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