The New Central Europe

In the spring of 1935, France was working most actively for Nazi Germany's encirclement. The Franco- Italian agreements had been signed and the Franco- Soviet- Czechoslovak treaties had been concluded. At the same time, however, Hitler himself was not idle. In March, he brashly announced the creation of a German Air Force and the introduction of compulsory military service. The French government called for a special session of the League of Nations. Response was slow. In April, finally, at the Stresa Conference, Britain, France and Italy condemned Hitler's treaty violation. But in June the political effects of the new British appeasement attitude were felt in earnest for the first time. Britain signed the notorious Naval Agreement with Hitler, by which she acquiesced in a restoration of German naval strength to thirty- five per- cent of her own. In vain did Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government argue that the Naval Agreement would limit the armament race, which had got out of control when the Disarmament Conference collapsed in 1933. The fact remained that one of the leading democratic powers of the West had complied with Hitler's violation of the Versailles Treaty and, in a way, had cooperated in Germany's rearmament. Between British and French policies a serious rift occurred; but if the rift was serious, the eventual healing of it was disastrous, for it entailed France's adjusting her policy to Britain's fully- fledged appeasement policy.

The display of British- French disunity encouraged Hitler. His re- militarization of the Rhineland and denunciation of the Locarno Pact precipitated a new crisis in March 1936. Poland's Foreign Minister Beck although at odds with French diplomacy, appealed to France and suggested armed action against Germany, and a similar suggestion had been made by Pilsudski in 1933, when Hitler seized power in Germany--though opinions differ about the seriousness and motivations of the Polish moves.t At any rate, Hitler was able to get away with his new violation of the Versailles Treaty. He further strengthened his position by making common cause with Mussolini, the invader of Abyssinia. In October 1936, Count Galeazzo Ciano visited the German capital and signed a pact which laid down the foundations of the Rome Berlin Axis. Called a league of "have- nots" against the league of the "haves," the Axis proved an effective instrument of aggressive policy. Another move of Hitler's diplomacy was the theatrical Anti- Comintern Pact signed with Japan in November 1936. Japan, the invader of Manchuria, was another suitable partner for Hitler. Thus, in uniting himself with the aggressors in Asia and Africa, Hitler was preparing for his eastward expansion in Europe. The year 1936 was truly a turning point. While the West was drifting ever more distinctly toward appeasement, Hitler was stepping up ever more boldly his aggressiveness.

The prospects for resistance to Hitler's Drang nach Osten were gloomy. The smaller countries east of Germany were disunited and perplexed by the appeasement currents of Western diplomacy, and their social ills and national strifes were skillfully exploited by Nazi diplomacy and propaganda.

Economic conditions in the predominantly agricultural eastern half of Europe played into the hands of the Nazis. Countries suffering from economic crisis generally benefitted by Hitler's economic policies, because Germany bought their agricultural products. Material interests called for cooperation with, rather than resistance to, Hitler. Moral resistance to Nazi ideology was greatly undermined by Hitler's appeal to the base instincts of anti- Semitism. The ratio of Jews in the more lucrative free professions, which was out of proportion to their percent- age of the total population, aided the spread of anti- Semitism through- out Central and Eastern Europe. The spearheads of Nazi infiltration were the many large German minorities of the Middle Zone, who readily embraced the aggressive and perverse ideas of national- socialism. In fact, Hitler's program appealed to many malcontents, irrespective of nationality, who were dissatisfied with the existing social or political order. The revisionist governments, of course, agreed with Hitler's loudly proclaimed aim of undoing "the injustices of the peace treaties." But the defenders of the status quo, too, in their confused and disorganized state, more and more deemed it opportune to curry the favor of the new and powerful German Reich.

While stamping out liberalism at home, the Führer advertised his foreign policy in terms of lofty liberal principles. His aim was, so he boasted, to apply for the benefit of the German nation too, the right of self- determination proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson's peace program of 1918. He wanted, so he said, nothing but the liberation of the German nation from the shackles of Versailles. The first goal of his expansion was the annexation of Austria.

