Interwar Territorial Conflicts—Europe

The situation elsewhere in Eastern Europe was no less complicated than in Poland. The problem of the German minorities was particularly pressing. It is difficult to imagine a stable international policy with a superpower in the center of the continent dead set on overturning the order of things. This explains the international community’s efforts to join the Weimar Republic to the League of Nations, which succeeded in the Locarno Treaty of 1925. This made the Germans accept their western border, while counting on the support of the superpowers in altering the eastern one…²

The aim was to retrieve lands appropriated/gained (whichever we prefer) by the Poles and the Czechs. Over twenty per cent Czechoslovakia’s inhabitants were German,³ which was the reason for its first partition in 1938, after the Munich Agreement.

Despite Berlin’s peaceful politics when Gustav Stresemann was in charge, the French did not fully believe the Germans had reconciled themselves to the loss of Alsace and Lorraine after World War One (and they were right to be skeptical). Hitler’s aggressive rise to power did little to alleviate these suspicions, though many pacifists thought that even a costly agreement with the Reich was a better solution than another war, especially given that their eastern neighbor’s demands were not morally unreasonable. Interestingly enough, even Benito Mussolini did not initially rule out an armed conflict with Hitler, fearing the loss of Italy’s South Tyrol.⁴

It was not only the Germans who had territorial claims. Hungary had their own, as after the Treaty of Trianon (1920) they lost a significant portion of lands they considered historically theirs (some were retrieved in 1938–40, taken from Czechoslovakia and Romania).

Territorial disagreements and nationalist agitation was not confined to the east. Even before Mussolini’s rise to power, Italy longed to increase their holdings. In Belgium, the Flemish complained of not having equal rights with the French-speaking Waloons (much like the Slovaks with the Czechs).

In Spain, after 1898, modern Basque and Catalan nationalism began to grow. Their demands and sometimes anti-Spanish rhetoric upset many adherents of a “traditional” Spanish identity—conflicts over Catalan and Basque autonomy were a factor in destabilizing the Second Republic (1931–36). Its crisis ultimately led to a bloody civil war that lasted several years.⁵

Many border and ethnic disputes were solved during World War Two and shortly thereafter. Often this meant the most horrific possible solution, such as the purges of Poles by Ukraine’s UPA, or of the Serbs by Croatia’s Ustasha. After the fall of the Reich, Germany paid a collective punishment for Hitler’s imperialist designs—the expulsions cost thousands of people their lives.⁶

Even the less brutal resettlements (Operation “Vistula”⁷) involved innocent people suffering—yet after a genocidal world war, politicians and the public considered this to be the lesser of two evils.