{"id":64871,"date":"2015-03-03T20:45:20","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T04:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=64871"},"modified":"2015-03-03T20:45:20","modified_gmt":"2015-03-04T04:45:20","slug":"europes-post-wwi-experiment-with-racial-nationalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=64871","title":{"rendered":"Europe’s Post WWI Experiment With Racial Nationalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in his book Modern Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Was the Treaty of Versailles, then, a complete failure? Many
\nintellectuals thought so at the time; most have taken that view since.
\nBut then intellectuals were at the origin of the problem – violent
\nethnic nationalism – which both dictated the nature of the Versailles
\nsettlement and ensured it would not work. All the European nation-
\nalist movements, of which there were dozens by 1919, had been
\ncreated and led and goaded on by academics and writers who had
\nstressed the linguistic and cultural differences between peoples at the
\nexpense of the traditional ties and continuing economic interests
\nwhich urged them to live together. By 1919 virtually all European
\nintellectuals of the younger generation, not to speak of their elders,
\nsubscribed to the proposition that the right to national self-
\ndetermination was a fundamental moral principle. There were a few
\nexceptions, Karl Popper being one. 115 These few argued that self-
\ndetermination was a self-defeating principle since ‘liberating’ peo-
\nples and minorities simply created more minorities. But as a rule
\nself-determination was accepted as unarguable for Europe, just as in
\nthe 1950s and 1960s it would be accepted for Africa. <\/p>\n

Indeed by 1919 there could be no question of saving the old
\narrangements in Central and Eastern Europe. The nationalists had
\nalready torn them apart. From the distance of seventy years it is
\ncustomary to regard the last years of Austria-Hungary as a tranquil
\nexercise in multi-racialism. In fact it was a nightmare of growing
\nracial animosity. Every reform created more problems than it
\nsolved. Hungary got status within the empire as a separate state in
\n1867. It at once began to oppress its own minorities, chiefly Slovaks
\nand Romanians, with greater ferocity and ingenuity than it itself had
\nbeen oppressed by Austria. Elections were suspect, and the rail-
\nways, the banking system and the principles of internal free trade
\nwere savagely disrupted in the pursuit of racial advantage imm-
\nediately any reform made such action possible. Czechs and other
\nSlav groups followed the Hungarians’ example. No ethnic group
\nbehaved consistently. What the Germans demanded and the Czechs
\nrefused in Bohemia, the Germans refused and the Italians and south
\nSlovenes demanded in the South Tyrol and Styria. All the various
\nDiets and Parliaments, in Budapest, Prague, Graz and Innsbruck,
\nwere arenas of merciless racial discord. In Galicia, the minority
\nRuthenians fought the majority Poles. In Dalmatia the .minority
\nItalians fought the majority South Slavs. As a result it was imposs-
\nible to form an effective parliamentary government. All of the twelve
\ncentral governments between 1900 and 1918 had to be composed
\nalmost entirely of civil servants. Each local government, from which
\nminorities were excluded, protected its home industries where it
\nwas legally empowered to do so, and if not, organized boycotts of
\ngoods made by other racial groups. There was no normality in the
\nold empire. <\/p>\n

But at least there was some respect for the law. In Imperial
\nRussia there were anti-Jewish pogroms occasionally, and other
\ninstances of violent racial conflict. But the two Germanic empires
\nwere exceptionally law-abiding up to 1914; the complaint even was
\nthat their peoples were too docile. The war changed all that with a
\nvengeance. There is truth in the historian Fritz Stern’s remark that
\nthe Great War ushered in a period of unprecedented violence, and
\nbegan in effect a Thirty Years’ War, with 1919 signifying the
\ncontinuation of war by different means. 116 Of course in a sense the
\ncalamities of the epoch were global rather than continental. The
\n1918\u201419 influenza virus strain, a pandemic which killed forty
\nmillion people in Europe, Asia and America, was not confined to the
\nwar areas, though it struck them hardest. 117 New-style outbreaks of
\nviolence were to be found almost everywhere immediately after the
\nformal fighting ended. On 27 July-1 August, in Chicago, the USA
\ngot its first really big Northern race-riots, with thirty-six killed and 536 injured. Others followed elsewhere: at Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 30
\nMay 1921, fifty whites and two hundred blacks were murdered. 118
\nIn Canada, on 17 June 1919, the leaders of the Winnipeg general
\nstrike were accused, and later convicted, of a plot to destroy
\nconstitutional authority by force and set up a Soviet. 119 In Britain,
\nthere was a putative revolution in Glasgow on 31 January 1919; and
\ncivil or class war was a periodic possibility between 1919 and the end
\nof 1921, as the hair-raising records of cabinet meetings, taken down
\nverbatim in shorthand by Thomas Jones, survive to testify. Thus, on
\n4 April 1921, the cabinet discussed bringing back four battalions
\nfrom Silesia, where they were holding apart frantic Poles and
\nGermans, in order to ‘hold London’, and the Lord Chancellor
\nobserved stoically: ‘We should decide without delay around which
\nforce loyalists can gather. We ought not to be shot without a fight
\nanyway.’ 120 <\/p>\n

