A telephone conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is warmly discussed by experts and observers. The ex-Prime Minister of Sweden Carl Bildt has already compared Trump's call to Putin with the Munich conspiracy of 1938. Recall that then the Prime Ministers of France and Great Britain, Eduard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain, concluded an agreement with Adolf Hitler-wanting to "
Obviously, this was the same conversation about Ukraine (in particular? ) without Ukraine. In history there are examples of such negotiations behind the backs of friends. And one of them concerns the latest history, and the consequences of such actions are catastrophic. Therefore, let's recall Munich 90 years ago. Moreover, those events were also directly related to Ukraine.
Autumn 1938 pumped anxious thoughts among all Europeans who were interested in politics. In the very center of Europe, Germany - one of the most powerful countries in the industrial, economic and military aspects - lived a thirst for revenge for the ridiculous defeat of twenty years ago and a humiliating world. Corporal Adolf Shiklgruber, who met the news of surrender in the hospital, twenty years later he was already headed by the state, for which he once voluntarily won four years on the terrible fronts of the First World War. Then he was defeated as a soldier. Now, as a German dictator, Adolf Hitler felt the weakness of the current world order and has already begun the attack on him.
Back in 1936, Hitler remilitarized Saar, rich in the minerals in the Germany region near France. For the security of France, which was a winning state in the First World War, agreed that there should not be German troops in this region. However, Hitler decided differently. And he was nothing for him.
In the spring of 1938, the Third Reich violated another condition of the Versailles Agreement, which also was supposed to be a fuse of war - carried out Austria Anschlus. In the future, the Nazi leader decided to strike at the very symbol of the current world order in Eastern Europe.
After the end of the First World War, the winning states tried to avoid the label of inexorable empires, which in their interests share the property of the vanquished. They wanted to present peaceful conferences not as a division of military prey, but as an attempt to build a fundamentally new world based on justice.
One of the key points of the new world order was to be the right of nations to self -determination. And one of the most important bails of the strength of the world was to be the democratization of states. And if the first did not work out at once - Ukrainians, who never received their own state, will not let them lie, then the second point contained a completely rational basis. Indeed, in a democratic society, it is much more difficult to collect an invasion army than in an authoritarian.
True, there was no answer to the question of what to do if the authoritarian state decides to attack the democratic, and the latter will not be able to mobilize the army to protect its territory. But this worst scenario, who had been drunk from the victory of the pragmatists and brought to euphoria from the foreboding of the close world, romantics preferred to ignore the romance.
The main engine of the new order was the United States of America, whose President Woodrow Wilson brought as many as 14 points from the ocean, which were supposed to protect the world from the new war. With their active assistance in the center of Europe, it was decided to form an exemplary democratic multinational state. So on the ruins of the Austria-Hungary lost war, a variegated state of Chekhov, Slovaks and Rusinov was formed (as Ukrainians were called then). And there was a territory inhabited by two million Germans. In the end, only two peoples were reflected in his name - Czechoslovakia.
The Ukrainians of Flying (this is what our Transcarpathia looks from Prague) was promised to provide broad national autonomy, but for twenty years this was never done.
Czechoslovakia was supposed to become a showcase of democracy in Eastern Europe and the Slavic world. And in many ways it succeeded. In this state there really was no oppression on the national, religious or other sign. There was freedom of speech and other basic rights and freedoms. Power was elected in democratic elections. As of 1938, Czechoslovakia remained the only democratic state in the region.
Adolf Hitler at this stage of his reign chose the main source of legitimacy by the unification of all Germans under the roof of a single German state. It was the unification of all ethnic Germans into one state that geopolitical theorists of the late 19th century considered the main prerequisite of a large war in Europe and in every possible way tried to avoid this. Actually, the unification of the Second Reich and Austria-Hungary eventually led to the First World War.
