Abstract
Until 1918 most of the peoples of Eastern Europe had been dominated by great empires. By the end of that year all those empires had ceased to exist. In their place there arose a series of new, or geographically redefined states, founded on the principles of national liberation and constitutional democracy. The oppressed nations of the region had at last attained their long-sought liberty. Yet the sweets of victory very soon turned sour. After little more than two decades constitutional democracy had everywhere proved a failure and almost the entire region was in thrall to predatory Nazi Germany.
Upon the Breaking and Shivering of a greate State and Empire, you may be sure to have Warres. For great Empires, while they stand, do enervate and destroy the Forces of the Natives which they have subdued … and when they faile also, all goes to Ruine and they become a Prey.
Francis Bacon
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References
For Wilson’s 14 Points see The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, pp. 158–62. The reference is to point 10. The idea of converting Austria-Hungary into a federation had been mooted before the war. On the collapse of the Polish Republic in the eighteenth century, see Chapter 15.
The two most active proponents of national liberation in Eastern Europe were the journalist H. Wickham Steed (see his memoirs, Through Thirty Years, 2 vols (New York, 1924)) and the historian R. Seton Watson. See the interesting account of the tetter’s activities by his sons Hugh and Christopher (The Making of New Europe (London, 1981) in which they seek to exonerate him.
The Czecho-Slovak agreement had been concluded with the American Slovaks at Pittsburgh on 30 June 1918. A similar accord with American Ruthenes led to Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia being brought into the new state. As will be seen, the Czechs failed to keep their promises to either nationality after independence. See also n. 10 below.
See Wilson’s eleventh point, which refers to the Balkans, and the conclusion of the document.
Romania had been knocked out of the war by the Central Powers in 1916 but rejoined it at the eleventh hour, on 10 November 1918. This allowed her to invoke the Agreement. By a similar agreement Greece had been promised south-western Anatolia with Smyrna at the expense of Turkey.
The Treaty of Versailles defined the western frontiers of Poland and Czechoslovakia; that of St Germain (10 September 1919) defined Austria’s frontiers with Czechoslovakia and the new Yugoslav state; that of Trianon (4 June 1920) fixed Hungary’s frontiers with her neighbours, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania, while the Treaty of Neuilly (27 November 1919) redefined Bulgaria’s frontiers with Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece. The Treaty of Sevres (10 August 1920), however, failed to stick because of Greece’s misadventure against the Turks in attempting to secure Anatolia (see n. 5 above) and was overtaken by the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923).
The great map of nationalities accompanying C. Macartney’s Hungary and her Successors (London, 1937), illustrates the fact in one sector of the region. Large-scale population movements were arranged only between Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.
E.g. the rights to life, liberty, property, citizenship and religion (insofar as was consistent with public order and morals). See, for example, clauses 1–8 of the Treaty with the Serbo-Croat-Slovene State (Yugoslavia), 10 September 1919 (UK Treaty Series 1919, No. 17, Cmd. 461) and Section VI of the Treaty of Trianon (with Hungary), British and Foreign State Papers, 1920, Vol. XCIII. For the right of linguistic minorities to maintain private schools in their own language, see Articles XVII and XVIII of the Final Protocol between Austria and Czechoslovakia, 7 June 1921 (Article 8 of the Czech Treaty and Article 67 of the Austrian). On religious rights for Yugoslavia’s Muslims, see clause 10 of its Treaty (supra). See also Articles 10 and 11 of the Treaty with Poland regarding the Jews.
Clemenceau to Paderewski, Paris, 24 June 1919.
For the obligations to the Ruthenes, see articles 10–12 of the Czech Treaty, 10 September 1919, UK Treaty Series 1919, No. 20, Cmd. 479. The promise to the Slovaks under the Pittsburgh Agreement (Note 3 above) was informal. In 1921 officialdom in Ruthenia was mostly Czech and Czech dominance increased thereafter (See Note 11 below).
See Macartney, op. cit., tables on p. 225.
The best account of these costs, on which the following brief account is largely based, is still D. Mitrany, The Effect of the War in South-Eastern Europe (New Haven, 1936).
Tariff levels over most of the region rose by about half between 1913 and 1927, and Bulgaria’s tripled. Only those of Austria and Poland saw a reduction. The only comparable rise in a Western European country occurred in Spain — see F. Hertz, The Economic Problem of the Danubian States (London, 1947) p. 72.
Delnicke Listy, Prague 1920, quoted in Herz op. cit., p. 66.
Macartney, op. cit., p. 118.
The Polish Peasant Union (PZL), the Polish Peasant Party (Piast), the Polish Peasant Party (Left), the Radical Peasant Party, and the Catholic Peasant Party.
R. Okey, Eastern Europe 1740–1980: Feudalism to Communism (London, 1982) p. 171; J. Zarnewski, Dictatorship in East-Central Europe 1918–1939 (Wroclaw, 1983) pp. 9–26; A. Polonsky in R. Leslie (ed.), Poland Since 1863 (Cambridge, 1980) pp. 139ff..
