Читать книгу East Central Europe between the Two World Wars - Joseph Rothschild - Страница 14

· 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. 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.

4

An 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, and less healthy than West Central and Western Europe. A potentially rich region with poor people, its interwar censuses record not so much a distribution of wealth as a maldistribution of poverty. The main component of this sad spectacle was the so-called peasant question, in both its economic and its ideological manifestations.

Interwar East Central Europe was preponderantly unproductively agricultural. While far higher proportions of its population were engaged in farming than was the case in Western Europe, the productivity of its agriculture in terms both of yield rates per unit of agricultural area and of yield rates per agricultural worker was far lower. The result was a vicious cycle of rural undercapitalization, underproductivity, underconsumption, underemployment, overpopulation, and pervasive misery. Despite strenuous, if often misapplied, efforts to correct these imbalances and to increase the area’s wealth through industrialization, in 1938 East Central Europe still produced only 8 percent of the industrial output of all Europe minus the Soviet Union, and of this small share, a third was recorded by Czechoslovakia. Except for that country, whose western half comprised the area’s most thoroughly industrialized region, the fate of the several states’ economies was annually determined by the single, hazardous, factor of weather.

Problems ancillary to, and aggravating, this low productivity in the agricultural sector were weak transportation, disruption of prewar trade patterns, economic nationalism and competitive striving for autarky (especially prominent and destructive in the Great Depression of the early 1930s), competition of Argentine and North American grains in the markets of Western Europe, and drastic reduction of opportunities for overseas emigration to the United States. The swelling surplus peasant population of East Central Europe vegetated at bare subsistence levels on its holdings, subdividing them into ever smaller and less rational plots. Its very existence and condition of underemployment discouraged any investment in agronomic technology. Even then, it was scarcely permitted to consume an adequate proportion of its relatively low food output as governmental fiscal, tariff, and investment policies consistently forced the undernourished peasants to sell at a pittance far more than any authentic surplus of their produce in order to raise cash for the payment of taxes, debts, fees, and a few astronomically priced (because protected and cartellized) essential industrial products.

Where governments did arrange land reforms for the ostensible benefit of the peasantry, the motivation and hence the application was primarily political—either, as mentioned above, to expropriate ethnically “alien” landlords or to immunize a restless peasantry against the feared attractions of Communism—and was not adequately supplemented with equivalent interest in correcting the economic and agronomic malaise of agriculture. The peasant’s standard of living was falling precisely at a time when his expectations and self-esteem were rising. His travels and other experiences as a mobilized soldier in World War I had not only sophisticated his material wants, but had also shown him how heavily governments and urban populations depended on his docility and labor. He now responded to his interwar lot by vacillating among resentment, mistrust, despair, and rage. In particular the combination of his disasterous impoverishment during the Great Depression of the early 1930s, when the industrial-agricultural price scissors opened drastically against him, followed in the decade’s second half by his economic rescue—in the Danubian and Balkan countries, if not in Poland and Czechoslovakia—through Nazi Germany’s bulk purchase at high prices of his produce, served to radicalize the East Central European peasant—occasionally toward the Left but more frequently toward the “new” Right. This trend suggests that a reexamination of the traditional claims and postures of peasantist ideologues and politicians is in order.

Against these ideologues’ claims, in the tradition of Rousseau and Jefferson, that the peasant’s proximity to nature, his rustic life-style, and his sustained work habits allegedly made him a “naturally” democratic, tolerant, peaceable, cooperative citizen, we may offer the suggestion that the East European peasant’s characteristic political behavior, as expressed by long periods of submissiveness interspersed with periodic bouts of jacquerie violence, indicates profound, albeit understandable, apathy, alienation, and rancor. Excluded from the general progress of Europe, he felt himself to be both the guardian and the victim of anachronistic values and institutions, whose very anachronism undermined and negated the potential power of the peasantry as the area’s most numerous class. The peasant’s political stance in the restored or enlarged “new” states of the interwar era was problematic and uneasy. Grateful, on the one hand, for land reform, he also resented that one of its side-effects had been to intensify the control of the state apparatus over his village. This control he felt to be exploitative rather than benevolent, exercised in its own interest by a culturally alien urban bureaucracy which would either neglect or suppress but neither probe nor solve the social tensions accruing from the economic malaise of the countryside.

