Munich Agreement(1938) and Eastern Europe, Geopolitical Crisis and Its Characteristics: Focusing on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia

Abstract

After the Great Depression of 1929, the international order accepted the territorial invasion and expansion of the Powers into weak countries to secure space for their survival as a natural evolutionary development process. And the basis for justifying this was Haushofer’s Lebensraum theory, which combined Darwin’s theory of evolution with sociology. This study aims to analyze Lebensraum among geopolitical theories, which provided the theoretical basis for Germany’s territorial expansion and racial nationalism. The Munich Agreement (September 1938) was the result of Lebensraum theory. In this study, I would like to analyze the impact of the Munich Agreement on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and its characteristics. In Chapter II of this study, based on the geopolitical values of Eastern Europe asserted by Mackinder and Spykman, I explain how Haushofer’s Lebensraum theory influenced the geopolitical crisis in Eastern Europe. In addition, I would like to introduce the process of concluding the Munich Agreement, one of the Lebensraum outcomes, and the impact this agreement had on Eastern European countries. In Chapter III, I analyze how the Munich Agreement affected Yugoslavia and what the process was like, focusing on three characteristics: first, the expansion of internal instability, second, the forced choice to bandwagon strategy, and third, the division of the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Lastly, in the conclusion of Chapter IV, I recall the geopolitical value of Eastern Europe in today’s new Cold War, and I would like to explain what lessons and implications this study provides to the Korean Peninsula, which is in a geopolitical position(Rimland) similar to Eastern Europe.