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Оглавление· Chapter Three ·
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
1
THE medieval Kingdom of Bohemia, the ancestral core of modern Czechoslovakia, had developed into a unified state at a time when not only Germany and Italy but even France and Spain were still disunited and internally fragmented. Geographical factors, which were both advantageous and disadvantageous, contributed to this early and perhaps premature development of an explicitly articulated Bohemian political entity. A string of mountains (the Sudeten, Giant, Ore, and Bohemian ranges) provided natural frontiers and at the same time landlocked the country. Ethnic geography, in turn, rendered Bohemia the westernmost Slavic salient amidst surrounding Germans.1 Reinforcing such geographical contributions to the formation of Bohemian statehood and Bohemian consciousness were certain historical experiences, of which the most enduring were the fifteenth-century Hussite Wars and their repercussions. As interpreted by subsequent generations of national intellectual leaders, these induced in the Czechs the self-image of a small but stubborn nation that taught all Europe the virtues of religious freedom, moral integrity, and social equality and was capable of martial valor but preferred leaders of intellectual and ethical, rather than of military or political, distinction. Be that as it may, the Hussite Wars also, alas, overstrained medieval Bohemia and isolated her within Europe, thus contributing to her eventual defeat and absorption into the empire of the Habsburgs. This process was completed with the exceedingly destructive Thirty Years’ War of 1618-48.
Map 3. Czechoslovakia
Within this Habsburg Empire, Bohemia occupied an anomalous position: it was economically the most valuable, but politically the most suspect of its rulers’ possessions. Precisely because its people were relatively recalcitrant and of dubious loyalty—they failed, for example, to resist the Prussian-French-Bavarian invasion of 1741—Bohemia’s economic exploitation by the dynasty could the more easily be justified. Yet, with the development of modern nationalist ideologies in the nineteenth century, the Habsburg regimes veered to the quite different, but still plausible, assumption that Czech nationalism—precisely because it was not affected by any “brother” states outside the imperial frontiers—was less dangerous to the empire’s integrity and security than, say, German, Italian, Romanian, or South Slav nationalism. Furthermore, Bohemia was central and vital, rather than peripheral and expendable, from the perspective of the imperial government, and the economic resources in the hands of its Czech population were second only to those of the Habsburgs’ German subjects by the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the central authorities in Vienna now intermittently found themselves taking a relatively tolerant view of Czech aspirations. For this they were denounced by their German subjects, particularly by the Sudeten Germans who lived along the interior rim of Bohemia and whose own nationalism had meanwhile grown to such a virulent racist intensity that its primary loyalty was more to the Pan-German Volk than to the Habsburg dynasty.2
During the half-century between the Ausgleich of 1867 and the eruption of World War I in 1914, the Austrian imperial government became something of an umpire between its German and Czech subjects, and the status of the latter was rather different from the supposed repression and deprivation that Masaryk and Beneš were later to allege to the West. Indeed, in the first part of the war, the Czechs did their duty, albeit with less fervor than their German fellow citizens. Also, as (unintended) schools of political and administrative preparation for subsequent independent statehood, the Vienna Reichsrat and the imperial civil service provided invaluable experience for the Czechs in the last decades before 1914.
The Bohemian nobility had been decimated and eventually destroyed during the two centuries of chronic foreign and domestic war between the burning of Jan Hus (1415) and the battle of White Mountain (1620). Czech nationalism and the Czechoslovak state were reborn in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the offspring of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, which, in turn, had emerged from the ever-resilient Czech peasantry in the process of Bohemia’s substantial industrialization. Thus, the modern Czech political style—in contrast, for example, to those of the Hungarian and Polish “gentry nations”—came to be characterized by bourgeois rather than by aristocratic traits: practicality and rationality, instead of audacity and romanticism. And the existence of a disciplined proletariat and an organized peasantry side by side with the experienced bourgeoisie made for a more balanced society and a more integrated polity than existed among these neighbors.
2
The territorial consolidation of Czechoslovakia and the delimitation of its frontiers, which included provinces and regions of disparate historical, cultural, and economic development, were the products of extremely intricate diplomatic maneuvers. Despite the vigorous development of their nationalism during the half-century before the outbreak of World War I, the Czechs by-and-large did not entertain the concept of a fully independent Czech state, let alone a Czechoslovak state, in 1914. Fearing that a disintegration of Austria-Hungary would only result in their own incorporation into a Greater Germany, the Czechs’ aspirations were initially directed toward a federalistic reform of the empire, entailing a substantial degree of autonomy for themselves. Hence their political activities within the Habsburg Empire had a different cutting edge than, say, those of the Piłeudskist Poles in the Russian Empire. Yet all this was to change precipitously during the World War; by its end the Czechs not only had an Allied commitment to an independent state of their own, but, through a combination of skillful diplomacy and luck, they had managed to emerge from the subsequent Paris Peace Conference with virtually all their serious territorial claims realized. Their state included not only the historic Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia intact, but also the Slovak and Ruthenian territories of historic Hungary, which had not been part of the old Bohemian kingdom, as well as the most valuable part of the Duchy of Těšín (Cieszyn, Teschen) Silesia. The duchy, though indeed formerly under the medieval Bohemian crown, was by the twentieth century predominantly Polish in ethnicity.
This was a remarkable achievement, and credit for it goes to a small, and initially scarcely representative, trio of Czech and Slovak exiles: T. G. Masaryk, Edvard Beneš, and Milan Štefánik. These men succeeded during the war in persuading the leaders of the Allied Powers that the replacement of Austria-Hungary by a series of independent national states was not only inevitable but also desirable from the Allied and general European perspectives. Only during the last year or two of the war did Czech public opinion at home, which was finally exasperated by deprivation, weariness, governmental chicaneries, and the growing suspicion that the war aims of the Central Powers were inimical to even the more moderate national aspirations of the Slavic peoples of East Central Europe, come to appreciate and to endorse the radical independence-oriented activities of Masaryk and his group in the West. Yet, as late as the last week of October, 1918, when imperial authority had indeed disintegrated, a group of leading Czech politicians traveling from Prague to consult with the exile leaders in Geneva interrupted their journey at Vienna for consultations with the now powerless Habsburg officials. In so doing they symbolized the tenacity of this traditional pull upon the Czech political consciousness.
The very fact, however, that the impressive Czech success scored at the peace conference was largely a function of the exile group’s persuasiveness and energy in the chancelleries and corridors of the major Allied governments, saddled the new Czechoslovakia’s political leaders, and in particular Beneš, with a heavy psychological mortgage that left them ever afterward with an exaggerated sense of dependence on the West and inadequate confidence in the nation’s own resources. Though by war’s end there were three infantry divisions and one cavalry brigade of Czech and Slovak Legionnaires in Russia, two infantry divisions in Italy, and one in France, which were formed largely of one-time Austro-Hungarian prisoners and deserters, and though the Legions in Russia were to become a potential (but not seriously played) Allied trump during the subsequent Russian civil war, which strengthened Czech bargaining power in the capitals of the Allies, nevertheless the strictly military contribution of these Czech and Slovak units to the Allied defeat of the Central Powers had not been of such an order or such an intensity as to shake Beneš’ conviction, born of his own diplomatic experiences during and immediately after the war, that ultimately Czechoslovakia’s fate and salvation rested less with her own forces than with her powerful patrons. (Even against Béla Kun’s improvised and ramshackle Hungarian Communist army in 1919, Czechoslovakia called Allied units to her rescue.) This dependent stance of the new state’s political elite entailed both irony and tragedy, for there is good reason to suppose that twenty years later, at the time of the Munich surrender, the worth of Czechoslovakia’s armed forces was greater than her political leaders’ confidence in them, and the nation’s readiness for self-reliance greater than the government’s willingness to test it.