Against its ideologues’ rhapsodic presentation of peasantism as a supposed humanistic alternative to allegedly crassly materialistic capitalism and socialism, we may legitimately note their naiveté about both the “soulless” industrialism espoused by these two competing ideologies as well as about their own favored “peasantist way of life.” For the hard fact is that the peasants could achieve prosperity only by transforming that way of life into an integrated, productive relationship with urban market needs and industrial capacities. Furthermore, the ideological celebrators of peasantism appear to have misread or misrepresented the real views of their claimed constituents. For the peasant’s actual attitude toward industrialization was less one of hostility than one of ambivalence: he was both fascinated and afraid. He realized that it alone held out the promise of salvation from rural poverty and overpopulation. But he also dreaded industrialization as a threat to his values and traditions. More specifically, he shrewdly suspected that its immediate costs in terms of restricted consumption and increased prices and taxes would be unloaded onto his shoulders, or rather squeezed from his belly.

The general peasant resentment and mistrust of urban society extended also to the proletariat, the area’s other interwar “outsider” class. The East Central European Socialist parties and workers, in turn, feared and shunned the peasant masses as incarnating an allegedly reactionary, clericalist threat to economic and social progress. It was, indeed, true that the only political parties other than explicitly peasantist ones that the East Central European peasantry occasionally supported were explicitly Christian-denominational ones in the 1920s and then also Right-Radical ones in the depression decade of the 1930s. More generally, the area’s still young and small urban proletariat, in its anxiety to avoid being weakened or manipulated from any quarter, tended to isolate itself from social alliances with any older and larger classes even on the rare occasions where these were available as would-be allies.

The potential political power placed in the peasantry’s hands by the universal suffrage introduced throughout interwar East Central Europe, except in Hungary, was soon blunted by the emergence of a specific political ruling class. This class initially coopted peasant political leaders and eroded the peasantist component of their political commitments; later, alarmed by escalating social and political unrest, it simply replaced the formally democratic political institutions with authoritarian ones everywhere except in Czechoslovakia. This political ruling class was not, contrary to conventional assumptions, the bourgeoisie, which was quite weak and either dependent on state subsidies or else ethnically “alien” and hence vulnerable. Rather it was the bureaucracy, which was allied with, and recruited from, the intelligentsia.

The conduct of peasant political leaders and the strategies of peasantist political parties will be analyzed and compared in detail in the chapters on individual countries. Briefly, the leaders ran the gamut from “bearer of the national conscience” or “peasant Gracchus,” through “statesman,” “pragmatist,” and “power-broker,” to sheer “betrayer-of-trust” and “office-seeker,” or, alternatively, “opposition demagogue.” None adequately benefited their village constituencies, which were nevertheless pathetically loyal to them. In many cases, the peasant politician’s class pride was accompanied and corroded by a residual political inferiority complex. This led him to overvalue the sheer fact of his admission into the councils of government, where his often vague programs and generalized aspirations were promptly and easily neutralized by cabinet colleagues who appealed to his sense of “realism” or “patriotism.” There were always plausible reasons, for example, why indirect taxes on necessities consumed in the village were more “feasible” than direct taxes on the incomes of the urban entrepreneurial, professional, and bureaucratic classes, or why the “national interest” required that the resultant revenue be spent on the army and on subsidized industry rather than reinvested in agriculture or in rural amenities. While prominent peasant “tribunes” were often thus coopted at the top, their party machines were always infiltrated at the less visible middle echelons by the same political class of lawyers and bureaucrats that had already captured control of other political parties and of the state apparatus as such. To the limited extent that this type was at all responsive to peasant needs, it served the interests of the more prosperous stratum of the peasantry.

International peasantist solidarity was articulated by the so-called Green International, an appellation intended to symbolize its supposed historic role as an alternative to the “Red” International of Communists and the “White” International of capitalists and landlords. Its institutional expression was an International Agrarian Bureau established in Prague by several East Central European peasantist parties. Organizationally and financially, it was controlled by the Czechoslovak Agrarians, who sought to give it a Slavophile flavor, to the irritation of its Romanian member. Despite high rhetoric, it never had much political influence; its constituent peasantist parties either failed to master domestic power in their respective countries or, in the few cases where they did so, became absorbed in the desperate but vain pursuit of purely domestic solutions to area-wide problems. In or out of power, these parties were quite nationalistic. The one authentic internationalist exception here was the Bulgarian peasant leader Aleksandŭr Stamboliski—and he was soon murdered for his pains by domestic supernationalists. The Green International’s particular irrelevance, and peasantism’s general inadequacy, were later exposed by the Great Depression.

