No meetings of the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Yugoslavia) took place during 1939. The dismemberment and destruction of Czechoslovakia during the autumn of 1938 has left only two members, despite the assertion of Dr. Benes, in his appeal to the League of Nations in June, that 'Czechoslovakia still maintains her legal existence,' although temporarily unable to appear in Geneva in full exercise of her rights. Many states have refused to acknowledge that Czechoslovakia no longer exists. The other two members, Rumania and Yugoslavia, belong also to the apparently still-existent Balkan Entente. The Little Entente, formed in 1933, was directed chiefly against the revisionist claims of Hungary (and Bulgaria), and received its principal outside support from France and Poland. Its dissolution may remove some of the outstanding obstacles that have separated Hungary from its Danubian neighbors and other states. Both Yugoslavia and Rumania in the early summer appeared conciliatory in their attitudes toward Hungary; but the events following the Soviet attack upon Finland and the rumors of a move against Rumania failed to produce either a relaxation of the territorial claims between Hungary and Rumania or substantial agreements of other nature. See also CZECHOSLOVAKIA.
1938: Little Entente
Two formal meetings of representatives of the states composing the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia) are reported for 1938. On May 6 in Sinaia, Rumania, and at Bled, Yugoslavia, during the third week in August, the much-considered question of relations between Hungary and the Little Entente was discussed. The states decided to make important concessions to Hungary, agreeing finally to allow the latter to scrap the clauses of the Treaty of Trianon restricting the size of its army and armaments in general; in return it was understood that Hungary would enter into non-aggression pacts with the three states of the Little Entente as soon as the minorities question in Czechoslovakia had been settled. The latter question, they felt, deserved serious attention in Hungary itself. A joint communiqué of Aug. 23 expressed the Little Entente's comprehension of the present situation of the League of Nations and its desire to collaborate and support that organization. After the Bled conference the Hungarian attempts to separate Yugoslavia from the Little Entente and thus to weaken it, appeared unsuccessful, but the partitioning of Czechoslovakia in September and October would seem to have virtually ended the Little Entente after its relatively successful five years of existence.
In Rumania a new nationalities statute was published on Aug. 4, granting immediately the same rights to all citizens without distinction of origin, religion, or language. State employment was thrown open to all, and the minorities were given the right to use their own language in, and to administer their own educational, religious and cultural institutions, under state supervision. The fact that Jews were included in the minorities benefited by the new law is apparently more or less incidental, for its main purpose seems to be improvement of relations with Hungary through according privileges to the large Hungarian minority in Rumania. Like the treaty between the Balkan Entente and Bulgaria, Rumania's action furnishes another example of Danubian states subordinating their mutual disputes to the need of mutual defense against aggressors.