fifty years ago, on September 29, 1938, in the Führer Haus (since demolished) in Munich, the British prime minister and French premier, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, acquiesced to Adolf Hitler’s demand that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Benito Mussolini, the organizer of the conference, looked on. Hitler’s demand was ostensibly based on the principle of self-determination, a principle popular today but applied only fitfully in the aftermath of the First World War.
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered at the Versailles conference, Austria lost the Sudeten Germans and the South Tyroleans, and Hungary lost a full third of its ethnic population to the newly created states of Czechoslovakia (one million plus), Rumania (1,650,000), and Yugoslavia (450,000). The Balkanization of the empire left successor states that were almost as riddled with national minorities as Austro-Hungary had been (in the newly acquired Vojvodina the Yugoslavs made up just 33 per cent of the population); thus the national governments that were set up lacked full legitimacy, leading in turn to the permanent prospect of instability and conflict in the center of Europe.
Comments