Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (9 page)

But the pure nation had to be made, for it was still a dream, not a reality. Neither Greece nor Germany nor any of the other so-called nation-states of central and eastern Europe was really ethnically homogeneous. Versailles had given sixty million people a state of their own, but it turned another twenty-five million into minorities. They included not only Jews, gypsies, Ukrainians and Macedonians but also former ruling groups such as the Germans, Hungarians and Muslims. Because the latter category in particular regarded themselves as more civilized than the peasant upstarts who now lorded it over them, they did not take easily to the idea that they should assimilate into the new national culture, as liberal political theory proposed. In fact, in inter-war Europe, neither minority nor majority believed in assimilation; the new democracies tended to be exclusionary and antagonistic in their ethnic relations.

The tensions created by the dream of national purification lay at the heart of inter-war European politics. Exterminating minorities—as the Turks tried with the Armenians—was not generally acceptable to international opinion; expelling or swapping minorities, as the Greeks and Turks did in 1922–3, did not seem much of an improvement. The victor powers at Versailles tried a different approach—keeping minorities where they were, and giving them protection in international law to make sure they were properly treated so that in time they would acquire a sense of national belonging. But the minority-rights treaties did not work very well, and failed to prevent ill-feeling and discrimination.

It was, in fact, because it was obvious that the principle of national self-determination would create this kind of problem that many people had doubted during the 1914–18 war whether a world of
nation-states was such a desirable outcome. Yet for the British and French, whose global empires were now bigger than ever before, such a territorial settlement in central-eastern Europe suited their imperial interests. It created a tier of states which would act as a buffer against both Germany and Russia, allowing them to govern their far-flung colonies while simultaneously dominating the continent.

The imperial ambitions of Germany and Russia, on the other hand, lay in precisely the area occupied by the new nation-states. Their temporary exhaustion in 1918 had allowed the British, French and Americans to impose a new liberal order. But as they regained their power and appetite, they approached the region on a very different basis. The Soviet Union, for example, was basically a federal solution to the ethnic complexities of the old Tsarist domains—or what was left of them, after the losses of the Great War; it centralized power through the Communist Party, while allowing administrative and cultural opportunities to local Ukrainian and Belorussian elites.

Because the Russians effectively gave up dreams of westwards expansion after their defeat in the Russo-Polish war, their Soviet empire was able to coexist with the Versailles system, and indeed actually entered the League of Nations in 1934. But in the 1930s the liberal order of nation-states and minority rights set up by the British and French began to collapse in the face of a more determined challenge. With the rise of Nazi Germany came a new racial nationalism across eastern Europe, a new assault on minorities and, as a result, a fast-growing refugee crisis. At the same time, a new round of empire-building began as the fascist states reasserted themselves against the older imperial powers. Mussolini showed the way with the invasion of Abyssinia; in 1938 Hitler embarked on his quest for empire inside Europe itself.

DISSOLVING THE GREAT EMPIRES

“If you ask me what is my native country,” wrote the playwright Odon von Horvath, author of
Tales from the Vienna Woods
, “I answer: I was born in Fiume, grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Pressburg, Vienna and Munich, and I have a Hungarian passport; but I have no fatherland. I
am a very typical mix of old Austria-Hungary: at once Magyar, Croatian, German and Czech; my country is Hungary, my mother tongue is German.”

Von Horvath was right: there was nothing unusual about his background. At the turn of the century, the Habsburg city of Czernowitz was home to Hungarians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, Jews and Germans. Further south, the dock workers of Ottoman Selanik (Salonika) routinely spoke six or seven languages: the city included some 70,000 Jews as well as Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Albanians and Bulgarians. This polyglot atmosphere was common in eastern Europe, whose towns and cities were a jumble of diverse religious and ethnic groups. As the doctrine of nationalism gained ground, the problems such places posed provoked discussion among politicians and political theorists alike: how could the constitutional and administrative arrangements of the great multi-ethnic and multi-religious empires be made compatible with the growing swell of national feeling which was moving eastwards across Europe?
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During the nineteenth century, nationalism had already begun to corrode the older dynastic or religious sentiments upon which imperial loyalties had once depended. Uprisings in the Ottoman Balkans led to the formation of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria; the revolutions of 1848 showed the power of German, Italian and Hungarian nationalism in central Europe, while the Polish revolt of 1863 showed the depth of resentment there at Russian rule. The failure of Habsburg neo-absolutism in the 1850s underlined the impossibility of turning the clock back to the eighteenth century.

