Conclusion

The end of the First World War is in many respects an inappropriate closing point for a history of Eastern Europe. Fighting continued or flared up anew in some parts of the region for several years after 1918, borders were still being disputed, and it was not until 1923 that the last of the peace treaties was signed. When the dust had settled, the multinational empires were no more, replaced by that belt of smaller states which now came to be known as Eastern Europe. Even then there was enough unfinished business to ensure that Eastern Europe remained a source of international instability throughout the interwar years.

In the Baltic states there were vicious civil conflicts raging for over a year between forces loyal to the new national governments, ethnic Germans and Communists, both local and Russian. German troops remained in the area at the request of the victorious Allies, to prevent the new states falling to Bolshevik revolution, until late 1919. In the Ukraine the Hetmanate was replaced in November 1918 by a Ukrainian National Republic. This independent Ukraine, however, was not only a base for the 'White' reactionary forces ranged against Lenin's regime in the Russian civil war, but it was also the scene of confused fighting between the Red Army and the Republic, which the latter finally lost in 1920. The Ukraine was reincorporated in what became the Soviet Union as the 'Ukrainian Soviet Republic'. Poland's western borders, including the 'Polish Corridor' to the Baltic, were decided by the Treaty of Versailles imposed by the Allies on Germany in June 1919, but its eastern frontiers were in a state of flux until 1921, following a war with Bolshevik Russia, which ended with Poland conquering most of the former territories of the old Polish Commonwealth, together with large numbers of Belorussians and Ukrainians. In 1920 Poland also seized the region around Wilno, a predominantly Polish and Jewish city, despite Lithuania's 'historic' claim to it. Hungary lost substantial territories to Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, but in the process succumbed to a brief Bolshevik dictatorship in 1919, which was then extinguished by a Romanian invasion and a 'White' reaction; a peace treaty with Hungary was possible only in 1920.

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (only formally named Yugoslavia in 1929) was eventually compelled to accept borders with Italy, in 1920, which left substantial numbers of Slovenes and Croats under Italian rule, although Yugoslavia itself was a decidedly multinational state, not all of whose subjects were Slavs, and even more of whom were unhappy with their lot. Albania was lucky to escape partition between Yugoslavia, Italy and Greece by 1920; as it was, large numbers of Albanians still lived in Yugoslavia and Greece. Bulgaria

Map 8 Territorial Changes 1918-23

Source: ‘The Peace Settlement'; Macartney, C. A. and Palmer, A. W., 1962, Independent Eastern Europe: A History, London, 137.

Lost territory to Yugoslavia and Greece, including its access to the Aegean. Finally, the partition of the Ottoman Empire produced a Turkish nationalist backlash, and resistance to the peace terms imposed in 1920 coalesced around a Young Turk army officer, Mustafa Kemal. Greece, awarded the right by the Allies in 1919 to occupy the Anatolian, but largely Greek, port of Smyrna and a large portion of its hinterland, overreached itself in 1921 by launching an even more ambitious invasion of the Turkish heartland. This attempt to realise the Megali Idea backfired when the Turks literally drove the Greeks into the sea in 1922. The result was not only a revised peace treaty in 1923 but also the first negotiated population transfer in modern history, whereby 1.1 million Greeks and 380,000 Muslims were expelled from their ancestral homelands and deported to a 'nation' they had never seen.1

Over this chaos the great powers of the war's winning side presided, at the Paris peace conference of 1919—20, and through innumerable interventions and attempted deals both before and after.2 It is important to dispel the notion that the great powers simply ordained the peace settlement in Eastern Europe. Although they had considerable leverage and could in some cases force a solution, their reach was limited by their resources, the war-weariness of their own electorates, and not least the actions of East European governments and peoples. The great powers' exhortations were in any case diluted by their selfinterest. Awards of territory were made to serve broader strategic desiderata, principally the limitation of German power and the insulation of Europe against the plague bacillus of Communism. To these ends the principle of national self-determination was implemented in Eastern Europe only partially, and in some cases not at all. Territory containing substantial minorities was either seized by states or awarded to them for strategic reasons. The result was a region of supposed nation-states which were in fact anything but that. Economically and militarily weak, politically faction-ridden and liable to slide into authoritarianism, the states of Eastern Europe were scarcely in a position to serve as a cordon sanitaire, hemming in Germany from the East while also guarding the continent against Communism. In reality the region was a vast power vacuum, which the true regional superpowers, Germany and Russia, would strive to fill as soon as they recovered from defeat and revolution.

