Relatively few scholars have taken it upon themselves to write a history of interwar East Central Europe, that brief, twenty-year period between the two World Wars that laid the groundwork for the emergence of nation-states in a region previously dominated by empires. With the publication of Interwar East Central Europe, 1918–1941: The Failure of Democracy-Building, the Fate of Minorities, Joseph Rothschild's country-by-country survey—East Central Europe between the Two World Wars1—has found a worthy, and indeed timely, replacement. In our age, characterized by the erosion of democracy, the rise of the right and far right, corruption, poverty, and discrimination against minorities, it is worth considering how an earlier age came to witness the same, especially as we know that the latter ended badly, with world war and genocide.
The new volume under review is a singular achievement: it is the first multi-authored work on the subject,...
