The First World War brought the collapse of the conservative monarchies in Europe and a victory for democracy and national self-determination. This victory, however, was neither complete nor permanent. The triumph of bolshevism in Russia meant not only the end of tsardom, but also the elimination of the nascent parliamentary regime. A way toward totalitarianism was opened under Lenin and reached its heyday under Stalin. In Italy a totalitarian creed of the extreme right came to prevail with the victory of the fascists in 1922. The advent of Nazi Germany in 1933 meant the addition of stringent racist doctrines. A formidable challenge arose which the Western democracies faced somewhat passively. The Great Depression called into question the very nature of capitalism. It radicalized the masses and brought new arguments and new recruits to the anti-democratic camp. Indeed, there came about a profound crisis of parliamentary democracy as derived from nineteenth-century liberal ideas, political and economic. In the West only Britain, France, and the smaller states of Scandinavia, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands successfully withstood the assault on their institutions. In East Central Europe, buffeted by the totalitarian gales from east and west, and struggling with economic problems worsened by the Depression, only Czechoslovakia was able to retain until 1938 a democratic parliamentary regime and economic stability. But even in this case one can speak only of a relative success.
The principle of national self-determination which the peacemakers, especially President Wilson, adopted as a guide for the reconstruction of East Central Europe, was to correlate state borders with ethnic divisions. In view of the existence, in many cases, of inextricably mixed areas, and the need to take into account economic, strategic, and historic factors, it was virtually impossible to draw absolutely equitable borders. True, fewer national minorities would be found after the First World War than before, but in the age of rampant nationalism they posed insoluble problems. The ensuing instability was worsened by the fact that although Germany had been defeated it did not cease to
Be a great power. Similarly, the weakening of the Russian colossus through revolution and civil war was of a temporary nature. Both states, discontented, revengeful, and isolated, posed a threat to the new East Central Europe, particularly to the Polish state.
Poland recovered its independence as a result of a combination of many factors. War had broken the solidarity of the partitioning states, and Russia had been forced out of the Polish lands by the Central Powers. They in turn were defeated by the Allies, while the two revolutions in Russia, the upheaval in Germany, and the disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy created a power vacuum. It was filled by the will and determination of the Polish nation that had never abandoned its struggle for freedom. Polish borders with Germany were drawn by the Paris Peace Conference, although the Poles were not mere spectators, as witnessed by the 1918-21 uprisings in Prussian Poland. The new frontiers denied to Poland its historic harbor Gdansk, which became the Free City of Danzig, and they split, after a plebiscite, Upper Silesia. The Germans did not accept the existence of the “corridor” (as they called it) linking Poland with the Baltic Sea and separating Germany from East Prussia. They denounced it as an artificial monstrosity, although ethnically it was predominantly Polish and had been part of Poland before the partitions. Polish-Czechoslovak frontiers were easier to establish except for a small part in Silesia (Tesin, Cieszyn, Teschen) which the Czechs seized by force in 1919. The subsequent division of this economically rich district was deeply resented by the Poles, and it contributed to the bad blood between the two countries.
The Peace Conference could not effectively establish Poland’s eastern frontiers given the chaos prevailing in the former Russian empire and the absence of Russia’s representative in Paris. The advancing detachments of the Red Army, seeking to carry revolution westward, clashed with the Poles claiming the lands that had belonged to the old Commonwealth. In former eastern Galicia an armed confrontation between the Ukrainians and the Poles lasted until 1919, when the Polish side took over the entire province.
Dmowski and the Polish right demanded the borders of 1772 as corrected by ethnic changes that had occurred in the course of the nineteenth century. This meant a certain expansion in the west (Silesia) and a contraction in the east (roughly the line of the second partition). In the latter region the Polish minority was strong culturally and economically and Dmowski believed in the possibility of assimilating the Ukrainians and Belorussians. Pilsudski and the left favored a “federalist” approach that would lead—after the withdrawal of Russia from all of the lands of the old Commonwealth—to the creation of a bloc of federated or allied countries: Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia, and the Ukraine. The Dmowski-Pilsudski controversy over Polish eastern policies was not lost on the great powers, although they, as well as the borderland nations, often suspected that both trends disguised Polish imperialist designs.
The Peace Conference did not unequivocally side with the Poles against the bolsheviks, politically or militarily, but it did not recognize the bolsheviks or try to make peace with them either. Procrastinating and zigzaging the conference in late 1919 proposed a minimal Polish border in the east, known later as the Curzon Line. This was no solution, and Allied preference for a policy of neither war nor peace with the bolsheviks was unacceptable to the embattled Poles. Pilsudski believed that peace could only be achieved after a military victory. Gaining the support of the Ukrainian leader Petliura, he launched an offensive in the spring of 1920 that resulted in the capture of Kiev. The Red Army attacked in turn and reached the outskirts of Warsaw. The entire postwar settlement was suddenly at stake. Poland and perhaps even Europe was saved through the “eighteenth decisive battle of the world,” as a British diplomat termed the Polish victory. Pilsudski’s opponents, trying to belittle his achievement, called it the “miracle of the Vistula.” The bolshevik rout opened the way to negotiations. The Peace Treaty of Riga of 1921 split the ethnically mixed, but largely Ukrainian and Belorussian borderlands between Poland and the Soviets. As for Vilnius (Wilno) and its region—historically Lithuanian, but ethnically Polish-Belorussian-Jewish—it was seized militarily by the Poles. Pilsudski was willing to give this region to Lithuania but only if the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were recreated. This, the Lithuanians, bent on independent national existence, were unwilling to accept. A wall of enmity arose between the two nations.
