to 1938, lent the party some additional prestige, but the real leaders were its founder Václav Klofáč, the first Czech parliamentarian to have been arrested by the Austrian authorities in World War I, and, until his apostasy to fascism in 1926, the demagogue Jiří Stříbrný.
8. As the National Socialists expelled their fascist elements and the Social Democrats demonstrated their national respectability, a political reconciliation became possible between them, though they did not merge. Tracing their organizational history back to 1878—further than any other Czech party—the Social Democrats were, during the interwar decades, a typical Central European Socialist party: patriotic, yet suspicious of the military establishment and eager for international disarmament; anticapitalist, yet receptive to technological innovations; class-oriented, yet ready to participate in coalition governments. One of this party’s major services to interwar Czechoslovakia was that of keeping open the channels of dialogue with the ethnic minorities through its fraternal relations with their Socialist parties.
9. The Communists finally parted ways with the Social Democrats in the autumn of 1920, after repeated urgings from Moscow and under considerable provocation from the Socialist party’s right wing. They took with them a majority of that party’s members and, at first, of its voters, but only a minority of its leaders and members of parliament. Unlike the several ethnically distinct Socialist parties, the various Communist groups amalgamated into one party for the entire republic, the only such transethnic party in all Czechoslovakia, in October, 1921. It was indeed a mass party but not a revolutionary one, despite attempts to “bolshevise” it through repeated purges. The country’s only party able to attract equal support in urban and rural areas, in the advanced and in the backward regions, on the basis of social as well as of ethnic discontents, the Communists—whether under the original leadership of the old Austrian Social Democratic war horse Bohumir Smeral, or later that of the Moscow-backed younger apparatchik Klement Gottwald—consistently failed to translate their considerable electoral and organizational strength into serious revolutionary or effective parliamentary action. Never declared illegal or driven underground in interwar Czechoslovakia (in sharp contrast to its sister parties in the other states of East Central Europe), the Communist Party drew its sustained strength less from any unbearable conditions of exploitation, than from a generalized complex of alienations that reflected rigid social barriers between the working class and the lower middle class, and estrangements between juxtaposed ethnic communities. In addition to these sources of support, in the late 1930s it gained patriotic respectability, thanks to its emphatic denunciation, first of nazism and appeasement in general, and then of the Munich capitulation in particular.
B. ETHNIC MINORITY PARTIES
As mentioned earlier, the Sudeten Germans were originally well-nigh unanimous in deploring their incorporation into Czechoslovakia, but in time a process of adjustment to this situation occurred both among the German Social Democrats as well as within the bourgeois political camp. Late in 1922 the latter, loosely aggregated as the Deutscher Verband (German Union), split into the potentially cooperative Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Association for Work) and the continuingly irreconcilable Kampfgemeinschaft (Association for Struggle). In interwar Czechoslovak political rhetoric, the first tendency received the appelation “activism,” which denoted a readiness to take an active part in the political life and institutions of the republic, while the intransigent position was referred to as “passivism,” or “negativism.”
1. Mention must be made first of the two members of the Kampfgemeinschaft, the German Nationalist Party and the German National Socialist Party. The latter was affiliated with the Hitler movement in the Reich and until the 1930s less troublesome for the Czechs than the former.
2. Within the Arbeitsgemeinschaft, as it moved toward “activism” in the mid-1920s, three distinct orientations were discernible:
a. a group of liberal Democrats, endorsed by industrialists increasingly eager to avoid Reich competition, supported also by German-speaking Jews, numerically relatively weak but fortunate in the skilled parliamentarians who represented it in the legislature;
b. the Christian Social Party, whose correct and then cordial relations with its ideological analogue on the Czech spectrum, the Catholic People’s Party, added to its distrust of the Los von Rom anti-Catholic pedigree of the National and National Socialist parties in its own German community;
c. the Bund der Landwirte (League of Farmers), which became the first German party to turn to “activism,” thereby presumably reflecting a lower level of nationalistic resentment among peasants than among townsmen, and a greater interest in the agricultural tariffs toward which the Prague government was being steered by its Agrarian leaders.
3. Beyond these several bourgeois parties stood the German Social Democrats. Initially the most fervent partisans of Anschluss to a Greater Germany, they then shifted, moving with the European “spirit of Locarno” (1925) and propelled by a compact among Czech and German trade union federations (1927), toward “activism,” and finally responded to the rise of Hitler with full commitment to the defense of the democratic Czechoslovak Republic. The German Communists, after splitting from the Social Democrats in January, 1921, fused into the unified Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in October of that year.
4. Among the Magyar minority in the eastern half of the country, the structural differentiation of parties resembled an embryonic version of that among the more numerous Germans in the western provinces. Here, too, there were Christian Social (Catholic), National Agrarian (Calvinist) and Social Democratic parties, but “activism” never achieved the resonance that it did among the Germans. This was partly a reflection of the fact that the governments of Hungary consistently showed a more intensive irredentist interest in the fate of their fellow Magyars in Slovakia and Ruthenia than did the governments of the Weimar Republic in that of the Sudeten Germans of Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia. Hence the Magyar minority problem was all along for Prague what the German one became only after 1933: a dual domestic and foreign policy issue. Furthermore, the consistent irredentism and revisionism of Hungarian policy toward Czechoslovakia had ideological as well as national motivations: the gentry rulers of Horthyite Hungary had little wish to see bourgeois democratic Czechoslovakia succeed and prosper lest the example undermine their own neobaroque system. To a small degree, indeed, this situation did elicit a backlash. The spectacle of “feudal” peasant conditions in Hungary enabled the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party to organize, in 1924, an affiliate among the Magyar peasants of Czechoslovakia, who, like the Sudeten German peasants, also appreciated Prague’s mid-decade agrarian protectionism. The Czechoslovak Social Democratic and especially the Communist parties also drew considerable Magyar votes. Also, the bloody pogroms of the white terror which had established the Horthy regime alienated many hitherto fervently Magyarophile Jews into opting for Czechoslovak or explicitly Jewish political identification. All this was, however, relatively unimportant in the overall context of general Magyar intransigence with respect to Czechoslovakia.
5. The small Polish minority of Silesia was obliged by its small size to participate in elections on joint lists with other slates: Jewish, Czech Social Democratic, or Slovak Populist. Similarly, in primitive Ruthenia political organizations were either affiliates of the main Czechoslovak parties or sundered into intensely local and scarcely comprehensible factionalism.
5
The political history of interwar Czechoslovakia up to the Munich disaster of 1938 was unique in East Central Europe not only for its uninterrupted constitutional and civil libertarian continuity, but also for a pattern of extraordinary stability, mentioned above, within and among the political parties. Once the Communists and Socialists had parted in 1920, and the Czech and Slovak Populists in 1921, no later crisis or election brought any drastic shifts in the positions or the relative strengths of the Czechoslovak political parties. Even the virtual absorption of the Sudeten German political community into the Henleinist incarnation of nazism in the mid-1930s had no organizational or electoral impact upon the traditional balances that prevailed among the non-German
