National Conflict in Czechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987
318
National Conflict in Czechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987
318Hardcover
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Overview
Czechoslovakia's history is virtually a museum for the major European political alternatives of the twentieth century, and this book is an experiment in applying the comparative methodology of political science not to cross-national studies but to the analysis of a single country over time. The author organizes consideration of policy making on the Slovak national question around three component elements and their impact on effective problem solving: the institutional structure of the pre-Munich republic and the postwar socialist state, leadership values and premises relevant to the disposition of the national question, and patterns of Czech and Slovak leadership interaction.
Originally published in 1988.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691635217 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #882 |
| Pages: | 318 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
National Conflict in Czechoslovakia
The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987
By Carol Skalnik Leff
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07768-0
CHAPTER 1
The Historical Preconditions for National Conflict: Slovakia and the Czech Lands Before 1918
The construction of the state of Czechoslovakia after World War I occurred under conditions that stamped all future patterns of ethnic relations. In the first place, Czechoslovakia shared with other new East European states a tempered artificiality. Emerging from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire, its major components, the Czech lands and Slovakia, had never experienced common administration, still less common self-government. Slovakia was carved from the integral territory of the Hungarian crown; within the empire there had been no identifiable political entity one could designate as Slovakia. The Kingdom of Bohemia and the Margravate of Moravia, on the other hand, fell within the Austrian half of the dual monarchy; both before and after the formal subdivision of the empire in 1867, the Czech lands, while retaining a distinct identity, were closely tied to the German sector. Thus, the lines of authority and the economic matrix linked the Czech lands and Slovakia each with a different colonial metropolis, Vienna and Budapest, respectively. The abrupt juxtaposition of two such previously discrete units, while by no means arbitrary, inevitably sent shock waves through the new, improbably elongated state and severely taxed the adjustment capacities of its uncertain and even astonished citizenry.
Some kind of identity had to be forged, some kind of understanding had to be reached, as to how Czechoslovakia was to be defined. The process differed from that of West European states which grew into nationhood prior to, or in consonance with, the upsurge of nineteenth-century nationalism. And again it differed from anticolonial liberation struggles later in the twentieth century, in that the geographical demarcation of those emergent states, however arbitrarily defined by conquest, occurred under a common overlord in the colonial period and was cemented by a common set of institutions. In Czechoslovakia, however, the juxtaposition of national groups coincided with the establishment of the state; the two sets of questions raised had to be solved simultaneously.
If the abruptness with which Czechs and Slovaks faced each other was a major factor in the stresses of their relationship, a second and complementary source of tension lay in the structure of the two conjoined societies. In the 1920s, Czechoslovakia was already among the ten most industrialized countries in the world, a circumstance that rested on averaging out a Western industrial economy in the Czech lands with a largely peasant culture in Slovakia. Although this characterization is an oversimplification, it approximates reality closely enough to serve as a point of departure. No political conflict can be divorced from its social, economic, and historical roots without fatal damage to its complexity. For the Czechs and Slovaks, the suddenness of the union and the structural dissimilarities underline the importance of historical context; in this chapter, I will attempt to provide this historical perspective with a survey of the diversity out of which state leadership evolved to contain the tensions of a disparate inheritance.
Socioeconomic Conditions
Both the Czech lands and Slovakia were key economic units in the empire. Bohemia and Moravia were the site of nearly three-quarters of Austria's industry; less well recognized is that Hungarian economic policy had made Slovakia the most industrially developed sector of its territory. Jointly, the two regions, with only 27 percent of the empire's population, employed 43.3 percent of its industrial labor force, including 53 percent of those engaged in mining, 72 percent in textiles, and 57 percent in building materials. Although both had been important in their respective economic spheres, the economic gap between them was still immense. By the time of the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic, Bohemia and Moravia were no longer agrarian economies in any sense, but Slovakia could clearly be placed in that category. Table 1-1 offers a more precise picture of the two economies as they attained statehood. The differences in the size of the agrarian and industrial sectors are self-evident. Farming, forestry, and fishing engaged nearly twice the proportion of people in Slovakia as in the Czech lands, while industrial employment was virtually a mirror image. Even these sharp distinctions provide only a rough index of the difference in social and economic structure, however, as they shed little light on the quality of economic organization and on the ethnic occupational distribution.
Organizationally, the Czech lands functioned as an industrial market economy by 1918. On a base of primary goods processing and agricultural industry, heavy industry had begun to develop in the second half of the nineteenth century. Labor was highly organized; industry was locked into the mold of finance capitalism that had prompted Marxist attention. This elaborated economic structure extended as well to an agrarian sector of increasingly commercial character. The Czech farmer could not properly be termed a peasant, for his economic horizons extended to the boundaries of Austrian territory, bolstered by an effective cooperative movement that had its roots in the mid-nineteenth century. Rural offspring were attracted in growing numbers to the city.
