The New Central Europe

Imperfect as the Locarno Pact was, if ever a favorable opportunity to bring about European reconciliation existed, it was during the Locarno era. The pact was the first step toward better relations between Germany and France, the two former enemy countries, from which European reconciliation had to take its cue. Democracyin Weimar Germany was still at that time strong enough to keep under control the enemies of civilization who on their way "from nationality to bestiality" (in fulfillment of Grillparzer's prophecy) had found their leader in Hitler. Stalin's Russia, the other principal enemy of Western civilization, presented no imminent threat as long as she was isolated behind the cordon sanitaire. Moreover, in 1928 the Soviet government launched its first Five Year Plan, and was anxious to remain in seclusion and preserve the peace of the world during the critical period of Russia's social and economic transformation.

The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, a true European, taking the measure of the dangers threatening Western civilization both from within and from without, gave warning in 1929 that to his way of thinking "the building- up of Europe into a great national state is the one enterprise that could counterbalance a victory of the "five year plan."[1] A "great European national state," or rather a supranational United States of Europe--for this is what Ortega y Gasset had in mind--could have counterbalanced, of course, not only the Communist threat to Europe, but also the other growing menace of tyranny, Hitler's rise to power.

From Austria, from this cradle and grave of federalist efforts, Count Richard N. Coudenhove- Kalergi had been advocating the idea of "Pan- Europe" since the early twenties. This movement, favoring the creation of a United States of Europe, gained momentum after Locarno and was supported by some of the best European minds. Among the great writers, scientists and artists who endorsed the pan- European movement were Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Miguel de Unamuno, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Bronislav Huberman, Bruno Walter, Paul Valery. These men, unfortunately, were not representative of the great masses of people, who were largely influenced by passions of exaggerated nationalism. And the political leaders of Europe, if they supported Coudenhove- Kalergi's movement at all, paid mostly lip- service to European unity, supporting it only as long as it served their special national interests. Thus, status quo supporters who favored the pan- European movement did so with the understanding that it was not a change of frontiers that was needed but their so- called spiritualization. The program of "spiritualization," originated by the Romanian Foreign Minister, Nicolae Titulescu, might have been commendable had it not been merely a shrewd way of circumventing the revision of the Danubian frontiers by elevating the problem above the plane of discussion. The revisionists, on the other hand, if they favored the idea of pan- Europe, did so in the expectation that it would help undo injustices by bringing about frontier revisions.

After Locarno the vanquished began to breathe more freely, but the controversy between supporters and opponents of the peace settlement remained unsolved. In 1926 Germany became a member of the League of Nations and, as a spokesman in Geneva for the rights of German minorities, encouraged the revisionists, who were demanding reconsideration of the status quo according to ethnic principles and rights of self- determination. France and her satellites, on the other hand, solidified the ranks of the anti- revisionists.

In 1927 Italy concluded a treaty of friendship with Hungary and Mussolini denounced the Trianon Treaty, calling for its revision. At the same time, the British newspaper owner, Lord Rothermere, launched a campaign against the Trianon Treaty. Hungarian revisionist propaganda remained rather ineffective in France, which was a single- minded supporter of the Little Entente; but it attained considerable success in Britain, where Conservative circles lent a sympathetic ear--though a good deal of the favorable response was motivated by British disapproval of French policies in the Danube Valley. The sympathy some British Conservatives retained for Hungarys ruling class also played into the hands of the revisionists; and the information these British sympathizers received about the peace settlement came from conservative Hungarian sources, anxious to persuade the Western Powers that restoration of pre- war Hungarywould be the magic cure for the post- war ills of Central Europe.

Hungarys neighbors were irritated enough with what was justifiable in the revisionist demands, namely the return of the territories inhabited by Hungarians; what infuriated them, however, were reckless revisionist claims to be seeking, also, "justice" for pre- war Hungarys non- Hungarian nationalities. The Budapest revisionists asserted that the Slovaks, Ruthenes and Croats were maltreated in the countries of the Little Entente and were disillusioned with the regimes under which they had been kept against their will. Thus Hungaryexploited the nationality tensions within the Little Entente countries, while the latter indulged especially in exposing Hungarys reactionary class rule. The two sides had consistently promoted discord in each other by means which they considered best suited for undermining stability.

