East Central Europe between the Two World Wars. Joseph Rothschild

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      We shall now sketch the constitutional anatomy of interwar Czechoslovakia and scan the spectrum of political parties which fleshed it out. The constitution under whose terms the country’s variegated population was to be governed was drafted and approved by a self-appointed Constituent National Assembly consisting of 201 Czechs designated by the political parties in proportion to their relative strengths at the last imperial Austrian Reichsrat elections in 1911, and 55 (later 69) Slovaks coopted by these Czechs (the Slovak districts having been too disfranchised in old Hungary to make feasible a similar representative selection from the old Hungarian parliament). The state’s ethnic minorities were thus excluded (but also exluded themselves) from the constitution-making process, and when they finally did agree (and were permitted) to enter the political arena, they found themselves confronted with a series of institutional faits accomplis. Certain politically sophisticated Sudeten Germans had wished to end their original boycott of the newborn Czechoslovak state and enter the Constituent National Assembly promptly with the signing of the Treaty of St. Germain on September 10, 1919, in order to fight within it for such federalistic constitutional devices as cantonization and the concurrent veto by regions. But now the Czechs and Slovaks were determined that the constitution be shaped by themselves alone and as nearly unanimously among themselves as possible.

      After slightly more than a year of deliberations, during which a brief provisional constitution of November 13, 1918, had interim validity, this Czechoslovak goal was achieved with the adoption of the nation’s definitive constitution on February 29, 1920. Of the 155 roll-calls required to pass the Constitution’s various articles and clauses, 105 were unanimous and the remaining 50 saw the parties of the Left and Center defeat those of the Right, who, in any event, had almost certainly been overrepresented in this postwar body due to the decision to use the 1911 Austrian Reichsrat returns as the base.

      The Czechoslovak craving to achieve near-unanimity had been so general and the anxiety to shun the specters of red and/or white terror (which vividly haunted neighboring Hungary in 1919) so pervasive, that the final constitutional document must be regarded as an ideological compromise rather than as a victory of the Center and Left. One of the less inspired of its internal compromises was the decision to have a Senate of 150 seats and simultaneously to ensure that it would be largely a powerless reflection of the 300-member Chamber of Deputies. In time, senatorial office became a dignified pension for veteran party war horses. More impressive was the subtle compromise on the presidency: the president was to be elected, like the French one, by the two legislative houses sittingjointly as the National Assembly, but he was given considerable executive powers in keeping with the American and Weimar models. In its curbing of the agencies of direct and plebiscitary democracy, on the other hand, as well as in its overall parliamentary and centralistic bias, the Czechoslovak constitution was quite British. Finally, the wide powers that were officially assigned to the political parties and their executive committees clearly indicated the Austrian parentage of the Czechoslovak constitutional system.

      The combination of (a) compulsory universal adult voting in parliamentary elections, (b) “fixed-order” lists of candidates arranged by the respective parties within a general system of proportional representation, and (c) the rule, enforced by the Electoral Court, that a deputy or senator must vacate his seat on the demand of his party (since in Czechoslovak theory, the electorate’s mandate had been conferred on the party, not the candidate) added up to a formidable assignment of power to the several party leaderships. In their hands the general electorate as well as the parliamentary backbenches were politically and legally reduced to mere auxiliaries and dependents. The party leaders’ effective sovereignty was limited only by the extent to which they might chose to permit some free discussion in the secrecy of the parliamentary party clubrooms before committing themselves to particular positions in public debate. (Membership in a parliamentary party club was legally compulsory for every deputy and senator; independency was proscribed.) It must, of course, be conceded that, in view of the large number of political parties, the remarkable cohesion and stability of Czechoslovak coalition cabinets might not have been maintained without this rather drastic system of discipline. Thus, though this political efficiency of the coalition system conveyed prestige on the country’s parliamentary system, the fact that in order to achieve it the “real” business of politics was withdrawn from the public arena detracted therefrom. Furthermore, the craving and the need for compromise within the government coalitions resulted in ever-increasing encroachment by the cabinet as a whole on the separate departments, as regards administrative and personnel as well as policy matters. Here again the results were mixed: a desirable degree of coordination and unity of administration at the cost of slow and difficult procedure.

      The political stability of the cabinets should not be obscured by the fact that formally there were seventeen successive cabinets in the years 1918-38. Most of these were “arranged,” technical reshuffles. No coalition ever broke up except as a result of a deliberate decision on the part of the leaders who composed it, preparatory to new elections. And no vote of censure was ever passed, nor was any government-sponsored bill ever rejected.

      Czechoslovak politics crystallized around “ideological” parties, whereas Polish politics polarized toward “charismatic” personalities. Thanks to the country’s complicated ethnic, religious, and cultural structure, thanks also to its Austrian and Hungarian political inheritances, and thanks, finally, to its proportional electoral system, the number of parties tended to be large and any one party’s

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