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