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    Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices
    Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices
    Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices
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    Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices

    By Marina Cattaruzza and Dieter Langewiesche

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    A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This “territorial revisionism” came to include all manner of political and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the war itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period and East European national histories.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerghahn Books
    Release dateDec 1, 2012
    ISBN9780857457394
    Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices

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      Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War - Marina Cattaruzza

      TERRITORIAL REVISIONISM AND THE ALLIES OF

      GERMANY IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

      AUSTRIAN AND HABSBURG STUDIES

      General Editor: Gary B. Cohen

      Published in Association with the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota

      Volume 1

      Austrian Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

      Edited by David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes

      Volume 2

      From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States

      Edited by David F. Good and Ruth Wodak

      Volume 3

      Rethinking Vienna 1900

      Edited by Steven Beller

      Volume 4

      The Great Tradition and Its Legacy: The Evolution of Dramatic and Musical Theater in Austria and Central Europe

      Edited by Michael Cherlin, Halina Filipowicz, and Richard L. Rudolph

      Volume 5

      Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe

      Edited by Nancy M. Wingfield

      Volume 6

      Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe

      Edited by Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit

      Volume 7

      The Environment and Sustainable Development in the New Central Europe

      Edited by Zbigniew Bochniarz and Gary B. Cohen

      Volume 8

      Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1890–1914

      Daniel Mark Vyletta

      Volume 9

      The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Sumbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy

      Edited by Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky

      Volume 10

      Embodiments of Power: Building Baroque Cities in Europe

      Edited by Gary B. Cohen and Franz A. J. Szabo

      Volume 11

      Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Differences in Central Europe, 1500–1800

      Edited by Howard Louthan, Gary B. Cohen, and Franz A. J. Szabo

      Volume 12

      Vienna Is Different: Jewish Writers in Austria from the Fin de Siècle to the Present

      Hillary Hope Herzog

      Volume 13

      Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900–1934

      Britta McEwen

      Volume 14

      Journeys Into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

      Edited by Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber

      Volume 15

      Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices

      Edited by Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff, and Dieter Langewiesche

      Volume 16

      The Viennese Cafe and Fin-de-Siecle Culture

      Edited by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller

      Volume 17

      Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience

      Edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary B. Cohen

      TERRITORIAL REVISIONISM AND THE ALLIES OF GERMANY IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

      Goals, Expectations, Practices

      Edited by

      Marina Cattaruzza

      Stefan Dyroff

      and

      Dieter Langewiesche

      First edition published in 2013 by

      Berghahn Books

      www.berghahnbooks.com

      © 2013, 2015 Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff and Dieter Langewiesche

      First paperback edition published in 2015

      All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Territorial revisionism and the allies of Germany in the Second World War : goals, expectations, practices / edited by Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff and Dieter Langewiesche.

          p. cm. – (Austrian and Habsburg studies ; v.15)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-85745-738-7 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-78238-920-0 (paperback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-85745-739-4 (ebook)

      1. World War, 1939-1945–Occupied territories. 2. World War, 1939–1945 – Territorial questions–Europe, Eastern. 3. World War, 1939–1945–Territorial questions–Europe, Central. 4. World War, 1939–1945–Collaborationists–Europe, Eastern. 5. World War, 1939–1945–Collaborationists–Europe, Central. 6. Europe, Eastern–Boundaries–History–20th century. 7. Europe, Central–Boundaries–History–20th century. 8. Nationalism–Europe, Eastern–History–20th century. 9. Nationalism–Europe, Central–History–20th century. I. Cattaruzza, Marina, 1950– II. Dyroff, Stefan, 1976– III. Langewiesche, Dieter.