In yet another sense the very success of the Czechs at the peace conference in gaining virtually all their territorial demands was to tempt nemesis against their new state. A large and truculent German minority along the strategic northern, western, and southern border regions could potentially call on the assistance of the powerful German Reich against the policy and eventually even the integrity of the Czechoslovak state. Poland and Hungary were tacit allies in coveting substantial and valuable Czechoslovak territories. Of the great and small powers on whose friendship Masaryk and Beneš had counted, the United States soon withdrew into isolation, and the United Kingdom into indifference; and even France occasionally speculated about boundary-revision in favor of Czechoslovakia’s direct enemies. Though they were helpful in containing Hungary, neither Yugoslavia nor Romania were prepared or able to pull Czechoslovak chestnuts out of any German fires. All in all, Czechoslovakia was born a territorially satisfied but politically rather isolated state, and desperately isolated she was destined to be again two decades later at the time of the Munich crisis when all her neighbors except Romania, with whom she shared her shortest border, lodged irredentist demands against Czechoslovakia. Her diplomatic situation—but not her military response to it—was reminiscent of Hussite Bohemia’s at the end of the Middle Ages.
The Czechoslovak claims as presented to the Allied Powers at Paris in 1919 had rested upon two radically different, indeed mutually incompatible, principles: (a) historic frontiers as against Sudeten German and Polish nationalism in Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia; and (b) nationality as against Hungary’s historic frontiers in Slovakia and Ruthenia. Not only did this contradiction corrode the logic of the Czechs’ case, but their moral credit was damaged by their apparent truculence against the Poles in Těšín in January, 1919. Their political plausibility was further undermined by their unimpressive military performance against Béla Kun’s Hungarian troops in Slovakia in May and June of that year. Aggressiveness plus weakness are ever a dubious combination. Furthermore, in the summer of 1919 the peace conference at Paris was made aware by the turbulent Slovak leader Father Andrej Hlinka that relations between Czechs and Slovaks—the “state-nation” of the new republic—were by no means as cordial as hitherto claimed by the Czech spokesmen. Thus, although the Allied leaders did proceed to grant and confirm the various Czech demands, one senses that at the very moment of doing so they were already skeptical of the long-run viability of these new territorial arrangements.
It was in defense of the historic Bohemian-Moravian boundaries that the Czechs had first to assert themselves against a Sudeten German movement for secession and subsequent affiliation to Austria and/or Greater Germany. Approximately three-and-a-quarter million Germans, the largest such Volksdeutsche community in any non-German state, had been settled for centuries in a circular belt of mountainous territories inside the rim of these frontiers and were intensely conscious of the fact that formerly they had been the dominant state-nation. They now insisted, virtually unanimously across their entire political spectrum, that the Wilsonian principle of self-determination of peoples be applied and that they be allowed to opt out of the new Czechoslovakia. On October 29, 1918, the day after the declaration of the independent Czechoslovak Republic, the Bohemian-German deputies of the old imperial Reichsrat in Vienna proclaimed “Deutschböhmen” as a province of Austria, and the next day their Moravian and Silesian compatriots likewise proclaimed their “Sudetenland” an Austrian province. Provisional governments of these two would-be provinces were established respectively in Liberec (Reichenberg) and Opava (Troppau), and repeated appeals for endorsement were sent to President Wilson. In review of the fact that the western and northern districts of these self-proclaimed provinces adjoined the German Reich (Bavaria, Saxony, Prussian Silesia) rather than Austria, from which they were separated by the broad Czech heartland, it appears that the long-run assumption behind these proclamations was Austria’s own early incorporation into Greater Germany. This assumption was shared by the new Austrian National Provisional Assembly when it both accepted the adhesion of these Bohemian-Moravian Germans and on November 12 declared Austria “a constitutent part of the German Republic.” Vienna thus had the will but lacked the power to help the Sudeten Germans avoid incorporation into Czechoslovakia.
For the German government itself, on the other hand, the fate of the Sudeten Germans, who had not belonged to the Bismarckian-Wilhelminian empire, had at this moment of defeat and revolution a relatively low priority. Hence, it gave them no serious support when Czech Legion troops, newly returned home from France and Italy, proceeded to occupy the German-populated areas and thus reassert the territorial integrity of the historic Bohemian lands during the next weeks. The provincial capitals of “Deutschböhmen” and “Sudetenland” fell to the Czechs on December 16 and 18, respectively, and all remaining localities by Christmas. The absence at this time of military resistance by the local Germans to this Czech occupation was a function not only of weakness but also of confidence that the Allied Powers at the peace conference would order plebiscites whose results would prove decisive. Three months later, when it was clear that such expectations were erroneous, the local Germans belatedly staged massive protest demonstrations, with scattered marches on gendarmerie barracks, on March 4, 1919, the day of the opening of the new Austrian National Assembly in whose election they had not been allowed to participate by the triumphant Czech authorities. In the course of dispersing them, fifty-two Germans were killed and eighty-four wounded by the Czech gendarmes and troops.
For the Czechs, the principle of the integrity of the historic Bohemian-Moravian frontiers was not negotiable. They refused to acknowledge the self-declared German provincial governments within these frontiers. Echoing the celebrated words of Prince Windischgrätz to the Hungarians in 1848, the Czech minister Alois Rasin now curtly informed the deputy chief of the “Deutschböhmen” movement, Josef Seliger, that “I don’t negotiate with rebels.” On December 22, 1918, two days after his return to the country from his wartime endeavors in the West and in Russia and one day after his installation as Czechoslovakia’s first president, Masaryk, in a solemn address to the National Assembly at the ancient Prague Hradčany (Royal Castle), insisted that the German-populated areas would, come what may, remain in the new state. Inviting the Germans to recognize this inevitable fact and to help build the new state, Masaryk reminded them of their one-time status as “immigrants and colonists.” Though historically valid, this expression, which was uttered rather vehemently, was scarcely the most tactful one to use when discussing the Germans’ political rights within the new democratic republic, and Masaryk sought to soften it by visiting the Prague German Theater the next day where he spoke soothingly of full equality for all nationalities in Czechoslovakia.
At Paris, meanwhile, concerned lest the German demands for self-determination make a positive impression on the peace conference in general and on the American delegation in particular, the new Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Beneš, was promising that it was his government’s intention “to make of the Czecho-Slovak Republic a sort of Switzerland, taking into consideration, of course, the special conditions of Bohemia.”3 He thereby, alas, gave later German propagandists, who habitually cited only the first clause of this statement, ammunition with which they would attempt to shame Czechoslovakia before the world when Hitler launched his pre-Munich propaganda offensive against her in the 1930s. At Paris in 1919 Beneš had also argued that a strong Czechoslovakia within her historic western borders not only would be an element of stability in the midst of anarchy, but also would simultaneously serve as a bulwark against both the Bolshevik tide rolling in from the east and the German Drang toward the east—the historic borders being happily also strategically strong and economically rational ones. The American delegation was initially unimpressed, the British reserved; the French, however, were at that time enthusiastic, and as they were the best organized and most purposeful of the Great Power delegations, they carried the day for Beneš and the Czechs.
