Századok – 2011
KÖZLEMÉNYEK - Rab Virág - Tóth Imre: Kánya Kálmán és Európa gazdasági újjáépítése. A Közép-Európa gondolat Der Neubau Europas. Egy ismeretlen kézirat I/117
142 TÓTH IMRE-RAB VIRÁG represented political opinion. One of them is a text showing the handwriting of Kálmán Kánya, minister of foreign affairs, and presumably prepared around 1934/1935, which has recently been discovered in the Hungarian State Archives. The study, written in German, is divided into three chapters. The first deals with the spiritual characteristics and moral reconstruction of Europe, the second with the questions of the political order of the continent, whereas the third, analysed in the present paper, is devoted to the problems of economic reorganisation. The conception represented by Kánya - like all the similar conceptions elaborated in the 1930s - was motivated by the desire to transform the „bad European system" and to remedy the consequences of the Great Depression. The author contrasts the writing of Kánya with the proposals of contemporary Hungarian economic and financial experts urging for economic cooperation. For the declining weight of the European continent in general and for the internal difficulties of Central Europe Kánya blames before all economic nationalism and the practice of closed economic units, and, consequently, sees the key of solution in their suppression and in economic cooperation. Yet around 1935, the time of German imperial territorialism, there was no more room for an overt exposition of the author's views. Kánya's proposal shows, however, that, although conceptions regarding the future of Central Europe continued to be contemplated, the road to their realisation was definitively closed by the emergence of an aggressive totalitarian state which played a dominant role in the region.
