parties competed and seventeen achieved parliamentary representation; the equivalent figures for the remaining three general elections of the interwar period were, respectively, twenty-nine and sixteen in 1925, nineteen and sixteen in 1929, and sixteen and fourteen in 1935. This enumeration does not even include the many mini-parties that, in the poorer regions such as Ruthenia, either did not enter slates for elections or rode “piggy-back” on the lists of others. The balance, furthermore, among those parties that achieved parliamentary representation in these four elections was such that a minimal numerical majority (quite apart from the question of a politically feasible and effectively working majority) required the cooperation of no less than five parties. The one exception was a brief period after the 1920 elections, when four would have been theoretically adequate. No party ever amassed more than a fourth of the popular vote. The profiles of the more important parties follow. The Czech and Slovak ones are discussed first, then those of the ethnic minorities; the spectrum in each case proceeds from Right to Left.
A. CZECH AND SLOVAK PARTIES
1. The “oldest” Czech political party in terms of ideological pedigree, if not of organization, was the National Democratic Party, heir to the Young Czech movement of the nineteenth century to which it added some smaller and later affiliates. It was nationalistic to the point of being chauvinistic, panslavist, conservative, and anticlerical,8 and it moved steadily toward the Right throughout the interwar period, putting forward a joint slate with the Czech fascists in the 1935 elections. Supported by the upper bourgeois commercial and industrial strata as well as by the nationalistic segment of the intelligentsia, the National Democratic Party never achieved much electoral strength outside its original base of Bohemia. Thanks, however, to its traditional prestige, its skilled leadership, its penetrating influence within the senior civil service, its control of much of the quality press, its strong organization in the capital city of Prague, and its ornamentation by a number of distinguished cultural figures, this party’s effective weight was greater than the election figures would tend to suggest. Its forceful leader Karel Kramář was one of the architects of the independence movement, his pro-Russian “domestic” prewar and wartime activities having paralleled in intensity and courage, if not in effectiveness, the “external” ones of his Western-oriented (and luckier) rival, Masaryk.
2. The Small Traders and Artisans Party was a secession from the National Democrats in protest against the Iatter’s capture by the upper bourgeoisie. Its clientele is indicated by its name. Opposed to the technology of mass production, to the cooperative movement, to department stores and related phenomena of economic rationalization, it was already a political beneficiary of some of the rooted economic tensions that stemmed from the uneven levels and patterns of development of Czechoslovak economic life even before the Great Depression sent new and frustrated recruits its way.
3. Also on the secular Right was the Fascist movement, which went under several labels until its partial merger with the National Democrats to form the National Union from 1934 to 1937. Although small and kept from power by the stability of the coalition pattern among the “respectable” parties, it had some significance thanks both to the benevolence extended it by the National Democrats and certain senior elements in the civil service, and to the celebrity of its leaders and patrons. Among the latter were the Siberian Legion hero and later acting chief of staff, General Rudolf Gajda, the talented poet Viktor Dyk, and the erratically brilliant politician Jiří Stříbrný, who like so many European Fascists of his generation (e.g., Déat, Moseley, Mussolini) was a renegade from socialism (see below).
4. Oscillating between Right and Center on the political spectrum were the Catholic, or so-called Populist (People’s), parties. Except for a brief and early period in 1920-21, the Czech and Slovak organizations remained distinct and generally went separate political ways. The Slovak People’s Party was the chief institutional and political repository of Slovak autonomist aspirations against Czech centralism and, except for a brief period from 1927 to 1929 when it supplied two cabinet ministers, it remained in opposition to the Prague governments. Its founder and leader was Msgr. Andrej Hlinka, who had earned his reputation as a Slovak national hero by his prewar resistance to the forced magyarization of his people and who sustained it in the postwar years by his eloquent, tenacious, suspicious, and provincial opposition to all influences emanating from the more secular and cosmopolitan Czech lands. Proud, refractory, and naive, Hlinka in his parochialism eventually became the dupe of more modern and more totalitarian elements that used his cassock as a shield. Czechs often alleged that Hlinka’s autonomist demands did not really speak for a majority of the Slovak people since his party never won a majority of their votes. Nevertheless, the centralist parties that consistently participated in the Prague governments also failed to achieve a collective majority of Slovak votes and appeared to draw their support in this province from resident Czechs and Jews, the Slovak Protestant minority, and those Slovak Catholics whose pragmatic appreciation of the political-bureaucratic system convinced them of the utility of being known as voters for the government parties. The fact that a disparate agglomeration of opposition parties (Hlinka’s, the Communists, the Magyar slates) consistently accumulated a majority of votes cast in Slovakia suggests the vanity of Czech claims that the province was satisfied with its status.
5. The Czech Populists, in contrast to their Slovak coreligionists, consistently preferred to be a government party. This choice may have been motivated in part by a need to demonstrate their nationalist respectability in postwar Czechoslovakia after having adopted a somewhat damaging Austrophile stance before and during World War I. Tightly led by Msgr. Jan Sramek, this clerical party drew some support from all Czech classes but was relatively strongest among the peasants and small-town workers of Moravia. It could not, of course, share in the national cult of Jan Hus, but it was nevertheless relatively advanced (in the old Austrian style of Christian socialism) on social and economic matters.
6. The largest and pivotal Czechoslovak party was the Agrarian Party (formally: The Republican Party of Agriculturists and Small Peasants). So strongly organized, so deeply entrenched in the provincial and local government apparatus, so thoroughly involved in the cooperative and banking systems, so indispensable to any and every cabinet coalition, and so strategic in its choice of ministerial portfolios was this party, that despite its name and without losing contact with the original constituency indicated by that name, the Agrarian Party in effect became a general political “holding company” for middle-class interests at large. It was the government party with the most evenly distributed support throughout the country, and even ethnic minority and Slovak and Ruthenian elements saw advantages in giving it, rather than their own specific parties, electoral support. Utilizing the land reform program whereby extensive properties were transferred from German, Magyar, and ecclesiastical magnates to Czech and Slovak (and Ruthenian and even German) peasants to secure its patronage over the countryside, the Agrarian Party simultaneously extended its political infrastructure in the urban areas through judicious leverage on the tax, tariff, and credit systems. It always managed to contain, if not to resolve, the internal tensions between its original peasant and its later bourgeois clienteles, but in the process of containing them it moved steadily rightward, against working class interests, in the 1930s. In Antonin Švehla, their leader during the happier decade of the 1920s, the Agrarians gave Czechoslovakia her shrewdest and her most responsible (in Max Weber’s sense of that word) democratic political leader, and by providing a political home for such prestigious Slovaks as Masaryk’s “Hlasist” disciple Vavro Šrobár and the ideologue of international “peasantism” Milan Hodža, the Agrarians complemented, to some extent, their organizational virtuosity with intellectual respectability.
7. Of the two Czechoslovak Socialist parties, the National Socialists, which bore no ideological relation to its German namesake, had been organized in 1897 as an explicitly patriotic, evolutionary Czech alternative to the avowedly internationalistic, Marxist Social Democrats. Originally the most articulately anti-Austrian, anticlerical, and antimilitarist Czech political formation, the National Socialists became the postwar party with the widest ideological spectrum. However, its membership and electoral appeal were still confined largely to Czechs, and its organizational base anchored in the rail, postal, and white collar unions. The formal membership of Edvard Beneš,