For the rulers of empire, two strategies presented themselves in the face of nationalism’s advance. One was the creation of a new imperial nationalism—Turkification of the Ottoman Empire, Russification of the Tsarist lands, and Magyarization in the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Dual Monarchy. Such policies aimed at the creation of modern, centralized empires. They might try, as the Hungarians did, to win acceptance by offering the possibility of assimilation into the ruling national group, but their intrusion into traditional society, their insistence upon standardization of language and promptly paid taxes often had the undesired effect of creating a backlash and encouraging counter-nationalisms. Hence in the first decade of this century,
the Young Turks inadvertently fuelled the rise of Albanian and Macedonian nationalist movements, Hungarian heavy-handedness boosted Romanian and Croatian resistance, while the Russians faced increasing opposition in Finland, the Baltic states and Poland.

The other strategy to cope with nationalism was through a policy of divide and rule. Thus the Ottoman authorities exploited differences between Greeks and Bulgarians by creating a separate Bulgarian Orthodox Church, while the Habsburgs—unable to build up their own imperial nationalism, since there were no Austrians—played off German nationalists against the Czechs. This strategy, of course, opened up possibilities for nationalist groups to gain concessions themselves, and so it is not surprising that in the decade before the First World War, imperial rulers were faced with demands for constitutional reform, a broader suffrage and linguistic and educational rights. The vehicle for such demands was new mass political parties. But these parties almost never envisaged complete national independence. Rather they pressed—with some success—for democratization and greater freedoms within the existing imperial state structures.

It was the Austrian Social Democrats who developed the most interesting discussion of how the empires could be modified to embrace national aspirations. By the turn of the century, Austria-Hungary—that “historical experiment” (as the constitutionalist Oscar Jaszi once described it)—had fifty-one million inhabitants, two states, ten “historic nations” and over twenty other ethnic groups. Two things seemed obvious to many Habsburg political thinkers: first, that nationalism was a political force which could not be ignored; and second, that the nation-state was an anachronism in the modern world, since economic progress required states to be organized into much larger units. Modern life therefore required some kind of political structure which did not deny national feelings but did not give in to them completely. British imperial theorists of the “Commonwealth” idea were thinking on much the same lines.

From the Habsburg perspective before the First World War it seemed possible to pull off this difficult achievement by offering national groups cultural autonomy and an expansion of the franchise within the empire. Many nations, in this view, could live together in a single fatherland. In the words of Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz in 1908:
“Its unique culture rather than its patrolled borders guarantees a nation its independent existence.”
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Jews like Peretz supported such views because they offered a third way between Zionism (a nationalism which abandoned Europe) and complete assimilation (with its denial of Jewish identity). But similar demands were voiced by the leaders of other national groups; few Czech or South Slav nationalists thought in terms of outright independence until very late in the day. Even in 1918 the Austrian socialist Karl Renner advocated turning the Habsburg empire into a “state of nationalities” in order “to present an example for the future national order of mankind.”
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If this humane approach failed to materialize in central and eastern Europe, it was less because of pressure from the nationalists themselves than because the empires committed suicide during the 1914–18 war by fomenting nationalism as a form of political warfare against their opponents. John Buchan’s best-seller
Greenmantle
reflected British fears that the Turks would lead India’s Muslims to revolt. But it was London and Paris who encouraged both Jewish and Arab separatists (with fateful consequences) to rise up against Ottoman rule in the Middle East. Russians and Germans tried the same game, and started a bidding war with the Poles. In August 1914, the Romanov Grand Duke Nikolai pledged autonomy to the Poles in the event of a Russian victory; two years later he was trumped by the Central Powers, who offered independence to a rump Poland wrested back from the Tsarist armies. Two years later still, the Entente reluctantly went one better by pledging an independent Poland with an outlet to the sea. Polish freedom-fighters sensibly moved from one sponsor to the next as the bidding progressed.

