Interwar Eastern Europe

Abstract

Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia have followed both common and varying paths of development, sharing traditions with both East and West as well as individually distinctive cultures. Their history is a chronicle of diverse nationalities, religions and cultures set, with few exceptions, in broadly similar economies. Common efforts to establish Communist Party rule in the years after the Second World War were prefigured by similar experiments in establishing liberal democracies in the interwar period. Thus in the diversity of interwar East European history it is possible to identify a number of common themes and similar experiences. In addition to their geographical proximity, the eight countries share an economic history in which industrialisation came late, if at all. Economically they were less developed than most of their West European counterparts. This had important sociological effects, notably the failure of a confident middle class to emerge. Geographical, economic and sociological factors converged in an unfortunate array of political problems. Attempted solutions to long-standing boundary problems generated neither nation states nor genuine multi-national communities, and led to nationality difficulties, local irredentism and great power hostility.