When in 1928 the Bulgarian minister of popular education ordered the disbanding of all school Esperanto clubs and banned the circula- tion of Esperanto periodicals among schoolchildren, among the motives adduced for this action the issue of security was the last to be mentioned. The reasons were as follows:
Because Esperanto is an easy language, the students will grow accustomed to easy things and will lose the desire to learn more difficult matters; because Esperanto is international, the students will begin to favor interna- tionalism and dislike the national language and culture; finally, the Esperanto movement is suspect because hidden beneath it are Bolshevists and anarchists.[250]
The minister made no distinction between the neutral and the workers' Esperanto movement, but declared that merely learning Esperanto was itself an 'action against the fatherland'.
The worst surprises for aspiring learners of Esperanto were reserved primarily for people living outside the big cities and belonging to the lower classes. For example the banate (regional) administration in Zagreb motivated its refusal to recognize an Esperanto group founded in 1931 in the following terms:
there is neither a national-cultural nor a social need to form such a club among the peasants and craftsmen of Delekovec, because there are various national, cultural, economic and social aspirations that a simple person should be interested in. Such a person should be taught literacy and cul- ture, but not by means of a lifeless artificial language (Esperanto), which requires preparatory instruction and knowledge of at least one established living world language. Given that the club under no circumstances can achieve the goal for which it is founded and because there exists a demon- strated danger that the club could damage the national interest, denial of permission is seen to be advisable and lawful.[251]
This decision offers striking evidence of the tendency of reactionary authorities to restrain the emancipation of people from less privileged social strata, dictate their path to education and suppress everything that might on its own account lead to the broadening of their intellectual horizons and the establishment of international contacts. The same con- siderations lay behind prohibitions in Hungary, as is documented in the explanations of local authorities in that country:
instruction in the Hungarian language and in orthography is a greater
need.[252]
[...] the workers barely know the Hungarian language, so it cannot be supposed that they would seriously desire to learn a foreign language.[253]
In Oroshaza the founding of an Esperanto group was denied on the grounds that 'it can be expected that the Esperantists will establish rela- tions with foreigners'.[254]
To summarize: in the countries of Southeast Europe, ruled by dictato- rial regimes and lagging behind other European countries economically and socially, embargoes and persecutions directed against Esperantists' activities were dictated not only by fear of revolutionary elements in their ranks but also by two other hypothetical considerations: (1) that Esperanto impedes prescribed procedures for citizens' education, and (2) that Esperanto allows its users to acquire knowledge from outside the country, which could have an unmanageable influence on their relation- ship with their own society.
So it is difficult to make a clear distinction between reactions to par- ticular applications of Esperanto and hostility to the language for its own sake. Much as the position of a government or political move- ment on the subject of Esperanto not uncommonly provided a good measure of its degree of democracy, so the political conviction expos- ing an Esperantist to persecution could not be wholly separated from Esperanto itself and generally seemed to the persecuted Esperantist a logical extension of the idealism behind Esperanto. As a result, by emphasizing the political neutrality of Esperanto when some par- ticular use of the language threatened to negatively influence public opinion on Esperanto itself, the 'neutral' Esperantists ignored the root causes of many of these negative judgments and their resulting negative responses. Instead, they tended all too rapidly to attribute them to the activities of leftist Esperantists.
The movement failed to apprehend the degree to which political obsta- cles included both covert and overt attacks on ordinary people's desire for self-education and their spontaneous reaching for international con- tacts, both tendencies manifested in their desire to learn Esperanto. Such attacks in fact touched the entire Esperanto movement, since the desire for self-education and the wish to overcome national barriers were fun- damental characteristics of the Esperantists. Silence and passivity in reac- tion to repression on grounds like those cited for Yugoslavia and Hungary indicate that the neutral movement was insufficiently aware of certain essential considerations—considerations that influenced every form of Esperanto activity and were important for the future survival of the move- ment. Instead, in April 1929, a few months before the World Congress in Budapest, the Esperantists published the following 'Declaration of Neutrality':
For some time the enemies of Esperanto have been trying to identify gen- eral propaganda for the international auxiliary language Esperanto with activity for certain social goals.
The International Central Committee of the Esperanto Movement [...] firmly and formally declares that its program, aimed only at the introduc- tion of Esperanto, is entirely neutral concerning political, religious, racial or social affairs.
It insistently opposes such false assertions, whose effect is only to hinder the important progress resulting from the introduction of an easily learned neutral auxiliary language side by side with the mother tongue in question.[255]
The declaration aimed to remove suspicions of the Esperanto movement's social unreliability, but by emphasizing the obvious it had almost no effect on the people to whom it was clearly directed. Rightists, if they did not already disapprove of the idea of an international language, in any case ignored theories about Esperanto's rigorous neutrality, comparing them with the reality, namely the apparently ineluctable advance of Esperanto among the working class.
As the workers' Esperanto movement continued to grow, UEA and the neutral national societies saw a decline in their membership.i 70 Particularly serious was an internal crisis in UEA. The association was already intellectually impoverished by the migration of many progres- sive Esperantists to SAT, the Worldwide Non-national Association founded in 1921. The successors of Hodler, as we have noted, were unsuccessful in further developing his spiritual and intellectual heri- tage. Although UEA remained an association of individual members and was therefore theoretically independent of national trends, it had weakened its link with internationalist goals (if only to protect its borders from SAT, with its 'non-national' goals) and at the same time faced a growing demand from national organizations for a right to col- lective decision-making concerning the international movement. The concerns of these organizations were conditioned in the first instance by the circumstances in their own countries; as a consequence they were calling, in part, for greater accommodation of the Esperanto movement to nationalism.
In 1932, UEA was threatened with bankruptcy. It drastically reduced its financial support for the Central Committee, which as of 1922 had served as a common body for representatives of national associations and UEA. As a result, the national associations nullified the contract with UEA and began planning for a new international organization of Esperantists, based on national societies. This development, augur- ing a turning away from the ideals of Hodler, was a direct result of UEA's financial problems, but at the same time it signaled the degree to which the Esperanto movement was influenced by the public's rising lack of faith in internationalism and the extent to which UEA lacked the strength to fight the wave of nationalism following the world eco- nomic crisis.