In wartime Berlin the Germans helped Ukrainians and Jews for the same short-term ends. They encouraged the formation of a League of Oppressed Nations of Russia to wean support away from the Tsar and to subvert morale inside the multinational Tsarist army: they sponsored Finnish and Ukrainian nationalist groups, supported religious autonomy for Polish Jews, and recognized Yiddish as an official language in Congress Poland. German Zionists formed a Committee for the Liberation of Russian Jews, and proposed an eventual federation of minorities in the Tsarist lands. Had Germany won the First World War, the fate of the Jews would have looked very different and we
would no doubt be reading monographs on the murderousness of Russian or Polish rather than German anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile the Entente played exactly the same game against the Central Powers: the anti-Habsburg Congress for Oppressed Nationalities—Czechs, Croats, Slovenes and Poles—convened in Rome. In London the magazine
New Europe
enthusiastically conducted its own campaign for the “oppressed nationalities” of the Habsburg lands. But not everyone in the British or French governments thought this was such a sensible idea. Lord Robert Cecil, for instance, criticized those who believed “in nationality as if it were a religion” and warned: “I do not myself believe that a European peace founded only on nationality, and without any other provisions, is likely to be desirable or even in all respects beneficial.”
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Nor did the Central Powers really believe in national self-determination either. The Germans, in particular, had other dreams for solving the ethnographic mess of eastern Europe. One of the most popular of these—in Germany at least—was the idea of an economically coherent
Mitteleuropa
. This was the goal of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s politics, and it was popularized by a wartime bestseller, Friedrich Naumann’s
Mitteleuropa
, which outlined the virtues of a German-dominated European heartland. But non-Germans were not so easily convinced of the economic and cultural benefits of enlightened German rule, while the Habsburgs—with whom the Germans were uneasily allied during the war—did not like being made to feel like second-class Germans.

Yet for the more extreme German nationalists the idea of Mitteleuropa was far
too
considerate of the sensitivities of other peoples in central-eastern Europe. The generals on the German general staff, men like Hindenburg and Ludendorff, were principally concerned to ensure military and political domination in the East.
Their
vision was an essentially authoritarian one which left little freedom to the Reich’s nationalist allies.

For a brief moment near the end of the war, their dreams were realized. In the spring of 1918—a strange prefiguring of 1941—they signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the new Bolshevik Government, which was desperate to make peace and willing to grant the Germans most of what they wanted in the East. This peace treaty
offered Berlin influence beyond the wildest dreams of the Pan-German League, and gave it control of a vast area of eastern Europe: client states in the formerly Tsarist lands of Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic. Austria-Hungary was marginalized and one million tons of wheat was pledged annually in the “bread peace” from the Ukraine as a condition of its independence. German troops pushed into Finland, the Ukraine and down towards Rostov and the Caucasus. The alliance with Turkey was cemented by the cession of former Russian territory. The war in the east seemed over: Brest-Litovsk had brought a
Pax Germanica
to eastern Europe. If today Brest-Litovsk is almost entirely forgotten, and seems “a mere bubble,” burst by the German collapse a few months later, it did not look that way to the British Foreign Office, who feared that Germany would now be able “to fight the world for ever and be unconquerable.” The combination of Germany and Turkey could threaten India and hold the Eurasian land mass indefinitely: the war might go on for years. Only the Entente victory in the West turned these fears into memories.
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