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,