East Central Europe between the Two World Wars. Joseph Rothschild

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