      D802.E92T47 2012

      940.53’2–dc23

      2012017044

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Printed on acid-free paper

      ISBN: 978-0-85745-738-7 hardback

      ISBN: 978-1-78238-920-0 paperback

      ISBN: 978-0-85745-739-4 ebook

      CONTENTS

      Acknowledgments

      List of Abbreviations

      Maps

      Introduction: Contextualizing Territorial Revisionism in East Central Europe: Goals, Expectations, and Practices

      Marina Cattaruzza and Dieter Langewiesche

      1 The Worst of Friends: Germany’s Allies in East Central Europe—Struggles for Regional Dominance and Ethnic Cleansing, 1938–1945

      István Deák

      The Role of Minorities

      2 Minorities into Majorities: Sudeten German and Transylvanian Hungarian Political Elites as Actors of Revisionism before and during the Second World War

      Franz Sz. Horváth

      3 The Ethnic Policy of the Third Reich toward the Volksdeutsche in Central and Eastern Europe

      Norbert Spannenberger

      Revisionism as a Driving Force

      4 Revisionism in Regional Perspective

      Holly Case

      5 Hungarian Revisionism in Thought and Action, 1920–1941: Plans, Expectations, Reality

      Ignác Romsics

      6 Bulgarian Territorial Revisionism and Bulgaria’s Rapprochement with the Third Reich

      Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk

      Practices of Revisionism

      7 Politics and Military Action of Ethnic Ukrainian Collaboration for the New European Order

      Frank Grelka

      8 Civil War in Occupied Territories: The Polish–Ukrainian Conflict during the Interwar Years and the Second World War

      Frank Golczewski

      9 The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and Bulgarian Revisionism, 1923–1944

      Stefan Troebst

      10 Romania in the Second World War: Revisionist out of Necessity

      Mariana Hausleitner

      Notes on Contributors

      Select Bibliography

      Index

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      The editors heartily thank the following institutions for their financial support for the project Territorial Revisionism and for the publication of this volume: the DFG–Sonderforschungsbereich Kriegserfahrung [German Research Foundation–Special Research Cluster Experiences of War] at Tübingen University; the Swiss National Science Fund; the Max and Elsa Beer-Brawand Foundation in Berne; the Hochschulstiftung der Burgergemeinde Bern; the Italian Culture Institute in Zürich; and the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Berne. They also thank Nicholas Zücker for his help in the editing of the translated texts. Finally, they express their gratitude to Gary Cohen for his readiness to include their book in the Austrian and Habsburg Studies series.

      LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

      Eastern Europe under Nazi Domination, Autumn 1942

      Source: Richard Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, Routledge, 1996, p. 136. By permission of Taylor & Francis.

      Peace Settlement, 1919–1923

      Source: Richard Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, Routledge, 1996, p. 36. By permission of Taylor & Francis.

      Territorial Changes, 1938–1941

      Source: Richard Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, Routledge, 1996, p. 134. By permission of Taylor & Francis.

      Introduction

      CONTEXTUALIZING TERRITORIAL REVISIONISM IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE

      Goals, Expectations, and Practices

      Marina Cattaruzza and Dieter Langewiesche

      Afew years after the coming to power of Nazism in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. The states involved in this alliance and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany lies at the core of this volume. In other words, the volume deals with the phenomenon of territorial revisionism in the interwar period and in the Second World War. Our purpose is to show the usefulness of a historical approach which considers East Central Europe in the Second World War as a whole instead of narrowing the focus to the individual states involved. In our opinion, this perspective allows for a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the Second World War, which are still in need of illumination. These include:

      • The interaction between Nazi Germany and its allies in reshaping East Central Europe, and the pursuit of autonomous goals by Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and so on within the framework of the German policy of Lebensraum (living space)

      • The parallel wars waged by Germany’s allies with one another in pursuit of their own territorial goals

      • The radical policies—in some cases with genocidal features—implemented by Germany’s allies, and which can be likened very closely to Nazi policies¹

      • The common heritage of ethnic struggle in the multi-national empires of the region and its transformation in the framework of the post-Versailles order

      Today, territorial revisionism does not seem to be a big issue—either in modern history or in political science. At most the term recalls the policy of the German foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, who aimed to revise the German–Polish border after having settled controversies with France and Great Britain in Locarno in 1925. Further proof of the limited attention paid to this issue is the fact that it is not easy to find a definition of the concept in the most commonly cited lexicons of political science and international relations. At best, one finds this concise description in the German Brockhaus encyclopaedia: Revisionism—keyword for attempts to change existing conditions, constitutions, laws or borders or to modify ideological statements.² Therefore we will utilize territorial revisionism for all manner of politics and military measures which attempted to change existing borders.

