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 Germans and on November 12 declared Austria “a constitutent part of the German Republic.” Vienna thus had the will but lacked the power to help the Sudeten Germans avoid incorporation into Czechoslovakia.
For the German government itself, on the other hand, the fate of the Sudeten Germans, who had not belonged to the Bismarckian-Wilhelminian empire, had at this moment of defeat and revolution a relatively low priority. Hence, it gave them no serious support when Czech Legion troops, newly returned home from France and Italy, proceeded to occupy the German-populated areas and thus reassert the territorial integrity of the historic Bohemian lands during the next weeks. The provincial capitals of “Deutschböhmen” and “Sudetenland” fell to the Czechs on December 16 and 18, respectively, and all remaining localities by Christmas. The absence at this time of military resistance by the local Germans to this Czech occupation was a function not only of weakness but also of confidence that the Allied Powers at the peace conference would order plebiscites whose results would prove decisive. Three months later, when it was clear that such expectations were erroneous, the local Germans belatedly staged massive protest demonstrations, with scattered marches on gendarmerie barracks, on March 4, 1919, the day of the opening of the new Austrian National Assembly in whose election they had not been allowed to participate by the triumphant Czech authorities. In the course of dispersing them, fifty-two Germans were killed and eighty-four wounded by the Czech gendarmes and troops.
For the Czechs, the principle of the integrity of the historic Bohemian-Moravian frontiers was not negotiable. They refused to acknowledge the self-declared German provincial governments within these frontiers. Echoing the celebrated words of Prince Windischgrätz to the Hungarians in 1848, the Czech minister Alois Rasin now curtly informed the deputy chief of the “Deutschböhmen” movement, Josef Seliger, that “I don’t negotiate with rebels.” On December 22, 1918, two days after his return to the country from his wartime endeavors in the West and in Russia and one day after his installation as Czechoslovakia’s first president, Masaryk, in a solemn address to the National Assembly at the ancient Prague Hradčany (Royal Castle), insisted that the German-populated areas would, come what may, remain in the new state. Inviting the Germans to recognize this inevitable fact and to help build the new state, Masaryk reminded them of their one-time status as “immigrants and colonists.” Though historically valid, this expression, which was uttered rather vehemently, was scarcely
