Little Entente

The Little Entente was a military and economic alliance formed in 1920-21 by Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, mainly to block attempts to restore the Habsburg monarchy in Hungary, to preserve the territorial status quo established by the treaties following World War I (Versailles, Saint-Germain, Trianon, Neuilly), and to prevent Anschluss of Germany and Austria. It was closely bound to France financially and had the occasional cooperation of Poland even though it never formally joined the alliance.

The Little Entente began to break apart in 1936 and was effectively ended in 1938 with the Munich Pact, which permitted German occupation of the Sudetenland and caused the resignation of Czechoslovak president Edvard Benes--the man responsible for the expulsion of over 2.5 million ethnic Germans and Hungarians from Czechoslovakia following the Second World War (see Benes Decrees).

Edvard Benes on the origins of the Little Entente (written in 1924):

On leaving the Peace Conference and having in December 1919 the opportunity once more of returning to Paris, I made in company with the representatives of Yugoslavia the first preparations for the formal treaty between Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The arguments were not merely of a sentimental character and dictated by the traditional policy held in common by the two countries: they resulted also from the European disorder owing to the reasons which I have already mentioned. Against the universal alarm in our neighborhood, the monarchistic plots, the threatened trouble from the East, and the reproaches levelled at our heads by Western Europe to the effect that we had "balkanized" Central Europe, we had to give a clear proof that we knew how to build up and maintain our States.