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