With the sharpening of the German danger in 1939, the government undertook conciliatory gestures toward its domestic foes. Its awareness of the strength of public feeling undoubtedly influenced its stubborn resistance to Hilter’s pressure. Per contra, the challenge of the semifascist Right, which was the most dynamic of the opposition parties, was handicapped by the fact that the regime was already nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian. But it was not totalitarian. Though badgered, the opposition parties operated legally, except for the Communists who were obliged to resort to the subterfuge of “fronts”; though harassed, the trade unions and press remained independent and active; outspoken enemies of the regime continued to teach at the universities and to publish their criticisms; the autonomy of the judiciary from the administration was preserved; and the administration, while rigid, was technically competent. Interwar Poland’s faults and weaknesses were many, and serious: the imprudent imbalance between frontiers and institutions, the alienation of the ethnic minorities, rural overpopulation and industrial backwardness, the political decline from the original semidemocracy to Piłsudski’s semidictatorship and then to his heirs’ spasmodic authoritarianism. But in no way did they justify her neighbors’ decision to inflict a fifth partition on her in September, 1939. With their heroic resistance in that campaign and under the next years of occupation, the Polish people demonstrated that they had overcome the most demoralizing error of the old commonwealth in its last century of decadence: the lack of a readiness to make personal or partisan sacrifices for the sake of the nation as a whole. In World War II Poland, in again fighting for her own freedom, was again fighting for Europe’s.
1. All statistics are from the official statistical yearbooks of the Main Bureau of Statistics of the Polish Republic (Główny Urzad Statystyczny Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej), entitled during the 1920s Rocznik Statystyki and in the 1930s Mały Rocznik Statystyczny.
2. Joseph Rothschild, Piłsudski’s Coup d’Etat (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), chs. 4-8.
3. It would be possible, but awkward, to demonstrate the generalization statistically as the two censuses of 1921 and 1931 were not strictly comparable in this regard: the first registered all land by various size-categories, the second only agricultural land; the size-categories were also slightly altered from the one census to the other; finally, the second census was taken only in the middle, rather than at the close, of the interwar era. Cf. Mieczysław Mieszczankowski, Struktura Agrarna Polski Miȩdzywojennej (Warsaw: PWN, 1960), chs. 1, 2, and 10.
4. Cf. P. N. Rosenstein-Rodan, “Agricultural Surplus Population in Eastern and South Eastern Europe,” summarized by N. Spulber, The Economics of Communist Eastern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1957), p. 276, versus Wilbert E. Moore, Economic Demography of Eastern and Southern Europe (Geneva: League of Nations, 1945), p. 64.
· 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.