As compared with all the complexities of the Polish territorial settlement, the drawing of Czechoslovak borders was far less dramatic. The old frontiers with Germany remained unchanged, the Allies having no intention of applying the ethnic principle to them or to Austria because it would have resulted in a Germany stronger than before the war. Hence the Sudeten Germans, as they came to be known, vainly sought to detach the border regions from the new Czechoslovak state. While the peacemakers endorsed the historic borders of Bohemia and Moravia —in Silesia the above-mentioned controversy with the Poles flared up— they accepted borders in Slovakia that were a mixture of ethnic, economic, and strategic compromises. Several almost purely Hungarian-inhabited regions were included in them. Further east, the region known as Carpatho-Ruthenia or Carpatho-Ukraine, was transferred from Hungary to Czechoslovakia mainly on strategic grounds, to establish contiguity with Romania. The Hungarians’ bad record of minority treatment was also invoked in this settlement. Thus, except for some extravagant claims, virtually all Czechoslovak territorial demands were granted, making the country highly heterogeneous. Somewhat ingeniously Benes drew comparisons with Switzerland; critics said that a near replica of the Habsburg monarchy had been created.
Czechoslovakia was the darling of the Entente; Hungary was its bete noire. All the efforts of Karolyi to win Allied sympathy for the new state after the disintegration of historic Hungary were in vain. The subsequent short-lived Soviet Hungarian republic only increased antagonism toward the Hungarians and delayed the peace treaty. When signed in 1920 with the counter-revolutionary regime of Admiral M. Horthy, it proved to be the harshest of all treaties that followed the First World War. Not only was the ethnic principle used everywhere against Hungary, but it was also violated when operating in Hungary’s favor. Plebiscite demands (with one exception in Sopron) were refused. In virtue of the Treaty of Trianon Hungary (excluding Croatia) was reduced territorially by two-thirds and in terms of population by three-fifths. Almost every third ethnic Magyar found himself now living under Romanian, Czechoslovak, Yugoslav, or Austrian rule. Hungary was fully independent at last but under conditions that amounted to a national disaster. Small wonder that extreme bitterness prevailed and the cry “nem, nem, soha” (“no, no, never”) reverberated throughout the truncated land. The Hungarians became obsessed with a revision of Trianon, revisionism shaping to a large extent Budapest’s external and domestic politics.
The new international order that arose out of the postwar treaties was to be based on the League of Nations. Yet from the outset its main pillar, the United States, was absent, and the support of the remaining two, Britain and France, was weakened by their mutual differences. The French were intent on the fulfillment of Versailles, preservation of the status quo, and prevention of a German comeback, by force if necessary. The British wished to eliminate the causes of German revisionism by satisfying German grievances through peaceful change. As time went on, France became increasingly dependent on Britain. This had dire consequences for France’s Eastern allies, Poland and Czechoslovakia, whose fate was closely associated with the preservation of the postwar system.
The international situation and the foreign policies of the three East Central European states exerted a great impact on their domestic evolution and vice versa. Poland, recreated albeit in a different shape after one hundred and twenty-odd years of partitions found itself between the German Scylla and the Russian Charybdis, or as it was said at the time, between the jaws of a gigantic pair of pincers which when closed would crush it. Poland could not, without jeopardizing its independence, side either with Germany against Russia or vice versa. Hence, Warsaw’s foreign policy came to be based on the twin principles of balance and alliances with France and Romania. It was not always easy to reconcile the two.
Unlike Poland Czechoslovakia had no declared enemy among the great powers. Identifying closely with the new international order, Prague relied in its foreign policy on three elements: the League of Nations, with which it cooperated very closely; the alliance with France, whose protege it became; and regionally the Little Entente, composed of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. In the mid-1930s a pact with the USSR was added. As for the Little Entente, designed to keep Hungary in check, it was above all a diplomatic instrument operative against revisionism, a Habsburg restoration, or a union (Anschluss) between Germany and Austria.
The international standing of the defeated and truncated Hungary was obviously very different from that of the victor states. With an area of 92,963 sq.
Km Hungary was much smaller than Czechoslovakia with 140,493 sq. km and Poland whose territory comprised some 388,634 sq. km. Poland was the sixth largest state in Europe; Czechoslovakia was only thirteenth, but it made up for the difference in economic might. Hungary was by far too weak to think of altering the Trianon settlement by force, and it pursued its revisionism through diplomacy. Budapest’s foreign policy oscillated between cooperation with Rome and with Berlin, while seeking also to exert some influence in London. Its options were obviously limited. Hungarian enmity centered on Czechoslovakia, the loss of Slovakia being particularly resented, and here Budapest and Warsaw found some common ground. The Polish card was never a trump in the Hungarian diplomatic pack, but it had its use, and it reinforced the traditional friendship between the Hungarians and the Poles.
While many reasons seemed to dictate Polish-Czechoslovak cooperation the two states never closed ranks. Prague did not want to jeopardize its position by siding with Poland, which was threatened by both Germany and the USSR. When in the mid-1930s the situation changed to Czechoslovak disadvantage, Prague’s advances met with a cool reception in Warsaw. Hungarian, Czechoslovak, or Polish external preoccupations, whether they were a desire for change or the fear of it, affected domestic developments, political and economic. Concern for security necessitated heavy military expenditure by both Poland and Czechoslovakia. Hungary, of course, was disarmed under the Treaty of Trianon.
World History
