During the ensuing ‘Winter War’, the Finns put up stiff resistance and repelled the invader.
When, in late November 1939, the latter’s government rejected certain of these demands, the Red Army attacked. Moscow initially tried to negotiate its territorial and other claims, which would have rendered Finland a vassal state. The secret protocols appended to the Nazi-Soviet Pact consigned it to the Soviet sphere of influence. (1) Following the defeat and dismemberment of Poland, the next country to be sucked into the vortex of war was Finland. There follows a brief examination of a number of individual cases, which, in addition to affirming variety, focuses on legitimacy as an important variable affecting the wartime course and post-war transition of different European states. This paper aims to test the assumption that a democratic tradition and culture provided a more enduring basis for political legitimacy in comparison with the authoritarian alternatives prevalent in interwar Europe and considerably reduced the risk of civil strife in the wake of liberation or capitulation.
Otherwise, their experience of war and occupation or collaboration varied widely as did their transition into the post-war era. This element of external coercion was the apparent common denominator of the condition in which ‘small states’ found themselves during World War II.
During the following twenty months, a string of smaller European states plus France were invaded and subjugated or were pressed into more or less complete alignment with Berlin, Rome or Moscow. Their reaction did little to help Poland which Germany quickly overpowered in partnership with the Soviet Union. War came when the two remaining democratic great powers, Britain and France, refused to acquiesce to yet another manifestation of Nazi expansionism. Under Stalin, the world’s only socialist state was preparing itself to take advantage of the ‘inevitable’ clash between the capitalist powers in order to promote its own concept of security through ‘revolutionary’ expansion beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Their disdain for democratic government, in particular, was shared by the third totalitarian great power, which was lurking in the background. The German annexation of Austria and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the Italian invasion of Albania and the involvement of both totalitarian states in the Spanish Civil War, in addition to their brutal domestic record of repression, manifested their disrespect for the rule of law at home and abroad.
Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were following a revisionist foreign policy bent on destroying the Paris Peace Settlement of 1919 and expanding at the expense of lesser neighboring powers. ‘Small states’ in World War II Even before the Second World War broke out, Europe was proving a very dangerous place for states smaller than those conventionally recognized as ‘great powers’.
Reinterpreting existing material, it is further argued that, during the war, democratic legitimacy increasingly appeared to guarantee a safer ground for both withstanding wartime travails and achieving a relatively smooth restoration of free national institutions, without the risk of civil war.ġ. The impact of this factor was particularly felt during the sensitive transition period from war and/or occupation into peacetime. It is argued in this paper that, among the factors influencing the outcome of a European small state’s involvement in World War II, the political legitimacy of its government should not be underestimated. Not all of them entered the war as victims of aggression, and even those that did so did not necessarily share the same dire consequences of warfare and/or foreign occupation they also exited the war in, sometimes dramatically different ways: a number of small states entered the post-war period relatively peacefully, other were plunged into civil war, while a third category experienced a measure of unrest short of civil strife. The experience of European small states involved in World War II varied widely.