Even so it was in Central and Eastern Europe that the violence,
\nand the racial antagonism which provoked it, were most acute,
\nwidespread and protracted. A score or more minor wars were fought
\nthere in the years 1919-22. They are poorly recorded in western
\nhistories but they left terrible scars, which in some cases were still
\naching in the 1960s and which contributed directly to the chronic
\ninstability in Europe between the wars. The Versailles Treaty, in
\nseeking to embody the principles of self-determination, actually
\ncreated more, not fewer, minorities, and much angrier ones (many
\nwere German or Hungarian), armed with far more genuine
\ngrievances. The new nationalist regimes thought they could afford to
\nbe far less tolerant than the old empires. And, since the changes
\ndamaged the economic infrastructure (especially in Silesia, South
\nPoland, Austria, Hungary and North Yugoslavia), everyone tended
\nto be poorer than before. <\/p>\n

Every country was landed with either an anguished grievance or an
\ninsuperable internal problem. Germany, with divided Prussia and
\nlost Silesia, cried to heaven for vengeance. Austria was left fairly
\nhomogeneous \u2014 it even got the German Burgenland from Hungary \u2014
\nbut was stripped bare of all its former possessions and left with a
\nthird of its population in starving Vienna. Moreover, under the
\nTreaty it was forbidden to seek union with Germany, which made
\nthe Anschluss seem more attractive than it actually was. Hungary’s
\npopulation was reduced from 20 to 8 million, its carefully integrated
\nindustrial economy was wrecked and 3 million Hungarians handed
\nover to the Czechs and Romanians. 121 <\/p>\n

Of the beneficiaries of Versailles, Poland was the greediest and the
\nmost bellicose, emerging in 1921, after three years of fighting, twice
\nas big as had been expected at the Peace Conference. She attacked the
\nUkrainians, getting from them eastern Galicia and its capital Lwow.
\nShe fought the Czechs for Teschen (Cieszyn), and failed to get it, one
\nreason why Poland had no sympathy with the Czechs in 1938 and
\nactually helped Russia to invade them in 1968, though in both cases
\nit was in her long-term interests to side with Czech independence.
\nShe made good her ‘rights’ against the Germans by force, in both the
\nBaltic and Silesia. She invaded newly free Lithuania, occupying Vilno
\nand incorporating it after a ‘plebiscite’. She waged a full-scale war of acquisition against Russia, and persuaded the Western powers to
\nratify her new frontiers in 1923. In expanding by force Poland had
\nskilfully played on Britain’s fears of Bolshevism and France’s desire
\nto have a powerful ally in the east, now that its old Tsarist alliance
\nwas dead. But of course when it came to the point Britain and France
\nwere powerless to come to Poland’s assistance, and in the process she
\nhad implacably offended all her neighbours, who would certainly fall
\non her the second they got the opportunity. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Poland had acquired the largest minorities problem in
\nEurope, outside Russia herself. Of her 27 million population, a third
\nwere minorities: West Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Belorussians, Ger-
\nmans, Lithuanians, all of them in concentrated areas, plus 3 million
\nJews. The Jews tended to side with the Germans and Ukrainians, had
\na block of thirty-odd deputies in the parliament, and formed a
\nmajority in some eastern towns with a virtual monopoly of trade. At
\nVersailles Poland was obliged to sign a special treaty guaranteeing
\nrights to her minorities. But she did not keep it even in the Twenties,
\nstill less in the Thirties when her minorities policy deteriorated under military dictatorship. With a third of her population treated as
\nvirtual aliens, she maintained an enormous police force, plus a
\nnumerous but ill-equipped standing army to defend her vast fron-
\ntiers. There was foresight in the remark of the Polish nobleman to the
\nGerman ambassador in 1918, ‘If Poland could be free, I’d give half
\nmy worldly goods. But with the other half I’d emigrate.’ 122 <\/p>\n

