Stemming from an initiative of French Prime Minister Aristide Briand, the Commission of Enquiry for European Union, set up by the League of Nations in September 1930, showcases how the Great Depression turned the mood of European politicians against Eastern Europe. Originally designed to promote a closer entanglement of European national economies and thus secure peace, its work quickly transformed into a blame game of finding culprits for Europe’s failure to recover from the depression’s economic shock.
The commission posited the ‘old’ states of Western Europe against the ‘new’ states of Eastern Europe, that had emerged from the collapsed Habsburg and Russian Empires. It also showed the double standards deployed by the ‘old’ states: The protectionist policies introduced by Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Yugoslavia, etc. obstructed the continent’s economic recovery, representatives of Germany, Britain and France claimed, while they defended their own countries’ soaring tariffs at the same time.
For the states of Eastern Europe, nothing less than their sovereignty seemed at stake as their markets disintegrated, making them vulnerable to the influence of states such as Germany that openly sought the revision of Europe’s borders – and thus threatened the existence of these states. Yugoslavia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vojislav Marinković, warned that the abolition of tariffs would to the destruction of domestic markets in Eastern Europe and, as a consequence, to mass emigration and famine:
‘No prediction of catastrophe following upon a Customs war could daunt us. . . . We have in any case to choose between one of two catastrophes – the catastrophe of the present and that of the future.’
Read more here: Richter, K. (2023). The Catastrophe of the Present and That of the Future: Expectations for European States from the Great War to the Great Depression. Contemporary European History, 1-19. doi:10.1017/S096077732200100X