By contrast, in Slovakia, where development was truly launched only at the end of the nineteenth century, the economy was far less integrated, with a modern industrial enclave grafted onto more traditional economic forms. Although a cosmopolitan but alien landed aristocracy continued to maintain a strong position, a substantial part of the agrarian sector still revolved around subsistence agriculture and the local village market. Industry, particularly metallurgy, was heavily subsidized and protected, though food processing enterprises were reasonably efficient. One could properly consider Slovakia a dual economy, typical of late-modernizing nations.
The data in table 1-1 obscure the ethnic composition of the work force. To say that a sizable part of the empire's industrial holdings rested on Czech and Slovak territory is not to say that it was concentrated in Czech and Slovak hands; on the contrary, these holdings were of ten controlled by non-Slav capital: German, Hungarian, and Jewish. The financial history of Czechoslovakia in the 1920s is in no small measure a chronicle of Czech efforts to buy out these non-Slav interests, and thus effectively to "Czechize" the foreign-linked enterprises and banking system. Such distinctions are also important in evaluating the occupational structure of the new country. As table 1-2 illustrates, Czechs and Slovaks were more heavily represented in the agrarian sector than was the non-Slav population. The Czech profile, however, was far closer to the German than was the Slovak to that of its resident German and Hungarian minorities. While the rate of Czech engagement in public services and the professions virtually equaled the German, for example, Slovak involvement in this area lagged well behind. Particularly striking in the Slovak territory, however, is the extent to which both Hungarians and Slovaks bowed to the Germans and the Jews in the field of industry and commerce. As a consequence of this skewed occupational profile, Hungarians and Germans in Slovakia were overrepresented in every job category save agriculture and menial labor; indeed, the Hungarians, with a third of the labor force, occupied two-thirds of the positions in transportation and three quarters of the professional and public service positions in Slovakia. In the Czech lands, the Czechs maintained a numerical superiority in every sector, rapidly surpassing a position of parity to monopolize the regional civil service. Thus, while Czechs were well-accustomed to the tasks of political and economic administration, the Slovak situation was far more tenuous. The occupational imbalances in Slovakia augured grave staffing difficulties for any new state, the nationalist equivalent of the "red or expert" dilemma of a later era, since Slovakia's most skilled human resources were potentially disaffected non-Slavs.
Underpinning the economic profile was a set of social and national factors that reinforced the discrepancies between the Czech and Slovak economies. Substantial ethnic diversity anchored non-Slav rule in both sections of the monarchy, as table 1-3 indicates.
In fact, the new Czechoslovak state was to be a chief legatee of a "multinational monarchy of multinational parts"; no successor state save Yugoslavia harbored so much national confusion. Most troublesome were the sizable German and Hungarian groupings, transformed overnight in 1918 from ruling nations to distrusted minorities. Indeed, these minorities had always been an irritant, as they translated "foreign rule" into domestic hegemony and were often more vigilant in opposing nationalist aspirations than were the rulers in either Vienna or Budapest. The minorities were distributed unevenly, with German strongholds along the north and west peripheries of Czechoslovakia and Hungarian concentration in the south and east of Slovakia. Under the empire, these concentrations encircled and diluted local Slav populations, but, more disconcerting, they threatened to surround the new republic with an unreliable population on its frontiers. Thus, Czechoslovakia's liberation from Austria-Hungary could by no means resolve the national tension that had simmered within it.
Within the framework of this general multinational dilemma, however, there were pronounced differences between the German-Czech and the Hungarian-Slovak relationships. Entering the twentieth century, the Austrian minorities increasingly adopted a standpat policy ("what is German remains German") which did not, and perhaps could not, block Czech penetration of major social positions and higher education. Even though the system maintained a disproportionate number of German schools, the establishment of a Czech university as well as the network of officially sanctioned Czech elementary and secondary institutions afforded access to social advancement without the relinquishment of national identity. The formal acceptance of Czech as a language of public transaction in 1880 further enhanced Czech opportunities. In a society responsive to industrial transformation, social mobility was possible for Czechs as well as Germans. Capitalizing on the openings permitted, Czech social structure became increasingly complex and differentiated.
This framework not only promoted atomistic individual gains, but accelerated autonomous institutional development as well: "The network of universities, gymnasia, theaters, newspapers magazines, publishing houses, bookstores, museums, orchestras, choral groups, artistic, scientific and professional clubs and associations — this network was the first institutional expression of wideranging, non-parochial cooperation among Czechs, the first element in their own, rather than the Hapsburg establishment."
