Wars and Betweenness: Big Powers and Middle Europe, 1918-1945

This book illuminates a set of crisis and conflicts that marked the 1920s and 1930s in the area between the Baltic and the Black Seas, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. By connoting the region as "Middle Europe," the editors revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position of in-betweenness, between the Big Powers and the two World Wars. The ten case studies combine more traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big Power rivalry. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under the control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of networks of clientele. The authors nevertheless aim to overcome the simplistic view that the Big Powers totally dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.