Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1932, General, Volume I

640.0031 Danube/30

Memorandum by the Under Secretary of State (Castle) of a Conversation With the Czechoslovak Minister (Veverka)

[Washington,] March 24, 1932.

Mr. Veverka came in to talk about the proposed Danubian Confederation. He said that he could not believe that this country would oppose some such confederation if it were brought about in a way that would obviously increase the prosperity and stability of that part of Europe.

I told him that I could only repeat what I had always said, that the greater the prosperity of Europe, the better off we should be. I also told him that I thought our attitude toward a customs agreement between two comparatively small countries would strike us as a very different matter from a similar agreement between one of the great countries and a smaller country, which might as a result merely become a “hanger on” of the big country. I told him that ten or twelve years ago when Mr. Beneš in Prague had told me about the Little Entente, I immediately answered that it was only a step toward an eventual Danubian Confederation and that it could never do much good until Hungary and Austria were included. I said that Mr. Beneš at the time answered that I must not say such things aloud, because anything that looked to the reconstitution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was treason in Czechoslovakia, but that he himself felt that some final arrangement under a very different name was inevitable for the prosperity of Central Europe. Mr. Veverka said that Beneš had said much the same sort of thing to him. He said that the only thing that troubled him about the present plan was that it was constituted under the aegis of France; that it would be better for all if it had been a voluntary coming together of the States concerned. He admitted, however, that perhaps some compulsion was necessary at the beginning and said that although he was not very optimistic of an immediate successful conclusion of the negotiations, he felt it very important that the matter was being seriously considered and in a friendly way by the governments of the different States.