Tuesday 3rd: Jan and Mechelen – Spring/Summer 1941

It was a bold and surprising plan, and it worked magnificently. Paris had fallen by the middle of June, and France’s allies had – ostensibly – made their respective peaces with the Empire. Another period of retrenchment and treaty-making had ensued, and the expansionist, anti-Slav rhetoric of the more colourful Imperial politicians had moderated (or at least quietened). For a while, it had looked as if things would settle down.

In time, however, it became apparent that the war(s) – and particularly the armed nationalisms and population movements that they had spawned – had developed an independent dynamic that could not be stilled by formal treaty-making.

Traditionally, the Empire had been ruled indirectly, a model that depended on economic hegemony rather than gunboat diplomacy. In this respect, the Empire had inherited much from the old Polish-Lithuanian polity (with which much of the eastern Empire was no co-extensive): in the early 1930s, when the world economy had convulsed in crisis after crisis, and even the Imperial [economy] had stumbled badly, the Empire had reduced its overseas commitments of manpower and investment, leaving even some of the most significant overseas possessions/clients to be administered/ruled by local [clients]/representatives – politicians, businesspeople, old Imperial hands who had gone native. The theory – widely held by politicians of all stripes – was that the bonds and habits of hundreds of years would hold fast even without the presence of the metropole’s direct representatives. And this theory held true for a number of years, until the newly unified Slav nationalism – freed from constraint by the easing of Imperial thought policing through cultural dominance – coalesced around widely-articulated principles of self-governance, native language administration, and more equable distribution of land (the large ‘factory estates’ of absentee Imperial landlords were a particularly popular rallying point in this emergent nationalism).

As this nationalism spread, consolidated, and radicalised, it generated border disputes and ethnically-centred reactions, where politics, economics and cultural identity blended into a combustible mixture that swirled, diffused, and re-condensed. On the Imperial periphery, where the Slavic influence was strongest – and where, in many places, revivified ethnic identities straddled more recent political/administrative borders – peoples started agitating for reincorporation into their alleged ‘parent’ state, fuelled by the post-slump economic uncertainties and by the breakdown of the old (and reliably robust) Imperial trading patterns. Anxiety and unemployment spread. Farms and factories laid off thousands of workers, creating sporadic crises and pools of unrest.

The pan-Slavic nationalist movement (PSN) emerged into this messy world of fear and doubt with caricature models of certainty and simplicity: unity was the only answer – confederations of ethnically homogenous states that shared the same racial, political and cultural backgrounds; the old Imperial [hegemony] had been an artificial imposition – now that its client states were freed from the Imperial economic yoke, their peoples were no longer bound to the loyalties and habits of the old [capitalistic] regimes; they should look eastwards for their economic models – towards peasant simplicity and honesty, towards collectivism, towards fair shares for all, and towards the ancient values of mutual support and the extended family; ethnic solidarity, and a belief in some ‘pure strain’ of blood that had emanated from the eastern side of the mountains, underpinned all these notions.