4


THE STATE UNDER SIEGE

Abby Innes


Assessing the resilience of a state on the basis of its history is not easy at the best of times.
Czechoslovakia has, moreover, been so steeped in misfortune that the question of how it stayed
together so long is at least as arresting as that of why it fell apart. In its seventy-four years
of existence Czechoslovakia emerged from World War I in chaos, weathered multiple ethnic grievances
and economic depression, was broken apart in turn by Slovak separatism and by Nazism and was then
put back together only to be subjected to forty years of Soviet Communism. After an anti-Communist
revolution and three years of social, economic and political disintegration and reform,
euphemistically referred to by political scientists as ‘transition’, the country finally collapsed.

Ascribing Czechoslovakia’s downfall to ‘the return of history’, is therefore, just plain confusing:
it implies that a particular aspect of the state’s history must have proved fatal, whereas in fact
the historical record is one of radically shifting contexts and quite amazing contingency. With a
past like this, separation might have resulted not so much from mutual hostility as from the tired
indifference of two peoples who, having endured war, fascism and Communism, viewed the bloody
national conflict in Yugoslavia with dismay and concluded that they had no wish to follow that
path.

This first chapter concentrates explicitly on national provocations before 1989. In considering the
issues generally seen as in conflict within Czech and Slovak memory, the purpose is to assess the
condition of Czech - Slovak relations over time, and to alert the reader to the fuller implications
of post-1989 political rhetoric. This chapter also seeks to identify the extent to which, by 1989,
there were any over riding economic, political and military reasons for a common Czech and Slovak
state.


CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1918-38: A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE


The Czechoslovak Republic was founded in October 1918 as a union of regions from opposite sides of
the Austro-Hungarian tracks. The industrially advanced Czech lands (Bohemia, Silesia and Moravia)
came from the Austrian side of the old Habsburg Empire, the still predominantly agrarian Slovakia
from the Hungarian^1.

Before 1918 Czechs and Slovaks had been divided not only legally, administratively and
traditionally but in many other ways. Before the Great War the Czech economy was among the most
industrialised and urbanised of the Habsburg Empire: Czechoslovakia contributed some 60 per cent of
overall taxation revenue, was the industrial powerhouse of the region and employed almost half the
Austro-Hungarian Empire’s labour-force and boasted a per-capita income not far below that of
Germany^2. Slovakia, on the other hand, although the most developed area of Hungary, had remained
predominantly agrarian and unmodernised under Hungarian tutelage: in 1914 Slovak industrial
development was in its infancy.

These very different economies sustained very dissimilar societies in terms of class structure,
social mores and traditions, and the contrast was accentuated by religious differences. Slovakia
was predominantly and profoundly Catholic, the Czech lands were also more Catholic than Protestant
but philosophically anti-clerical, a confirmation of their relative modernity, with its attendant
secularisation. When it came to political culture the Czechs were far more conscious of themselves
as a mature political nation deserving a state of their own. In this respect the experience of
these territories under the deadening hand of imperial rule had proved extremely important.
Slovakia under Hungarian rule had suffered greater national repression and isolation than the
Czechs had under Austria.

During the nineteenth century Hungary had attempted the systematic assimilation of the Slovak
minority and all but crushed Slovakia’s attempts at national assertion. The start of the twentieth
century brought a further deterioration in the condition of Hungary’s national minorities as the
Hungarians sought to eliminate self-determinist impulses root and branch. Hungarian was the
exclusive language of instruction in all schools after 1907, a potentially fatal blow to Slovak
national identity. Before 1918 the Slovak region was never at any stage permitted administrative or
economic recognition distinct from other Hungarian regions. It also lacked a major urban centre on
which a nationalist-minded intelligentsia might converge.

In comparison with the other minorities within Hungary, the Slovak voice was scarcely audible. The
Hungarians had been forced through painful experience to acknowledge Serb and Romanian national
movements, but they could never be persuaded that Slovak nationalism was anything more than an
aberration which, as Macartney points out, ‘they also believed to be curable’^3. Slovakia’s
miniature political and intellectual elite (predominantly and disproportionately Protestant^4) was
well aware of its lack of a historic claim to statehood. By 1918 it saw little choice but to appeal
directly to the newly vaunted but hardly attainable ‘right of self-determination’.

The Czechs, in contrast, possessed by 1918 a strong national tradition as well as a large educated
class^5. Perhaps most importantly, they could also claim ancient statehood in the form of the
Kingdom of Bohemia and the Margravate of Moravia, and they had a history of national independence
until the outset of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). The Czechs joined the Habsburg monarchy in
1526^6 along with the Hungarians and considered themselves by rights their equal. Angered by the
creation of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867, the Czechs grew increasingly
disillusioned by and hostile to rule from Vienna.

While the Slovaks in the late nineteenth century found themselves under growing threats of total
assimilation, the Czechs, the third strongest ethnic group in Austria-Hungary, experienced a
cultural and economic renaissance on a sufficient scale to challenge the traditional dominance of
Germans in the area. The economic strength of Bohemia and Moravia brought with it not only a
developing middle class but also new and independent Czech institutions - their own bank in 1868, a
national theatre in 1881 and university in 1882. Bohemia’s capital, Prague, had long been a
cosmopolitan and much admired European city and throughout the latter half of the nineteenth
century it acted as the locus of an ascendant Czech nationalism. An almost entirely German city
until the middle of the nineteenth century, Prague was only 6 per cent German by 1910^7. In strong
contrast to Slovakia, therefore, the Czech National Revival proceeded apace from 1848 to the
outbreak of World War I, and through its many cultural and political associations had popularised
the Czech aspiration to independence. Slovakia, dominated by the Hungarians for over 1000 years,
was in an altogether weaker position in its claims for national recognition, let alone statehood.

