Marina Cattaruzza,Stefan Dyroff and Dieter Langewiesche,eds,Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals,Expectations,Practices

Reviewed by: Andrew Demshuk, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA

The aftermath of World War I revolutionized the interrelationship between nationalism and state legitimacy in East Central Europe. The victorious Western Allies shattered four longstanding multi-ethnic empires, made national self-determination into international policy, sanctioned limited ethnic cleansing, and thus carved a complicated cartography of antagonistic successor states and shrunken imperial cores. Yet by granting their radical nationalist ‘allies’ nation-states with overextended boundaries, the victors sowed the seeds of the ruin of their own system: the war’s ‘losers’ eagerly adopted the same principles to realize their own ethno-national ambitions.

While most previous scholarship on territorial revisionism has focused on individual states or regions, this volume combines field work conducted in manifold languages across East Central Europe. Thanks to two incisive introductory essays which interconnect the assembled findings, this volume attains a rare unity of purpose, introducing both experts and students to the complex world of East Central European domestic and international politics, social relations, and cultural practices amid the charged and ever-changing debates over territorial revisionism from the 1920s until 1945.

Several crucial insights emerge over the course of the volume. First, revising Timothy Snyder’s presentation of East Central Europe’s ‘Bloodlands’ as an area of Nazi-Soviet contestation, the essays demonstrate the ‘autonomous role of minor players driven by ethno-national ideologies’ inside quarrelsome regimes that ultimately allied to Germany and later the USSR (11). As István Deak and Holly Case summarize, although numerous Faustian pacts were forged with Hitler, the supposed Axis partners always favoured what they perceived as their own interests, usually harnessed to their obsession with the most extreme border revision possible, and often anticipating future regional conflict. This explains Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk’s observation that, while expanding its territory at Nazi behest in Greece and Yugoslavia, Bulgaria maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union (121). Hence, Deak rightly concludes that perhaps no other alliance system ‘has ever included as many mutually hostile allies’ (22). This significant autonomy also exposes unsettling implications, as pervasive and usually popular ethno-nationalism imbued each territorial expansion with ethnic cleansing, mass killing and some degree of participation in the Holocaust.

A second insight highlights the fluidity and diversity of revisionism as ideological objective and practice. Expanding prior findings by scholars such as Eagle Glassheim, Jeremy King and James Mace Ward, several essays reveal that interwar nationalist leaders previously possessed imperial and multilingual identities. From here, Franz Horváth traces how both Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein and Transylvanian Hungarian leader Árpád Paál steadily shifted from hopes for autonomy under Czechoslovak or Romanian rule towards explicit demands for integration into Germany or Hungary by the late 1930s. A similar turn towards extremism arose among the diverse minorities such spokespeople claimed to represent. As Horváth observes, once in power former minorities felt that their ‘suffering now had to be compensated for by the looting of Jewish properties’,and they applied the same policies of persecution to the Czechs and Romanians that had been used against them before (46–7), not least through widespread ethnic German entry into the SS, as shown by Norbert Spannenberger. Frank Grelka outlines the evolution by which Ukrainian nationalists openly collaborated with the Nazis, were granted their own SS unit, and by 1943 took the initiative on vicious anti-Polish actions ‘along the lines of German policies toward the Jews’ (136). Proving that even post-1918 ‘winners’ adopted this ‘minority’ attitude, Marianna Hausleitner reveals how, right after Romania lost much territory to rapacious revisionists, Antonescu enthusiastically ‘purified’ much of Romania, as well as conquered Soviet provinces, of Jews and Roma incongruously blamed for past losses (179).

Finally, evidence throughout this volume frames territorial revisionism and resultant mass killing and ethnic cleansing as a ‘sign of the times’ self-evident to interwar statesmen and citizens. Ignác Romsics, Elżbieta Znamierowska-Rakk, and Stefan Troebst demonstrate how Hungarians and Bulgarians embraced ambitious revisionist platforms as leading state policy throughout the interwar era, resulting in wartime ethnic violence. Holly Case goes so far as to frame revisionism as an ‘ideology’ of the age, rooted in modern ‘notions of progress and teleology’ (75). It even framed social and domestic policies, including distribution of stolen Jewish property and meddling in local politics in annexed territories (85–6). Sadly, as Frank Golczewski’s summary of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict notes, this ‘era’ was continuous with immediate post-war ethnic ‘cleansings’, which further remade East Central Europe.

Ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia and contemporary territorial revisionist conflicts in Ukraine make it depressing to read the editors’ assurance that ‘today, “territorial revisionism” does not seem to be a big issue – either in modern history or in political science’ (2). In the ever more interconnected global world, territorial revisionism is supposed to be old-fashioned, unthinkable, illegal. Yet early twenty-first-century Europe may not be entirely removed from populist ethnic nationalism and territorial grievances as justification for political and military action. Timely on so many fronts, this book offers scholars, students, and informed readers an instructive regional exposition of how territorial revisionist projects overcame petty nationalist regimes and impoverished the culture of a continent.