Free Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul Johnson Page B

wars were fought there in the years 1919–22. They are poorly recorded in western histories but they left terrible scars, which in some cases were still aching in the 1960s and which contributed directly to the chronic instability in Europe between the wars. The Versailles Treaty, in seeking to embody the principles of self-determination, actually created more, not fewer, minorities, and much angrier ones (many were German or Hungarian), armed with far more genuine grievances. The new nationalist regimes thought they could afford to be far less tolerant than the old empires. And, since the changes damaged the economic infrastructure (especially in Silesia, South Poland, Austria, Hungary and North Yugoslavia), everyone tended to be poorer than before.
    Every country was landed with either an anguished grievance or an insuperable internal problem. Germany, with divided Prussia and lost Silesia, cried to heaven for vengeance. Austria was left fairly homogeneous – it even got the German Burgenland from Hungary – but was stripped bare of all its former possessions and left with athird of its population in starving Vienna. Moreover, under the Treaty it was forbidden to seek union with Germany, which made the Anschluss seem more attractive than it actually was. Hungary’s population was reduced from 20 to 8 million, its carefully integrated industrial economy was wrecked and 3 million Hungarians handed over to the Czechs and Romanians. 121
    Of the beneficiaries of Versailles, Poland was the greediest and the most bellicose, emerging in 1921, after three years of fighting, twice as big as had been expected at the Peace Conference. She attacked the Ukrainians, getting from them eastern Galicia and its capital Lwow. She fought the Czechs for Teschen (Cieszyn), and failed to get it, one reason why Poland had no sympathy with the Czechs in 1938 and actually helped Russia to invade them in 1968, though in both cases it was in her long-term interests to side with Czech independence. She made good her ‘rights’ against the Germans by force, in both the Baltic and Silesia. She invaded newly free Lithuania, occupying Vilno and incorporating it after a ‘plebiscite’. She waged a full-scale war of acquisition against Russia, and persuaded the Western powers to ratify her new frontiers in 1923. In expanding by force Poland had skilfully played on Britain’s fears of Bolshevism and France’s desire to have a powerful ally in the east, now that its old Tsarist alliance was dead. But of course when it came to the point Britain and France were powerless to come to Poland’s assistance, and in the process she had implacably offended all her neighbours, who would certainly fall on her the second they got the opportunity.
    Meanwhile, Poland had acquired the largest minorities problem in Europe, outside Russia herself. Of her 27 million population, a third were minorities: West Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Belorussians, Germans, Lithuanians, all of them in concentrated areas, plus 3 million Jews. The Jews tended to side with the Germans and Ukrainians, had a block of thirty-odd deputies in the parliament, and formed a majority in some eastern towns with a virtual monopoly of trade. At Versailles Poland was obliged to sign a special treaty guaranteeing rights to her minorities. But she did not keep it even in the Twenties, still less in the Thirties when her minorities policy deteriorated under military dictatorship. With a third of her population treated as virtual aliens, she maintained an enormous police force, plus a numerous but ill-equipped standing army to defend her vast frontiers. There was foresight in the remark of the Polish nobleman to the German ambassador in 1918, ‘If Poland could be free, I’d give half my worldly goods. But with the other half I’d emigrate.’ 122
    Czechoslovakia was even more of an artefact, since it was in fact a collection of minorities, with the Czechs in control. The 1921 census revealed 8,760,000