ABSTRACT
Despite the liberal and theoretical Marxist arguments, and also the opinion of some later researchers, this nationalism did not in fact cause any serious harm to the European economy. The healthy demand for the growing industrial and agricultural production of the region facilitated the reconstruction of domestic markets. The Baltic countries had been plying new trade routes since the 1920s. From closer ties with the Russian market before World War I, they redirected their trade primarily toward the German and British markets, which in 1923 took over 46 percent of Estonian, 54 percent of Latvian, and 70 percent of Lithuanian exports. A. Salter's forecasts that economic nationalism would have sprouted until carefully planned countermeasures were undertaken proved accurate only in part. Crisis in the East-Central European region in the first half of the 1930s was merely a part of the world crisis, and therefore its overcoming depended only to a very small degree on the relaxation of the restrictions.