The countries of the Middle Zone succumbed to Hitler's aggression one by one. Although the circumstances of the various conquests were different, there were some common causes of the tragedy of the small nations. First, their inner weaknesses undermined their individual power of resistance. Second, their strifes with each other destroyed whatever abilities they might have had for resistance through cooperation. Third, the blundering of the Western Powers left them without guidance and aid.

The inner weakness of Austria was greater than that of any other country threatened by Hitler's aggression. She had led an aimless sort of life since the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire The program in favor of union with Germany, the so- called "Anschluss," had always been popular in Austria. It remained popular after Hitler's seizure of power in Germany. Austria was no longer a democratic state which could reject union with Nazi Germany for reasons of political ideology. The most powerful source of anti- Nazi resistance could have been the socialist movement. But this had been crushed by the Dollfuss government in the winter of 1933- 34 when Vienna had become the scene of a full- scale civil war. The battle against the highly civilized and once powerful Austrian social democracy had actually begun in the early twenties. The attack was led by the Heimwehr, a private army organized mainly by monarchists who aped the Italian Fascists and looked upon Mussolini as the champion of Habsburg restoration. The Heimwehr and the Fascist course of Austrian policy managed to grow under Ignaz Seipel, the Catholic priest- Chancellor, as the reactionary elements succeeded in taking control of the Christian Social party. The Fascist trend culminated in 1934 with Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss's establishment of a dictatorship on the Italian model.[2]

Dollfuss relied upon his own brand of dictatorship to foil the Nazi dictator's project for annexing Austria. However, the conservative- clerical regime which Dollfuss had helped to create was unable to unite the country against Hitler. Dollfuss was murdered in the miscarried attempt of Austrian Nazis to seize power in the summer of 1934. Dollfuss's successor and the heir to his policy, Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, was fighting a losing battle against the rising tide of Nazi- German nationalism as the showdown with Hitler approached.

Austria's Danubian neighbors were unable to bring themselves and Austria with them into any kind of unity to oppose Hitler's aggression. An eleventh- hour attempt to integrate the Danubian countries was made by Milan Hodza, Premier of Czechoslovakia, in 1936. His original aim was to establish cooperation between the three countries of the RomeProtocol (Italy, Austria, Hungary and the three countries of the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia). But Mussolini, after his pact with Hitler in 1936, ceased to be a protector of Austrian independence, and the Romebloc lost its anti- Hitler potentialities. Hodza therefore had to drop Italy from his scheme. The resulting so- called Danubian Plan--which, like Tardieu's plan, proposed to link together the Danubian states by means of a preferential system--never materialized; it shared the fate of many pious desires aimed at the recreation in modern form of the economic unity of the old Habsburg Empire

Hodza discussed with Schuschnigg the possibility, also, of the restoration of a Habsburg ruler in Austria as a means of bolstering the country's threatened independence. Meanwhile, in sharp contrast to the plans for saving Austria by Danubian cooperation directed against Germany, or by a Habsburg restoration, Schuschnigg flirted with a pro- German course, too. In his conversations with Franz von Papen, the German envoy to Vienna, Schuschnigg suggested that Austria's political and moral forces might be placed at the disposal of the German nation in its struggle to regain world position. Schuschnigg was alleged to have argued that Austria had a German mission in southeastern Europe; therefore she should be permitted to retain the character she had formed in the course of a millennium and not be yoked to any sort of centralized system directed from Berlin.[3]

Schuschnigg, in his attempt to save Austria, played with a surprising variety of possibilities, none of which led to Austria's salvation. Otto Habsburg, the man whom the legitimists--Schuschnigg included--thought of as being most competent to perform the miracle of Austria's salvation, could hardly have succeeded either. In the first place, opinion in Austria was widely divided over the Habsburg restoration. Further- more, rumors of the Habsburg restoration did nothing to enhance Danubian unity, without which any attempt to stop Hitler was doomed to failure.

