Dig Peat!

The chapter examines national policies to economically empower the titular nations and thus establish a national merchant class. It argues that these policies bore rather different results: the marginalization of minorities and the creation of states that were major economic agents. It explores how attempts of foreign powers to exploit the new Polish and Baltic states economically interacted with the emerging governments’ efforts to take control of the region’s raw materials from the disintegrating commercial monopolies of the German occupation. Using the example of timber and flax trade, the chapter retraces how territorial fragmentation spurred distinct policies that shaped states within East Central Europe, but also an international image of the region: the collapse of sovereignty spurred the commercial engagement of outside powers, which in turn contributed to domestic efforts to secure sovereignty, seal off the territory, and organize commerce within the titular nations.

A Future Not as Gloomy as It Seems

The chapter traces the emergence of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia as independent states from the First World War. It starts out by looking at the change of German war aims against the background of the rapid advance into the multi-ethnic western parts of the Russian Empire and traces how German politicians, academics, and military staff conceived of plans to integrate newly created states in the region deeply into a German-dominated Central Europe—firstly in alliance with Poland, then in the form of an openly anti-Polish system. Subsequently, the chapter investigates how politicians of these new states struggled to secure independence after German defeat. It finishes by showing that in domestic politics these politicians had to accept post-war territorial fragmentation as irreversible. At the international level, on the other hand, they had to fit the new states into the post-war international order by conceptualizing them as strictly anti-Bolshevik and anti-German.

Conclusion

The conclusion provides an outlook on the role of authoritarian coups and of policies designed to respond to the challenges of the Global Depression in consolidating fragmentation. It argues that the economic, scientific, and social developments outlined in the previous chapters culminated in policies that fully rejected the international project of the pre-war liberal order’s recovery. The catastrophic impact of the Great Depression on East Central Europe made it easier for German revisionists to emphasize the alleged failure of Polish and Baltic projects to integrate their territories. The chapter concludes that interwar political responses to the challenges of fragmentation yielded two seemingly contradictory results: they consolidated East Central Europe’s territorial order at a structural level, but the high frequency of status changes meant that further changes always remained a possibility. The chapter ends with an outlook on the legacy of interwar fragmentation for post-Cold War East Central Europe.

The Land of the Enemy

This chapter focuses on policies to overcome the effects of fragmentation at a domestic level. It takes German wartime practices of expropriation as a point of departure to investigate forms of property redistribution over the course of the 1920s. Land reform acts formed the most comprehensive and successful policy to empower the titular nations and structurally integrate the different parts of the states’ territories. It traces the interaction of local experiences of expropriation with the League of Nation’s Minority Section and with broader international discussions about the changing nature of property norms and the relationship of property and territory. Disenfranchised ethnic Germans relied on German nationalists, who used the case of land reform to promote a revision of the East Central European territorial order. Yet National Socialism, the land laws of which surpassed their counterparts in Poland and the Baltics regarding their radical character, ultimately made this support impossible.

Yet Another Wire Entanglement

This chapter looks at the effect of territorial fragmentation, starting from the level of the local economy. Subsequently, it traces its repercussions to international politics, which led to the formation of a new international image of East Central Europe as inherently fragmented and particularistic. The chapter assumes a multi-dimensional approach to the creation of new borders between Silesia and Estonia through military developments, through bilateral, multi-lateral, or international dynamics, and puts a strong focus on local agency, e.g. in the case of merchants, who were among the most important agents to mitigate the impact of borders and re-establish severed networks. Moreover, the chapter explores how the proliferation of borders and scepticism concerning territorial size shaped a highly normative and pessimistic international discourse about the survivability of the new ‘small states’, which many regarded to be merely provisional states sooner or later to be reintegrated into recovering Germany and Russia

Introduction

The introduction sets out the central objective of the book: to retrace the consequences of territorial fragmentation and responses to it from the First World War to the end of the 1920s. Never before had Europe’s map been so thoroughly transformed as after 1918. New borders, reinforced by military means and soaring tariffs, intersected centuries-old commercial, social, and cultural networks. East Central Europe, as the site of imperial collapse and of the emergence of a range of new ‘small’ states, such as Poland and the Baltic states, was particularly affected by fragmentation. To gauge the consequences of fragmentation for politics and state-building, this breaking apart has to be understood as a gradual process rather than as a sudden rupture. Because fragmentation is both an international phenomenon and has an internationalizing effect, its history must be written as an international history.

Awakening the Hinterland

This chapter traces how the ripple-like effects of territorial fragmentation entirely reconfigured the relationship of Baltic Sea ports with one another and with their respective hinterlands. Whereas many localities across Europe declined as a consequence of the disruption of established trade networks, some, such as the Polish port of Gdynia, experienced an astonishing boom, and others, such as Kaunas and Danzig, were thoroughly transformed. Here one group’s loss was the other group’s gain. The chapter explores how liberals on the one hand and supporters of ‘statism’ on the other negotiated highly specific, state-centred national economies based on cooperative systems that worked almost exclusively through members of the titular nations. It argues that both the construction of Gdynia and the annexation of Klaipėda were crucial and successful components in strategies of what was deemed an ‘emancipation of foreign trade’.

Who We Are, What We Do, and How Many of Us?

The chapter shows how territorial fragmentation interacted with displacement to create hitherto unimaginable forms of population policies. It explores the constellation of expulsion, border changes, and repatriation policies and its impact on the self-perception of state-builders, majorities, and minorities, whom the war had left demographically as well as socially thoroughly transformed. The chapter concludes that the interaction of displacement and territorial fragmentation opened up spaces for policies of national empowerment as population was turned into a variable that could be engineered through mobility and citizenship policies. The experience of responses to wartime displacement served as a blueprint for the targeted population policies of the 1920s. The chapter also shows how these policies interacted with the League of Nation’s minority-protection regime, which rested on the assumption that minorities first and foremost had to prove loyalty to ‘their’ states.