How, then, to summarise the developments that had made Eastern Europe such a distinct region in this formative period from the early eighteenth century to the end of the First World War? In particular, what can be said about the underlying themes of modernisation, nationalism and supranationalism? Despite considerable advances in several parts of Eastern Europe, it is clear that economically the region had not caught up with Western Europe; indeed, the gap might even be said to have been widened by the outcome of the war. Apart from the physical damage inflicted on some areas, the division of the region into yet more sovereign states, each with its own customs barriers, currency, and legal and institutional systems, and each desperate to protect what industry it had, constituted a serious retardation of economic development. The inefficiency of agriculture was not lessened by the rise, under constitutions which to begin with almost everywhere relied on universal suffrage, of mass-based peasant parties; these were able to put land redistribution on the political agenda in several states, which created a larger class of smallholders, not noted for high productivity. Only in the Soviet Union did forced collectivisation in the 1930s produce an agricultural revolution, but at hideous human cost and with as yet unsuspected inefficiencies of its own; the export of this self-defeating model to Communist Eastern Europe after 1945 is arguably one of the reasons it has remained economically backward down to the present.

Politically, too, Eastern Europe might be said to have remained backward after 1918. Democratic constitutions and universal suffrage were introduced to most of the region, but did not seem to take easy root. Before the 1920s were out several states had succumbed to dictatorship or authoritarianism, and political instability and violence were endemic. We should, however, beware of seeing this as a peculiarly East European problem, since Western Europe in the interwar period had its fair share of violence and political extremism. Nevertheless it may be that there was something in the political culture of the pre-1918 period, or in some cases, as in tsarist Russia, the absence of political culture, which helps explain this political immaturity.

The end of our period saw the seeming triumph of nationalism, with the formation of so many 'national' states. Yet this triumph was only partial and indeed deeply flawed. Fresh injustices were perpetrated in creating these states, but the mere fact of state creation was enough to ensure the continued strength of nationalism's appeal. Now there were new grievances on which nationalism could feed. Macedonians were stranded in Yugoslavia, Hungarians in the three successor states around Hungary; above all, Austrian Germans were permanently excluded from union with Germany, and Germans were a vocal minority in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in the Baltic states and elsewhere.

Finally, the concept of supranational states seemed discredited and discarded. The old empires were gone, and although the Soviet Union was still a multinational state it was not only appealing to a different, and supposedly higher ideology, socialism, for its raison d'etre; the 'Union of Soviet Socialist Republics', to give it its full name, was deliberately given a federal appearance, if not reality, in order to defuse the nationalism of its constituent peoples. Curiously, however, the new Eastern Europe contained two states, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, purporting to represent a composite 'state' nationalism. Each officially promoted the fiction, unsupported by ethnography or philology, that there was such a thing as a 'Czechoslovak' or a 'Yugoslav' national identity. Neither was a convincing advertisement for such a thesis. In Eastern Europe as a whole, in the interwar period, there was little sign of any sustained ability to cooperate internationally, let alone return to some larger political unit.

At the end of the Second World War Eastern Europe had the Soviet supranational model, Communism, imposed on it. This had the effect, obvious as early as the 1950s but even clearer after the fall of Communism in 1989, of making nationalism stronger. Not only did nationalism, especially among the peoples of the Soviet Union itself, appear to be the one disintegrative factor the Soviet leadership had not reckoned with, it has so far demonstrated its continuing importance to East Europeans. Yet the eagerness of the postCommunist states to join the European Union, whatever their disappointment since doing so, may be some indication that a different form of supranationalism is now acceptable.