What brought two such apparently disparate nations together in 1918? The traditional explanation,
presented in the state-building rhetoric of the new Czechoslovakia, was based on the understanding
that, as neighbouring Slavs, the Czechs and Slovaks shared deep common roots of culture and
language. These supposed commonalities, however, were a constant source of debate. Even the state’s
founder, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk (of Slovak/Moravian origin but born in Slovak Moravia and hence
viewed by Slovaks from Slovakia as a Czech!), believed that ‘Slovaks and Czechs formed a single
nation, separated only by differences in language, history and culture’^8. If one understands
‘nation’ to refer to a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related^9, Masaryk’s
verdict implied very little kinship indeed. Language, history and culture are, in most
circumstances, critical markers of national difference, and with such divisions paralleled by deep
social and economic disparities, Czechs and Slovaks would require an overarching common interest if
they were to avoid conflict. In 1918, however, such a common interest did, apparently, exist.

A more convincing explanation for Czechoslovakia’s existence came from the calculations of the
Czech and Slovak political elite and the state-makers of the Paris Peace Conference in 1918, and
their understanding of Germans and Hungarians. Czechoslovakia was, to a critical degree, a product
of its massive minorities^10. During the First World War the previously limited business and
culture-oriented contacts between Czechs and Slovaks broadened as the two political leaderships
joined in mutual support of their respective national claims. Masaryk, the principal initiator of
this collaboration, calculated early in the war that neither region was likely to achieve
independent statehood alone^11, nor, if independence was achieved, could they sustain it in the
face of those German and Hungarian minorities who would find themselves demoted from overlords to
underdogs. It was undoubtedly with such thoughts in mind that Masaryk, as early as 1907, made
pointed references to the two million Slovaks in upper Hungary as ‘belonging to our nationality’,
and as ‘co-nationals’^12.

There were also international pressures for the creation of a unified Czechoslovak state, and,
concomitantly, for a unified ‘Czechoslovak people’ to act as the bulwark against the strength of
other minorities. Without the proclamation of a ‘Czechoslovak people’ Czechoslovakia would have
been a state lacking an absolute national majority, and the question might then reasonably have
been asked why it should include three million Germans. Without the German territories, however,
the Czechoslovak economy would have been considerably weakened^13. A strong Czechoslovakia
constrained Germany, an obvious gain in the eyes of the Great War victors, and the ethnic German
territories stood within the natural and historical military border of the Czech lands, as was made
all too clear in 1938.

If Czechoslovakia, however, was not to be dependent for life upon the persistent untrustworthiness
of its neighbours, it needed to develop a state identity that was not simply about defensible
frontiers and economic viability but was also positively attractive to its constituent members. As
soon as Czechoslovakia was born, however, the profound inherited differences between Czechs and
Slovaks manifested themselves - as friction.


NATIONAL STEREOTYPES AND THEIR SOURCES


The Pittsburgh Agreement, 1918


One of the most embittering experiences for Slovaks was that as soon as the new state was formed,
the language of ‘fraternity’ prevailing before 1918 translated into a Czech assumption of the role
of the older brother. Czechs wore their historic nationhood and economic success as a badge of
maturity and deemed their own goals the most appropriate for Slovak development. On the reverse
view many Czechs, including those more sympathetic to Slovak particularism, were dismayed at the
seemingly endless demands of Slovaks for both improved conditions and greater equality. The Czechs’
resentment of Slovak ingratitude and their surprise at the coherence of Slovak nationality -about
which they had known little before 1918 - provided fertile ground for unflattering stereotypes on
both sides.

To many in Slovakia’s political and cultural elite, especially its young Catholic contingent,
grievances over the term ‘Czechoslovak’ arose almost immediately, provoked by the very founding
documents of state. On 30 October 1918 a Slovak document - the Martin Declaration - endorsed
Czech-Slovak unity but was obscure as to the status of the Slovak nation within a Czechoslovak
state^14. The Martin Declaration, however, came two days after a proclamation of statehood by the
Prague National Committee, to which a pro-Czech Slovak representative, Vavro Srobar, was the sole
Slovak signatory. The 28th of October duly became the Czechoslovak Republic’s official anniversary
date. This first declaration, with its minimal Slovak participation, was assumed by Czechs from the
outset as legitimating not only a unitary, Prague-centralised state but also membership in a
Czechoslovak nation’ and use of a ‘Czechoslovak’ language^15: terms to be found throughout the 1920
constitution. In his opening address to the National Assembly on 14 November 1918, Prime Minister
Karel Kramář explicitly defined Czechoslovakia as a ‘Czech state’ and welcomed the Slovaks as ‘lost
sons’ who had now ‘returned to the nation’s fold, where they belong^1^6. When another document, the
Pittsburgh Agreement of 30 May 1918, became known in Slovakia in 1919^17,  it provided a focus for
those who wished to reassert Slovakia’s national rights.

Signed by the future state President, T. G. Masaryk, and by Czech and Slovak emigre groups in the
United States, the Pittsburgh Agreement, like the Cleveland Accord of 1915^18, stipulated a
separate administration, parliament, and even courts for Slovakia^19. According to Masaryk,
however, the Agreement was ‘concluded to appease a small Slovak faction which was dreaming of God
knows what sort of independence for Slovakia... I signed the Convention unhesitatingly as a local
understanding between American Czechs and Slovaks upon the policy they were prepared to
advocate’^20. Legally, Masaryk was in the right; the concluding clause of the agreement stated that
its US signatories were in no way competent to bind the nation to the Agreement’s contents, since
only the state itself, following independence, could decide its fate^2^1. Though Masaryk had
conceded that ‘a demand for autonomy is as justifiable as a demand for centralism, and the problem
is to find the right relationship between the two’^22, practical developments in the new
Czechoslovakia had already been firmly on the centralist side.