Encouraged by Lord Rothermere's campaign and by Mussolini's denunciation of the Trianon Treaty, hopes of revision rose high both in Hungaryand among the Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. At the same time, the Little Entente grew correspondingly alarmed by this success of Hungarian revisionism. Mass demonstrations organized by the Prague, Bucharest and Belgrade governments of the Little Entente protested against Hungarys revisionist aspirations. In 1929 the three members of the Little Entente reorganized their alliance; their treaty system henceforth was to be automatically renewed at the end of each five- year period.

The propaganda of the revisionists and anti- revisionists was mainly focused on the territorial settlement of the peace treaties. Thus the illusion was spread among both opponents and supporters of the status quo that peace in Europe was essentially a matter either of maintaining or of changing national boundaries. In fact, few territorial changes were needed to satisfy those demands of the revisionists that were justifiable. The kind of "revision" Europe truly needed was a profound change of its political structure. Nationalist rivalries were threatening the peace of Europe as much as were the forces hostile to democracy. International pacification was not simply a matter of redrawing some of the national boundaries, it was above all a matter of democratic governments, social progress, economic prosperity. These conditions of true peace had not been attained under the European system of sovereign nation- states. A League of Nations with supranational powers to guarantee and enforce the rule of democracy throughout Europe could have tackled the intricate problems of international reconciliation. But such a "revision"was out of the question. Europe, alas, was not ready to embrace "democratic internationalism," as advocated by Norman Angell toward the end of the First World War. Attempts at international cooperation for much less ambitious objectives proved failures during the late twenties and early thirties, as Europe approached the crucial point of its post- war history with Hitler's rise to power in Germany.

Plans to extricate Europe from the nationalist deadlock through new forms of international cooperation were not lacking. But the plans, though actually not comprehensive enough, nevertheless proved too ambitious, and failed because of lack of support. The most ambitious plan on a governmental level was launched by France's Aristide Briand in 1929- 30. Briand proposed to create a "European Association," or, as it was vaguely interpreted, a United States of Europe. The plan rightly diagnosed that the underlying causes of Europe's ills were of a political nature, and prescribed peaceful arbitration of all international disputes. Some critics felt the plan neglected the economic foundations of inter- national cooperation. Probably the plan did not strike the right balance between economic and political factors; but the real causes of its failure lay elsewhere, and they were summed up twenty years later by another French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, who, working for a federated Europe, was trying to save the peace after another world war. Three points emphasized by Schuman may explain the failure of all unity plans, whether continental like Briand's or regional like the Danubian plans: First, the Briand plan definitely excluded any infringement of national sovereignty. (". . . making it a matter of principle that not a particle of their sovereignty was to be relinquished, the signatories . . . promised to deprive themselves of the chief means of achieving their goal. It was to be accepted in advance that the original organization would be powerless.") Second, the inferior status of the vanquished was not abolished. ("What hope would there be of common action by France and Germany, when the former clung to her unsatisfied legal rights and the latter clamored for equality and revision of the Treaty? In such an atmosphere there was no possibility of cooperation.") Third, the time was not ripe for European union. ("The French plan was stillborn because it was ahead of its time, and, even if it had been tried, it would not have worked."[2]) Of course, the policy of federalism was "ahead of its time," not because it was not needed, but because it could not be popular in an age which extolled national egotism. And few politicians had the foresight and courage to perform the unpopular job of stemming popular cur- rents. They preferred drifting along with the old tide of nationalism to charting bold new courses of federalism. Federalist pioneers were especially and urgently needed in the Danube Valley.

The smaller nations of Danubian Europe, not unlike the French and Germans in the west, were interlocked in rivalries for hegemony. These rivalries were petty affairs in comparison with what was at stake in the rivalry between the two great nations of Europe, Germany and France. What made the rivalry of the small nations especially pernicious, however, was the great number of their conflicting aspirations; crowded into the relatively small area of the middle Danube Valley were more national conflicts than there were in all the rest of Europe. And what made these petty rivalries even more dangerous was the fact that these small nations of Central Europe, in order to bolster themselves against their rivals, were enlisting the support of the Great Powers. The Hungarians thus placed traditional reliance upon Germany, and they also found a new ally in Italy; revisionist policy formed the bond of union between Hungaryand these two Great Powers. On the other hand the three Little Entente countries, Hungarys rivals, found their protector in France, with whom they shared a common interest in maintaining the status quo and combating revisionist aspirations. Thus the rivalries of the small nations became intertwined with those of the Great Powers, and the Danubian conflicts, though petty in themselves, became enmeshed in the great conflicts of Europe.

