Interwar East Central Europe, 1918–1941: The Failure of Democracy-Building, the Fate of Minorities

Abstract

Sabrina P. Ramet, in her preface to this invaluable, multiauthored volume, poses the question, “[W]hy present yet another book about interwar East Central Europe,” when “there have been at least five books published that deal with the politics of this region during the years 1918–1939/1941” since 1945? Her answer is persuasive. Notwithstanding the fact that the volume that has been considered “standard” [Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (University of Washington, 1974)] appeared 46 years ago, and that the most recent of what may be considered the competing studies [Ivan Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (University of California, 1998)] was published two decades ago, the subject is timely. She points out that there is a striking similarity between the problems and challenges that East Central Europe confronted in the interwar period and those facing Europe today. Among them are the erosion of democratic accountability, the growing presence of extreme right ideologies, and the failure to ensure respect for ethnic and religious minorities. We may also add that it is equally important to remind ourselves that as a consequence of the collapse of the Paris Settlement of 1919, Europe tore itself apart in World War II, and thus forced two non-European powers to decide its fate.The challenges faced by the successor states to the Settlement, as well as the manner in which they addressed them, provide the focus of the volume. The countries covered, and the respective authors in this volume, are the Polish Second Republic (M. Biskupski)), Czechoslovakia (Sabrina Ramet and Carol Skalnic Leff), Hungary (Béla Bodó), Romania (Roland Clark), Bulgaria (Christian Promitzer), Yugoslavia (Stipica Grgic), and Albania (Bernd J. Fischer). These case studies are complemented by an analysis of “The Peasantries and Peasant Parties of Interwar East Central Europe” (Robert Bideleux). A perceptive analytical afterword by Stefano Bianchini caps off this rewarding study.The main themes addressed give the book its unity. They are the collapse of parliamentary systems, right radicalism, the economics of peasant agriculture, the impact of the Great Depression on a transitional economy, the failure to respect the minority treaties of the League of Nations that were designed to protect ethnic groups, the nature of the political class, anti-Semitism, the quest to defend the territorial integrity of the new or enlarged states of 1919–1920 in the face of revisionist claims by Nazi Germany and Hungary, and the threat posed by a Bolshevik Russia to a number of the nation-states. Consideration of these issues leads the reader to assess the relative significance of internal structural state weaknesses and pressure from external forces, which, taken together, created problems of harmonization and consolidation that leaders in several of the countries covered had little time or inclination to address. This stimulating study demonstrates that the failure to solve them blighted progress toward modernization and the exercise of genuine democratic rule in the period covered.