rights within the new democratic republic, and Masaryk sought to soften it by visiting the Prague German Theater the next day where he spoke soothingly of full equality for all nationalities in Czechoslovakia.
At Paris, meanwhile, concerned lest the German demands for self-determination make a positive impression on the peace conference in general and on the American delegation in particular, the new Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Beneš, was promising that it was his government’s intention “to make of the Czecho-Slovak Republic a sort of Switzerland, taking into consideration, of course, the special conditions of Bohemia.”3 He thereby, alas, gave later German propagandists, who habitually cited only the first clause of this statement, ammunition with which they would attempt to shame Czechoslovakia before the world when Hitler launched his pre-Munich propaganda offensive against her in the 1930s. At Paris in 1919 Beneš had also argued that a strong Czechoslovakia within her historic western borders not only would be an element of stability in the midst of anarchy, but also would simultaneously serve as a bulwark against both the Bolshevik tide rolling in from the east and the German Drang toward the east—the historic borders being happily also strategically strong and economically rational ones. The American delegation was initially unimpressed, the British reserved; the French, however, were at that time enthusiastic, and as they were the best organized and most purposeful of the Great Power delegations, they carried the day for Beneš and the Czechs.
To appreciate fully how their current discomfiture and impotence struck the Sudeten Germans, how allusions to them as “colonists,” “immigrants,” “rebels” enraged them, one must bear in mind that they were traditionally the most Pan-Germanist of all the Germans of the Habsburg Empire, far surpassing in nationalistic intensity, for example, those of the Austrian Alpine provinces proper. They regarded themselves as historically conditioned and destined to rule over the inferior Czechs in Bohemia, to control the imperial government in Vienna, and, in alliance with the Reich Germans to the north, to organize all Central Europe against the West and the Slavs. During the Great War they had expended their blood and their treasure with desperate abandon in the cause of Germandom, sustaining casualties that were proportionately greater than those of any other group in the Habsburg Empire, and indeed, in the German Empire as well.4 Now, overnight, their dream was shattered, and their first response was an instinctive refusal to live as a minority in a land where they had once held a privileged status. Sudeten German Social Democrats were, if anything, initially even more vehement in their insistence on seceding into a Greater Germany than were the bourgeois nationalists, for to them this option bore the further ideological legitimacy of the Marxist radical German democratic vision of 1848. As late as June, 1919, the Social Democrats called a general strike in protest against the Treaty of St. Germain which officially and definitively confirmed the Sudeten lands to Czechoslovakia.
As time passed, the Germans reluctantly took stock of the new situation. Always politically energetic and shrewd, they now insisted that, the bulk of their territories having been assigned to Czechoslovakia, any partial arrangements that would lower their numbers and lessen their political weight within this state (for example, the rumored cession by Czechoslovakia of the extreme western Egerland district to Germany or other minor border rectifications) were not permissible. They now recalled that, long before they had become Pan-Germans, they had been “Böhmer”—provincial German patriots characterized by a particularly tenacious and parochial sense of identity with their land and with each other.5 Finally, their economic elite sobered and bethought itself of the unwelcome consequences should it have to compete with the German Reich’s industry in a Greater German market unprotected by Bohemian tariffs. Furthermore, as a “victor” state, Czechoslovakia, in contrast to Germany and Austria, escaped heavy reparations obligations. More dramatically, the Sudeten German elite could draw an instructive contrast in the spring and summer of 1919 between the reassuringly bourgeois government of Prague and the alarmingly “red” ones of Vienna, Munich, and Berlin. This comparison lost nothing in vividness with the great inflation and political turmoil of 1923 in Germany and Austria. The Sudeten Germans now decided to bide their time, meanwhile fighting tenaciously for their rights, privileges, and powers within a Czechoslovakia whose western half had been restored to its historic frontiers.
When it came to delimiting the borders of the eastern half of the new state, the provinces of Slovakia and Ruthenia, the arguments were reversed: history and economic factors were the weapons of the Hungarians, and it was the Czechs who now turned to the theory of national self-determination. Another difference is that the Hungarians were initially willing and able to offer much more serious military resistance to the Czechs than were the Germans and Austrians.
Among the Slovaks, the Protestant minority (16 percent) had traditionally felt close to the Czechs, and its fraternal sentiments had been reinforced since the end of the nineteenth century by the influence of Masaryk’s western-oriented, as contrasted to Pan-Slavic, Czecho-Slovak ideology, whose main Slovak organ was the revue Hlas (Voice). The first serious Czech political claims to Slovakia came during World War I. Masaryk’s group articulated them in the Western capitals, and, in an address of May 30, 1917, to the new Habsburg emperor Charles, the Czech delegation to the Vienna Reichsrat demanded a federal reorganization of his entire realm, that would unite the Czech and Slovak-populated lands at the expense of millennial Hungary. The political lead was taken by the Czechs since the Slovaks were politically impotent in old Hungary, both in the gerrymandered central parliament at Budapest as well as in the local administration. In 1910, for example, there were only 184 Slovak speakers out of 3,683 judicial functionaries in the Slovak-populated counties of northern Hungary, and only 164 Slovaks out of the other 6,185 civil servants. Furthermore, since the Ausgleich of 1867 the Hungarian rulers had imposed on the Slovaks a rigorous policy of linguistic and cultural assimilation (but not racial exclusion) that had by the outbreak of World War I achieved such success among the nonpeasant strata of the Slovak population as to deprive it of much of its potential national elite.
At the postwar Paris Peace Conference, Beneš skillfully and indefatigably presented the Czech—or Czechoslovak—case in general and in detail. He argued that Czechs and Slovaks were two branches of the same nation, that the Slovaks wanted separation from Hungary and affiliation with the Czechs in a new state, and, finally, switching back from ethnic and political to strategic and economic criteria, that the new border should be drawn far enough south to incorporate significant parts of the rich plains and a generous stretch of Danubian shoreline into the new Czechoslovakia. Encouraged by a pro-Czechoslovak declaration issued on October 30, 1918, by about one hundred Slovak intellectuals and politicians gathered at Turčiansky Svätý Martin (Thurócz Szent-Martón), Beneš even urged the Czech authorities in Prague to “assist” his arguments by confronting the peace conference with a fait accompli in the form of military occupation of the Slovak territories being claimed. Twice, however—in November, 1918, and in May-June, 1919—the resilient Hungarians were able to force back the Czech contingents attempting to implement this strategy, and eventually it was to be French diplomatic endorsement in Paris rather than military performance locally that won the day for the Czechoslovak argument.
As in the Sudeten German case, so here, too, among the roughly seven hundred thousand Magyars who were now incorporated together with the Slovaks into the new Czechoslovakia, it was the Social Democratic workers who initially resisted most vigorously. The society and governments of rump Hungary were never reconciled to the loss of the Slovak-populated northern counties of their historic kingdom and remained doggedly determined throughout the interwar era to recover them and the neighboring Ruthenian-populated counties to the east. As political relations between Czechs and Slovaks also soon soured, the Slovak link of the general peace settlement of 1919 proved to be a source of chronic friction.
The easternmost province of interwar Czechoslovakia, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, or the Carpatho-Ukraine, had held no political interest for the Czechs as long as Russia remained in the war and was regarded by them as having primary claims of cultural wardship over this retarded but strategically important Slav-inhabited corner of old Hungary. At war’s outbreak Ruthenia was populated by approximately six hundred thousand people, of whom two-thirds were miserably poor peasants and mountaineers