The disparagement of the Pittsburgh Agreement had a decisive impact on party political developments
in the new state, resonating, in particular, within the Slovak People’s Party (HSPP), hitherto
preoccupied by Catholic rights and education. Father Andrej Hlinka, its leader, had promoted and
endorsed the principle of Czech-Slovak unity on several occasions before 1918, but he had remained
suspicious of Czech ami-clericalism^23 and had argued passionately for Slovakia’s distinctiveness
after the war. The Agreement tipped the HSPP toward a defensive position of Slovak autonomism, and,
as we shall see, this position grew ever more assertive as Slovak grievances mounted through the
1920s and 1930s.

The initial shift toward Slovak autonomism in the HSPP was expressed in the Žilina Memorandum in
1922. The Memorandum accused Prague, and Masaryk in particular, of a breach of faith in failing to
implement either the Cleveland or Pittsburgh ‘Treaties’ - a status these documents had never had,
although nationalist histories have long granted it. Thereafter Hlinka campaigned to present
Pittsburgh as the ideal and unfairly forsworn guidelines for the reform of the state and for the
full recognition of the Slovak nation^24. The failure of Prague to acknowledge even the spirit of
these two Agreements marked them down in Slovak eyes as the first of several instances of broken
Czech promises of constitutional equality.

It is important to note that, despite its solid Catholic pedigree and attempts at agitation,
Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (known as L’udáks or Populists) did not fare as well in the first,
1920 election as subsequent nationalist and L’udák histories have implied. The 1920 election,
coinciding with a postwar recession, indicated that ‘Czechoslovakia’ at this stage remained a
feasible project: it revealed a political consensus across the territory that had every appearance
of transcending national differences. Both the Czech and Slovak electorates favoured the left, and
1920 represented the high point in inter-war social democratic support. The social democratic left
was loyalist as far as the state was concerned. More preoccupied with social than ‘narrow’ national
questions, they supported multi-national states in principle whilst opposing ‘nationalist
particularism’, accepting that the prioritisation of Slovakia’s national grievances could only mean
the incitement of additional national tensions. In the early 1920s, moreover, the evidence suggests
that Slovaks were more engaged by urgent socio-economic issues than by aspirations to threaten the
recently achieved order and the relative freedoms of the Czechoslovak unitary state.


Bureaucracy: the glass ceiling


The First Republic lost a tremendous opportunity for cohesion by thwarting social mobility for the
growing Slovak middle classes and persisting with Czech administrative dominance. No sooner had the
Czechs arrived in Slovakia in 1918, it seemed, than they began to replace the Hungarians as
administrators and choose Slovak Protestants to assist them, though Protestants represented a small
minority in Slovakia, some 18.7 per cent of the population in 1910^25. Slovakia’s governance had
immediately fallen to the so-called Slovak ‘Hlasists’^26, close and predominantly Protestant
followers of Masaryk. Though it was only a hastily constituted Slovak National Council that had
empowered Vavro Šrobár, a leading Hlasist and a Catholic, to represent Slovak interests in Prague,
he became the sole Slovak representative on the so-called Czechoslovak National Council^27. In the
Slovak nationalist canon, Šrobár’s subsequent advocacy of Prague centralism and Prague’s apparent
Protestant chauvinist administration marked him thereafter as a traitor to the national cause.

Returning as Minister for Slovakia in December 1918 Šrobár abolished the limited organs of Slovak
administrative autonomy that had grown out of the grassroots of Slovak society, using his powers in
ways that could only increase hostility to Prague among Slovaks already antagonised by the
‘one-nation’ principles of Czechoslovakism. Endowed with wide powers of decree and also with units
of the Czechoslovak legionnaires, Srobar dissolved the Slovak National Council (SNC) immediately on
coming to office and the local councils, formed under SNC auspices, soon after, in January 1919.
Following the first parliamentary elections, Slovakia’s special caucus was also dissolved in April
1920^28, and Šrobár’s own administration lasted only until May^29. Thereafter, Slovak deputies
seemed destined to speak from within Czech-dominated, state-wide parties, albeit representing
Slovak wings of those parties.

Slovak nationalist historians have naturally emphasised how the Hlasists appointed Czech
Protestants to public positions in Slovakia, some of whom undoubtedly viewed themselves as
‘bringing enlightenment to a backward country’^30. Though this was not another case of ‘iron
centralism’, as Slovak nationalists have subsequently claimed, the security-conscious Hlasists were
sufficiently dogmatic in their purging of Hungarianised Slovaks - who, because of the past
assimilationist role of the Church, were predominantly Catholic -as to appear anti-Catholic as a
matter of policy^31. In branding as ‘Magyarone’ those Catholics who had worked for the Budapest
government before the war, however, Prague applied a double standard, since in the Czech lands
experienced Czechs who had worked for the Viennese government were actually encouraged to offer
their services to the new administration^32.