      In a paper published some years ago, Robert H. Jackson and Mark W. Zacher stated that between the Westphalian Peace at the end of the Thirty Years war (1648) and 1945, the percentage of wars ending with a redistribution of territory was around 80 per cent—that is to say that most interstate conflicts were settled with the handing over of territory. The extension of territory was the first source of security and wealth for a state; therefore, the maintenance and acquisition of territory was the prime object of international politics. Apart from war, territory could be gained through such things as inheritance, marriage, conquest, colonization, and purchase.³ But things became more complicated when sovereignty needed to be legitimized by the will of the people—that is, by the nation. According to the Italian historian Rosario Romeo, since the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a place in Europe only for those states which could claim a national legitimacy.⁴ Therefore, the multi-national empires suffered from a growing lack of legitimacy, which resulted in a fatal weakness when a major international clash, the First World War, broke out. The formidable impetus of the formula of the self determination of people proved invincible, perhaps beyond the hopes and expectations of its proponents among the Western allies.⁵

      The European Scenario in the Interwar Period

      When America entered the First World War in 1917, its justification was that this was part of a struggle for human rights and democracy. Therein lay the core principle of the postwar order that the victorious allies sought to create: the people’s right to political self-determination in the form of a parliamentary democracy, which at the time could only be imagined as existing within a nation-state. To establish oneself as a nation in one’s own state was the focal point in most thinking about political self-determination. The end of the First World War seemed to provide the opportunity for dismantling the multi-national Habsburg monarchy along those lines and replacing it with nation-states. With the cessation of hostilities, parliamentary democracy applied to nation-states had become the dominant constitutional model for postwar Europe. Europe now consisted of twenty-eight states, nine of which had been newly added: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

      But, against the optimistic expectations of Woodrow Wilson, who claimed that his intention was to fight a war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy, the First World War introduced to Europe an era of insecurity and disorientation. In fact, for most people the war meant the end of the world as they had known it. On August 3, 1914, Sir Edward Grey had prophetically evoked the impending catastrophe: The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time. A time of great uncertainty had begun, a time of seeking new things. Parliamentary democracies won the war, but they lost the peace, for this war destroyed the foundations of an entire century. In the search for a new order capable of replacing the vanished bourgeois world, democratic principles were seen as a spent force.⁶ In most elections the liberals dissolved into small splinter groups, and new parties of the masses came into being with very different patterns of organization, mass mobilization, and other aims. The First World War increased political and social violence on a mass scale.⁷ In many states—such as Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia—political parties both on the Left and on the Right set up their own armed militias. The state lost its monopoly over the use of force as it was challenged by organized groups which were able to exercise violence on their own for their own aims. Political assassinations and murders were the order of the day, and in many countries the war continued in the form of a civil war. In Germany, for instance, 354 people were killed for political reasons from 1918 to 1921, while in the last phase of the Weimar Republic street fighting caused some 400 casualties. In Bulgaria, unrest in 1923 claimed at least 20,000 lives.⁸ Even in Switzerland, a stronghold of political stability, there was a general strike.

