The military potential of France's various alliances with Eastern European states was more apparent than real. Although creating a cordon of friendly small states, of which the Little Entente of Romania-Czechoslovakia-Romania was just one of several, to both keep Germany and the Soviet Union in check looked good on paper, this alliance network only functioned under a particular set of circumstances and was increasingly dysfunctional after the Locarno Pact and effectively ceased to function after the Sudeten Crisis.

One of the overarching problems facing this alliance system was the fundamental lack of inter-alliance unity and clear strategic goals. Although the strategic interests of these these Eastern European states (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania) overlapped somewhat with French interests on the continent, each alliance partner wanted something different from this military alliance. Romania wanted French military assistance but was less interested in military cooperation with either Czechoslovakia or Poland. Both Warsaw and Prague saw a French alliance as advantageous against Germany, but the French wanted the Poland and France to take an offensive against Germany in case of conflict, while these smaller nations saw the alliance as defensive in nature.

The muddled direction of France's foreign and economic policy exacerbated the fault lines in this alliance structure. French participation in the Locarno Pact feed into Eastern European apprehensions that the Western powers were not wholeheartedly committed to protecting their interests. The one common denominator that made this loose alliance structure viable was the fear of a revanchist Germany. At Locarno, the French, with the strong encouragement of the British, began a process of diplomatic rapprochement with Germany. Locarno's explicit omission of renegotiating and settling Germany's eastern borders heightened collective insecurity about the stability of the post-Versailles borders and many of these Eastern European states began to fear each other instead of Germany. The French commitment to a strong franc and the gold standard also weakened the Eastern European commitment to the alliance network because to accept French economic leadership would lead to dependency and stagnation. Germany in the 1930s was increasingly able to use its trade and economic policy as a wedge against France, which bore particular fruit in Romania.

Ultimately, the piecemeal nature of this alliance structure proved to be its undoing. So long as each partner could negotiate separately with Germany or Hungary, it was difficult to create practical cooperation amongst the various partners. German rearmament under Hitler made chances of these Eastern European states taking on Germany a much more questionable proposition than in the 1920s. The Depression hindered matters as it made rearmament in these small countries a contentious domestic issue and gave the Germans a "carrot" in the form of war material which it could further use to undermine commitment to France. The growing perception in the 1930s, and one that was not entirely inaccurate, that the alliances served the interests of France and not the various Eastern European states further prevented the alliances from operating to their full potential. The Sudeten Crisis and the ultimate dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the most consistently firm of France's Eastern Europe's allies, proved to be the gravestone for this ineffectual alliance system.

Sources

Bakić, Dragan. "‘Must Will Peace’: The British Brokering of ‘Central European’and ‘Balkan Locarno’, 1925–9." Journal of Contemporary History 48, no. 1 (2013): 24-56.

Leitz, Christian. "Arms as Levers: Matériel and Raw Materials in Germany's Trade with Romania in the 1930s." The International History Review 19, no. 2 (1997): 312-332.

Wandycz, Piotr Stefan. The Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, 1926-1936: French-Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from Locarno to the Remilitarization of the Rhineland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.