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232 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1944)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0232 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD BETWEEN the two most powerful states of Europe-Germany and Russia -from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Aegean seas, there stretches a zone of small states. Some of these states are old because of their long and glorious pasts, and others are young in the sense that their independence was won only in the nineteenth and twentieth cen- turies. This central-eastern European region, for which there is no common name, is the real political weather pole of the world, for it comprises more than 100,- 000,000 inhabitants and more than thirty nationalities, some small, some large, but none absolutely predominant. It also represents the only remaining economic frontier of the European Con- tinent with immense potentialities of development. Although this European core has shaken our contemporary civilization to the very foundations by the fact that both World War I and World War II started there, and although the sparks which have twice reached the United States emerged from the embers of Sarajevo and Warsaw, that region still remains a terra incognita in the eyes of many ethnocentric Anglo-Saxons. In- deed, most American political writers have treated that strategically impor- tant section very lightly. Although Munich brought about a sudden inter- est in that area, the increasingly com- plex and always explosive conditions in that part of Europe are not easy to understand. Numerous misconceptions, coupled with utter ignorance, are still too evident in the majority of the writ- ings and judgments concerning that part of the world. These misconceptions are particularly evident in the numberless proposals of the postwar planners who are working for a better future. In many cases these dreamers fail because they refuse to appreciate the complex realities of the situation-realities which simply cannot be wished away. The culminating point of such unreasonable tendencies was reached in Chamber- lain's statement regarding the Czecho- slovak crisis in 1938: How terrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing. Yet, it is noteworthy that each of the World Wars which menaced the very existence of the British Empire started not on account of imperial affairs but as a re- sult of political tensions in central- eastern Europe, and that World War II originated in a country about which the Prime Minister of the Empire knew nothing. The causes for this unfortunate state of affairs are many. Among others, we may note the influence exerted in the United States and in Anglo-Saxon his- toriography by the concepts of western civilization and the related tendencies in German historical scholarship. For many years, America and west- ern Europe have considered western civilization identical with universal his- tory. For the last century we have been victimized by this kind of myopia, and we have come to regard western Europe as the world. Prior to the First World War it seemed altogether plau- sible to think of a single world order based on the concept of western civiliza- tion. It was a sort of cultural domi- nance based on an attitude of cultural superiority which, over a long period, had tended to become chronic. From this point of view, central-eastern Eu- rope was not considered as being exactly within the sphere of western civiliza- tion; the farther east these states were located, and the more unpronounce- vii

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