The New Central Europe

In his notorious Sportpalast speech on September 25, 1938, Hitler demanded the annexation of the Sudeten territories and threatened to use force against Czechoslovakia if this "last territorial claim" of Germany in Europe was not fulfilled. Czechoslovakia had been under general mobilization since September 23, but her decision to fight, in the event of Hitler's fulfilling his threat, depended upon the decision of Czechoslovakia's allies to honor their treaty obligations. One of these allies, Soviet Russia, stood by her treaty obligations. This, however, meant merely that Russia would fight if France did the same. France on the other hand made her decision depend upon Britain's decision, which meant that Czechoslovakia's defense was caught in a vicious circle of indecision.

After dramatic tension, during which the decision to fight would have been the greater surprise, the forces of appeasement prevailed. In order to save peace, Britain and France decided to surrender the Sudeten territories of Czechoslovakia to Germany. Agreement was reached with Germany on September 29, at the Munich Conference attended by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier. Czechoslovakia was not consulted. The Soviet Union was not invited.

In Munich the Big Four agreed that within ten days, beginning October 1, a territory with a population of 3,600,000 should be handed to Germany. About 600,000 of this population were Czechs, who were to pass under German rule, while after this cession some 300,000 Germans were to remain in Czechoslovakia. A declaration attached to the agreement provided that the problems of the Polish (80,000) and Hungarian (800,000) minorities of Czechoslovakia, if not settled within three months by direct agreement between the governments of the countries involved, should be the subject of another meeting between the four Great Powers.

Next morning, on September 30, the Czechoslovak government ca- pitulated and accepted the Munich dictate. The peace settlement, dictated by the victors to the vanquished after the First World War, lay in ruins. Hitler had achieved his goal without having to resort to force.

What would have happened if Hitler had met resistance? General Halder, Hitler's chief of the Army General Staff, testified after the Second World War that a plot to arrest Hitler and his principal associates was called off at the last minute on September 14, 1938, when it became known that Chamberlain was going to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden. And General Keitel, who was head of the supreme command of the German armed forces in 1938, when asked at the Nuremberg trials after the war whether or not the Reich would have attacked Czechoslovakia if the Western Powers had stood by Prague, answered: "Certainly not. We were not strong enough militarily." These and other stories certainly indicate that inside resistance to Hitler existed which could have been touched off into action if, and apparently only if, Hitler had met outside opposition. But though the British government was informed about the plot of the German generals, it did not believe Hitler would be over- thrown if the West resisted. Therefore appeasement prevailed, and therefore the generals did not act. This sequence was part of the whole chain reaction of impotence which began with the indecision in regard to defending Czechoslovakia.

Winston Churchill thought the vicious circle could have been broken by Edvard Benes, President of Czechoslovakia. He believed Benes was wrong in yielding to the Munich dictate. Benes's resistance would have infuriated both Hitler and his generals, and probably would not have deterred them from attacking Czechoslovakia. But, in Churchill's view: "Benes should have defended his fortress line. Once fighting had begun . . . France would have moved to his aid in a surge of national passion, and Britain would have rallied to France almost immediately."2 Stalin too thought Benes had made a mistake in not resisting Hitler. The very day Benes arrived in Moscow for his first visit during the war, in December 1943, Stalin confronted him with the question: "And why didn't you fight in September 1938?"[3]

But actually would the West (on which Russia's action in turn depended) have moved to the aid of Czechoslovakia in 1938 if Benes had refused to yield? Benes thought not, and he was probably right.

Churchill, in a statement to the press a week before Munich, said: "The partition of Czechoslovakia under pressure from England and France amounts to a complete surrender of the Western democracies to the Nazi threat of force." Unfortunately Churchill's battle cry, that the Western democracies were in danger, did not arouse the spirit of resistance. Peoples in the West were hardly aware of the forces threatening to destroy the foundations of their civilization. The defeat of the West at Munich was not a sudden disaster, but a slowly ripening catastrophe.

Domestic policies in the West, dominated by economic and social problems, widened the gap between the upper and lower classes, and split their views on the aims and purposes of democracy. Foreign policies, formulated out of narrow- minded nationalism, could not pro- duce understanding for the broader common interests of the West. "Western democracy" was for many people an empty slogan; and for many it meant even something quite different from what Churchill was trying so desperately to defend, for they thought of Hitler rather than Churchill as the defender of the West--quite a number of Europeans were misled by Hitler's boast that he was defending Western civilization against Bolshevik barbarism.