6

The Communist parties, which came to power after World War II thanks to the Soviet armies’ conquest of the area, were politically weak during the interwar era. Though they might attract many genuine idealists, and though their cadres usually bore persecution with courage, and though they benefited from the irascible habit of many local regimes of labeling all opposition as communistic, these parties were often discredited by their “antinational” identification with: Russia (perceived as a historic foe and potential threat in Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states); the local ethnic minorities (popularly suspected as subversive); and atheism (especially damaging in the Roman Catholic countries). They were also hampered by their often inappropriate and vacillating approaches to issues of territorial revisionism, to the agrarian question, and to the peasantry as a class (was it a solid bloc or internally differentiated?)—a weakness which, in turn, flowed from their organizational, financial, and moral dependence on the Comintern. Occasional lapses from slavish imitation of the vagaries of the Moscow party-line resulted in drastic purges, which racked the Polish, Yugoslav, and Bulgarian Communist parties with particular severity. Hence, zombie-like obedience and the ritual discharge of assigned tasks became both a necessity for survival and a kind of psychological compensation for the Communist cadres’ lack of real political influence.

On the other hand, the Communists could capitalize on the pervasive discontent with poverty and oppression, on the peasants’ resentful alienation from the bureaucratic state apparatus, and on the related failure of the peasantist parties and leaders. Here their appeals to social justice and revolution, while eliciting no immediate response, nevertheless sustained an awareness of them as representing a political alternative. Under Nazi occupation the Communists finally enjoyed the advantage of long experience at underground organization, survival, and action. Ultimately, however, their conquest of power was determined less by local factors than by the decisive intervention of the Soviet Union. The one exception was in Yugoslavia, where they fought independently and won a revolutionary national and civil war.

7

Trends and styles of governmental activity passed through several similar sequences in the interwar East Central European countries. Yet throughout these changes and phases the bureaucratic “political class,” to which allusion has been made above as coopting peasantist leaders, formed the effective and, except in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the virtually autonomous ruling class of interwar East Central Europe. Both its civilian and military components were recruited from the so-called intelligentsia which, in turn, was simply identified by its possession of academic diplomas. The intelligentsia and, through it, the bureaucracy might be descended from the gentry, the middle class, or the peasantry; in the last-mentioned case, it tended to sever its cultural and political ties with the village despite sentimental and propagandistic professions of attachment. It might rule in association with the landed and entrepreneurial classes, but it was never a mere tool of the aristocracy or bourgeoisie. Universal suffrage did not protect the peasant masses from the intimidation or manipulation of this political class of bureaucrats and intelligentsia, and election results generally reflected its overall priorities, if not always its particular preferences. Indeed, in the area’s more primitive regions, universal suffrage functioned as the bureaucracy’s tool for breaking the traditional power of “feudal” notables over their dependent peasant clientèles.

Given the high prestige of formal academic education in the “new” interwar states of East Central Europe, the investment in higher education tended to be disproportionately large relative both to their investments in primary education as well as to the absorptive capacities of their still basically agrarian, or at most transitional, societies. The failure of industrialization to develop with sufficient rapidity and depth to absorb the surplus peasant population was paralleled by its analogous failure to absorb the surplus academic proletariat into economically or socially functional employment. Politics and state-service remained the only career-lines for these university alumni, who were heavily biased in their studies toward law or humanities and away from science and technology. Thus, land-hunger among the peasantry was matched by office-hunger among the intelligentsia. The result was a proliferation of political parties more concerned with patronage than with policy (“program” parties fared badly), and a swollen, nepotistic, underpaid, callous, routine-ridden bureaucracy that was open to corruption. All this deepened the peasant’s alienation from, and contempt for, the state, the city, and politics, which consistently confronted him as an impenetrable and hostile maze of linked fiefdoms and privileged connections.