To appreciate fully how their current discomfiture and impotence struck the Sudeten Germans, how allusions to them as “colonists,” “immigrants,” “rebels” enraged them, one must bear in mind that they were traditionally the most Pan-Germanist of all the Germans of the Habsburg Empire, far surpassing in nationalistic intensity, for example, those of the Austrian Alpine provinces proper. They regarded themselves as historically conditioned and destined to rule over the inferior Czechs in Bohemia, to control the imperial government in Vienna, and, in alliance with the Reich Germans to the north, to organize all Central Europe against the West and the Slavs. During the Great War they had expended their blood and their treasure with desperate abandon in the cause of Germandom, sustaining casualties that were proportionately greater than those of any other group in the Habsburg Empire, and indeed, in the German Empire as well.4 Now, overnight, their dream was shattered, and their first response was an instinctive refusal to live as a minority in a land where they had once held a privileged status. Sudeten German Social Democrats were, if anything, initially even more vehement in their insistence on seceding into a Greater Germany than were the bourgeois nationalists, for to them this option bore the further ideological legitimacy of the Marxist radical German democratic vision of 1848. As late as June, 1919, the Social Democrats called a general strike in protest against the Treaty of St. Germain which officially and definitively confirmed the Sudeten lands to Czechoslovakia.
As time passed, the Germans reluctantly took stock of the new situation. Always politically energetic and shrewd, they now insisted that, the bulk of their territories having been assigned to Czechoslovakia, any partial arrangements that would lower their numbers and lessen their political weight within this state (for example, the rumored cession by Czechoslovakia of the extreme western Egerland district to Germany or other minor border rectifications) were not permissible. They now recalled that, long before they had become Pan-Germans, they had been “Böhmer”—provincial German patriots characterized by a particularly tenacious and parochial sense of identity with their land and with each other.5 Finally, their economic elite sobered and bethought itself of the unwelcome consequences should it have to compete with the German Reich’s industry in a Greater German market unprotected by Bohemian tariffs. Furthermore, as a “victor” state, Czechoslovakia, in contrast to Germany and Austria, escaped heavy reparations obligations. More dramatically, the Sudeten German elite could draw an instructive contrast in the spring and summer of 1919 between the reassuringly bourgeois government of Prague and the alarmingly “red” ones of Vienna, Munich, and Berlin. This comparison lost nothing in vividness with the great inflation and political turmoil of 1923 in Germany and Austria. The Sudeten Germans now decided to bide their time, meanwhile fighting tenaciously for their rights, privileges, and powers within a Czechoslovakia whose western half had been restored to its historic frontiers.
When it came to delimiting the borders of the eastern half of the new state, the provinces of Slovakia and Ruthenia, the arguments were reversed: history and economic factors were the weapons of the Hungarians, and it was the Czechs who now turned to the theory of national self-determination. Another difference is that the Hungarians were initially willing and able to offer much more serious military resistance to the Czechs than were the Germans and Austrians.
Among the Slovaks, the Protestant minority (16 percent) had traditionally felt close to the Czechs, and its fraternal sentiments had been reinforced since the end of the nineteenth century by the influence of Masaryk’s western-oriented, as contrasted to Pan-Slavic, Czecho-Slovak ideology, whose main Slovak organ was the revue Hlas (Voice). The first serious Czech political claims to Slovakia came during World War I. Masaryk’s group articulated them in the Western capitals, and, in an address of May 30, 1917, to the new Habsburg emperor Charles, the Czech delegation to the Vienna Reichsrat demanded a federal reorganization of his entire realm, that would unite the Czech and Slovak-populated lands at the expense of millennial Hungary. The political lead was taken by the Czechs since the Slovaks were politically impotent in old Hungary, both in the gerrymandered central parliament at Budapest as well as in the local administration. In 1910, for example, there were only 184 Slovak speakers out of 3,683 judicial functionaries in the Slovak-populated counties of northern Hungary, and only 164 Slovaks out of the other 6,185 civil servants. Furthermore, since the Ausgleich of 1867 the Hungarian rulers had imposed on the Slovaks a rigorous policy of linguistic and cultural assimilation (but not racial exclusion) that had by the outbreak of World War I achieved such success among the nonpeasant strata of the Slovak population as to deprive it of much of its potential national elite.
At the postwar Paris Peace Conference, Beneš skillfully and indefatigably presented the Czech—or Czechoslovak—case in general and in detail. He argued that Czechs and Slovaks were two branches of the same nation, that the Slovaks wanted separation from Hungary and affiliation with the Czechs in a new state, and, finally, switching back from ethnic and political to strategic and economic criteria, that the new border should be drawn far enough south to incorporate significant parts of the rich plains and a generous stretch of Danubian shoreline into the new Czechoslovakia. Encouraged by a pro-Czechoslovak declaration issued on October 30, 1918, by about one hundred Slovak intellectuals and politicians gathered at Turčiansky Svätý Martin (Thurócz Szent-Martón), Beneš even urged the Czech authorities in Prague to “assist” his arguments by confronting the peace conference with a fait accompli in the form of military occupation of the Slovak territories being claimed. Twice, however—in November, 1918, and in May-June, 1919—the resilient Hungarians were able to force back the Czech contingents attempting to implement this strategy, and eventually it was to be French diplomatic endorsement in Paris rather than military performance locally that won the day for the Czechoslovak argument.
As in the Sudeten German case, so here, too, among the roughly seven hundred thousand Magyars who were now incorporated together with the Slovaks into the new Czechoslovakia, it was the Social Democratic workers who initially resisted most vigorously. The society and governments of rump Hungary were never reconciled to the loss of the Slovak-populated northern counties of their historic kingdom and remained doggedly determined throughout the interwar era to recover them and the neighboring Ruthenian-populated counties to the east. As political relations between Czechs and Slovaks also soon soured, the Slovak link of the general peace settlement of 1919 proved to be a source of chronic friction.
The easternmost province of interwar Czechoslovakia, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, or the Carpatho-Ukraine, had held no political interest for the Czechs as long as Russia remained in the war and was regarded by them as having primary claims of cultural wardship over this retarded but strategically important Slav-inhabited corner of old Hungary. At war’s outbreak Ruthenia was populated by approximately six hundred thousand people, of whom two-thirds were miserably poor peasants and mountaineers speaking several Ukrainian dialects, with the remaining third divided roughly evenly between Hungarian officials and Jewish merchants and innkeepers. For a thousand years it had been an integral part of Hungary, supplying that country’s most faithful peasant soldiers and itinerant agricultural laborers and, in turn, being treated by the Hungarian gentry as a primeval deer forest. With over half of them illiterate on the eve of the war, the depressed and exploited Ruthenian peasants lacked the resources for effective political action; indeed, the real pressure for extricating them from under Hungarian rule came during the war from their numerous (about three hundred thousand) brothers in the United States. But the American Ruthenians’ stand against their old homeland’s Hungarian past did not by itself answer the question of Ruthenia’s political future.