      In 1938, there were sixty-five sovereign states in the world, only seventeen of which could be called parliamentary constitutional states. From the point of view of types of government, Europe was divided in two: in the north and west there were constitutional states with a democratic structure, against which stood a block of dictatorships in the south and east. This block included autocracies, dictatorships in the fascist mould, and the Soviet Union.⁹ It even appeared at times that fascist or authoritarian regimes might gain a foothold in the democratic heartlands of Western Europe.¹⁰

      Dictatorship was now catching on as democracy had once done, and even a rule of terror could be based on the broad acceptance of the populace.¹¹ Apparently, the new totalitarian and authoritarian dictatorships managed to address the problems of the modern age more forcefully, above all through the social and political reshaping of mass society according to radical new principles: Volksgemeinschaft, administration by Soviets and dictatorships of the proletariat, and pervasive fascist mass organizations and parties.¹²

      With regard to international settlements, dictatorships appeared as the architects of a new European order which could improve the territorial situation established after the First World War. As the Swiss historian Jörg Fisch recently pointed out, the treaties signed at the Paris Peace Conference tried to reconcile two opposing principles: the traditional right of the victorious powers to establish the postwar order, and the new right to self-determination of the people.¹³ Fisch shows how at the peace conference the victorious as well as the defeated powers utilized the principle of self-determination as a powerful rhetorical device in order to achieve the most convenient international position. The unchallenged acceptance of the principle of self-determination imposed the necessity of ethical-juridical legitimacy regarding the ceding of territory. This was something new in the history of international relations.¹⁴ In reality, though, the right of self-determination was recognized in the Peace Treaties only for the victors and the successor states of Austria-Hungary (again without the losers: Austria and Hungary).¹⁵ Still, as the right to self-determination appeared to be self-evident, and not in need of further justification, the defeated powers were able to put forward their revisionist claims wrapped in a highly convincing discourse.¹⁶ As is generally known, the Anschluss of Austria by the Third Reich and its claims to the Sudetenland were supported by Great Britain under the principle of self-determination.¹⁷ Not only did Great Britain and France consent to a radical revision of the Treaty of Versailles, but this revision, carried out in the name of the defense of minorities, was acknowledged as legitimate and reasonable.¹⁸

      It is no coincidence that the center of gravity for attempts at territorial revisionism in Europe was located in the lands of the old multi-national empires. In fact, as Hannah Arendt remarked perspicaciously, it seems that the drawing-up of boundaries for the new nation-states created in Paris in 1919 and 1920 simply served the purpose of reproducing the experiment of the Habsburg monarchy in miniature. Most of the new states were just as multi-national as the old empires had been, but in their perception of themselves they were nation-states in which their respective core nation was regarded as representing the whole population.¹⁹ Therefore, the rise of Nazi Germany as the most successful revisionist power, which based its politics on the criterion of race and radical anti-Semitism, set the agenda for its neighboring countries as well. The latter enacted plans of territorial enlargement, at least a partial elimination of the Jews, and ethnic engineering that, on the whole, provided considerable destructive potential on their own. Such plans were fitted to the general framework of the Third Reich’s New European Order.

      Revisionism in Practice

      As a consequence of the Munich Agreement of 1938, the Sudetenland was transferred from Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. But other states, such as Poland²⁰ and Hungary,²¹ also demanded parts of Czechoslovakia for themselves: Poland claimed the district of Teschen, and Hungary desired Carpatho-Ukraine. Poland got the desired territory in direct negotiations with Czechoslovakia, whereas a small part of Carpatho-Ukraine together with a strip along the Slovak–Hungarian border was allotted to Hungary by Nazi Germany and Italy in the First Vienna Award of November 2, 1938.²² After Germany destroyed the rump state of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Hungary marched into Carpatho-Ukraine and held it until the final phase of the Second World War. The First Vienna Award, accomplished just one month after the Munich Agreement and greeted with benevolent indifference by the Western powers,²³ marked a crucial turning point in the political alliances of East Central Europe. Germany proved itself to be both the unchallenged hegemonic power in the area and the determining factor of the new order. Alternative alliances, which were pursued up to that point, such as one between Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia under the patronage of Mussolini,²⁴ suddenly became pointless. Fascist Italy itself signed the unfavorable and far-reaching Pact of Steel with Germany in May 1939.