The only Danubian country with latent sympathies for the Habsburgs was Hungary This was not because the Hungarians were "loyal to the dynasty," as the legitimists alleged, but because the revisionist propaganda, conservative and nationalistic, glorified the past, thus spreading the conviction that a Habsburg restoration in the Danube Valley might also help restore pre- war Hungary In the countries of the Little Entente, nationalistic passions were inclined to swing in exactly the opposite direction, for the very name of Habsburg was a symbol of the past they hated. Therefore when rumors from Austria about Habsburg restoration reached the Little Entente countries, Belgrade's reaction was: "Rather Anschluss than restoration." Bucharest's reaction was similar in tone. Prague, the third capital of the Little Entente, did not join the anti- Habsburg chorus at this particular time. The Czechs had always before been solidly opposed to Habsburg restoration, and the fact that they did not react vigorously to such plans at this time did not imply a change of heart on the Habsburg issue. It denoted, rather, a realistic evaluation of the situation created by Hitler's determination to annex Austria. This Anschluss would have almost surrounded the Czech lands by Nazi Germany. No wonder that the person with whom the Czechs were concerned was Adolf Hitler, and not Otto Habsburg. Prague's concern was epitomized by the slogan, "Anschluss means war," coined by Edvard Benes, President of the Czechoslovak Republic since December 1935.

The Western Powers, whose guidance and aid were badly needed in Central Europe, remained passive onlookers of the growing crisis. In May 1937, Stanley Baldwin, who "knew little of Europe and disliked what he knew," retired. He was succeeded by Neville Chamberlain, who on the other hand "was imbued with a sense of a special and personal mission to come to friendly terms with the dictators of Italy and Germany."[4] In January 1938 President Roosevelt alarmed by the European situation, proposed to take the initiative by calling an international conference. No event, as Churchill saw it, would have been more likely to stave off, or even prevent, war than "the arrival of the United States in the circle of European hates and fears." Opinions differ as to who is to be blamed for the failure of the American initiative. At any rate the United States did not arrive, and "the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war," was lost.5 Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden resigned, in February 1938, in protest against Chamberlain's appeasement policy. He thus steered clear of responsibility for that which was soon to follow and which he was unable to stop.

On March 12- 13, Hitler occupied Austria. The Western Powers merely protested, which did not discourage Hitler from sighting his next goal--the "liberation" of the Germans in Czechoslovakia.

The inner weakness of Czechoslovakia was of a nature different from Austria's. Czechoslovakia, unlike Austria, was a multinational state. The 3.5 million Sudeten Germans were the most powerful of Czecho- slovakia's so- called national minorities--and the best united, under the leadership of Konrad Henlein. In giving expression to their national grievances, they were greatly emboldened by Hitler's successes. Other discontented groups were the Slovak and Ruthenian autonomists, the Hungarian and Polish separatists. They remained calmer than the Sudeten Germans--not out of greater loyalty to the Czechoslovak Re- public, but because of lesser numerical strength.

Henlein, in the spring of 1938, demanded autonomy in his Karlsbad program. The Sudeten Germans pretended to be fighting for equal rights, as if their aim were the strengthening of Czechoslovakia by transforming it into a federal union of equal nations. President Benes pretended, too, that he was ready to forget about the original Czech mission of the Republic as a bastion against German power. In four successive "plans" the Prague government showed itself willing to grant autonomy to the Sudeten Germans and, under pressure of the growing crisis, to the other discontented nationalities. But no one really believed that federalization would be feasible. The government was bidding for time. The discontented nationalities, above all the Sudeten Germans, were ready to desert the Republic.

Besides her masses of disloyal citizens, Czechoslovakia's other fundamental weakness was her isolation from her neighbors. After the Anschluss, the "head" of the Czech state was caught in the German pincer, while the "tail" was squeezed between two countries, Poland and Hungary which had never had any sympathy for even the existence of Czechoslovakia. Only the easternmost tip of Czechoslovakia was connected with allied Romania, a member of the Little Entente. But Romania, as well as Yugoslavia, was more anxious to get along with Hitler, master of nearby Austria since the Anschluss, than to go to the rescue of hard- pressed Czechoslovakia. Italy too, a neighbor of Germany since the Anschluss, preferred cooperation with, rather than the role of counterpoise against, Hitler. In vain did the Western Powers expect Italy to play the latter role in exchange for the Italo- British agreement, signed in April 1938, which tacitly condoned the Fascist conquest of Abyssinia.