From the Slovak point of view the Czechoslovak regime thus appeared philosophically and
legislatively anti-clerical. Czech politicians seemed bent on separating Church and state, and were
quick to nationalise primary and secondary education, previously the preserve of religious
authorities. Agrarian reform also threatened the Church estates, and even anti-Hungarian priests in
Slovakia found that they were denied the flourishing parishes for which they had hoped. The
journalist Ferdinand Peroutka concluded that ‘in probably the most complete way, they [the
Protestants] excluded Catholic representatives from public service and the enjoyment of glory’^33.
As a consequence, the profoundly conservative, parochial, and socially influential clergy in
Slovakia concluded early on that it was they who would have to find a convincing explanation for
national inequalities, if Slovakia was not to be radicalised by secular ideas of class and
emancipation. When the reality of Slovakia’s persistent relative economic backwardness also sank
in, support for the Slovak People’s Party grew as the division between those who opposed and those
who supported Prague rule began to cut more clearly down religious lines.

Undoubtedly it was this religious cleavage that supported the development of a Slovak (political)
party belying notions of a single Czechoslovak identity. In another age such a development might
have proved sustainable. In 1930s Czechoslovakia, however, Slovak Catholic discontent was an
Achilles heel. The Hlinka Slovak People’s Party had, by the 1930s, created a strong alliance of
co-religionists, frustrated clergy, Catholic laymen, and also ‘Magyarone’ Slovaks behind the cause
of autonomy. Untried as it was, autonomy seemed the idea holding the greatest hope of relief from
Czech dominance.


The Hlinka Slovak People’s Party (HSPP)


According to the historian Robert Seton-Watson, Father Andrej Hlinka was a priest ‘of the twelfth
rather than the twentieth century’^34. In Czech eyes, Hlinka was too overtly tolerant of the now
officially despised ‘Magyarone’ Slovaks; indeed, he was suspected as prone to Hungarian
manipulation. In Catholic Slovakia, by contrast, Hlinka was considered a patriot who had suffered
for his efforts against Hungarian repression and had earned Czech animosity only by drawing
attention to the iniquities of Czech power. Prague’s mistrust and a tendency of the Czechoslovak
parliament toward character assassination increasingly marked Hlinka out as Slovakia’s ami du
penple - a powerful position in an era of increasingly radicalised politics across Europe.

By linking a wide range of Slovak grievances to perceptions of Czech religious bias, Hlinka’s
clerically based party was able to frame a Slovak national agenda literally as an article of
religious faith. The party’s main political rivals in Slovakia increasingly forfeited support
through their relative abstraction from Slovak realities but also because of their continued
unwillingness to touch upon national issues in a state with so fragile an ethnic balance. After the
social democracy movement divided into warring Communist and Social Democratic Parties between 1920
and 1921 both groups seemed incapable of noting Slovak difficulties without first appraising them
through the prism of international Socialist strategy, a practice diminishing their initial support
to a smaller, if consistent, core. The Slovak section of the Agrarians (unified in 1922) might have
laid claim to significant support had not their leader, Milan Hodža, established himself as one of
Hlinka’s main adversaries at the same time as appearing deeply attached to his position and
influence in Prague. In 1920, Hodža had gone so far as to prophesy that Czech and Slovak cultures
would converge and their languages merge - a recitation of the Czechoslovakist creed. The
Czechoslovak People’s Party, led by Jan Šrámek, might also have laid claim to Slovak Catholic
sympathies had it not fallen out with the Hlinka Party in the early 1920s over religious education.
As coalition king-makers between 1921 and 1938, however, Šrámek’s populists held so great a stake
in the Czechoslovak establishment as to lose the disenchanted Slovak vote almost entirely to
Hlinka’s L’udáks^35.

Most of the interwar Czechoslovak cabinets were constituted by Socialist-Agrarian coalitions
including all but the National Democrats and the Communist Party^36. Agrarian-Clerical coalitions
governed only between 1925/7 and 1929, and these included not only the National Democrats and
eventually the Hlinka Slovak People’s Party but also representatives of four out of the seven
German groups. This eventual co-option of German parties and the Slovak populists was bought at the
cost of ‘abandoning extreme centralism, of toning down anti-clerical tendencies and of stiffening
tariffs in the interests of the Agrarians’^37. The price seemed eminently worth paying to bring the
hitherto uncooperative principal minority - the Germans - and the obstructionist HSPP into the
state’s mainstream. Neither, however, stayed long.

Having emerged as the strongest party in Slovakia, the HSPP demanded greater decentralisation from
Prague. In 1927, the county system was abolished and the administration reorganised along
provincial lines, creating a ‘Slovenská Krajina’, which transformed Slovakia from an object to a
source of power^38. Though the HSPP thereafter participated in government (after a full two years
of negotiations), the frail accord lasted only until the trial for treason of Hlinka’s adviser, Dr
Vojtech Tuka, in 1929. The so-called Tuka affair^39 had a fateful impact on the political
environment as a whole. It rocked HSPP support, which had wavered following its move into the
government coalition, and caused a final breach between the HSPP and all mainstream political
groups, bar Šrámek’s Populists, despite the brief rapprochement after 1926. Tuka’s imprisonment put
an end to Hlinka’s attempt at constructive engagement with the Czechoslovak political
establishment, and the affair pushed the HSPP into a more extremism-prone opposition than they had
ever previously entertained^40. The Depression then improved L’udák electoral fortunes, relatively
well attuned to Slovak social and economic grievances as the Hlinka party had become^41.


The betrayal of Czechoslovakia


It was a mark of the coalition dynamics in the First Republic and the failure to integrate
Slovakia’s more outspoken political forces that it was not until the mid-1930s that regional
economic disparities were debated in any direct and politically sensitive way^42. The assumption
throughout the 1920s and early 1930s had been that Slovakia would catch up economically with the
Czech lands, despite the tendency of Czech industry to treat Slovakia as a colony, left to provide
agricultural products, labour and raw materials. Czechoslovakia’s initial laissez-faire politics
had in practice done little positively to advance Slovakia’s relatively underdeveloped economy. The
state’s concern, when it came, was far too late: by the mid-1930s, continuing economic inequality
had helped create a convergence of Slovak grievances that looked set to pitch the entire state into
crisis.