The target of Hitler's fury, Czechoslovakia, was a popular country in the West; but this popularity was mainly the result of earlier propaganda through which Czechoslovakia had acquired the reputation of being the mainstay of peace and democracy. The French, especially, thought of the Czechs as pillars of their own security. But in the summer of 1938 the growing feeling of the French was that Czechoslovakia, instead of keeping them out of trouble, was dragging them into it. Czechoslovakia's reputation rapidly dwindled as the country became a center of crisis rather than of security. Both the fear of war and the hope of peace were overwhelming in Europe during the Czech crisis. The peoples of the West saw no reason why they should take up arms and sacrifice them selves for Czechoslovakia. Their sentiments were expressed in Chamberlain's words when at the height of the Czech crisis he spoke about a "quarrel in a far- away country between people of whom we know nothing." Czechoslovakia was "far- away" for them--and for that matter far away also was the whole danger zone between Germany and Russia; they were only too ready to disengage themselves from those "far- away" countries, peoples and problems.

The independence of the Middle Zone, dominated for so long by the empires of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs and Sultans, had been proudly proclaimed after the First World War as the victory of Western democracy. But the Western governments were never really interested enough to become organizers, leaders or peacemakers of the many quarreling nations of this area. The French concluded only alli- ances dictated by sheer national interest, while the British always re- fused to take up any direct commitments there. The Czech crisis brought to the surface the latent disgust of the West with the intricate problems of this unhappy half of the Continent. Benes, who knew the West well, must have realized all this when he perceived the futility of defying the Munich dictate, because the Western Powers would not come to his rescue anyway. Under the conditions then prevailing, Czech defiance could easily have resulted not in what Churchill expected but in the very opposite--that is to say, in condemnation of the Czechs and their total isolation.

Nor was the population of Czechoslovakia in such a fighting mood as was later declared in propaganda. Not even the Czech part of the population (7. 2 million in a country of 1 5 million) was really united, and its unity with the Slovaks (roughly 2.8 million) had been greatly under- mined by the Slovak autonomist movement. The condition of the Czech- Slovak union was sad indeed; the Slovak autonomists, despite their close cooperation with the Sudeten German enemies of the state, were rapidly gaining popularity with the masses. Among the Czechs, on the other hand, powerful elements organized by the Agrarian party opposed Benes's pro- Soviet orientation and blamed Benes personally for the disastrous situation of the Republic. And some of the critics of Benes's policy believed that if the Czech- Soviet alliance had been renounced, the showdown with Hitler could have been avoided. Under such circumstances, even if some Soviet help could have been rendered to a defiant Czechoslovakia after the Western betrayal in Munich--as some patriots of the Left, preferring defiance to submission, expected--it could only have fanned the flame of inner division and confusion.

Benes had no reason to fear that his two hostile eastern neighbors, Poland and Hungary would unite with Germany in a joint attack on Czechoslovakia. Anxious though they were to annex those Polish and Hungarian territories which had been awarded to Czechoslovakia after the First World War, they were no less anxious to avoid a military campaign in alliance with Nazi Germany. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia could expect nothing more than strict neutrality from her two allies in the Danube Valley, Romania and Yugoslavia. It must have appeared to Benes as almost certain that Czechoslovakia would be left alone if she rejected the Munich dictate. And Benes must have been tormented by the thought that Czech resistance not only would not arouse the conscience of the West, but also would probably result in the disintegration and inglorious collapse of the multinational army and population of the Republic, rather than in their heroic resistance, should Hitler decide to take by force what he already had been given in Munich by agreement.

Thus Benes was in no position, by resisting Hitler, to transform the West's appeasement policy into a Grand Alliance of the Second World War. He was in no position to wrest the leadership from Neville Chamberlain. Broken and sick, President Benes resigned the week after Munich; he left his unfortunate country three weeks later for London.

The views of Prime Minister Chamberlain on the hopelessness of the Czechoslovak situation lie buried now in documents of British foreign policy,[4] but in 1938 more people--from the Left as well as from the Right--shared these views than can remember the fact today. Chamberlain decided to accept Hitler's demands and pressed the Czechs to accept them because he was convinced that Czechoslovakia could not be defended against a German attack. Both London and Paris had a rather poor opinion of the Czechoslovak army; indeed, under the impact of the Sudeten crisis, they developed a rather poor opinion of the very existence of the Czechoslovak state. As one of the British documents bluntly stated the matter: why fight a European war for something you cannot protect and do not expect to restore?5