This answer was eventually supplied in 1918 by a process of elimination: Russia was in the grip of civil war, hence the new Ukrainian state’s future appeared dubious; as Ukrainian-speakers, the Ruthenians were unwilling to be assigned to Poland or Romania; the American Ruthenians’ preference for a new state composed of the Bukovina, eastern Galicia, and Ruthenia was discouraged by President Wilson. At this point, late in October, 1918, their leader Grigory Žatković met with Masaryk, who was then traveling in the United States, and worked out with him an agreement to affiliate Ruthenia with Czechoslovakia, reserving for her extensive autonomous rights and institutions. A referendum among American Ruthenian parishes, culminating in a congress at Scranton on November 19, then approved this option, and on May 8, 1919, it was endorsed by the Central National Council back home in Užhorod (Ungvár). In Ruthenia the sentiment for continued association with Hungary, which earlier had more adherents at home than in America and which the first postwar Hungarian government had sought to encourage with a law of December 25, 1918, promising the Ruthenians autonomy, had meanwhile withered, partly under the impact of Béla Kun’s Hungarian Communist regime. The Great Powers were also suitably impressed by this logic of events and duly assigned Ruthenia to Czechoslovakia, specifying that the province be granted autonomy (September 10, 1919). Žatković himself came from America to be its first governor but resigned on March 16, 1921, and returned home a few weeks later, embittered at finding his supposed autonomous authority to be a dead letter and at learning that his province’s western boundary was so drawn as to leave almost one-fifth of Czechoslovakia’s Ruthenians outside it, in Slovak administrative districts.
Though the chance to attach Ruthenia to their state was for the Czechs a windfall from the unforeseen fact that the war destroyed both the Habsburg and the Tsarist empires, the Prague authorities quickly came to appreciate Ruthenia’s strategic significance for interwar Czechoslovakia, as a land bridge to her Little Entente ally Romania and as a potential political magnet for the Ukrainians in rival Poland. (The fact that Ruthenia is the only Ukrainian-speaking area south of the Carpathian Mountains is, of course, also of great strategic interest [military and political] to Moscow and probably accounts for Stalin’s decision to take it from his Czechoslovak ally in 1944.)
If Ruthenia was the acquisition for which Beneš found it easiest to elicit Great Power endorsement at the Paris Peace Conference, Těšín was the most troublesome one. This corner of old Silesia was small but important, thanks to its coal and industry and its transportation network. The Polish claim to it was ethnographic. The Czech claim was based on a combination of historical, economic, and strategic considerations: it had belonged to the Bohemian Crown since the fourteenth century; it contained Czechoslovakia’s only potential high quality coal reserves (of which Poland had a surplus); through it passed the railroad connection between the Czech provinces and Slovakia and on to Ruthenia and Romania.
Though Polish and Czech nationalism were in one sense allied during World War I—both aspiring to the restoration of their lost independence—Polish and Czech war aims and political strategies had not been synchronized and, indeed, were implicitly at variance. Their respective assessments of the Habsburg and Tsarist empires clashed: the former was the Czechs’ bugbear but was regarded benevolently by the Poles, and the reverse attitudes pertained toward Russia. Their views of each other’s postwar frontiers and destinies were also incompatible. Each wished to see the other confined to ethnographic frontiers, lest this neighbor become a source of irredentist instability in postwar Europe, while reserving for itself the right to claim historic or strategic or economically rational frontiers. The Czechs, for example, were convinced that Poland blundered in annexing her Belorussian- and Ukrainian-populated eastern kresy, while the Poles were skeptical about Czech-Slovak fraternity. Interwar alienation between Czechoslovakia and Poland thus went much deeper than the Těšín (Cieszyn, Teschen) dispute, this being rather its most vivid and tangible example.
Early in 1919, the Poles appeared to have the stronger hand in that dispute. For varying reasons, the American, British, and Italian delegations to the conference at Paris accepted the Poles’ ethnographic claims, and the Czechs had somewhat discredited themselves and embarrassed their French patrons by attempting—and failing—to impose a fait accompli via a sudden military occupation of Těšín at the end of January. The Poles resisted successfully, and the Czechs here, as they had in Slovakia on two occasions, paid the price of lowered credibility for this combination of aggressiveness and weakness. In 1920, however, the diplomatic situation shifted to the Czechs’ favor. The pro-Polish American delegation lost influence when the Senate repudiated President Wilson, Curzon replaced Balfour in the office of the British Foreign Secretary, and the Poles’ desperate straits in July, 1920, at the time of the Soviet advance on Warsaw, obliged them to become docile over Těšín, whose coal mines and railroad junction the Allies now assigned to Czechoslovakia. The Poles considered this loss to have been the result of despicable blackmail at a moment of great danger and never forgave the Czechs. (Two decades later, at the time of the 1938 Munich crisis, the Polish and Czech roles were to be reversed in an otherwise remarkably similar situation.) Masaryk and Beneš, if left to their own judgment, might have been more accommodating toward Polish sensibilities, but they were obliged—or claimed they were obliged—to trim their sails to the strong wind of the Russophile and Polonophobe Czech National Democrats in the Prague government. Beneš, indeed, had at the time no independent political strength in the Czechoslovak party system and felt himself under constant pressure to protect his political flanks by great stubbornness in the conduct of foreign policy. Vis-à-vis Poland, this degenerated into the ludicrous pettiness of a wrangle that extended until 1924 over Javořina (Jaworzyna), a village of three hundred souls in the Tatra Mountains to which Czechoslovakia’s claim was weak but successfully realized.
Czechoslovak and Polish considerations of national prestige had become so involved in these border quarrels and so irritated by the failure to solve them amicably or at least promptly, that the two neighbors never during the interwar period overcame their mutual mistrust. Even in the face of revived German and Russian pressures in the later 1930s, which might have been expected to bring home to them a realization of their common stake and destiny, they remained hostile.
Three more small Czechoslovak territorial acquisitions require mention to conclude this survey of the establishment of the new state’s frontiers. From Austria, Czechoslovakia received the railroad junction, but not the town, of Gmünd (Cmunt) and a short stretch of the Morava River at Feldsberg. From Germany she acquired the small Hlučín (Hultschin) valley near Opava with a population of about forty-five thousand poor peasants who were Czech-speaking but notoriously cantankerous.
In sum, the frontiers of interwar Czechoslovakia were eminently defensible from a topographical point of view: seven-ninths of their length ran along mountain ridges, one-ninth was river banks, and only the last one-ninth was artificial. On the other hand, only one-tenth of the total international frontier was conterminous with linguistic frontiers. The state’s area was 140,493 square kilometers.
3
The several territories incorporated within the new Czechoslovakia’s frontiers had never before been united as a sovereign state or even as a distinct administrative entity within another state. Lacking ethnic, religious, cultural, historical, or physical unity, the new Czechoslovakia was faced with the task of compensating for the absence of such unity by creating political unity through the application of that political and administrative skill which the Czech elite possessed in generous measure. The challenge was formidable but the resources that Prague could apply to its attempted solution were also impressive.