Termination of the rivalry of the Great Powers was no doubt the surest way of making an end to the rivalry between the small nations also; but such a change in the political climate of Europe was as remote as any willingness of the small nations to seize the initiative and compose their differences among themselves.

There was a popular theory circulating, which tried to explain the unhappy Danubian situation by the lack of democracy among the enemies of the peace settlement. This theory, although far from flawless, was not quite without foundation. Even before Hitler seized the leader- ship of the revisionist camp, the European countries, small and great, which opposed the peace settlement were either poor practitioners or outright enemies of the democratic form of government. Revisionist Hungaryas governed by Admiral Horthy was a dictatorship adorned by a facade of parliamentarianism. Hungarys first revisionist friend was Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy. Poland, which refused to co- operate with the anti- revisionist Little Entente, while cultivating a friendship, called "historical," with Hungary was developing under Marshal Joseph Pilsudski her own brand of dictatorship with parliamentary adornments. Revisionist Bulgaria was another example of democracy's failure; there a coup in 1923 ended Alexandertambolijski1">AlexanderStambolijski's drastic experiment of a peasant democracy.

On the other hand, in anti- revisionist Yugoslavia too, democratic evolution was arrested by the royal dictatorship of King Alexander Also in the kingdom of Romania, another anti- revisionist country, the vitality of the reactionary forces curtailed the effectiveness of the post- war democratic reforms. Only Czechoslovakia could equate anti- revisionism with the rule of democracy. Yet, victors or vanquished, reactionaries or democrats, revisionists or anti- revisionists, all the regimes in the Danube Valley had one thing in common: they were strongly nationalistic. Nationalism coupled with democracy was certainly a lesser evil than nationalism coupled with reaction. Nevertheless, a peaceful evolution in the Danube Valley depended as much on the abandonment of the nationalist dogma that viewed the state as a vehicle of power directed against another nation, as on the universal extension of democracy. Only thus, if at all, could the national states of the post- Habsburg era have evolved toward a federal union of the Danubian peoples.

The responsibility of Admiral Horthy's counterrevolutionary Hungaryfor blocking this evolutionary process was twofold: neither was she a democracy nor was she willing to give up her exaggerated nationalist aspirations to dominate the Carpathian basin. The exiled Hungarian pioneer of Danubian federalism, Oscar Jászi, saw from far- away New York what the rulers of Hungaryrefused to see from Budapest. In 1924 Jászi wrote: "Only a thoroughgoing democratization of Hungaryand loyal intimate relations between this democratized Hungaryand the new states, can create such an atmosphere in Central Europe as can cure the gravest evils of the present situation and clear the way for a democratic confederation of all the small nations which are now tormented by the rigid dogma of national sovereignty."[3] Jászi no less clearly saw also the effects of the imperialistic peace forced upon Hungaryby her neighbors: "I believed and still believe that a Hungaryreorganized on the model of Switzerland, closely united in federal bonds with the neighbor states, would have been a better guarantee of democracy, of economic progress and of peace, than a mutilated Hungaryrobbed of the means of existence, embittered and pursued by dreams of revanche, and hardening her heart against the surrounding states."[4]

The neighbors of Hungaryalso shared a twofold responsibility for failure of peaceful evolution in the Danube Valley. First, in a frenzy of nationalism they carved up Hungarywell beyond what was permissible according to ethnic principles, thus making themselves rulers over vast Hungarian minorities. Second, they refused to reconsider the harsh terms of the peace. Their favorite way of laying the blame on Hungaryfor the post- war troubles was to say that the existing controversies could be settled if Hungaryhad a democratic regime. The practical value of such statements, considering the small chance of replacing the Horthy regimewith a democratic government, amounted to almost nothing--although it was fair to assume that a Hungarian democratic regime could have eased the Danubian tensions. More indicative, however, of the true intention of Hungarys neighbors than such vague hints at eventual treaty revision were their efforts to assimilate the Hungarian minorities and to make the territorial settlement irrevocable.