On 5 November 1935 President Masaryk appointed the Agrarian Milan Hodža as Prime Minister - the
only Slovak premier in the history of the First Republic. After the shocking success of the
covertly pro-Nazi Sudeten German Party in the 1935 election it was hoped that a Slovak Prime
Minister might at least reinforce the core state relationship, leaving Hodža little choice but to
open discussions with the Slovak autonomists. He was, however, in a clear bind; for Czechs, his
credibility partly depended upon his presumed powers in Slovakia, but if he accepted HSPP demands
for economic and administrative concessions and implementation of the Pittsburgh Agreement he would
lose his place in Prague. As an established Pragocentric politician, moreover, Hodža had poor
prospects in an autonomous Slovakia. The negotiations, begun at the end of January 1936, ended in
complete failure in late March^43. Thereafter the HSPP assumed its full potential as a major threat
to the Czechoslovak state^44.

Hodža’s coalition negotiations revealed that by 1935 the Hlinka Slovak People’s Party had succumbed
to the radicalisation sweeping Europe. The HSPP’s moderates were increasingly pushed aside by a
faction intent on closing ranks with the Sudeten German Party, the Czech Fascists and others of the
extreme right. Since the mid-1930s Hlinka had acted as arbiter between moderates who were more
faithful to the Republic, led by the ideologist Jozef Tiso, and neo-fascist and separatist
radicals, which notably included the younger party leaders. In 1937, L’udák agitation increased and
culminated in anti-Czech demonstrations and accusations that the government had Bolshevised the
Republic^45, citing the May 1935 Soviet-Czechoslovak Treaty of Mutual Assistance as evidence.
Anti-Czech, anti-Communist and anti-Semitic propaganda became the favoured weaponry of the day^4^6.
Hlinka’s death on 16 August 1938 opened the HSPP fully to the factional contest, and the moderates
seemed as good as defeated. The HSPP presented its programme for autonomy - the ‘Whitsun Programme’
- to parliament on 17 August. Their platform was framed exactly to the demand for ‘national
self-determination’ to be invoked by Hitler’s Germany in the Saarland, Austria, and eventually in
the Sudetenland: Czechoslovak territory. In the context of the time, therefore, the HSPP aligned
itself with the spread of Nazism and the de facto destruction of the Czechoslovak state. By
September, conditions were moving dramatically in the Populists’ favour.

As the extreme right had begun to hold sway, Milan Hodža had attempted a last and desperate
acceleration of governmental reforms as a basis for negotiations with Germany, including a new
statute of national autonomy, but the time for such efforts had passed. Unwilling to step beyond
appeasement of the growing Nazi threat, France and Britain, despite the former’s treaty
obligations, had made it clear to the Czechoslovak government back on 19 August that it should
comply with Hitler’s demands for the Sudeten territories. With Czechoslovakia’s fate sealed, Slovak
L’udák behaviour became transparently pragmatic: when the Polish and Hungarians raised territorial
claims on Czechoslovakia in early September, the L’udáks retained the demand for autonomy but
decried the prospect of any forceful solution to Czechoslovak statehood. As Hitler’s I October
deadline for handing over the Sudetenland drew closer, L’udák leaders proposed a Polish-Slovak
union to forestall the Hungarian occupation of Slovakia in the event of Czechoslovakia’s
destruction^47.

The Munich Conference of Germany, Italy, France and Britain on 29 September signed away
Czechoslovakia to the German sphere of influence, forcing Prague to cede to Germany the Sudetenland
-Czechoslovakia’s frontier territories with Germany and her military fortress line - leaving
Czechoslovakia unprotected and in Hitler’s grasp. On 6 October, Slovakia’s centrist parties
capitulated to the Slovak autonomists and embraced the Whitsun Programme as their own, informing
the new Syrový Government in Prague^48 that all Slovak parties now supported Slovak autonomy. The
Czechs conceded without debate, besieged by the loss of the Sudetenland and assailed by Hungarian
and Polish territorial demands^49. A nominally ‘federalist’ Second Czecho-Slovak Republic was
established on the same day.

Slovakia’s sudden autonomy meant a fundamental shift in regime under a now extremist-ridden HSPP,
led since Hlinka’s death by Dr Jozef Tiso. Slovak elections were held from which the Communists and
Social Democrats were excluded, and all other parties were merged with the L’udáks. Independent
associations such as trade unions were swiftly brought under HSPP authority. Tiso meanwhile sought
to hold off the independence so desired by the L’udák radicals so as to try to consolidate a
measure of economic self-sufficiency^50. The Czechs’ response, military intervention, the
suspension of Tiso’s government and the introduction of martial law in Slovakia, only hastened the
fatal blow from Germany. Tiso was presented with a German ultimatum: Slovakia could assert full
independence or suffer Hungary being given a free hand in her former territory. Slovakia duly
declared itself independent on 14 March 1939 - becoming, in effect, a Nazi puppet state. On the
15th, the Slovaks requested Hitler’s ‘protection’, and Germany annexed what remained of the Czech
lands, establishing the Reich’s ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’^5^1.