Moreover, the British and French governments thought uneasily of the Soviet alliance in a European war. Chamberlain not only distrusted the intentions of Soviet Russia but doubted her military power as well. (Skepticism concerning Russia's military strength was widespread in the West after the great Stalinist purges of the mid- thirties.) On the other hand, Chamberlain neither doubted the military power of Germany nor, at the time of Munich, distrusted Hitler's intentions. Because Chamber- lain trusted Hitler, he believed peace would reign in Europe once Hitler's "last territorial demands" were fulfilled. An Anglo- German declaration, signed at the time of the Munich Pact, expressed the desire of the two peoples "never to go to war with one another again." Furthermore, Munich provided for a new "method" of assuring peace, outlined in a passage of the Anglo- German declaration which read as follows: "We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other question that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe." A French- German agreement was signed in the same spirit on December 6, in Paris. Munich canceled the anti- German edge of the cordon sanitaire, leaving the Middle Zone open to German penetration. But since Chamberlain seemed to trust Hitler's intentions, he could hardly have expected Eastern Europe to become exclusively German Lebensraum, subservient to German interests. It is reasonable to assume that even Benes, a politician more astute than Chamberlain, believed, for a while at least, in a modus vivendi between Hitler's Germany and post- Munich Czechoslovakia.6 The relationship between Germany and the countries of the Middle Zone was expected to develop along somewhat the same lines as the relationship of Russia to this area was supposed to develop according to the Yalta agreements seven years later. Governments friendly toward Germany were to cooperate with their mighty neighbor, while their quarrels--such as that over the unsolved problem of the Polish and Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia--were to be settled by the judicial court of the Big Four.

Soviet Russia was excluded from this new era of "European cooperation." She was not invited to Munich; there was evidently no room for her in the new system. The anti- Russian edge of the former cordon sanitaire remained in force, and there could be no doubt about the hostile attitude the Big Four had taken, according to their temperaments, toward Russia. But Chamberlain, a believer in peace, did not mean to incite Hitler against Russia--as the Soviet interpretation of Munich has claimed. Chamberlain believed, rather, that a new and steady balance of power was being created in Munich, in which Germany would be a natural counterweight to the Soviet Union.

The guiding principles of the Munich peacemaking, therefore, can be summed up as follows: friendship to Germany, hostility to Russia, and recognition of the rights of national self- determination. None of these principles was suitable for European peacemaking in September 1938. In fact, Nazi Germany was the indomitable enemy of the Western democracies, Soviet Russia was their indispensable ally, while the right of national self- determination was a weapon of Hitler's Machtpolitik only. The complete misunderstanding of the situation is immortalized in Chamberlain's famous comment on Munich: "This is . . . peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time."

The "method of consultation" provided by the Anglo- German declaration never went into effect. Not even the problem of the Polish and Hungarian minorities of Czechoslovakia, explicitly mentioned in the Munich agreement, was settled in the way agreed upon. Poland, instead of resorting to a Four Power decision as provided by the Munich agreement, chose unilateral action. After an ultimatum, she took possession on October 2 of the Teschen region of Czechoslovakia, which included not only 80,000 Poles, but also not less than 150,000 people of Czech, Slovak, or German nationality. The problem of the Hungarian minority of Czechoslovakia, handled first in Komárom by direct negotiations between Hungaryand Czechoslovakia which ended in failure, was finally decided in Vienna on November 2 by a German- Italian verdict. The Hungarian government headed by Béla lmrédy, a man of pro- Western reputation at that time who later became one of the pro- Nazi extremists, would have preferred a Four Power decision; but to turn down the German- Italian offer for "mediation" in the Czech- Hungarian controversy would have been tantamount to open rebellion against Hitler's "new order" in Central Europe. For such an action Hungary eager at long last to pluck the fruits of her revisionist policy, was not qualified.

At the Vienna meeting of the Axis dictators, Hungarys exorbitant territorial claims were opposed by Hitler as a sort of punishment for Hungarys unwillingness, during the pre- Munich crisis, to enter into a military alliance with German against Czechoslovakia. (Horthy had refused this German offer, at a meeting with Hitler in Kiel, in August 1938.) With Mussolini's help, however, the decision was still favorable to the Hungarians. Hungaryregained about 700,000 of her nationals, taking along with them about 300,000 Slovaks, Ruthenes, Germans and Romanians, while about 100,000 Hungarians were left in Czechoslovakia. Imperfect ethnically as it was, the new frontier between Slovaks and Hungarians nevertheless followed the ethnic principle more closely than did the line drawn by the Trianon Treaty after the First World War. The Hungarians, of course, rejoiced over this first revision of the Trianon frontiers. They were blind to the tragedy of Munich: they did not know that Munich, being the collective tragedy of all Central Europe, was before long to toll the bell for Hungarytoo.

