National Rivalries Disrupted Central Europe

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29270, 30 July 1960, Page 3

National Rivalries Disrupted Central Europe

The Triumph of Tyranny. By Stephen Borsody. Jonathan Cape. 285 pp. The author of this book, a Hungarian by birth, is a graduate of Prague and Budapest Universities. He resigned his post as 1 Counsellor and Press Attache at i the Hungarian Legation in Wash--1 ington after the Communist coup • in Hungary in 1947; he is now ■ an American citizen, and Profes- ! sor of History at Chatham College in Pittsburgh. With this back1 ground he is well qualified to write about the unhappy history of Central Europe. His survey begins with the 1919 Peace Settlement and ends in ’ 1959, with Russia well in control ' of Central Europe and the German problem still unsolved. His main theme is that the tyranny established in Central Europe is due to nationalist rivalries, particularly between Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Indeed, he claims that conflict between nations played a ■ greater part than economic op- ! pression and social revolt in imposing both the Nazi and Communist tyrannies on Europe. The nation-state, he says, was not a suitable alternative to the Hapsburg Empire, and the new States which arose after 1918 failed to create a new order in the “Middle Zones,” by which he means the smaller Central European nations exposed to the pressure of Germany and Russia. The need was for federalism, defined as “a truly democratic state of mind, ready to respect the equal freedoms of the, individual as well as the equal rights of nations within a broader international community.” 6X3SJSJBX3CSC3SXXS After 1918 the victors, including Chechoslovakia, received very generous treatment; the vanquished, including Hungary, which lost 71 per cent, of its territory and 60 per cent, of its population, were unjustly treated and thus became the enemy of the new order of which the main prop was the intensely nationalistic Czechoslovakia, which, allied with Jugoslavia and Rumania, formed the Little Entente which was firmly opposed to Hungary’s revisionist claims. The hostility between democratic Czechoslovakia and. reactionary Hungary was the main cause of the ruin of Central Europe: it paved the way for Hitler’s aggression. The Great Powers who framed the peace settlement do not escape their share of blame. Not only were they disunited among themselves, but they antagonised Germany and Russia by using the Middle' Zone as a bulwark against them, and failed to create conditions favourable for co-operation among the nations of the zone. When Hitler came to power in Germany, an alliance' between East and West could have prevented Munich, finished Hitler and prevented war. As it was, the policy of appeasement demonstrated the failure of the’ peace settlement in the Danube Valley, which was now left open to German encroachment.* The war led to a revival of federalist planning, such as the “Confederation of States” envisaged between Benes and Sikorski, but little came of them. -Benes set out to restore Czechoslovakia rather than to create a Danubian federation; he drew closer to Moscow, and worked for a preMunich Czechoslovakia, with the

troublesome minorities expelled. This was, of course, incompatible with the democracy for which his country had been famed, and he became a “totalitarian Slav nationalist”; Dr. Borsody argues that Benes failed because he trusted Stalin too long, and because his policy of the homogeneous nation-state was essentially a bad one. The decline of Czech democracy, he says, proves what havoc nationalism can work; its collapse revealed the depth of political and moral disintegration which two world wars produced in Central Europe. The story of Hungary is equally sad in a different way. She, ought to have been one of the leaders of a Danubian Confederation of which she was the geographical centre. Hampered successively by the Treaty of Trianon, the collapse of the liberal Karolyi regime and the establishment of the reactionary counter-revolution of Horthy, she failed to negotiate any revision of the peace settlement before the war. and afterwards she alone of Hitler’s Danubian satellites suffered the consequences of defeat without mitigation. Here again, the victors failed to deal properly with the situation. Both the Atlantic Charter and the Yalta agreements envisaged the restoration of the prewar nation-states, and when the war was over, and Soviet domination threatened Central Europe, the West failed “to integrate the democracies into a socially progressive and spiritually dynamic force.” Western softness at Potsdam ruined any remaining chance of saving Eastern Europe from the Soviets. In the Epilogue, entitled "The Unfinished Struggle,” Professor Borsody deals among other things with the tragic events in Hungary in 1956 and their connexion with the simultaneous Suez crisis, and reaches the conclusion that Western policy was invariably based on the assumption that nothing tangible could be done on behalf of freedom in the Soviet sphere of influence. On the other hand the Western nations were reminded of the sorry state of their unity, with the result that they turned again to the work on European federalisation. There is also much else of interest in his conclusions. The real solution of the German problem, he says, is the integration of the Germans into a federated Europe; if that federation were sufficiently stable and obviously peaceful in intention, the Russians might come to recognise it as a solution which served the interests of their own security. The solution of the German question is a prerequisite in solving the question of the Middle Zone.

There are two other points which call for special notice. The story of the forcible expulsions of alien populations from Central European countries after 1945 is appalling. The Poles expelled 5 million Germans, and the Czechs got rid of 2.6 million; there were also the German minorities driven out of Hungary, Rumania and Jugoslavia. It is right that we should be reminded of this tale of human misery before World Refugee Year draws to a close. Professor Borsody also quotes Chamberlain’s reference in 1938 to the Czech crisis as a “quarrel in a far-away country between

people of whom we know nothing.” There are no longer any far-away countries, and we still know too little of the Central European peoples and their difficulties. This book both provides clear information and suggests a promising solution to a complicated problem.