Czechoslovakia was, first of all, the richest of the “successor states” that emerged from the destroyed Habsburg Empire. Its territories had not been overrun or ravaged during the war, and they contained in toto over two-thirds of the industries but only one-fourth of the population and one-fifth of the area of the old empire. It is true that a considerable fraction of this industrial capacity was in Sudeten German hands, and that Czechoslovak industry was henceforth to be deprived of the former secure internal imperial market and subjected instead to the competitive vagaries of several international trade, currency, and tariff systems. Nevertheless, there is no denying that Czechoslovakia emerged from the war with a unique economic advantage, especially as she was also blessed with sufficient rich agricultural land to render her theoretically capable of a greater degree of self-sufficiency than any other state in Central Europe. Her war industry was bigger than Italy’s, and even in the late 1930s, after frantic endeavors by all her neighbors to develop their heavy industries, Czechoslovakia was still producing half the steel and pig iron of all East Central Europe, i.e., as much as the other states of the area combined. Additional assets were the high rates of literacy and education among the Czech and German sectors of the population, and the availability of a well-trained, honest, and efficient though slow-moving Czech bureaucracy, which was numerous enough to staff Slovakia and Ruthenia as well as the western, historic provinces. Even Czechoslovakia’s wedgelike geographical thrust into the core of Germanic territory might, under certain circumstances, be construed as an advantage since it gave her general European strategic significance—and her mountain-ringed borders were emphatically defensible. The problem confronting the country’s political elite was whether all these assets could be exploited to prevail over Czechoslovakia’s congenital weaknesses.
The most vivid of these infirmities was Czechoslovakia’s dubious distinction as ethnically the least homogeneous of all the new states of Europe. Her German, Magyar, and Polish minorities were numerous, settled in strategic border areas, and at best reluctantly acquiescent in their minority status in this state. Unlike, for example, the Belorussian and Ukrainian minorities of Poland, for them this status was doubly painful as they had been the master nations of the prewar imperial system. In addition to chronic tensions with these minorities, the Czechs soon learned that relations with their “brother” Slovaks and Ruthenians were to be troubled and complicated.
Even the generally rosy economic prospectus was not without thorns: industrialized and fertile Bohemia is geographically part of the Elbe Basin system but connected with its navigable section by only one gorge; Moravia, Slovakia, and Ruthenia, on the other hand, belong to the Danube system, which is much better fitted for navigation, but being poorer, they had much less economic use for its facilities. Silesia is topographically part of the Oder system. The railroad and road networks of Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia had been designed to connect them with Vienna, while those of Slovakia and Ruthenia had focused on Budapest; consequently, the transport connections between these formerly Austrian and formerly Hungarian parts of Czechoslovakia were poor. Initially, indeed, the only main railroad line between them was the one running through the disputed Těšín area, and by the end of the interwar period there were only four additional secondary connections. This paucity of communications tended to confirm and exacerbate the inherited imbalances in overall economic and social levels between the wealthy western (ex-Austrian) and poor eastern (ex-Hungarian) parts of the country. The latter remained an area deficient in both industrial and agricultural capital and costly to administer. Even in the relatively advanced western provinces, many of the industrial enterprises were small and dependent on rather primitive technology, their economic survival being a function of highly specialized production, traditional family dedication, and extensive recourse to low-paid artisanal work done at home. Thus, though Bohemia and Moravia were, indeed, highly industrialized and utilized an impressive array of modern technology in such sectors as heavy industry and shoe manufacture (e.g., the famous Škoda and Bat’a works), other sectors of industry lacked the attributes of modern industrialization as their plants were dispersed and obsolescent and they conserved types of production that were elsewhere extinct.6
To supplement the preceding discussion and to provide auxiliary information for the political analysis that follows, some statistics are here in order. While the Czechoslovak tabulations on ethnicity were on occasion challenged as biased by spokesmen for the German and Hungarian minorities, the author’s own chief difficulty arises from the official refusal to register separate categories for “Czech” and “Slovak.” It should also be noted that the total number of Jews is not included in the Hebrew and Yiddish-speaking column since many Jews listed Czech, German, or Magyar as their mother tongue and nationality. Here the table on religion (table 14) is more accurate than the table on ethnicity (table 13).
The author is aware of the hazards involved in all efforts toward a valid identification of the nationality of individuals in ethnically mixed areas such as interwar East Central Europe. “Spoken tongue” was for long the internationally preferred criterion of demographers and statisticians, but in this part of the world, where so many people were bilingual, the problem was whether “mother tongue” or “colloquial language” was the “spoken tongue.” For Jews, as mentioned, either language criterion could be misleading and for everyone else “colloquial language” tended to absorb minorities into the dominant culture. Theoretically, the subjective self-identification of census-respondents might be taken as definitive, but this, too, creates dilemmas as between “origins” and “political identification.” Furthermore, among poor and premodern populations, such as those that still existed in substantial numbers in all the states of East Central Europe during the period under review, many respondents were unclear about their nationality. In addition, a deliberate abdication by the census authorities of all claims to control respondents’ replies would, in localities of mixed population, have allowed various forms of pressure to be inflicted by dominant social elements upon the dependent ones. While conceding that in a state where several nationalities coexist uneasily the census inevitably becomes a political measure, the author nevertheless considers the Czechoslovak tabulations credible and useful. Tables 12 through 18 give the calculations from the two interwar censuses of February 15, 1921, and December 1, 1930.7
TABLE 12
POPULATION BY PROVINCE
TABLE 13
POPULATION BY ETHNICITY (MOTHER TONGUE)
The preponderance of the resident foreigners were, in descending numerical order, citizens of Poland, Austria, Germany, and Hungary. Hence, had they been included in their respective ethnic categories in table 13, the resulting computations would have slightly lowered, by less than 1 percent, the Czechoslovak proportion of the total population and slightly raised the Polish, German, and Magyar ones.
TABLE 14
POPULATION BY RELIGION
The cross-correlations between ethnicity (table 13) and religion (table 14) require some explanation. Most Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, and Magyars were Roman Catholic, but a substantial minority of each was Protestant (Bohemian Brethren in the case of Czechs, Lutheran in the case of Slovaks and Germans, and Calvinist in the case of Magyars). The Czechoslovak National Church was an antipapal, nationalistic, modernistic secession of Czechs from Roman Catholicism, dating from 1919-20, while the Old Catholics had rejected the dogma of papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals since its proclamation in 1870. The Ruthenians (Ukrainians) were overwhelmingly Uniate with a small minority Eastern Orthodox.
Table 15 gives population by economic sector. The proportions of Czechoslovakia’s population engaged in the agricultural and industrial sectors were respectively the lowest and highest of any state in interwar East Central Europe. In other words, her economic level and profile were the area’s most modern. That this generalization, while valid, tends however to hide the profound disparity in levels of development between the country’s western, ex-Austrian provinces on the one hand, and the eastern, ex-Hungarian half on the other, is exposed when the percentages for economic sectors as well as for urbanization and literacy are given by province (tables 16, 17, and 18). The comparison of illiteracy rates and the calculation of illiteracy reduction between 1921 and 1930 is somewhat marred by a change in the officially defined base-age from six years in the first census to ten in the second.