      For Germany, the redrawing of borders in favor of its allies (or at least promises to do so) became a powerful tool for keeping alliances alive or gaining a new ally in the course of the Second World War.²⁵ Such was the case with Romania, which definitively joined the German camp after the loss of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union in accordance with the Nazi–Soviet Pact. The Romanian alignment with Germany occurred despite the loss of northern Transylvania and Southern Dobrudja to Germany’s allies, Hungary and Bulgaria.²⁶

      Territorial gains or the recovery of territories previously lost played a crucial role in foreign and domestic policies in East Central Europe between 1918 and 1945, and even later. Territorial expansion, legitimized by more or less well-founded national claims, was a key foreign-policy issue for states like Hungary, Bulgaria,²⁷ and Yugoslavia.²⁸ Even the Soviet Union was eager to reconquer territories which the Russian Empire had lost after the Bolshevik revolution, such as Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, the Baltic states, western Ukraine, and at least a part of Finland. Others, like the Slovaks, the Croats, and the Ukrainians, took advantage of the war in order to achieve a certain amount of political independence under the protection of Germany.²⁹ Finally, a third pattern pertained to those states which lost territory as a consequence of others’ successful revisionism and hoped to recover it thanks to Germany: these were the already mentioned cases of Romania and Finland.

      To sum up, all these states (and various separatist movements) were revisionist in one way or another. All of them strived either to change the settlements agreed upon at the Paris Peace Conference, or to modify the new status quo established in the framework of the Nazi–Soviet Pact (even though, in the long term, neither Finland nor Romania achieved the revision of the boundaries set down in the terms of the Pact), or to achieve full state independence. Such goals were often pursued by these states against each other, through border infiltration by paramilitary forces,³⁰ through claims on their neighbors’ territories, or by cooperation in seizing parts of states when they collapsed, such as Yugoslavia, which Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria carved up.³¹ Extremely brutal clashes between Poles and Ukrainians occurred in the regions under German occupation (Volhynia, the Zamość area under the General Government, and Eastern Galicia). Also, the Ukrainians in northern Bukovina were persecuted by Romanians despite Ukrainian collaboration with the Germans. Therefore, we may conclude that the different agents involved in these regional conflicts over possession of an ethnically cleansed territory were fighting their own war, quite different from the one the Germans were fighting. István Deák sustains here the thesis that the allies of Nazi Germany constantly sought to push to the fore their own agenda and to engage on the side of Germany only when doing so corresponded with their own aims. This fact meant, of course, a weakening of the Axis alliance and a narrowing of its military effectiveness.

      The Minorities Issue

      The settlement of Versailles had assigned millions of people whose common language and ethnic self-perception were different from those of the majority population to states where they felt foreign or even in opposition. The most obvious cases were that of Germans, handed over to Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland,³² and of Magyars, divided between Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Sizeable Bulgarian minorities, meanwhile, were consigned to Romania and Greece, while Croats and Slovenes came under Italian sovereignty.³³ Of course, not all people who were claimed as co-nationals shared nationalist or irredentist aims.³⁴ In any case, the sharing-out of the empires among would-be nation-states,³⁵ combined with revisionist agitation and the discredit heaped upon democracy and liberalism after the onset of the world-wide economic crisis³⁶ in the 1930s, helped to radicalize existing minority networks. In the first section of this volume, Norbert Spannenberger shows that among German settlements in Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia there was a clear orientation toward National Socialist programs, forms of organization, and rituals. The German SS could easily put the volksdeutsche networks under their control and utilize them as a trump card in foreign policy.³⁷ Franz Horváth demonstrates in his chapter on the German minority in Czechoslovakia and the Hungarian minority in Transylvania how different factors affected the attitude of representatives of minorities towards the host state. His contribution offers evidence of the fluid character of the revisionism advocated by minority networks: in both cases, territorial revisionism was actively supported by minorities after the outbreak of the world economic crisis, and particularly after 1937/38, when it became a politically viable aspiration. In contrast, in the 1920s, many representatives of the German and Hungarian minorities accepted the status quo and took part in the political life of Czechoslovakia and Romania. Overall, in the late 1930s, asserting minority-identity and minority rights seemed to be successful and worthwhile projects.³⁸