Incidentally, the League of Nations too, as guarantor of the minority protection system, favored a kind of gradual assimilation of the minorities. As Mello- Franco, Brazil's representative on the League Council said in 1926: "It seems to me obvious that those who conceived this system of protection did not dream of creating within certain states a group of inhabitants who would regard themselves as permanently foreign to the general organization of the country. On the contrary, they wished . . . gradually [to] prepare the way for the conditions necessary for the establishment of a complete national unity."[5] But this was exactly the point of bitter conflict between Hungaryand her neighbors. The Hungarians denied their Danubian rivals the right to expand at the expense of the Hungarian nation, by assimilating Hungarian minorities into the Czechoslovak, Romanian and Yugoslav nations.

The extreme difficulties in the way of any reasonable policy between Hungaryand her neighbors in this emotionally charged nationalistic atmosphere were recognized and discussed frankly by Thomas G. Masaryk, President of Czechoslovakia, in one of his conversations with Oscar Jászi. Jászi, referring to the "desperate dilemma of some Hungarian progressives between servile submission and secret irredentism," raised the following question: "If you were a Hungarian statesman, what would you do now? What would be the leading ideas of your policy in regard to Hungaryproper and the Hungarian minority which had been cut off by the peace treaty?" Masaryk answered that he would try to do two things: "First, I would fight for an honest carrying out of national autonomy for the Hungarians. In the second place, I would advocate the return to Hungaryof those territories in the frontier regions where the Magyars constitute a solid, homogeneous majority. . . ." Then he added: "Of course I do not know how far such a Hungarian statesman would be successful under the prevailing conditions. But he at least would advocate a reasonable program which one day might become reality, instead of the orgies of chauvinism which cannot achieve anything, but only create new inner convulsion and new war. . . "[6]

T. G. Masaryk, who played such a prominent role in creating the post- Habsburg nationalist order of Central Europe, did much also to tame the "orgies of chauvinism." But in the end, his efforts to control that spirit of nationalism which had been unleashed by the great nationalist revolution of 1918 of which he himself was a leader met with failure.

After the war, Masaryk advocated cooperation of the small nations. "Everywhere the weak, oppressed and exploited unite themselves," he wrote in his book The New Europe. But actually his plans, even in theory, did not embrace all the small nations of the Middle Zone but only the victorious ones. The federalist plans he discussed in 1918 with the Romanian statesman Take Ionescu and with Premier Venizelos of Greece envisaged cooperation only among the victor nations--Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece.[7] The upshot of these plans was, first, a narrow military union among Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia--the Little Entente--directed against one of the other small nations, Hungary and second, the Balkan Pact among Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece, directed against another small nation, Bulgaria.

Common agrarian interests and some vague notions of Slavic solidarity gave birth, in the early twenties, to the International Agrarian Bureau, known also as the "Green International."This International had branches in all the Slav countries of the Middle Zone: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. It was criticized at its inception as a "movement of democratic Panslavism, inspired by Czechoslovaks . . . on which Czechoslovakia might rest her policy in Central and Eastern Europe."[8] In fact the center of the movement was the Prague Bureau, and Antonin Svehla, together with Milan Hodza, the two prominent Czechoslovak agrarian politicians, were the guiding and driving spirits of the movement. However, the movement gradually lost its exclusive Slav character. Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Austrian--and even French, Swiss and Italian--agrarian movements cooperated with the Prague Bureau. Of particular importance were the conferences held in 1930 at which peasant delegates from the Baltic states and from Poland, Hungary Bulgaria and the Little Entente countries met to discuss the grave problems posed by the agrarian crisis. This so- called "agrarian bloc" tried to coordinate the economic policy of the participating countries, but proved too weak to fulfill its aims.

The economic crisis that rocked Central Europe in 1931 with the bankruptcy of the Austrian Credit- Anstalt (a crisis precipitated, incidentally, by the French withdrawal of the Credit- Anstalt's short- term credits in reprisal for the plan of an Austrian- German customs union) produced new arguments in favor of international cooperation. But efforts to bring about better relations among rivals by economic rapprochement remained unsuccessful. What the prevailing spirit of nationalism favored was not cooperation but isolation in the form of "autarky," a policy designed to make individual nations economically self- sustaining.