Czechoslovakia was even more of an artefact, since it was in fact a
\ncollection of minorities, with the Czechs in control. The 1921 census
\nrevealed 8,760,000 Czechoslovaks, 3,123,448 Germans, 747,000
\nMagyars and 461,000 Ruthenians. But the Germans claimed it was
\ndeliberately inaccurate and that there were, in fact, far fewer in the
\nruling group. In any case, even the Slovaks felt they were persecuted
\nby the Czechs, and it was characteristic of this ‘country’ that the new
\nSlovak capital, Bratislava, was mainly inhabited not by Slovaks but
\nby Germans and Magyars. 123 In the Twenties the Czechs, unlike the
\nPoles, made serious efforts to operate a fair minorities policy. But the Great Depression hit the Germans much harder than the Czechs –
\nwhether by accident or design – and after that the relationship
\nbecame hopelessly envenomed. <\/p>\n

Yugoslavia resembled Czechoslovakia in that it was a miniature
\nempire run by Serbs, and with considerably more brutality than the
\nCzechs ran theirs. In parts of it there had been continuous fighting
\nsince 1912, and the frontiers were not settled (if that is the word)
\nuntil 1926. The Orthodox Serbs ran the army and the administra-
\ntion, but the Catholic Croats and Slovenes, who had much higher
\ncultural and economic standards, talked of their duty to ‘European-
\nize the Balkans’ (i.e., the Serbs) and their fears that they themselves
\nwould be ‘Balkanized’. R.W.Seton-Watson, who had been instrumental in creating the new country, was soon disillusioned by the way the Serbs ran it: The situation in Jugoslavia’, he wrote in 1921, ‘reduces me to despair …. I have no confidence in the new constitution, with its absurd centralism.’ The Serb officials were worse than the Habsburgs, he complained, and Serb oppression more savage than German. ‘My own inclination’, he wrote in 1928, ‘. . . is to leave the Serbs and Croats to stew in their own juice! I think they are both mad and cannot see beyond the end of their noses.’ 124 Indeed, MPs had just been blazing away at each other with pistols in the parliament, the Croat Peasant Party leader, Stepan Radic, being killed in the process. The country was held together, if at all, not so much by the Serb political police as by the smouldering hatred of its Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Albanian neighbours, all of whom had grievances to settle. 125 <\/p>\n

Central and Eastern Europe was now gathering in the grisly
\nharvest of irreconcilable nationalisms which had been sown through-
\nout the nineteenth century. Or, to vary the metaphor, Versailles lifted
\nthe lid on the seething, noisome pot and the stench of the brew
\ntherein filled Europe until first Hitler, then Stalin, slammed it down
\nagain by force. No doubt, when that happened, elderly men and
\nwomen regretted the easy-going dynastic empires they had lost. Of
\ncourse by 1919 the notion of a monarch ruling over a collection of
\ndisparate European peoples by divine right and ancient custom
\nalready appeared absurd. But if imperialism within Europe was
\nanachronistic, how much longer would it seem defensible outside it? <\/p>\n

Self-determination was not a continental principle; it was, or soon
\nwould be, global. Eyre Crowe’s rebuke to Harold Nicolson at the Paris
\nConference echoed a point Maurice Hankey had made to Lord Robert
\nCecil when the latter was working on the embryo League of Nations
\nscheme. Hankey begged him not to insist on a general statement of
\nself-determination. ‘I pointed out to him’, he noted in his diary, ‘that it would logically lead to the self-determination of Gibraltar to Spain, Malta to the Maltese, Cyprus to the Greeks, Egypt to the Egyptians, Aden to the Arabs or Somalis, India to chaos, Hong Kong to the Chinese, South Africa to the Kaffirs, West Indies to the blacks, etc. And where would the British Empire be?’ 126 <\/p>\n

As a matter of fact the principle was already being conceded even at
\nthe time Hankey wrote. During the desperate days of the war, the Allies
\nsigned post-dated cheques not only to Arabs and Jews and Romanians
\nand Italians and Japanese and Slavs but to their own subject-peoples.
\nAs the casualties mounted, colonial manpower increasingly filled the
\ngaps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in his book Modern Times: Was the Treaty of Versailles, then, a complete failure? Many intellectuals thought so at the time; most have taken that view since. But then intellectuals were at the origin of the problem … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9993],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64871"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64872,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64871\/revisions\/64872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}