TABLE 15
POPULATION BY ECONOMIC SECTORS (INCLUDES DEPENDENTS)
TABLE 16
ECONOMIC SECTORS BY PROVINCES (IN PERCENTAGES)
TABLE 17
POPULATION BY URBAN/RURAL RESIDENCE* (IN PERCENTAGES)
*Urban = town of 10,000+ inhabitants
TABLE 18
ILLITERACY (IN PERCENTAGES)
4
We shall now sketch the constitutional anatomy of interwar Czechoslovakia and scan the spectrum of political parties which fleshed it out. The constitution under whose terms the country’s variegated population was to be governed was drafted and approved by a self-appointed Constituent National Assembly consisting of 201 Czechs designated by the political parties in proportion to their relative strengths at the last imperial Austrian Reichsrat elections in 1911, and 55 (later 69) Slovaks coopted by these Czechs (the Slovak districts having been too disfranchised in old Hungary to make feasible a similar representative selection from the old Hungarian parliament). The state’s ethnic minorities were thus excluded (but also exluded themselves) from the constitution-making process, and when they finally did agree (and were permitted) to enter the political arena, they found themselves confronted with a series of institutional faits accomplis. Certain politically sophisticated Sudeten Germans had wished to end their original boycott of the newborn Czechoslovak state and enter the Constituent National Assembly promptly with the signing of the Treaty of St. Germain on September 10, 1919, in order to fight within it for such federalistic constitutional devices as cantonization and the concurrent veto by regions. But now the Czechs and Slovaks were determined that the constitution be shaped by themselves alone and as nearly unanimously among themselves as possible.
After slightly more than a year of deliberations, during which a brief provisional constitution of November 13, 1918, had interim validity, this Czechoslovak goal was achieved with the adoption of the nation’s definitive constitution on February 29, 1920. Of the 155 roll-calls required to pass the Constitution’s various articles and clauses, 105 were unanimous and the remaining 50 saw the parties of the Left and Center defeat those of the Right, who, in any event, had almost certainly been overrepresented in this postwar body due to the decision to use the 1911 Austrian Reichsrat returns as the base.
The Czechoslovak craving to achieve near-unanimity had been so general and the anxiety to shun the specters of red and/or white terror (which vividly haunted neighboring Hungary in 1919) so pervasive, that the final constitutional document must be regarded as an ideological compromise rather than as a victory of the Center and Left. One of the less inspired of its internal compromises was the decision to have a Senate of 150 seats and simultaneously to ensure that it would be largely a powerless reflection of the 300-member Chamber of Deputies. In time, senatorial office became a dignified pension for veteran party war horses. More impressive was the subtle compromise on the presidency: the president was to be elected, like the French one, by the two legislative houses sittingjointly as the National Assembly, but he was given considerable executive powers in keeping with the American and Weimar models. In its curbing of the agencies of direct and plebiscitary democracy, on the other hand, as well as in its overall parliamentary and centralistic bias, the Czechoslovak constitution was quite British. Finally, the wide powers that were officially assigned to the political parties and their executive committees clearly indicated the Austrian parentage of the Czechoslovak constitutional system.
The combination of (a) compulsory universal adult voting in parliamentary elections, (b) “fixed-order” lists of candidates arranged by the respective parties within a general system of proportional representation, and (c) the rule, enforced by the Electoral Court, that a deputy or senator must vacate his seat on the demand of his party (since in Czechoslovak theory, the electorate’s mandate had been conferred on the party, not the candidate) added up to a formidable assignment of power to the several party leaderships. In their hands the general electorate as well as the parliamentary backbenches were politically and legally reduced to mere auxiliaries and dependents. The party leaders’ effective sovereignty was limited only by the extent to which they might chose to permit some free discussion in the secrecy of the parliamentary party clubrooms before committing themselves to particular positions in public debate. (Membership in a parliamentary party club was legally compulsory for every deputy and senator; independency was proscribed.) It must, of course, be conceded that, in view of the large number of political parties, the remarkable cohesion and stability of Czechoslovak coalition cabinets might not have been maintained without this rather drastic system of discipline. Thus, though this political efficiency of the coalition system conveyed prestige on the country’s parliamentary system, the fact that in order to achieve it the “real” business of politics was withdrawn from the public arena detracted therefrom. Furthermore, the craving and the need for compromise within the government coalitions resulted in ever-increasing encroachment by the cabinet as a whole on the separate departments, as regards administrative and personnel as well as policy matters. Here again the results were mixed: a desirable degree of coordination and unity of administration at the cost of slow and difficult procedure.
The political stability of the cabinets should not be obscured by the fact that formally there were seventeen successive cabinets in the years 1918-38. Most of these were “arranged,” technical reshuffles. No coalition ever broke up except as a result of a deliberate decision on the part of the leaders who composed it, preparatory to new elections. And no vote of censure was ever passed, nor was any government-sponsored bill ever rejected.
Czechoslovak politics crystallized around “ideological” parties, whereas Polish politics polarized toward “charismatic” personalities. Thanks to the country’s complicated ethnic, religious, and cultural structure, thanks also to its Austrian and Hungarian political inheritances, and thanks, finally, to its proportional electoral system, the number of parties tended to be large and any one party’s size correspondingly limited. In the elections of 1920, twenty-three parties competed and seventeen achieved parliamentary representation; the equivalent figures for the remaining three general elections of the interwar period were, respectively, twenty-nine and sixteen in 1925, nineteen and sixteen in 1929, and sixteen and fourteen in 1935. This enumeration does not even include the many mini-parties that, in the poorer regions such as Ruthenia, either did not enter slates for elections or rode “piggy-back” on the lists of others. The balance, furthermore, among those parties that achieved parliamentary representation in these four elections was such that a minimal numerical majority (quite apart from the question of a politically feasible and effectively working majority) required the cooperation of no less than five parties. The one exception was a brief period after the 1920 elections, when four would have been theoretically adequate. No party ever amassed more than a fourth of the popular vote. The profiles of the more important parties follow. The Czech and Slovak ones are discussed first, then those of the ethnic minorities; the spectrum in each case proceeds from Right to Left.
A. CZECH AND SLOVAK PARTIES
1. The “oldest” Czech political party in terms of ideological pedigree, if not of organization, was the National Democratic Party, heir to the Young Czech movement of the nineteenth century to which it added some smaller and later affiliates. It was nationalistic to the point of being chauvinistic, panslavist, conservative, and anticlerical,8 and it moved steadily toward the Right throughout the interwar period, putting forward a joint slate with the Czech fascists in the 1935 elections. Supported by the upper bourgeois commercial and industrial strata as well as by the nationalistic segment of the intelligentsia, the National Democratic Party never achieved much electoral strength outside its original base of Bohemia. Thanks, however, to its traditional prestige, its skilled leadership, its penetrating influence within the senior civil service, its control of much of the quality press, its strong organization in the capital city of Prague, and its ornamentation by a number of distinguished cultural figures, this party’s effective weight was greater than the election figures would tend to suggest. Its forceful leader Karel Kramář was one of the architects of the independence movement, his pro-Russian “domestic” prewar and wartime activities having paralleled in intensity and courage, if not in effectiveness, the “external” ones of his Western-oriented (and luckier) rival, Masaryk.
2. The Small Traders and Artisans Party was a secession from the National Democrats in protest against the Iatter’s capture by the upper bourgeoisie. Its clientele is indicated by its name. Opposed to the technology of mass production, to the cooperative movement, to department stores and related phenomena of economic rationalization, it was already a political beneficiary of some of the rooted economic tensions that stemmed from the uneven levels and patterns of development of Czechoslovak economic life even before the Great Depression sent new and frustrated recruits its way.
3. Also on the secular Right was the Fascist movement, which went under several labels until its partial merger with the National Democrats to form the National Union from 1934 to 1937. Although small and kept from power by the stability of the coalition pattern among the “respectable” parties, it had some significance thanks both to the benevolence extended it by the National Democrats and certain senior elements in the civil service, and to the celebrity of its leaders and patrons. Among the latter were the Siberian Legion hero and later acting chief of staff, General Rudolf Gajda, the talented poet Viktor Dyk, and the erratically brilliant politician Jiří Stříbrný, who like so many European Fascists of his generation (e.g., Déat, Moseley, Mussolini) was a renegade from socialism (see below).
