Ricerc@Sapienza

The article focuses on the main aspects of economic policies in
Eastern Europe after the Peace Treaty of Versailles, when the whole region witnessed
the collapse of the old multinational empires and their replacement with national states
that were theoretically built according to the principle of national self­determination,
though they were in many cases as ethnically mixed as the old empires. As a matter of
fact, the new frontiers did not perfectly correspond to the ethnic divisions among the
different communities that in some cases coexisted for many centuries. Also under the
economic point of view, the new settlement did not reflect the economic dynamics
that had characterized the region until that moment and this problem became a further
hurdle for the future economic development of Europe, as pointed out during the
negotiations by British advisor J. M. Keynes. The approach of the new governments,
which were all destined to adopt nationalism as the ideological clue for their political
and economic structures, represented an additional obstacle for the difficult post­war
reconstruction and played an important role in the post­1929 framework. The result was
a rapid decline of the newly established states towards authoritarianism and the descent
of the international scenario into a bloody “European Civil War”.