Economic crisis, the failure of Briand's European plan, and the success of Hitler's aggressive nationalist movement, the reverberations of which were already being felt throughout Europe, prompted a group of Danubian politicians to organize, in February 1932, an unofficial Comite Permanent pour Rapprochement Economique des Pays Danubiens. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary Romania and Yugoslavia were represented in the committee under the chairmanship of Paul Auer, a Hungarian advocate of Danubian federation. The committee favored economic cooperation, with a view to closer future union of the five Danubian countries. The suggestions of the committee found favorable reception by the French Foreign Minister Andre Tardieu, and served as a basis for his memorandum issued in March 1932. The Tardieu memorandum displayed, relatively speaking, the most serious initiative of the inter- war period toward bringing about cooperation among the peoples of the former Habsburg Monarchy. In effect, Tardieu's plan, if successful, could have restored the economic unity of the former Habsburg Empire-and this was a goal which many deemed desirable but which nobody had known how to achieve.

Tardieu's memorandum proposed preferential reciprocal tariffs and mutually favorable quota allotments among the five Danubian countries, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary Romania and Yugoslavia. It was strictly a plan of economic cooperation in line with the school of thought that the more complicated political reconciliation in the Danube Valley must be preceded by economic rapprochement. The memorandum was modest in setting the goals of economic cooperation. Tardieu thought it would not be opportune to consider a customs union between the Danubian countries, because the formation of such union would meet with insuperable difficulties. The memorandum stated that "it will be best to leave the initiation of the discussions to the five countries concerned," and it pointed out that so far as possible "the interests of the states outside the Danubian combination," should be taken into account. The Tardieu plan failed even before the Danubian governments had had much chance to discuss it, because "states outside the Danubian combination" were opposed to it. Not only Germany and Italy, as could be expected, but even Britain, reacted unfavorably to the French proposal.[9]

The British government harbored the suspicion that the Tardieu plan was just another ruse to promote French interests in Central Europe. Germany, never enthusiastic over any Danubian plan which did not recognize her leadership, had an additional reason to oppose the Tardieu plan: a year before, in 1931, the project of a German- Austrian customs union--the so- called Schober- Curtius plan--had been killed by a vigorous protest from the French, Italian and Czechoslovak governments. As for Italy, she viewed the Tardieu plan with as much antipathy as she had the Schober- Curtius plan, because both ran counter to her own ambitions for an Italian sphere of influence in Central Europe and the Balkans. Italy's treaty of friendship with Hungaryin 1927, and with Austria in 1930, were precursors of the RomeProtocol of 1934, which provided for closer economic cooperation among the three countries. With revisionist Bulgaria also, Italy forged intimate relations. Mussolini's sympathy with all these revisionists was fairly Machiavellian. His claim for "justice" for his revisionist friends was above all a smoke- screen behind which he promoted the power interests of Italy. In the Balkans he was interested in isolating Italy's rival, Yugoslavia, from her neighbors, Bulgaria and Hungary In the Danube Valley he tried to strengthen Italy's position vis- a- vis France and Germany. This motivation of Mussolini's Central European policy was even "clearly" understood--or, at least, Admiral Horthy said so in his memoirs--by the government of Hungary Italy's protege in the Danube Valley.[10]

The Danubian governments, whose cooperation was anticipated in the Tardieu plan, never met to discuss the implementation of the plan. Their reactions, however, were symptomatic of the mistrust and suspicion with which they eyed each other.

Hungarys point of view was summed up most distinctly by Count Stephen Bethlen, under whose premiership the Horthy regimehad been consolidated, and whose influence remained considerable even after his resignation in 1931. In one of the revisionist lectures he delivered in England in the autumn of 1933, Bethlen said: "The Tardieu plan, the scheme of a Danube confederation, as well as a long line of other variations, are all suffering from a common disease: they are economic conceptions which, however, do not solve the economic problems, having been born in a bed of a political mental reservations. . . Practically all of them have the ultimate hidden end of drawing Hungaryinto the sphere of interest of the Little Entente, by offering to this country superficial economic favors, without, however, previously satisfying her rightful demands of a fair and just revision of the peace treaty."[11]

On the other hand, for almost opposite reasons, the Tardieu plan did not please the Little Entente countries either. They would have nothing to do with the plan should it change the political status quo. They suspected that the plan, if further developed--as some of its supporters hoped it would be--might introduce a new form of cooperation which would supersede the Little Entente. These fears were aired by Edvard Benes, Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, on March 22, 1932, when he said: "If this cooperation should evolve political obligations of any kind, or its aims or consequences should tend towards some sort of organization, so- called confederation, or similar political combination, then, I believe, there is no doubt on our part that we would reject this cooperation, and in this respect the countries of the Little Entente stand united."

