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E2's avatar

"The West was given the chance between war and dishonor, it chose war"

No, dude. Putin chose war. You can tell by the tanks crossing the border on his command.

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Eöl's avatar

The part that you're very carefully eliding, in both cases actually, is what came before. The Germans, shortly before the Munich Conference, had invaded their sovereign neighbor, Austria, after sponsoring all manner of thuggish actors within the country, and followed it with a sham referendum.

The extent to which Russia's playbook in annexing Crimea matched that of the Anschluss is somewhat shocking for those whose justification is denazification. Both of these incidents clearly should have demonstrated to any that were paying attention that, indeed, both of these states were addicted to gangsterism. Even before that, and again almost exactly parallel, paramilitary or even official forces associated with both powers had been committing atrocities in a supposedly neutral country in the midst of a civil war (Spain and Syria).

I'll concede that the logic of national self-determination was extremely salient post-Versailles, it being a relatively recent invention, and that this did indicate that the creation of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the forms they took was mostly to punish Germany without regard for the self-determination of the Germans living in those countries. But punishing the defeated power in a war was also fair by the logic of the time; it just happened that the victorious powers miscalculated as to which logic would remain salient, and underestimated the extent to which their own interests would immediately cease to coincide once the military threat of Germany at least temporarily receded.

But really, if Germany had actually wanted to employ the self-determination weapon, we'll call it, in at all a good-faith manner, they would have done (or tried to do) the referenda BEFORE they started moving the army around. Referenda had been used in numerous places post-war to determine borders, not least at the German-Polish border. By the logic of self-determination, Germany could have requested or sponsored referenda in Austria and Czechoslovakia. If, as is likely, those states had refused to hold them, or the victorious powers had tried to forbid them, then Germany would have had a much easier time assuming the moral high ground.

But the Germans had no interest in good faith; they wanted to achieve greater Germany, and all else was secondary at best. They would tolerate no such extrinsic or self-incurred risks to the end goal. So it is with Russia. They wanted to dismember and neutralize their rivals, and aggrandize themselves territorially. I don't know to what extent any free and fair referenda took place or were requested and then blocked in places like Donbass, but I doubt there were any.

Also, don't forget that it was the Soviet Union that dismantled itself, and not on the basis of national self-determination. Obviously, numerous of its constituents had territorial and other disputes with each other when the union broke apart along its internal SSR divisions, and this led to wars and referenda and ethnic cleansing of all kinds (Armenia v. Azerbaijan, Chechnya v. Russia, etc.).

The shape of the union's various SSRs had little, generally, to do with the national or ethnic character of the relevant places (the divisions that did attempt to conform to such generally were only ASSRs and below, entirely within the RFSR, as I recall, none of which have ever been offered or really sought independence) Indeed, as far as I know, these borders were constructed with the specific intent of erasing national and ethnic distinctions in favor of Soviet-ness.

All of which is to say that the time to deal with these problems, especially with the history of the interwar period to educate the interested parties, was when the union broke apart. It was the Soviets, dominated by the RFSR, but often led by non-Russians, who chose to include 'Novorossiya,' so called, and Crimea within Ukraine. It was they, or its successor, the RFSR and later the Federation, that should All of which is to emphasize that Russia's appeal to the supposedly neutral principle of self-determination was a sham, and the principle itself has lost a great deal of its salience due in large part to its victory (most places now conform to it, to a large extent), and as a result most people (especially outside the interested areas) don't have a lot of desire to upset the status quo in favor thereof.

Anyone who needed the final destruction of Czechoslovakia, or hypothetically Ukraine, to 'see' that Germany/Russia was addicted to gangsterism would, at best, be extremely morally myopic, not paying attention, or latently hostile. Of course, in the end, it was that gangsterism that ended up attracting some of their most important allies, such as with the Soviet-Nazi alliance. I think that Russia-China follows the same pattern; whatever the Chinese think in an absolute sense about Russian gangsterism is secondary to the fact that their gangsterism has caused them to be extremely diplomatically isolated, which makes them attractive as a target for diplomacy among countries similarly isolated (China, North Korea) or that feel themselves marginalized in some way (Brazil, India), which itself is usually due to their own internal dysfunction, which they choose to externalize. Similar logic applies to Germany and its allies, particularly the Japanese, and I guess the Romanians.

Also, as I recall, the Czechs were in fact not invited to the Munich Conference; not sure why you claim otherwise in this piece without supporting the assertion (the fact that the Czechs were not invited would seem to be one of those well-known myths you seek to debunk). The Ukrainians, again as I recall, were consulted as to whether they wanted to surrender their territorial integrity. Considering the aggression they'd already suffered (not so unlike the Czechs, as with German puppet Freikorps violence in the Sudentland prior to Munich) from the country doing the asking, they quite reasonably said no.

If one were to justify Munich purely in terms of buying time to enable better rearmament by the Allies, I'd say that's not crazy, but I don't believe any of the protagonists viewed it in that fashion, as you acknowledge in footnote 3. Chamberlain really believed his own bullshit. And of course it ended up not really being true. The Germans would never have been able to invade the UK. They never even really tried. The Germans hardly made a serious effort to defeat the UK in the air in the Battle of Britain. This was particularly true once the Germans lost their radio navigation and targeting advantage.

The French ultimately squandered time bought by building mostly okay weapons but using them totally ineffectively. It was they, with their massive, well-equipped, and under-employed land army, that refused to make any significant offensive moves in order to relieve Poland, due to what can only be termed civilizational despair.

I love the unsupported shot at Churchill at the end about Poland. As I recall, Churchill was prepared to risk a war with the Soviets over Poland, after they reneged on the promise of free and fair elections post-war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable).

That failed for numerous reasons, but primarily due to a lack of American support, which is kind of goofy in hindsight considering how much more badly infiltrated with communists the UK was. It's interesting that, essentially, the top level of government in the UK was much more hostile to the Soviets than the rank-and-file, and vice-versa in the US.

This quick take needs longer in the oven, I think.

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