The situation in Slovakia was rather different. There the Slovak class structure was sharply truncated. Educational opportunities were generally more limited than in the Czech lands, and the illiteracy rate was five to ten times higher. Educational opportunities in the generation preceding statehood appear to have been growing. Because of the absence of Slovak-language secondary and university institutions, there was, however, a price to be paid: socialization in a Magyar educational environment. Moreover, a Magyarized education was merely a prelude to career options equally premised on the sublimation of national ties. Magyar was the only official language of political, judicial, and administrative intercourse. Even a Slovak who acceded to the situational demands of this environment could not hope for advancement, however, if he stubbornly clung to a personal Slovak identity; that Slovak could only be a closet Panslav, all the more dangerous for his training. This mesh of social and cultural pressures had the effect of continuously decapitating the Slovak elite through the process of functional Magyarization, generally allowing for individual achievement only within the existing Magyar power structure. Although David W. Paul rightly points to a diversification of the Slovak nationalist elite in the industrializing decades immediately preceding independence, a clear difference remained between the levels of socioeconomic differentiation in the Czech lands and Slovakia.
The first Slovak census conducted under the new Czechoslovak Republic, and recent research into the educational preparation of the rising generation of Slovak students suggest the frequent absence of a clearly defined national identity at the mass level. Although the base for national consciousness had broadened somewhat since the earliest nationalist impulse, census respondents in 1920 were still prone to offer regionally or religiously defined self-identifications to the census-takers, or even such politically unappetizing national monstrosities as "Magyar-Slovak." Even those who spoke Slovak at home were apt to have little written facility with the language.
Equally enervating to Slovakia's development was the content of the pervasive Magyar value system. While German Austria was increasingly embourgeoisified, Hungary's elite harbored an aristocratic vision, even in the face of industrialization, which denigrated commerical and industrial pursuits, leaving them disproportionately in German and Jewish hands: "development by proxy." The fact of Magyarization, coupled with its elitist ethos, had a profound effect on the potential for leadership of a Slovak movement.
Historians have questioned just how effective and deep-rooted Magyarization could have been, in light of the relative facility with which Slovaks were wooed from Magyar identity after 1918. The query demands a specification of what Magyarization indeed accomplished. It would not appear that it engendered a fervent Magyar patriotism. Svetoii is probably closer to the truth when he argues that Magyarization operated as a centrifugal force generating "national deconcentration, the creation of a "mass of individuals, differentiated by class, without group consciousness of a feeling of national belonging." As a positive commitment, it may have foundered, but as a mechanism of behavioral constraint it was more successful. To channel erstwhile Slovaks into activities supportive of the state, to seal them off from a sense of kinship with the Slovak peasantry in a more cosmopolitan world, to siphon off key human resources in any incipient national movement, these functions Magyarization could perform. It was a useful tool for a governing nation insistent on its own unity in the battle against Vienna. But even as it succeeded in imposing these constraints, is it not obvious that such a process could not function outside of the system of sanctions and rewards a ruling elite could offer? In a new state, the denationalized Slovak might equally well serve a master in Prague, rediscovering just such of his ethnic background as would provide credentials to do so. A whole cadre of so-called neo-Slovaks was created in 1918.
Moreover, Magyarization sparked enduring counterforces in its own time. First of all, the recruitment and resocialization of a small number of Slovaks could only engender greater resentment and frustration among the vast majority. Slovaks who found no foothold on the Hungarian promotional ladder became doubly disenchanted as they pursued educations in Vienna or Prague and returned to fill marginal societal niches that of ten became launching points for national agitation. Then too, the Magyarization policy, however conditional in its effectiveness, was an all too visible reminder that Budapest was interested in the eventual extinction of the Slovak identity, the fear of which gave added impetus to the decision to escape Magyar dominance in 1918.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from National Conflict in Czechoslovakia by Carol Skalnik Leff. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- LIST OF TABLES, pg. ix
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xi
- Introduction, pg. 1
- PART I. THE EMERGENCE OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK STATE, pg. 9
- PART II. POLITICAL STRUCTURE AND NATIONAL CONFLICT, pg. 43
- PART III. THE ENGINEERING OF A STATE: THE FAILURE OF UNIFICATION, 1918-1968, pg. 129
- PART IV. LEADERSHIP INTERACTION AND NATIONAL CONFLICT, pg. 179
- PART V. FEDERALIZATION AND THE CZECH-SLOVAK RELATIONSHIP, pg. 241
- Index, pg. 299