Cordon sanitaire
Cordon sanitaire was originally the name for the isolation area to contain epidemics .
After the First World War , the term also served as a political catchphrase for the belt created in 1919/20 from independent states between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. It reached from Finland via the Baltic states and Poland to Romania and was supposed to protect it from the "Bolshevik world revolution". The Hitler-Stalin Pact divided this belt of states in 1939 into a German and a Soviet sphere of interest . The catchphrase is said to have been coined by the then French Foreign Minister Stéphen Pichon . It was later applied to other buffer zones between opposing states.
Buffer zone in Europe from 1919 to 1939
The post-war order of Europe after the First World War was laid down in the Paris suburb agreements of 1919/1920 by the victorious powers Great Britain , France and the USA . A belt of newly created or enlarged states from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic and the Black Sea was created from areas that until the collapse of these monarchies had largely belonged to the German Empire , Austria-Hungary or Russia . This included all the new states in East Central Europe that were created as a result of the First World War : Finland , the Baltic states , Poland , Czechoslovakia , Hungary , Yugoslavia , and Romania . This chain of sovereign states with a western orientation was supposed to protect Europe from communism and Soviet Russia or the Soviet Union , whose leadership threatened the bourgeois powers with a world revolution .
France saw in these states not only a protective wall against the Soviet Union, but also potential allies who should oppose a renewed German expansion. Many of these states, however, were inferior to both Germany and the Soviet Union in terms of population and economic strength, both of which strove to restore their spheres of influence from the prewar period.
Construction problems and internal tensions
The possibilities of the countries of the "Cordon" to rely on the Western powers for their security were inadequate from the start. Great Britain refused any political alliance engagement in East Central Europe until 1939, and it was not until the spring of 1939 that Poland's independence was guaranteed (more here ). France limited itself to defensive military alliances with Poland (1921 and 1925) and Czechoslovakia (1924), which were directed against Germany, and Romania (1926) and Yugoslavia (1927), against the Soviet Union. The bilateral alliances also served to reduce tension between the partners. Since 1921 there was an alliance commitment between Poland and Romania in the event of a Soviet attack.
The alliance policy of the "Cordon" states was made more difficult by the fact that they raised territorial claims among themselves. One of the roots of these border conflicts lay in the principle of the peoples ' right to self-determination , which, according to the will of the victorious powers of the First World War, was supposed to enable the reorganization of Europe according to ethnic-national points of view, but was not to be sustained. New multiethnic states emerged like Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania with considerable nationality problems.
Like Europe as a whole, the cordon sanitaire was divided into two different halves, the winner and the loser. The winners included Yugoslavia, Romania and Czechoslovakia. They tried to maintain their new territorial status. Hungary and Bulgaria were on the losing side and therefore tried to revise the post-war regulations. Significant parts of their national population lived in the surrounding newly formed states. To protect themselves against the claims of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania united to form the Little Entente . In 1934, on French initiative, it was linked to the Balkan Entente of Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania and Turkey, which was directed against claims by Bulgaria.
Dissolution and demise due to the appeasement policy
As a result of the appeasement policy of France and England towards the German Reich , the ties between the states of the "Cordon" and the Western powers loosened in the 1930s. During the Second World War , they initially came under the influence of Germany as occupied or allied states.
Europe after World War II
In the Cold War after 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/1991, the states of this security belt (except Finland and Yugoslavia), which had originally been directed against the Soviet Union, formed the western glacis of the Soviet sphere of influence.
After 1999, a large number of the former “Cordon” states became members of NATO . The three Baltic states on the Baltic Sea, Poland, the Czech Republic , Slovakia , Hungary , Bulgaria and Romania no longer belong to the Russian sphere of influence, but, like Slovenia and Croatia, are members of NATO. On May 1, 2004, the EU's eastward expansion also came into force. In 2007 Bulgaria and Romania also became EU members.
Individual evidence
- ^ Joachim von Puttkamer : East Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-486-58170-6 , p. 83.