In August 1938, the British government sent Lord Runciman to Czechoslovakia to investigate and to mediate between the Czech government and the Sudeten Germans. The Runciman mission reported that the two nations, Czechs and Sudeten Germans, could not continue to live in one state. The finding was accurate. Czechoslovakia was not, and could scarcely become, the true home of the Sudeten Germans or of the other discontented national groups inasmuch as they were forced against their will into the national state of the Czechs. But two separate issues existed which were never clearly distinguished: the chronic problem of conflict among the former Habsburg peoples on the one hand, and the acute struggle against the Nazi threat to civilization on the other.

Hitler had appealed to the right of national self-determination on behalf of the Sudeten Germans. But whereas President Wilson in 1918 had conceived the principle of national self-determination as a means of spreading democracy, Hitler invoked it to expand the rule of nazism, the deadly enemy of democracy. The Paris peacemakers committed an initial blunder when they failed to recognize that the principle of national self-determination cannot make Central Europe safe for democracy except in combination with a broader federal principle. The appeasers repeated the blunder and precipitated the final defeat of democracy in Central Europe when they conceded Hitler's right to the Wilsonian principle.

That Czechoslovakia should submit to the application of the principle of national self-determination, by virtue of which, and by the violation of which, she was originally created, was proposed publicly by The Times on September 7. In a leading article The Times called on the Czechoslovak government to consider "the Project, which has found favor in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous national state by the cession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation to which they are united by race." Thus, the "homogeneous national state" was acknowledged on the eve of Munich as the possible basis of a new peace settlement in Central Europe.

The Czech government tried to federalize the country, a program originally proposed by the Sudeten Germans. But the federalization of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1938 proved to be just as belated an attempt at saving the country as had been the federalization of the Habsburg Monarchy, proclaimed by Emperor Charles' pathetic Manifesto, in the autumn of 1918.

In the Danubian countries there was a vague notion of common danger in the summer of 1938. There were even a few conciliatory gestures exchanged between the old antagonists. Hungarywas invited to attend the Little Entente Council at Bled, Yugoslavia, ln August 1938-- which incidentally was the last session of that institution. At the same time, the tension also eased between Bulgaria and the countries of the Balkan Pact. Both Hungaryand Bulgaria were freed of the disarmament clauses of the peace treaties. Meanwhile Yugoslavia and Romania, The New Central Europe 66

watching closely the deterioration of Czechoslovakia's domestic situation, both made efforts to relieve their own nationality tensions. In Romania, a so- called Nationalities Statute promised to the minorities what they were supposed to possess already according to the peace treaties, namely equal rights without distinction as to race, language or religion. In Yugoslavia, the spirit of compromise improved Serb- Croat relations, producing a year later (in August 1939) the so- called Sporazum, which pledged the long- sought autonomy to the Croats. But all these efforts, domestic and international, were merely improvised steps rather than the well- planned actions needed to make Central Europe cohesive and resistant to common dangers.

Even the great realist of the day, Winston Churchill, was a victim of illusions in gauging the strength of Central Europe. On March 14, 1938, in a House of Commons debate following the Anschluss, he evaluated the strength of the Little Entente, then on its way to disintegration, in these words: "Taken singly, the three countries of the Little Entente may be called powers of the second rank, but they are very powerful and vigorous states, and united they are a great power." The Little Entente was at no time really a "great power" and in its state of disintegration in 1938, it represented even less power than before. Far more realistic than Churchill's faith in the Little Entente's power was his view that the combined power of Russia and the West could deter Hitler from aggression.