The tenacious but essentially stagnant power of this bureaucratic class largely accounts for the peculiar syndrome of immobility and instability in interwar East Central European politics—a syndrome to which, as has been indicated, Great Power pressures and ethnic tensions also contributed. Changes in cabinets were frequent, in constitutions occasional, but the fundamental political reflections of social transitions were suffocated by these bureaucracies, and the social transitions themselves were often deliberately braked and slowed. When the resulting tensions, aggravated by the depression, became so acute as to erode the reliability of the parliamentary regimes of the 1920s as shields for the bureaucracy’s ongoing power, it initiated or endorsed coups d’état that replaced the old regimes with royal, military, or political dictatorships or semidictatorships. The exception to this trend was Czechoslovakia, the area’s economically most mature society.

This East Central European shift from parliamentary to authoritarian institutions was also facilitated and supposedly vindicated by the impressive performance of the Great Power dictatorships, especially of Nazi Germany, in energizing their economies and consolidating their societies. Over the great esteem in which German culture had traditionally been held in East Central Europe was now superimposed a new fascination, which was grudging or enthusiastic as the case might be, but always respectful, with the Nazi political model. The imposing domestic and diplomatic successes of the Nazis, which contrasted vividly with the apparent stagnation and decadence of France, projected the impression that authoritarian dictatorship was the wave of the future. States of lesser power, especially new or restored states, generally take as their model the political institutions and values of the seemingly strongest and most successful Great Power of the day. On the morrow of World War I, this appeared to be France; after the depression, it became Germany. Furthermore, and with specific reference to East Central Europe, Nazi Germany’s policies rendered territorial revisionism realistically “thinkable” and ethnic xenophobia, especially anti-Semitism, psychologically “respectable.”

But the East Central European dictatorships would not or could not emulate the totalitarian dynamism of Hitler’s example. Their commitments were essentially bureaucratic and conservative, at most technocratic and oligarchical. Projecting no mass ideology, they either failed or refused to elicit mass support. Despite their sonorous rhetoric of “the strong hand,” they proved petty, brittle, often irresolute, and generally demoralizing.

Various Right-Radical movements, drawing their political elan even more emphatically from the Nazi example, atavistic in their ideology but modern in their methods, claimed to supply the dynamism, the commitment to radical change, and the capacity to mobilize the masses, that these authoritarian regimes lacked or spurned. Noisiest in the countries with prominent and vulnerable Jewish minorities, the Right-Radical leaders, while themselves usually educated and urbanized, appealed to the supposedly primitive, instinctive, and healthy revulsion of the peasant and proletarian “folk-masses” against the allegedly decadent, “judaized,” secular culture of their bureaucratic and bourgeois exploiters. Indeed, the appeal and the appeals of Right-Radicalism nicely reflected the contemporary condition of interwar East Central Europe as an agricultural society in a crisis of transition and fragmentation: though not yet sufficiently developed and integrated to have moved beyond this demagoguery, it no longer was adequately stable and patriarchal to remain immune to it. The local Right-Radical movements were, however, inhibited in their political offensives by the very fact that the authoritarian regimes which they sought to challenge already embodied a number of their professed ideological values, i.e., were already undemocratic, ultranationalistic, and militaristic, and often mouthed Right-Radical rhetoric even while repelling Right-Radical bids for power. An even greater irony was the fact that Hitler’s regime, eager to extract maximal economic resources from East Central Europe for its own projected war effort, eventually endorsed the local forces of order and rationality, i.e., the authoritarian governments, against the counterproductive, albeit ideologically closer, enthusiasts of turmoil and upheaval, i.e., the Right-Radicals.

8

To the extent that the area’s dictatorships scored any permanent successes, it was in the limited, albeit important, area of etatist economic investment, which did not, however, extend into radical social change or political mobilization. In all cases, excepting Poland and Czechoslovakia, this was achieved through Nazi German assistance in the form of bilateral exchange of local agricultural surpluses and raw materials for industrial equipment, investments, and technical support. While such German economic aid was scarcely altruistic and was clearly designed to achieve regional hegemony and supplement the Reich’s war economy, neither was it utterly exploitative or negative. Contrary to frequent allegations at the time and since, Germany did not flood East Central Europe with cuckoo clocks, aspirin, and thermometers in exchange for grains, minerals, and timber; rather she supplied capital goods for industry, encouraged the diversification of vulnerable one-crop agricultures, and supplied a steady market at reasonable prices. Nazi Germany’s economic policy and behavior thus effectively supplemented her ideological, political, military, and diplomatic prowess in attracting Danubian and Balkan Europe to herself in the second half of the 1930s. Though the Serbs recoiled at the last moment, the Yugoslav governments had also climbed on this bandwagon.