Slovakia’s autonomy, won in 1938 and completed in March 1939, stunned Czechs as a betrayal of
Czechoslovakia and of the democratic principles that had flown about the masthead of the new state
in 1918. This was a feeling shared by many Slovaks. Though the true level of public support for the
HSPP is ultimately hard to judge, there is little evidence that there was a Slovak majority who
preferred the resolution of national differences by the dismemberment of the state, let alone the
crushing of Czechoslovakia by German forces dictating the installation of Nazism. The early
enthusiasm of the Catholic majority in Slovakia should not be interpreted simplistically. As others
have explored in great depth, support for the new regime can be attributed either to the perception
that Slovakia had finally seized its fate into its own hands or to a genuine hostility to all
aspects of the First Republic. There is evidence to support both interpretations^52, but not to
resolve the issue.


FIRST REPUBLIC - DOOMED TO FAIL?


In the long term the apparent betrayal of the First Republic produced powerful national
stereotypes. Masaryk’s frequently overbearing presidential influence had been directed toward
fostering progressive and ‘state-building’ parties whose priority would be ‘state’, rather than
religious, ethnic or even party, interests. The priorities of the Slovak L’udáks had always
represented an attack on the Masarykian philosophy as such. Tiso’s brand of clerico-fascism
provided Czechoslovak history with evidence of Slovak disloyalty and difference, but also of a
latent, ‘demonic’ Slovak nationalism. Subsequently, Czechs have rarely failed to allude to the
‘liberal’ state’s betrayal at moments of Czech-Slovak tension, and for many years afterwards they
clearly expected Slovak acts of atonement and contrition.

For many Slovaks the events of 1938-9 only exacerbated Slovakia’s already overlooked frustrations
with the inequalities of Czech rule. The failure to grant Slovaks significant autonomy throughout
the First Republic had marked Masaryk’s establishment notion of ‘Czechoslovakia’, with an
irreducible defect for Slovak pride. Many Slovaks had increasingly felt that Slovakia had been
co-opted into a notion of ‘Czechoslovak’ identity only to safeguard the stability of a
Czech-dominated state. This interpretation grew once the rewards accruing to Slovakia for its
Czechoslovak status were seen to be inadequate, albeit for different reasons in different quarters.
The logic of the state’s built-in flaw and the reasoning to which Czechs had recourse between 1918
and 1938 were nevertheless powerful; granting Slovak aspirations to administrative autonomy could
trigger irredentist claims by both Germans and Hungarians^53.

To complicate matters further the ‘Slovak question’ in the First Republic had been ‘triangular’,
i.e. not simply between Czechs and Slovaks as homogeneous opponents but between Czechs, Slovak
autonomists and Slovak integrationists^54. This triangular relationship would persist, with some
variations, after the Second World War and until the state’s demise in 1992. The integrationist
first generation of ‘Czechoslovakists’ within Slovakia (among them the bulk of Slovakia’s young
Protestant intellectuals) had clearly believed that Slovakia could only benefit from the
modernising and Westernising influence of the Czech territories and should adopt a suitably
loyalist attitude. From the beginning, however, the Czechoslovak project was a hostage to the
fortunes of its Slovak population, predominantly Catholic and agrarian as that population for the
moment remained: with hindsight, an unlikely seedbed for the visions of progressive, Westernising,
and secular intellectuals.

Demographic developments, moreover, worked against assimilation into a homogeneous Czechoslovak
identity. The Slovak population had grown rapidly after 1918 through the combined effects of an
increase in the Slovak birthrate, a decline in emigration and the re-Slovakisation of the
previously Magyarised population. The 1921 census revealed the sweeping away of the apparent
Hungarian majority in many Slovak cities. Combined with a continuing process of urbanisation,
concentrated in Bratislava and Kosice^55, and a comprehensive improvement in the entire education
structure within Slovakia, conditions had turned to favour those who wished to distinguish the
Slovak national identity as sustainable and as distinct from the Czech.

Had the fate of Chechoslovakia been sealed from, the start by the mis-equation of its
minorities?^56 It is a seductive explanation. The combined imperatives facing Czechoslovakia in
1918 suggest a state besieged, To begin with, Slovak goodwill appeared considerable. The evidence
is that the coexistence with and the assistance of the Czechs was initially welcomed by most
Slovaks as the realisation of an ethnically natural, economically beneficial, non-assimilationist
and relatively non-centralising Slavic state. In these early years Bratislava became the
headquarters of new and resuscitated parties, newspapers, home to a national university and other
diverse cultural and educational institutions, able to function with relative freedom^57 and to
bear the marks of a capital city. Above all, in terms of its own cultural security, Slovakia won
formal demarcation as a distinct territory - for which many Slovaks were undoubtedly grateful. On
the down side, the weakness of the Slovak element in Czech collective awareness turned out to be
critical.

The term Czechoslovak had become a rich source of contention almost immediately after the states
formation: the emergence of the new state in October 1918 was not accompanied by a clear
delineation of what the term Czechoslovak meant. Some persons thought it descriptive, others saw it
as prescriptive. Some thought it was related to politics, while others cast it solely into the
ideological sphere. There was disagreement whether its significance was primarily internal or
external. By 1938, the Czechoslovak concept was beginning to give way to recognition of distinct
Czech and Slovak nations . . .^58 As the journalist Ferdinand Peroutka put it at the time, how
could Slovaks not be antagonised when there did not exist a Czechoslovak nation. How else could one
refer to it other than as a demand?^59 The development of national stereotypes and grievances was
critical in the demise of the First Republic, but it remained equally the case that the First
Republic had been denied any attempt at the constitutional arrangements to which multi-ethnic
states may typically, and often successfully, resort. The Czechs discovered the strength of Slovak
national identity in the direst geopolitical circumstances imaginable, and there was no hope of
remedy when, in Churchills memorable phrase, the whole equilibrium of Europe [had] been
deranged.^60




                                               NOTES


1.   The Hungarian territory of Ruthema (Sub-Carpathian Ruthema) eventually also accrued to
Czechoslovakia as an autonomous region, Czechoslovakia seeming the least difficult choice. Ruthenia
was administered by a Governor appointed by the Czechoslovak President and, though promised a
separate civil administration for 1922, this was still not established when the Czechoslovak
Republic fell in 1938. See Seton-Watson (1965), p. 324.

