Interwar East Central Europe: The Clash of Geopolitics and National Self-Determination
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At the close of World War I, the four defeated empires that had dominated and ruled East Central Europe—the German, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires—were replaced by a dozen new or restored or enlarged would-be nation-states, all of which based their asserted legitimation on the then reigning politico-moral principle of national self-determination. Though the territorial arrangements of 1919 to 1921 still left a number of additional nations in East Central Europe stateless and created problems of aggrieved minorities allocated to states toward which they felt little or no affinity, conditions that induced revisionist apologists for the territorial losers of World War I to charge that the territorial arrangements were merely a cynical and unprincipled victors’ fiat, for all their admitted flaws, they still freed three times as many people from nationally alien rule as they subjected to such rule.
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The real political weakness of the interwar effort to implement the principle of national self-determination in East Central Europe lay not in its alleged hypocrisy, but in the impossibility of reconciling it with three other important aims of the peacemakers of 1919 to 1921: the permanent diminution of German power, the permanent containment of Russian power, and the permanent restoration of international order in Europe. In other words, the geopolitical map of interwar East Central Europe, with its plethora of new, restored, and enlarged so-called nation-states, was not congruent with the real distribution of power in Europe.
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Germany and Soviet Russia embodied the two basic revisionist threats to the territorial and social settlements of the interwar years… The defeat of Germany in 1918 was deceptive. Neither in absolute nor in relative terms had Germany been weakened to anything like the extent that was often assumed in the 1920s. In absolute terms, Germany’s industrial and transportation resources had been left largely intact because World War I had not been fought on its territory. In relative terms, a territorial settlement predicated on the national principle, such as that popular in 1919 to 1921, ipso facto left Germany as Europe’s second largest country after Russia. Relative to East Central Europe, Germany gained through the replacement of the Habsburg Empire, which for all its infirmities had still been a major power… Germany’s geographical position in the center of the continent was only enhanced by these developments.
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The very existence of the newly independent but highly vulnerable states of East Central Europe, endorsed by the victorious Western Allies, proved on balance a political and diplomatic asset to Germany. It (1) initially buffered Germany against a spillover of the Bolshevik Revolution, (2) then tempted Soviet Russia to collaborate with Germany throughout the 1920s and in the partition of this area in 1939 and 1940, and (3) ultimately frustrated efforts at Soviet–Western cooperation to halt Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, as the West was then inhibited by its commitments to the successor states from paying the Soviet Union’s price for such cooperation—the sacrifice of East Central Europe’s effective independence to Soviet hegemony…