Indeed the spirit of the Tardieu plan was in many ways incompatible with the spirit of the Little Entente. If the plan could have been properly carried out, economic cooperation could have become the first step toward political reconciliation; then mutual recognition of parity among the Danubian nations would have become imperative, and revision of the Trianon Treaty's inequalities so stubbornly defended by the Little Entente would have become unavoidable. However, considering the general trend of European diplomacy, the Little Entente's worries over the Tardieu plan were unfounded. So too were Count Bethlen's worries lest Hungarybe drawn into the Little Entente's "sphere of interest," with consequent impairment of her chances to regain domination of the Carpathian basin.

How slim the Tardieu plan's chances of success were, even among France's Danubian allies, could be seen from the diplomatic activities of the Little Entente. They did not conceal their view that the plan represented a rival scheme to their existing alliance system. Shortly after the launching of the Tardieu plan in March 1932, the Little Entente was revamped into an even tighter organization. The three foreign ministers, Benes of Czechoslovakia, Titulescu of Romania, and Jevticof Yugoslavia, met in Belgrade in December 1932 and agreed on the so- called Statute of the Little Entente, which was signed at Geneva on February 16, 1933.

By this Statute of 1933, a permanent council consisting of the foreign ministers of the Little Entente was set up, to which was added an economic council and a permanent bureau with an office in Geneva. The Little Entente, it was said, had developed from a military alliance into a "diplomatic federation." Moreover, the Statute described it as a "higher international unit open to other States under the conditions applicable to each particular case." The propaganda of the Little Entente accordingly began to speak about a Central European federation in the making, a slogan which found its way even into scholarly literature in the West. For instance, a publication of the University of California Press described the Little Entente as an excellent beginning, a definite step in the right direction, an organism which, whatever its faults, looked forward to the federal idea.[12] It is difficult to comprehend how anyone could view the Little Entente as the nucleus of a Central European federation, save by ignoring the difference between a federation and an imperialistic alliance concluded for the defense of selfish national interests.

The true purpose of the Little Entente was somewhat similar to the Austro- Hungarian Compromise of 1867. Both displayed liberal trends which earned them respect; in the Compromise, Hungarywas put on equal footing with Austria, and in the Little Entente, nations once oppressed asserted their freedom. Nevertheless the Compromise was really designed to maintain the hegemony of Germans and Hungarians, while the Little Entente really favored the domination of the Danube Valley by the Czechs, Serbs and Romanians. It was characteristic of the spirit of Danubian politics that those who saw clearly the imperialistic aims of the Austro- Hungarian Compromise failed to recognize the very same objectives in the Little Entente, and vice versa.

The Little Entente's role was to enforce a new order in Central Europe which certainly was more equitable than the old one established by the Austro- Hungarian Compromise. National and social freedom was greater under the Little Entente era than under the Habsburg regime. Yet complaints like those from the past, when the Serbian nation was split into four parts, were still voiced--only this time they came from the Hungarian nation split into four parts. Also, Czech supremacy in multi- Federalist Experiments 39

national Czechoslovakia, as well as Serbian supremacy in multinational Yugoslavia, curtailed the full freedom even of the so- called liberated nationalities. Furthermore, each of the small succession states into which the former Habsburg Empirewas divided tried to carry out mutually irreconcilable nationalistic programs which, instead of paving the way for reconciliation, actually tended to keep the Danube Valley in a state of permanent conflict. The Little Entente, therefore, as the defender of this status quo, blocked rather than promoted peaceful development toward a Danubian federation of equal nations. Unless the purposes for which the Little Entente had been designed were discarded, federalism in Central Europe was as impossible as it would have been under the Habsburg Monarchy without complete revision of the Austro- Hungarian Compromise.

After its reorganization in 1933, the Little Entente took to boasting that it was well on its way to becoming the beginning of a Central European federation. Nothing could have been farther from the truth, as subsequent events have shown. The Little Entente remained, as before, mainly an anti- revisionist coalition directed against revisionist Hungary The same held true of the Balkan Pact, signed in 1934 by Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece, which was directed against revisionist Bulgaria. This pact too was mainly an anti- revisionist platform, even though Bulgaria's neighbors who brought the pact into being preferred to regard it as the harbinger of Balkan federalism.

The New Central Europe