest where “alien” landlords and entrepreneurs could be expropriated for the benefit of “native” peasants and bureaucrats. Such an amalgamation of ethnic and social policy was facilitated by the fact that ethnic, religious, and class differences and identities often coincided or at least overlapped. In Poland, the Baltic states, and the former Habsburg lands, the large estate owners were Poles, Germans, and Magyars, while the entrepreneurial class was heavily German and Jewish and only in part native. In the Balkans the entrepreneurial class was Greek, Italian, and Jewish and only incipiently native, while in several regions the landlords were still Muslim or Magyar. Another indirect way of implementing ethnic policy in the absence of explicit legislative authorization to that effect, which was generally avoided for legal reasons or because of public relations, was through silent but relentless administrative discretion. All in all, the importance of ethnic consciousness in the new, or restored, or enlarged victor states of interwar East Central Europe is illustrated, en reverse, by the observation that none of them experienced the sharp social and class violence that on the morrow of World War I wracked the losers—first Russia, then Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria.
Standing politically midway between state-nations and ethnic minorities were those peoples who were officially defined as belonging to the former but felt themselves not only culturally distinct from, but also politically and economically exploited by, the dominant part of that same state-nation. The most vivid interwar examples of these groups were the Slovaks with respect to the Czechs, and the Croats with respect to the Serbs. In each case the aggrieved group became increasingly disenchanted with and suspicious of the formal ideology of “Czechoslovak” and “Yugoslav” nationality, which appeared to it to be a manipulative device screening, respectively, Czech and Serb domination. Whereas in the Czechoslovak case there was a correspondence between the Czechs’ political control and their superior economic and cultural resources vis-à-vis the Slovaks, in Yugoslavia there existed a “crossed” relationship between Serb political domination on the one hand, and the more advanced and developed Croatian economic and cultural levels on the other. Many commentators, expressing acknowledged or unconscious Marxist assumptions, have termed the latter case “anomalous.” But the statistics belie this judgment, for the world abounds, for better or worse, with cases of economically and culturally marginal regions that exercise political dominion over more productive and modern ones. One need mention only the traditional political power of provincial France and of the United States’ southern and agrarian states, the preponderance of Poles from the eastern kresy during the Piłsudski era, and the more recent hegemony of Pakistan’s western and Nigeria’s northern regions.
A third, and far less incendiary, category of ethnic tensions in interwar East Central Europe consisted of those cases where nations of common stock and language had earlier been partitioned for extensive periods of time among different political units. Upon being finally reunited after World War I, their diverse and even divergent past experiences tended to generate a certain amount of friction. However, that friction was nowhere near as intense or long-lasting as was often gloatingly and maliciously claimed by propagandists for the erstwhile master (now revisionist) powers. In fact, these nations—the Poles, who had been partitioned among the Austrian, German, and Russian empires; the Romanians who had been separated between their Danubian Principalities and historic Hungary; the Lithuanians of old Russia and East Prussia—quickly asserted their political unity toward the outside world despite some lingering internal conflicts. (An analogous post-World War II case adjacent to our area is the Ukrainians.)
All in all, the rather complicated structure of the ethnic minority question both reflected the attempted but fragile interwar European power-balance and, due to the ensuing political tensions, also helped to overturn it. These chronic tensions, and particularly the manner in which Nazi Germany manipulated them, then elicited a sharply different approach to the entire problem at the close of World War II. Whereas at the end of the first world conflagration there had been vast frontier changes but relatively little mass population movement in East Central Europe, after the second one there were fewer frontier changes, the major exceptions being in the case of the Soviet Union’s western borders and Poland’s eastern and western ones, but enormous population migrations and expulsions, following on the wartime Nazi genocide of the area’s Jewish and Gypsy minorities and persecution of several indigenous nations. Hitler, having on the one hand rendered the numerous German minority in East Central Europe odious to the Slavic peoples, and having on the other hand demonstrated the ease with which minorities could be eliminated, thereby provoked the colossal enforced Völkerwanderung of 1944-46. In the course of this migration a millennium of German eastward expansion by peasant, burgher, miner, monk, and soldier was reversed and the political achievements of Henry the Lion, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck were undone. While proclaiming that he only wished to save Europe from the supposedly corrosive “Internationals” (Communist, Jewish, Jesuit, Masonic, plutocratic, etc.), Hitler had in fact persuaded the six million Volksdeutsche of East Central Europe to serve him as an all-too-truly subversive Pan-German “International,” to their ultimate misfortune.
5
While ethnic tensions constituted interwar East Central Europe’s most vivid and sensitive political problem and were, indeed, often exploited so as to obscure social and economic weaknesses, these weaknesses proved just as chronically debilitating and difficult to correct. By virtually every relevant statistical index, many of which will be analyzed in the later chapters devoted to individual countries, East Central Europe was less productive, less literate,