      The Manifold Problems of the Heirs of East Central Europe’s Empires

      The states and movements involved in revisionist dynamics were without exception relatively new or only would-be states. They had appeared in the course of the dissolution of the Ottoman, Czarist, and Austrian-Hungarian Empires between 1878 and 1918/19 with no clear idea about adequate national boundaries.³⁹ As a rule, nationalist politicians asserted the right of their nation to the largest possible territory, making use of a highly disparate and inconsistent set of arguments, which combined such things as historical rights (sometimes dating back to prehistoric times), an alleged cultural superiority linked with an exclusive claim to exercise the civilizing function in an area, geopolitical interests, integrative achievements regarding heterogeneous populations, and a more defined cultural identity in comparison to neighboring peoples.⁴⁰ As Imanuel Geiss has rightly argued, such states utilized a backwards projection of nation and empire in order to justify historically their territorial claims as nation-states.⁴¹ For instance, the territorial horizon of Bulgaria was set, as Stefan Troebst points out in his chapter, by the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, even though the terms of that treaty were never enacted. The political elites of these states shared the conviction of the time that a state should prove its strength through territorial expansion and that war was a legitimate price to pay in order to achieve an enlargement of state power.⁴²

      At the same time, the new states of East Central Europe were relatively weak, non-homogeneous, plagued by dire economic and social problems (including the peasantry and land reform issues),⁴³ and they also had inadequate control over their border regions.⁴⁴ They were light years away from corresponding to the ideal type of a modern nation-state as described a few years ago by Charles Maier, and unable to mobilize fully the people and resources existing on their territory.⁴⁵

      Two factors primarily affected the minority question in the successor states of the old multi-national empires. First, under the Habsburg monarchy, the different groups had undergone a process of nationalization and politicization from the bottom up. In fact, the monarchy had sponsored a process of political democratization without trying to nationalize the people. As a consequence, people nationalized themselves, claiming pre-existing ethnic appurtenances or other criteria to prove the existence of their nation.⁴⁶ Second, in the case of the Germans and the Hungarians, the minorities belonged to previous master nations,⁴⁷ which were not used to being nationally oppressed or dispossessed.

      One of the ways the new states strived to strengthen the position of the titular nation was to get rid of at least some of their minorities. This objective was pursued so that the new states could establish themselves as worthy successors to the imperial order, to attain a sufficient degree of internal homogeneity corresponding to the criteria of a nation-state, and to stabilize their political power.⁴⁸

      The new states were faced with manifold concerns: border disputes, nation-building, economic problems, and an unstable international situation. The uncertainty of a significant proportion of the citizens of these states as to whether they actually belonged to the political community made things worse and created a palpable atmosphere of internal instability.⁴⁹ The territorial premise of the sustainability of a political community, whereby identity space should coincide with decision space,⁵⁰ failed to materialize in many parts of East Central Europe.

      An Era of Revisionism?

      In all revisionist programs, a supposedly incorrect order needs to be replaced by a correct one, which corresponds more closely to the supposedly just claims of the states or movements involved. In the end, the fulfillment of revisionist claims inevitably led to new revisionisms being created, forming a vicious circle that arose out of a desire to possess as much territory as possible.⁵¹ Territorial revisionism became contagious: when revisionist claims were fulfilled, they made revisionists out of states that were previously territorially satisfied. A prime example is Romania, which almost doubled its territory at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919/20 and became revisionist after the Soviet Union and Hungary

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