4. Oscillating between Right and Center on the political spectrum were the Catholic, or so-called Populist (People’s), parties. Except for a brief and early period in 1920-21, the Czech and Slovak organizations remained distinct and generally went separate political ways. The Slovak People’s Party was the chief institutional and political repository of Slovak autonomist aspirations against Czech centralism and, except for a brief period from 1927 to 1929 when it supplied two cabinet ministers, it remained in opposition to the Prague governments. Its founder and leader was Msgr. Andrej Hlinka, who had earned his reputation as a Slovak national hero by his prewar resistance to the forced magyarization of his people and who sustained it in the postwar years by his eloquent, tenacious, suspicious, and provincial opposition to all influences emanating from the more secular and cosmopolitan Czech lands. Proud, refractory, and naive, Hlinka in his parochialism eventually became the dupe of more modern and more totalitarian elements that used his cassock as a shield. Czechs often alleged that Hlinka’s autonomist demands did not really speak for a majority of the Slovak people since his party never won a majority of their votes. Nevertheless, the centralist parties that consistently participated in the Prague governments also failed to achieve a collective majority of Slovak votes and appeared to draw their support in this province from resident Czechs and Jews, the Slovak Protestant minority, and those Slovak Catholics whose pragmatic appreciation of the political-bureaucratic system convinced them of the utility of being known as voters for the government parties. The fact that a disparate agglomeration of opposition parties (Hlinka’s, the Communists, the Magyar slates) consistently accumulated a majority of votes cast in Slovakia suggests the vanity of Czech claims that the province was satisfied with its status.
5. The Czech Populists, in contrast to their Slovak coreligionists, consistently preferred to be a government party. This choice may have been motivated in part by a need to demonstrate their nationalist respectability in postwar Czechoslovakia after having adopted a somewhat damaging Austrophile stance before and during World War I. Tightly led by Msgr. Jan Sramek, this clerical party drew some support from all Czech classes but was relatively strongest among the peasants and small-town workers of Moravia. It could not, of course, share in the national cult of Jan Hus, but it was nevertheless relatively advanced (in the old Austrian style of Christian socialism) on social and economic matters.
6. The largest and pivotal Czechoslovak party was the Agrarian Party (formally: The Republican Party of Agriculturists and Small Peasants). So strongly organized, so deeply entrenched in the provincial and local government apparatus, so thoroughly involved in the cooperative and banking systems, so indispensable to any and every cabinet coalition, and so strategic in its choice of ministerial portfolios was this party, that despite its name and without losing contact with the original constituency indicated by that name, the Agrarian Party in effect became a general political “holding company” for middle-class interests at large. It was the government party with the most evenly distributed support throughout the country, and even ethnic minority and Slovak and Ruthenian elements saw advantages in giving it, rather than their own specific parties, electoral support. Utilizing the land reform program whereby extensive properties were transferred from German, Magyar, and ecclesiastical magnates to Czech and Slovak (and Ruthenian and even German) peasants to secure its patronage over the countryside, the Agrarian Party simultaneously extended its political infrastructure in the urban areas through judicious leverage on the tax, tariff, and credit systems. It always managed to contain, if not to resolve, the internal tensions between its original peasant and its later bourgeois clienteles, but in the process of containing them it moved steadily rightward, against working class interests, in the 1930s. In Antonin Švehla, their leader during the happier decade of the 1920s, the Agrarians gave Czechoslovakia her shrewdest and her most responsible (in Max Weber’s sense of that word) democratic political leader, and by providing a political home for such prestigious Slovaks as Masaryk’s “Hlasist” disciple Vavro Šrobár and the ideologue of international “peasantism” Milan Hodža, the Agrarians complemented, to some extent, their organizational virtuosity with intellectual respectability.
7. Of the two Czechoslovak Socialist parties, the National Socialists, which bore no ideological relation to its German namesake, had been organized in 1897 as an explicitly patriotic, evolutionary Czech alternative to the avowedly internationalistic, Marxist Social Democrats. Originally the most articulately anti-Austrian, anticlerical, and antimilitarist Czech political formation, the National Socialists became the postwar party with the widest ideological spectrum. However, its membership and electoral appeal were still confined largely to Czechs, and its organizational base anchored in the rail, postal, and white collar unions. The formal membership of Edvard Beneš, who was foreign minister from 1918 to 1935 and president from 1935 to 1938, lent the party some additional prestige, but the real leaders were its founder Václav Klofáč, the first Czech parliamentarian to have been arrested by the Austrian authorities in World War I, and, until his apostasy to fascism in 1926, the demagogue Jiří Stříbrný.
8. As the National Socialists expelled their fascist elements and the Social Democrats demonstrated their national respectability, a political reconciliation became possible between them, though they did not merge. Tracing their organizational history back to 1878—further than any other Czech party—the Social Democrats were, during the interwar decades, a typical Central European Socialist party: patriotic, yet suspicious of the military establishment and eager for international disarmament; anticapitalist, yet receptive to technological innovations; class-oriented, yet ready to participate in coalition governments. One of this party’s major services to interwar Czechoslovakia was that of keeping open the channels of dialogue with the ethnic minorities through its fraternal relations with their Socialist parties.
9. The Communists finally parted ways with the Social Democrats in the autumn of 1920, after repeated urgings from Moscow and under considerable provocation from the Socialist party’s right wing. They took with them a majority of that party’s members and, at first, of its voters, but only a minority of its leaders and members of parliament. Unlike the several ethnically distinct Socialist parties, the various Communist groups amalgamated into one party for the entire republic, the only such transethnic party in all Czechoslovakia, in October, 1921. It was indeed a mass party but not a revolutionary one, despite attempts to “bolshevise” it through repeated purges. The country’s only party able to attract equal support in urban and rural areas, in the advanced and in the backward regions, on the basis of social as well as of ethnic discontents, the Communists—whether under the original leadership of the old Austrian Social Democratic war horse Bohumir Smeral, or later that of the Moscow-backed younger apparatchik Klement Gottwald—consistently failed to translate their considerable electoral and organizational strength into serious revolutionary or effective parliamentary action. Never declared illegal or driven underground in interwar Czechoslovakia (in sharp contrast to its sister parties in the other states of East Central Europe), the Communist Party drew its sustained strength less from any unbearable conditions of exploitation, than from a generalized complex of alienations that reflected rigid social barriers between the working class and the lower middle class, and estrangements between juxtaposed ethnic communities. In addition to these sources of support, in the late 1930s it gained patriotic respectability, thanks to its emphatic denunciation, first of nazism and appeasement in general, and then of the Munich capitulation in particular.
B. ETHNIC MINORITY PARTIES
As mentioned earlier, the Sudeten Germans were originally well-nigh unanimous in deploring their incorporation into Czechoslovakia, but in time a process of adjustment to this situation occurred both among the German Social Democrats as well as within the bourgeois political camp. Late in 1922 the latter, loosely aggregated as the Deutscher Verband (German Union), split into the potentially cooperative Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Association for Work) and the continuingly irreconcilable Kampfgemeinschaft (Association for Struggle). In interwar Czechoslovak political rhetoric, the first tendency received the appelation “activism,” which denoted a readiness to take an active part in the political life and institutions of the republic, while the intransigent position was referred to as “passivism,” or “negativism.”