The injustices of the new frontiers were decried by the Czechs and Slovaks, whose turn it was to become revisionists and to reclaim the lost boundaries. The Czechoslovak revisionists did essentially the same as the Hungarian revisionists had done since the First World War: they repudiated the frontiers forced upon them. Yet the circumstances under which these two revisionist claims originated and developed were so different that their similarities passed, so to speak, unnoticed. R. W. Seton- Watson, a great British friend of Czechoslovakia, as early as 1939 termed the injustices of the new Hungaro- Czechoslovak frontier "scandalous" and "still more contrary to all reason than that [the frontier] adopted between Bohemia and the Reich,"7 while Winston Churchill, in a calmer atmosphere after the Second World War, in his memoirs branded Hungaryand Poland as "beasts of prey."[8]

Harsh words like these were not entirely without justification. They were applicable, however, not merely to the 1938 situation, when Czechoslovakia suffered injuries, but also to the 1918 situation, when Czechoslovakia inflicted injuries upon others. In fact, seen from a broader perspective, the Czechoslovak tragedy of 1938 was conceived in the womb of the great nationalist revolution of 1918, when the small victors, like "beasts of prey," carved out their nation- states from the Habsburg Monarchy and set up frontiers "contrary to all reason" among inter- dependent peoples. Unfortunately, during the Second World War, "Munich" became so much the symbol of Czechoslovakia's betrayal by the West that it was never really seen for what it was: a demonstration of the failure of the peace settlement in the Danube Valley. The wartime temper of the West was not favorable to such interpretations. Since appeasement led to the revision of the peace settlement in Munich, it followed in logic that when the blunder of appeasement was exploded, the peace settlement should appear to be vindicated. Criticism of the peace settlement seemed so completely enmeshed in the disastrous policy of appeasement that, under the pressure of wartime political expediency, it was thrown out of the Western thinking, together with the shameful memory of appeasement. During the Second World War, approval of the pre- Munich status quo in the Danube Valley was considered, so to speak, a full proof of repudiation of Munich in the same way that pro- Soviet orientation (after 1941) was considered a full proof of democratic anti- Fascist sincerity.

While, as a rule, the mistakes of the peace settlement in the Danube Valley were lightly glossed over, the mistakes of the Western Powers' policy toward Nazi Germany were heavily concentrated on by the critics of Munich. A.J.P. Taylor, for instance, defended the pre- Munich Danubian status quo by arguing that it "would have been permanent and stable had it not been for the breakdown of the Versailles settlement of Germany." In his picturesque parable: "To attribute the fall and dismemberment of the national states in central and south- eastern Europe to their own defects is comparable to condemning Sir Christopher Wren as an architect because of the collapse of the City churches in the blitz of 1940- 1."[9] Another English historian, C. A. Macartney, was of the opinion, though, that "it is obvious and tautologous to say that an overwhelming outside force in favor of the status- quo would have preserved it. But the ideal which the treaty- makers hoped to achieve was not a structure, unstable in itself, which had to be propped up by titanic efforts from outside, but rather something possessed of inherent vitality and solidarity. And in fact, when the test came, the solidarity was conspicuously lacking and the vitality insufficient." Such views, however, drew few followers.

Lack of solidarity among the nations of the Middle Zone was not, of course, the sole cause of their undoing. One of the leading historians of the Middle Zone, the Polish Oscar Halecki, was right in pointing out: "The liberation of that whole region after World War I could have changed the destiny of its peoples if they had shown more solidarity, if German and Russian power had not been so quickly reborn under particularly aggressive totalitarian regimes, and if the system of inter- national organization, inseparable from lasting self- determination in one of the most exposed regions of the world, had worked more satisfactorily." Indeed, it was a grave misfortune to live in Europe's danger zone; and the blunders of Western policy in the inter- war period were most un- fortunate; nonetheless, the essential harm done the Middle Zone nations was of their own doing. Their energies had been consumed in wrangles over national prerogatives and boundaries; free development of their great human resources was impeded to a large extent by reactionary class rule and ethnic rivalries; their economic progress was hampered by artificial political frontiers. They had attained national independence after the First World War, but they had overlooked, and so had their Western protectors, the iron laws of interdependence. Preoccupied with quarrels among themselves, they failed to protect themselves against the common dangers of their precarious geographical location between Russia and Germany. Munich and its consequences reminded them again of the old truth that only in federation could they develop and maintain their freedom and independence.

The New Central Europe