DANUBE VALLEY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 July 1938, Page 8

DANUBE VALLEY

MANY PROBLEMS AWAITING SOLUTION. In France people used to look upon the Little Entente as the best and most reliable addendum to the military clauses of Versailles, writes Baron Paul Forster in the “Danubian Review.” France now realises that Yugoslavia’s economic interests necessarily draw her into friendly cooperation with Italy and Germany; that Rumania has similar tendencies; and is also harassed by internal dissensions; that Czechoslovakia is in a deadly iron grip, while the great protector of France and Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia, is of very doubtful military value. We might add that the Croatian problem is still awaiting a solution in Yugoslavia, while in Czechoslovakia the German, Magyar, Slovak, Ruthenian and Polish minorities are clamouring for what is their due, for what was guaranteed them either by international treaties or by bilateral agreements between Czechs on the one hand and supposed representatives of Slovaks or Ruthenians on the other. At present conditions in the Danube Valley are certainly not better than they were before the war, probably worse for the majority .of the various peoples of this region. We have today chauvinistic Czech, Rumanian oi- Serbian hegemony instead of the former considerate German or Hungarian ascendancy, with only just a meagre recent effort on the part of Yugoslavia to improve the conditions of the racial minorities in that country.