During the critical summer of 1938, Churchill was urging upon Lord Halifax, then Foreign Secretary, the idea of a British- French- Russian "Joint Note," for which he expected also to gain President Roosevelts support. In this note Hitler would be warned that world war would inevitably follow an invasion of Czechoslovakia.6 Churchill's suggestion apparently was linked to an earlier move by Soviet Foreign Commissar Litvinov, who had proposed to the British, French and United States governments, on March 18, that they, with Russia, should confer in order to discuss means of preventing further aggression.7 A firm Britain, ready to take such a course of action as Churchill urged, could have thrown its weight into an anti- Hitler coalition, the nucleus of which already existed in the French- Soviet- Czechoslovak alliance. Such a coalition, had Britain adhered to it, could perhaps have been made effective and palatable to all those nations threatened by Nazi Germany but distrustful of Soviet Russia. A firm Britain, more than any other factor, could have ended the confusion and indecision of the nations in Central and Eastern Europe, exposed as they were to German aggression, fearful of the Bolshevik menace, and disunited by their petty rivalries. But Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain opposed the idea of a Soviet alliance, and he seemed to be annoyed rather than concerned with the problems of "far- away"small nations in Central and Eastern Europe.

The French government, led by Premier Daladier and Foreign Minister Bonnet, presided over a nation badly split between the Right and the Left; they possessed neither the strength nor the conviction to base the country's foreign policy on the French-Soviet- Czechoslovak alliance. Somewhat reluctantly they yielded the command to Neville Chamberlain, while Chamberlain's appeasement policy was increasingly supported by a growing body of pacifist opinion throughout the West. The West, it seemed, was willing to compromise with Hitler, especially since the success of such a policy did not require tangible sacrifices from either France or Britain. Also, Nazi propaganda made inroads on European public opinion, with the result that the Soviet alliance was ever more sharply criticized as exposing the Continent to the dangers of communism.

The pro- Soviet Left was, no doubt, nurturing an illusion when it thought of the Soviet tyranny as a progressive form of democracy. Nevertheless the Left's advocacy of alliance between the Western democracies and the Russians against Hitler was well founded. As Churchill, certainly no "leftist," realized, such an alliance was the combination of power that could tip the balance in favor of the anti- Nazi forces in Europe. Even had the Western alliance with the Russians entailed great risk for the countries of Eastern Europe, this risk should have been considered worth taking by everybody concerned in view of the alternative of letting Nazi tyranny expand in the heart of Europe.

But very few of those concerned were of this opinion. The Polish and Romanian governments, upon whose attitude the effectiveness of an East- West alliance depended, were particularly distrustful of Soviet Russia. Their distrust was enhanced by the fact that they both ruled over territories with Ukrainian and Russian populations. They feared the Red Army would be more willing to enter than to leave their territories. They therefore could not bring themselves, in case of war against Germany, to grant the Red Army the right of passage. Moreover, they were most unwilling to take any risks for the sake of Czechoslovakia in a situation which they shortsightedly considered no concern of their own.

Poland's shortsightedness was especially striking. Like Czechoslovakia, she too had German minorities; but apparently the Polish govern- The New Central Europe 68

ment was caused no uneasiness by the thought that the Polish Germans, after the Germans of Czechoslovakia, might become the next target of Hitler's "liberation" policy. Actually, the Polish government seemed to approve of Hitler's demands in Czechoslovakia, and even considered demanding the simultaneous liberation of the eighty thousand Poles there. The governments of Great Britain and France, too, looked at the Czech crisis with singular shortsightedness. They viewed the Sudeten- Czech conflict merely as a local! quarrel between two nations. They were ready to accept the explanation that this quarrel had been caused simply by the peace settlement's failure to draw frontiers according to the ethnic principle.

The "moral" justification for the West's appeasement attitude was found mainly in the belief that the time had come for the revision of the unjust peace treaties. But even if the treaties were unjust, Hitler was the last person in the world entitled to claim justice. Moreover, as a device of "peace making" the appeasers reinforced the nation- state principle. This was a capital error in itself--without even considering that the Nazi brand of nationalism was the worst the world had ever seen. Not only was the peace lost by this appeasement; but also revisionism (in contrast to rigidity) as a policy of change, a sane program in itself if taken away from the revisionists, was discredited.

The New Central Europe