After the Austria Anshlus, which, according to Hitler, was a German state artificially torn from the Reich, the countries of the Entente, only German enclaves outside the maternal territory remained - these are Germans in Switzerland, which was very difficult to accuse of discriminating the German minority (and she also had a powerful and powerful and powerful and was powerful and powerful and was powerful. Therefore, the Nazi dictator focused on the Germans who lived on the territories torn after defeat in the world war - Lithuania, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The internal German audience began to be warmed up by threats to these states.
The weakest link was Czechoslovakia, which was close to Germany (unlike Lithuania with its Germans Klaipeda Territory) and did not have a strong army (unlike Poland with its Danzing corridor). Back in 1918, German Austria formed a part of Austria-Hungary inhabited by the Germans and tried to combine all the " However, then the Czechoslovak army, with the support of the states of the Entente, was able to curb the appetites of the defeated. After Anschlus, Hitler said that these territories should be part of the Reich.
The Germans, who inhabited the Sudetian region of Czechoslovakia (Sudetland), acted in the real fifth column in every possible way provoking the official Prague. Finally, after the next riots in the region in mid -September 1938, martial law was introduced in the Sudesta. In Berlin, this was trajected as the use of force and announced their readiness to deliver a response.
At the same time, Reich diplomacy played the greed and resentment of the neighbors of Czechoslovakia. So Hungary, which, together with Austria, was a defeated state, the Nazis promised part of Slovakia and Transcarpathia, and Poland - the Teshinsky region, which the Poles could not conquer in a series of regional wars after the First World War.
In appeals to the world community, Hitler declared the injustice of the current world order. At the same time, the Fuhrer skillfully mowed the facts, emphasizing the really problematic moments of the Versailles system, which far from always shared borders by ethnic principle. So, in particular, the Ukrainians were part of as many as four different states, without having their own (we do not take into account the real independence of the Ukrainian SSR).
In the end, against the backdrop of the crisis in the Sudestes themselves and the assertiveness of Hitler in Paris and London, they decided to succumb to the provocation of Nazi Germany and partially satisfy Hitler's demands. Prague informed Prague about the need to transfer the industrialized territories of their country in Germany (territories where more than 50% of the population were ethnic Germans).
In fact, Czechoslovakia, hoping for the military support of the UK, and especially France, under the auspices of which she conducted her foreign policy for the entire period of independence, was supposed to pay for their mistakes. It is unclear by what principle the ethnic German territories were part of Czechoslovakia, but now they had to go to Germany on the principle of law of power.
In such a difficult situation, Prague proposed the help of the USSR. However, London and Paris received threats of their military performance against Czechoslovakia, if the latter accepts help from the Bolsheviks.
Finally, on September 29, 1938, a conference was held in Munich through the mediation of the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. It has already mentioned French Prime Minister Eduard Daladier and his British colleague Neville Chamberlain entered into an agreement on the transfer of the territories of Czechoslovakia, on which about 2 million Germans lived in the Reich.
The Munich Agreement did not bring anything good to any of the parties.
Poland, who was on the proposal of a neighbor to dismember a neighbor, herself became a victim of aggression less than a year later. The irony that from the south on September 1, 1939 was attacked by the "
Ukrainians of Transcarpathia, who hastily proclaimed autonomy, lost less and less than six months - in March 1939, Carpathian Ukraine was occupied by Hungary a few days after the proclamation of their own statehood.
Slovakia, which was a creature of the agreement, as well as his other beneficiaries Hungary, passed the Second World War as Hitler's puppet. Were occupied by Soviet troops and lost real independence until the end of the century.
The direct participants in the conference in Munich became the main participants in the Second World War, having lost tens of millions of citizens on its fields and in the rear.
It would seem that the events in Europe of the late 30s of the XX century would have to teach everyone forever that the policy of peacefulness of the aggressor leads only to the growth of his appetites.
However, not even a century has passed since European leaders step on the same rake.
Hitler went to the deployment of a large war for more than a year, violating more and new norms of international law. And who knows what would happen if he had been stopped at the first minor violation. However. The army of Nazi Germany could not stop democratic governments. She crashed from the blows of another no less cruel totalitarian state, but this is a completely different story.