2.   Pryor (1973), p. 190,

3.   The Serb Orthodox Church acted as a bulwark against Magyar assimilation of Serbs culturally.
Moreover, after 1878 an independent Serbia acted as a focus for Serbian identity, just as after
1859 the independent Kingdom of Romania encouraged an independent, indeed Irredentist, Romanian
identity Macartney (1968), p. 730.

4.   Between 1910 and 1920 Bohemian Catholics began to leave the church in droves, perceiving the
Catholic hierarchy to be an instrument of Habsburg oppression. Equally, anti-Magyar Slovak
intellectuals who had sought refuge in the Czech education system tended to be from Protestant
backgrounds precisely because their Protestantism had rendered them relatively immune to
Magyarisation. Leff (1988), p. 19.

5.   Seton-Watson (1965), p. 13.

6.   In 1526 the Czech Diet elected Ferdinand I, a Habsburg, to the throne. The Czech nobility
sought the strength of the established pan-European family as a way of reinvigorating the Czech
kingdom. Ferdinand, however, proved so strong as to secure the succession of his descendants.
Thereafter ‘the Czech Diet ceased to elect kings and, instead, accepted them.’ Bradley (1971), p.
68.

7.   Mason (1997), p. 13.

8.   Skilling (1994), p. 79.

9.   Connor (1994), p. 212.

10.The First Republic embarked on the interwar period with some three million Germans and
three-quarters of a million Magyars - in a population of 13,600,000. By 1930 Czechs constituted
49.9 per cent of the total population; Germans 21.9 per cent; Slovaks 15.9 per cent; Hungarians 4.7
per cent; Ukrainians, Ruthenians and Russians 3.7 per cent; Jews 1.3 per cent and Poles 0.6 per
cent: Prucha (1995), p.45.

11.Bartlova (1995), p. 163.

12.Skilling (1994), p. 71.

13.Johnson (1985), p. 53.

14.The Slovak National Council was viewed domestically as the representative forum of Slovak
political feeling, having been reconstituted in May 1918 by the Slovak People’s Party, the Social
Democrats and the Slovak National Party.

15.There existed a popular Czech notion that Slovak existed only as a backward form of Czech, which
would soon dissolve as Slovak society passed through the modernisation already completed by Czech
society, Johnson (1985), pp. 52-3.

16.Beneš (1973), pp. 73-4.

17.It should be remembered that these were chaotic postwar times. Bratislava was not occupied until
4 January 1919 and border security between Slovakia and Hungary was not achieved until August and
the collapse of the five-month-old Hungarian Bolshevik regime under Béla Kun, a situation not fully
stabilised until the Treaty of Trianon of 4 June 1920. Seton-Watson (1965), pp. 322-4.

18.The Cleveland Accord had already been swept aside. It was a joint declaration by émigré
representatives of the Slovak League and the Czech National Association, calling for an independent
federated Czechoslovak state. The Accord provided for Slovak autonomy to the extent of its own
financial and political administrations and total cultural freedom. As Johnson points out, the
significance of the document was that the American Slovaks could claim to represent the Slovak
cause in northern Hungary, effectively silenced by the war. Johnson (1985). p. 47.

19.Jelinek (1983), p. 5.

20.T. G. Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations 1914-1918 (London: George Alien
& Unwin, 1927), p. 208.

21.Seton-Watson (1965), p. 334.

22.Masaryk, op. cit., p. 209.

23.Mamatey (1973), p. 9.

24.Hlinka agitated for the adoption of the Agreement, making his way to Pans to lobby at the Peace
Conference. He was arrested on his return and, untried, was only allowed to return to Slovakia
after his election to the Prague Parliament in 1920: Kirschbaum (1983), p. 165.

25.Leff (1988),p. 21.

26.The works of Masaryk greatly influenced and shaped the anti-Habsburg feeling of many Slovak
students in Prague during the 1890s. The newspaper Hlas (Voice) was a mouthpiece of the liberal
democrats among the progressive student clubs advocating closer Czech Slovak cooperation on the
basis of their common roots

27.The Council acted as temporary government before the first sitting of the Czechoslovak National
Assembly. Bartlova (1995), p. 170.

28.Before the first elections in 1920 the Czechoslovak National Council apportioned mandates among
existing parties according to their results in the last election to the (Habsburg) Reichsrat, held
under universal suffrage. This method could not be applied to Slovakia because of the distorting
Hungarian franchise, which had left Slovakia with only three deputies. The Czechoslovak National
Council therefore, acting on Šrobár’s advice, had nominated forty-one leading Slovaks, to whom a
further fourteen were soon added. This was later criticised, though at the time, according to
Seton-Watson, ‘it was universally accepted as a graceful compliment’: Seton-Watson (1965), p. 317.

29.Bartlová (1995), p. 171.

30.Jelinek(1976),p. 5.

31.Some 70.89 per cent of Slovaks were Roman Catholic and 6.46 Greek Catholic in 1921: Johnson
(1985), p. 27.