In Poland, the equivalent etatist economic success was scored in the late 1930s without German assistance, through enforced local savings and investments. Czechoslovakia, on the other hand—or, more precisely, its western provinces of Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia—had already reached a substantial industrial plateau and made no analogous economic leap.

Though promising and perhaps indispensable, these etatist investment successes of the late 1930s were too little and too late to absorb more than a puny fraction of the surplus rural population into industrial employment or to spark self-sustaining economic growth. Hence they failed to transform the general economic physiognomy of interwar East Central Europe as an area of low industrialization, poor urban-rural imbalances, acute shortages of capital, and chronic agricultural poverty. Furthermore, as these etatist policies were generally predicated on attitudes of economic nationalism, they also aggravated the understandable but nevertheless irrational craving for state-autarky and thus contributed to the further fading of the fragile flower of intra-area cooperation, already withered by the arid winds of ethnic and irredentist enmity.

The searing trauma of the depression had, of course, been the catalyst of the twin decisions to industrialize and to pursue “beggar-my-neighbor” economic policies. It is difficult, even in retrospect, to appreciate and impossible to exaggerate the tremendous impact of this experience on the peoples and governments of interwar East Central Europe. As the world prices of agricultural commodities fell earlier, more steeply, and remained longer at deeper troughs than the prices of industrial products, the depression taught the dire lesson of the economic impotence of agricultural-exporting countries relative to industrial ones. Particularly hard hit were those extensive regions of East Central Europe that practiced an exclusive cultivation of grain for export, for grains are a commodity for which demand is notoriously inelastic while its supply is highly variable. Hence, as prices dropped, the peasants desperately sought to compensate by increasing production, thereby merely further depressing prices to their own impoverishment. In combination with governmental protection of infant native industries, with absurdly deflationary fiscal and monetary policies, and with exorbitant indirect taxes on necessities such as salt, matches, and kerosene, purchasable only from state monopolies, this price trend put virtually all industrial commodities—plows for production as well as textiles for consumption—out of the reach of the peasants and pushed them into bare subsistance and often into outright starvation. Economic despair then prompted political radicalization which, in interaction with the judiciously orchestrated German drive for hegemony in the area, reopened the whole question of East Central Europe’s international, domestic, political, and economic order. Apropos the author’s earlier judgment of the futility of the Green International, one may note that on no occasion did the area’s agrarian countries negotiate as a bloc with any industrial grain-importing country.

The agricultural price disaster was paralleled and compounded by the West’s abrupt, and probably unnecessary, withdrawal of all its capital credits to East Central Europe in the midst of the depression. Unnecessary—because, while the sums involved were critical for the area’s stability (even though they had often been applied unwisely), they were a relatively small fraction of the Western creditors’ total international investments. Industrial output, capital formation, and employment now all fell precipitously, with calamitous political repercussions. This politico-economic myopia of the West, which had already been foreshadowed by France’s earlier and persistent refusal to support her alliances in the area with adequate trade relations, virtually invited Nazi German penetration. Germany, in turn, did not intend to integrate East Central Europe into the world economy, but the reverse: she wished to tie it to her own and thus create a large and autarkic Grossraumwirtschaft supplementing and facilitating her projected political and military conquest of Europe.

A particularly powerful instrument of this economic strategy was the blocked currency device, whereby the high prices paid by Germany for her huge purchases of agricultural goods and raw materials from East Central European countries were held in blocked accounts at the Reichsbank and could only be “cleared” by East Central European purchases of German commodities. Though sometimes the local governments grumbled at being obliged to take German equipment when they would have preferred being paid in convertible currencies, on balance they appreciated being rescued by Berlin from the economic and political disaster of otherwise unsaleable agricultural surpluses. Nazi Germany thus acquired control over the area’s economy by first dominating its exports, then through these its imports, and finally rendering it utterly dependent on continuing German purchases, supplies, spare parts, and infrastructure. In this way she achieved a position approaching both monopsony and monopoly. By 1939, on the eve of World War II, Germany’s economic hegemony over East Central Europe was more categorical than it had been in 1913, demonstrating that the political advantages that accrued to her from the replacement of the Habsburg Empire by several 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.