Zarnewski, op. cit., p. 23.
A. Savu, Sistemul partidelor politico din Romania 1919–1940 (Bucharest, 1976) p. 26 quoted in B. Valota, Questione Agraria e vita politica in Romania (1907–1922) (Milan, 1979) pp. 172–3.
N. Iorga, O viata de om (Bucharest, 1933), pp. 543–4, quoted by Valota, op. cit., p. 198.
The Soviet Union, while not solving the problem, found an accommodation by granting minority nationals cultural, and a measure of political, independence, while maintaining a centralist union in practice. On the formation of Soviet nationality policy (of which Stalin was the chief architect), see R. Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union, Cambridge (Mass.) 1954.
For a picture of the lowest stratum, the farm servants (in some respects worse off than the serfs of former ages) see G. Illyes’s fictionalized autobiography, People of the Puszta, (trans. G. Cushing) (London, 1971). However, particularly in south-western Hungary there were some comparatively prosperous peasants.
The foregoing account is based principally on A. Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary (Princeton, 1982).
These generalizations are based on A. Carr Saunders, World Population (Oxford, 1936) esp. col. 2 of ‘Density of Population and Agricultural Employment in Europe’, p. 141; Economic Development in South-Eastern Europe, London 1945, tables on ‘Employment according to Main Branches’ (p. 129), ‘Density of Agrarian Population’ (p. 26) and ‘Yields per Hectare’ (p. 29); and Hertz, op. cit., esp. the table on yields 1925–9, p. 110. Carr Saunders (op. cit., p. 143) calculates Poland’s excess rural population at 3 millions.
See tables on overseas migration in Economic Development, op. cit., p. 128; Carr Saunders, op. cit., p. 147, and table on immigration under American quota legislation, p. 193.
Table on ‘Age Distribution of Population’ in Economic Development, op. cit., p. 126.
Based on tables in Hertz, The Economic Problem, op. cit.; Economic Development, op. cit.; N. Forter and D. Rostovsky, The Romanian Handbook (London, 1931) pp. 89ff.; B. Valota, op. cit.. Also Hertz, pp. 114–16, D. Warriner, Economics of Peasant Farming (London, 1939) and her Revolution in Eastern Europe (London, 1950) p. 176.
P. Petkov (ed.) Aleksandr Stamboliiski: lichnost’ i idei (Sofia, 1930). See also G. Jackson, ‘Peasant Political Movements in Eastern Europe’ in H. Landsberger (ed.), Rural Protest (London, 1974) pp. 259–315. Under Stamboliiski the poor were billeted on the rich and urban dwellers forced to toil in the fields for several days each year. Traces of the latter practice were in evidence until recently, students and scientists being called out to help in the East European countryside at harvest-time.
The figures are drawn chiefly from G. Ranki, Economy and Foreign Policy (New York, 1983).
Generally on the resort to barter in the countryside in 1932 see Macartney, op. cit., p. 472.
Yugoslav Foreign Minister’s speech to the Commission for European Union, 1931.
The story of how Germany realized these plans is well told by Ranki, op. cit..
The Little Entente had been strengthened in December 1932 by the formation of a permanent secretariat. In general on the foundation and history of the Little Entente see R. Machray, The Little Entente, (London, 1929) and his The Struggle for the Danube and the Little Entente 1929–1938 (London, 1938).
Ranki, Economy and Foreign Policy, op. cit., pp. 167–9. Also Machray, Struggle, op. cit.
F. Szalasi, Ut es Cel [The I and the Us] (Budapest, 1936) parts of which have been translated in E. Weber, Varieties of Fascism (New York, 1964) pp. 157–60, from which this rendering has been adapted.
C. Codreanu, Pentru Legionari (Bucharest, 1937) pp. 385–98, trans. S. Fischer-Galati, Man, State and Society in Eastern European History (New York, 1970) pp. 327–30. See also Weber, op. cit., pp. 284–7.
The text of the Slovak-German Treaty of 18–23 March 1939 in Prager Tageblatt, 24 March 1939.
See the text in The Military Negotiations between the Soviet Union, Britain and France in 1939’, International Affairs, Moscow, February 1959, pp. 119–23. Western archives corroborate the accuracy of this version.
By the end of the war there were only about 350,000 left in Romania (T. Schieder (ed.), Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe, Vol. II (Bonn, 1961) p. 73) and some 200,000 in Hungary (ibid. vol. III, pp. 121f.), besides substantial communities in the Baltic countries and Slovenia. The ‘Volga Germans’, settled in Russia since the eighteenth century, were removed out of reach of the German forces.
See, among others, A. Basch, The Danube Basin and the German Economic Sphere (London, 1944). For another perspective of the problems described in this chapter see Z.A.B. Zeman, Pursued by a Bear (Oxford, 1989).
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© 1992 Philip Longworth
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Longworth, P. (1992). Independence and its Consequences 1918–44. In: The Making of Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22202-5_4
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