1. Mention must be made first of the two members of the Kampfgemeinschaft, the German Nationalist Party and the German National Socialist Party. The latter was affiliated with the Hitler movement in the Reich and until the 1930s less troublesome for the Czechs than the former.
2. Within the Arbeitsgemeinschaft, as it moved toward “activism” in the mid-1920s, three distinct orientations were discernible:
a. a group of liberal Democrats, endorsed by industrialists increasingly eager to avoid Reich competition, supported also by German-speaking Jews, numerically relatively weak but fortunate in the skilled parliamentarians who represented it in the legislature;
b. the Christian Social Party, whose correct and then cordial relations with its ideological analogue on the Czech spectrum, the Catholic People’s Party, added to its distrust of the Los von Rom anti-Catholic pedigree of the National and National Socialist parties in its own German community;
c. the Bund der Landwirte (League of Farmers), which became the first German party to turn to “activism,” thereby presumably reflecting a lower level of nationalistic resentment among peasants than among townsmen, and a greater interest in the agricultural tariffs toward which the Prague government was being steered by its Agrarian leaders.
3. Beyond these several bourgeois parties stood the German Social Democrats. Initially the most fervent partisans of Anschluss to a Greater Germany, they then shifted, moving with the European “spirit of Locarno” (1925) and propelled by a compact among Czech and German trade union federations (1927), toward “activism,” and finally responded to the rise of Hitler with full commitment to the defense of the democratic Czechoslovak Republic. The German Communists, after splitting from the Social Democrats in January, 1921, fused into the unified Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in October of that year.
4. Among the Magyar minority in the eastern half of the country, the structural differentiation of parties resembled an embryonic version of that among the more numerous Germans in the western provinces. Here, too, there were Christian Social (Catholic), National Agrarian (Calvinist) and Social Democratic parties, but “activism” never achieved the resonance that it did among the Germans. This was partly a reflection of the fact that the governments of Hungary consistently showed a more intensive irredentist interest in the fate of their fellow Magyars in Slovakia and Ruthenia than did the governments of the Weimar Republic in that of the Sudeten Germans of Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia. Hence the Magyar minority problem was all along for Prague what the German one became only after 1933: a dual domestic and foreign policy issue. Furthermore, the consistent irredentism and revisionism of Hungarian policy toward Czechoslovakia had ideological as well as national motivations: the gentry rulers of Horthyite Hungary had little wish to see bourgeois democratic Czechoslovakia succeed and prosper lest the example undermine their own neobaroque system. To a small degree, indeed, this situation did elicit a backlash. The spectacle of “feudal” peasant conditions in Hungary enabled the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party to organize, in 1924, an affiliate among the Magyar peasants of Czechoslovakia, who, like the Sudeten German peasants, also appreciated Prague’s mid-decade agrarian protectionism. The Czechoslovak Social Democratic and especially the Communist parties also drew considerable Magyar votes. Also, the bloody pogroms of the white terror which had established the Horthy regime alienated many hitherto fervently Magyarophile Jews into opting for Czechoslovak or explicitly Jewish political identification. All this was, however, relatively unimportant in the overall context of general Magyar intransigence with respect to Czechoslovakia.
5. The small Polish minority of Silesia was obliged by its small size to participate in elections on joint lists with other slates: Jewish, Czech Social Democratic, or Slovak Populist. Similarly, in primitive Ruthenia political organizations were either affiliates of the main Czechoslovak parties or sundered into intensely local and scarcely comprehensible factionalism.
5
The political history of interwar Czechoslovakia up to the Munich disaster of 1938 was unique in East Central Europe not only for its uninterrupted constitutional and civil libertarian continuity, but also for a pattern of extraordinary stability, mentioned above, within and among the political parties. Once the Communists and Socialists had parted in 1920, and the Czech and Slovak Populists in 1921, no later crisis or election brought any drastic shifts in the positions or the relative strengths of the Czechoslovak political parties. Even the virtual absorption of the Sudeten German political community into the Henleinist incarnation of nazism in the mid-1930s had no organizational or electoral impact upon the traditional balances that prevailed among the non-German parties. Instead of the radical discontinuities that marked her neighbors’ politics, Czechoslovakia’s was characterized by palpable but nevertheless secondary shifts along her partisan spectrum. These shifts ran from a brief nationalist, to a brief socialist, to a long agrarian-dominated phase, and culminated in the telescoping of domestic and international crises at the close of our period; each shift along the spectrum occurred within the prevailing pattern of coalition adjustments.
The first, nationalist phase of Czechoslovak politics was both a general expression of the euphoria of newly recovered independence, and a particular consequence of proportioning party representation within the Constituent National Assembly to the results of the 1911 Reichsrat elections. This formal discounting of popular reactions to the World War and the Russian Revolution undoubtedly gave exaggerated representation to the National Democrats, until it was corrected in the first general elections of April, 1920. In any event, the achievements of this early nationalistic phase, in which the prestigious National Democratic leader Karel Kramář was premier and his party colleague Alois Rašín was the policy-making pacesetter as finance minister, were: the establishment of favorable frontiers; the maintenance of public order amidst the chaos of the other successor states; the avoidance of inflation (which likewise was lacerating the country’s neighbors) through vigorous deflationary and control measures; the passage of land-reform legislation for gradual implementation; the “Czechization” of public administration.
While the municipal and communal elections of June 15, 1919, in the historic provinces did not formally alter the balance of parties within the Constituent National Assembly, they did indicate that the national political mood was now to the left of 1911. Accordingly, Kramář resigned the premiership, remaining, however, as formal head of the Czechoslovak delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. In that capacity he threw himself into a futile and embarrassing crusade on behalf of European intervention (utilizing, he hoped, the Czechoslovak Siberian Legions) to crush the Bolshevik experiment in Soviet Russia.
Meanwhile, his cabinet constellation was succeeded on July 8,1919, by a “red-green,” i.e., Socialist-Agrarian, one headed by the Social Democratic veteran Vlastimil Tusar. Its legislative achievements were the institution of secular democracy, not socialism. The constitution was adopted; church-state relations regulated; secular education provided; state control over railroads, mines, and hydroelectric power authorized. Less explicitly and more subtly, the Tusar experiment established a number of patterns and precedents: the restless urban masses, who had staged hunger- and price-protests against Kramář as recently as May, were mollified when a Socialist became premier; the Socialist parties, in turn, accustomed themselves to governmental responsibility in lieu of the oppositional heritage of Habsburg days; there was established the tradition that the most popular party furnish the prime minister, who need not be the cabinet’s—or even his own party’s—most prestigious figure. Tusar, for example, owed his designation to (a) the Social Democrats’ recent victory in the local government elections, and (b) the fact that four better-known party comrades declined, pleading lack of administrative skill or Jewish origins.
The general parliamentary elections of April 18 and 25, 1920, which were postponed in Ruthenia, Těšín, Hlučín, and a few smaller frontier districts, confirmed the public’s leftward shift along the political spectrum. The suffrage age was twenty-one years for the Chamber of Deputies and twenty-six for the Senate. The results are given in table 19.9 Of a total of 285 elected deputies, 139 belonged to Socialist parties; within the Czechoslovak contingent of 203, there were 104 Socialists.
TABLE 19
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, APRIL, 1920