32.In the first years of the Republic Slovakia lacked sufficiently educated and politically
reliable people to assure fair representation in the prestigious civil service - a legacy of
Hungarian rule. By the time the reformed Slovak education system had produced large numbers of
competent candidates in the Republic’s second decade, however, they too found themselves unable to
penetrate into the central administration. This persistent discrimination caused tension amongst
Slovakia’s educated classes, newly swelled with Catholics as these classes were. Some Czech
politicians interpreted this frustration as rank ingratitude for the comprehensive new
‘Czechoslovak’ education system that had so elevated them, an appraisal which hardly helped
matters. As late as 1938, a head count of all those employed in the ministries, together with the
office of the president and executive council, totalled 10,825 positions, of which a staggering 123
were occupied by Slovaks; see Bartlova (1995), p. 173.

33.Budování státu Volume 11:1227: in Kirschbaum (1983), p. 161.

34.Seton-Watson (1965), p, 917.

35.Benes (1973), p. 83.

36.Eduard Beneš’s National Socialists, it should be noted, were not Nazis but non-Marxist radicals
with a lower-middle and working-class constituency. This secular party was beleaguered by factional
infighting and never gained a strong foothold in Slovakia; see Leff (1988), p. 57.

37.Seton-Watson (1965), p. 330.

38.The 1927 law gave Slovakia a Provincial President with wide powers and an elected Provincial
Assembly. The latter was, however, a throwback to Hungarian practices in that it consisted of
two-thirds elected representatives and one-third selected directly by the civil service (ibid., p.
335). This latter third favoured central administration and keeping in line with central government
policies, a factor exposing it to the HSPP’s dissatisfaction, see Bartlová (1995), p. 174.

39.In 1928 Hlinka’s adviser, Dr Vojtech Tuka, repeated in the Hlinka Party’s paper Slovak a
long-established myth that there existed a potential legal vacuum as a result of a secret clause in
the 1918 Martin Declaration stipulating the right of Slovaks, after ten years, to reconsider their
decision to enter into a political union with the Czechs. He insisted that if autonomy was not
granted by 31 October 1928, Slovakia might go its own way. Tuka was tried for treason as a
Hungarian spy and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment (Seton-Watson (1965), p. 311). It was
only after the war that Czechoslovak historians were able to produce unequivocal evidence proving
Tuka’s guilt, see Jelinek (1976), p. 10. Released from prison in 1938, Tuka would become Prime
Minister of the clerico-fascist Slovak state from March 1939 to September 1944, and clearly and
mstrumentally pro-Nazi.

40.In-fighting and Comintern dictates led the Communist Party at the time to engage in a leadership
purge significant to postwar developments. The new elite centred on a Stalinist cadre around
Klement Gottwald; ‘young fanatics, whose greatest qualification was their willingness to accept
Moscow’s orders unconditionally’. At the end of the 1920s the Party presented the vision of a
‘Soviet Slovakia’ and while highlighting the differences between the Party and the Populists,
Gottwald clearly played on L’udák ground. Mere autonomy, said the Communists, would only subject
the Slovak worker to the Slovak bourgeoisie. Despite this Slovakia’s branch of the Communist Party
remained notoriously short of card-carrying members and functionaries during the Great Depression,
see Jelinek (1983), pp. 17-25.

41.Jelinek (1976), p. 10.

42.See Johnson (1985), p. 51.

43.Mamatey (1973), p. 157.

44.When Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933 that other marginalized political group, the
Communist Party, comprehended at last the true scale of the Nazi threat. Turning from its
interminable attacks against the Social Democrats, the Party shifted its priorities to support the
‘bourgeois state’ and voted for the first time in favour of parts of the state budget. Following
Masaryk’s resignation in 1935, the Communists voted for Eduard Beneš (as did the L’udáks) rather
than propose a candidate of their own. The slogan ‘Soviet Slovakia’ disappeared (Jelinek, ibid., p.
27), leaving the Hlinka party again alone in calling for Slovak autonomy, but this time with a new
resonance.

45.The Communist Party faced tremendous difficulties by this time: they had to demand pro-Slovak
changes, for which they were accused of pro-L’udák behaviour. The minorities meanwhile rejected the
Communists’ brushing aside of self-determination and their apparent born-again Czechoslovakism. As
Jelinek concludes, ‘Communism was in retreat in the last years of the Republic’: Jelinek (1976), p.
3.

46.ibid., pp. 11-16.

47.See Mamatey (1973), p. 164.

48.In the confusion during September, Hodža’s government had resigned and President Eduard Beneš
appointed a cabinet of experts, led by General Jan Syrový, to replace it.

49.Prochazka (1973), p. 260.

50.The Czech historian Jan Rychlík has described this as a process of ‘constructing Slovakia’s
independence paid for by the Czech taxpayer’, a common Czech theme after 1989; see Rychlík (1995)
(1995), p. 182.

51.See Mamatey (1973), p. 167.

52.See Leff on this issue (1988), p. 90.

53.The Hungarians and Germans rejected the invitation to participate in the pre-192o ‘Revolutionary
National Assembly’ which wrote the 1920 constitution; see Johnson (1985), p. 60. They boycotted the
Parliament, hoping for reunion with Hungary and Austria respectively. When they eventually entered
the legislature they were, of course, confronted by laws and principles established by Czechs and
Slovaks.

54.For an in-depth discussion, see Leff (1988), pp. 193-211.

55.See Johnson (1985), p. 84

56.It is equally thought-provoking to ask whether the expulsion of ethnic Germans after the Second
World War effectively removed all reason for the existence of Czechoslovakia.

57.See Bartlová (1995), p. 169.

58.Johnson (1985), p. 50.

59.Ferdinand Peroutka, Budování státu Volume I, p. 213, in Kirschbaum (1983), p. 170.

60.Churchill, The Second World War: The Gathering Storm, Volume I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1948), p. 294.



In: Innes, Abby (2001), Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye, Yale University Press, New Haveh, pp.
1-16