Unlike most other states in this region, Czechoslovakia, founded on 28 October 1918, was quick to attain a measure of stability. While in Germany, Austria and Hungary, workers’ councils challenged government authority, and while the Baltic states, Poland and southern Europe were rent by savage disputes over frontiers (or even the very existence of certain states) the Western powers soon came to view Czechoslovakia as a country where the establishment of a democratic system and a model of stability in the region might actually be possible. The government of Czechoslovakia, a polity that contemporaries viewed as an ‘island of quiet’,Footnote ¹ could safely assume that it would have international backing for any territorial claims it might make. The Czech case thus does not fit neatly into the interpretative framework that Alan Kramer has developed for political violence in post-1918 Europe. He argues that western European societies were successful either in exporting their potential violence to the colonies or Ireland (in the case of the United Kingdom) or in creating a durable anti-war consensus (as in France).Footnote ² By contrast, he regards central and east-central Europe as a hotbed of potential conflict and instability, nourished by the contradiction between the impracticable notion of ‘a people's right to self-determination’,Footnote ³ the aspirations of power politics and ideological opposition within individual societies.

By focusing on the newly created Czechoslovakia, this article seeks to differentiate the rather neat separation of Europe into a peaceful western and a rather violent eastern half during the period immediately after the end of the First World War. In the last few years research into the impact of the First World War on European history post-1918 has been increasingly influenced by the question of whether, and in what way, the experience of that war ‘brutalised’ the political culture of the interwar period and inclined post-war societies towards violence.Footnote ⁴ Dirk Schumann has pointed out that it is important to distinguish at the outset between the behaviour of soldiers returning from the front in 1918, deeply marked by the violence they had experienced and pitchforked into a world of profound social change, and abrupt changes in political culture that could lead to politically motivated violence.Footnote ⁵ Schumann argues that such resorts to violence were only indirectly connected with the war and were much more directly connected with the ever increasing tension between two camps – the socialist labour movement and its enemy, radicalised right-wing nationalism. The final trigger for, and a powerful contributory factor in, developments in central and east-central Europe was the impact of the Russian Revolution on societies already destabilised by the war.Footnote ⁶

A second important source of potential conflict in the immediate post-war period, alongside the increasing clash of ideologies and an entrenched proclivity to violence, was the post-1918 changes in political geography. From the ruins of the three empires of central and east-central Europe – Russia, Germany and the Habsburg monarchy – a number of new states had been created and new frontiers had been established, some involving territorial losses. These new frontiers, established or retrospectively legitimised by the Paris peace treaties, engendered conflicts over the nationality of various border areas and the role and status of national minorities, some of which became virulent on both the national and the supranational level. The aim of the victorious allies was to create an international order that would make it possible to resolve such conflicts peacefully and prevent a repetition of what they perceived as the catastrophic military confrontation of 1914–18.Footnote ⁷

An important contributing factor to these discussions was the ‘Fourteen Points’ that the US president, Woodrow Wilson, had proposed on 8 January 1918 as a framework for the post-war world order. The most influential point, where east-central Europe was concerned, was ‘self-determination’. From the outset this rather idealistic notion came up against a strong element of realpolitik embracing both security and economic issues. All in all, this multiplicity of ideas ensured that the potential effectiveness of the new order, based on collective security and peacemaking, and supposedly to be fostered by the newly established League of Nations, was far from clear from the start.Footnote ⁸ Consequently, the actions of the victorious powers failed either to prevent the national conflicts of the immediate post-war period or, at least, to mitigate the further antagonisms that were waiting in the wings.

From this perspective, the issues that framed the post-war period in Czechoslovakia appear quite similar to the conflicts in neighbouring states. It is therefore necessary to examine critically the assumption that Czechoslovakia was an island of stability in the region. During the war, the Movement of Czechs Abroad, consisting of exiles, had been successful in creating a positive image in the Western world of its proposal for a new state. The favourable assessment of the new state emerged just when Bolshevism, in the form of workers’ councils, seemed to be gaining ground in its immediate vicinity, while the outcome of events in Russia was still unclear. The situation of Czechoslovakia, and the possibility of using it as a counterweight to other unstable, revolutionary interlocutors and a re-emergent Germany, make it look like a potential strategic partner.Footnote ⁹

Czechoslovakia was actively involved in regional conflicts, not least with an eye to territorial gain. From its very foundation it was unclear how far its aspirations to recreate the historic boundaries of Bohemia, including the mainly German-inhabited borderlands, could be realised.Footnote ¹⁰ For several months after the end of the war it was equally uncertain whether Slovakia, hitherto part of the Kingdom of Hungary, could be successfully integrated into the new state and whether the integration process would be peaceful.Footnote ¹¹ Czechoslovakia was also threatened by a boundary dispute with Poland over the Teschen region and squabbles over the incorporation of Carpathian Russia.Footnote ¹² Not wishing to have these boundary decisions made over their heads by a peace conference, the founders of the new state strove to create a fait accompli using their own troops.Footnote ¹³ During this phase the Prague government deployed its newly created army with a view to extending its boundaries by force of arms. While the western boundaries were on the whole settled peacefully, in spring 1919 the Czechoslovak army waged war on the Hungarian workers’ councils, led by Béla Kun, aiming not only to secure Slovakia but also at a strategic occupation of Hungarian regions on the other side of the previously established frontier.Footnote ¹⁴ But the war's objectives were not solely strategic; they also implied a test of how far Czechoslovaks could consolidate their position by asserting their claims against those of the Bolsheviks.

Contemplating this initial situation, some contemporary commentators ranked Czechoslovakia with other belligerent states, born out of the turmoil of the Great War, whose influence in the region was destabilising rather than peaceful. Thus the US secretary of state Robert Lansing remarked on 22 January 1919,

Further conflicts arose within the new polity. Society had been destabilised by four years of war. During the second half of the war the overstretched war economy and poor supply situation had led to a sharp increase in strikes and walk-outs which continued after the war. Veterans trickling back from the front had to be demobilised and gradually reintegrated into society. In particular, soldiers returning from the war in the east had witnessed the chaos of the Russian Revolution along with the intense political mobilisation it had involved. Some had been radicalised by their encounters with Bolshevism. So had some former prisoners of war (POWs), returning, perhaps after many adventures, from Russia; and so had some members of the Czechoslovak Legion, a motley host comprising Czech and Slovak deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army, ex-POWs pressed into service, and volunteers. The Legion had originally been intended as a contribution by exiled Czech activists to the military struggle against the Habsburg monarchy; its members fought across Russia as far as the Pacific, whence they returned by ship to Europe.Footnote ¹⁶ Although the legionaries were hailed as patriots and were mostly anti-Bolshevik, it was far from clear that the little groups that straggled back would not be, if anything, a destabilising element.

Equally serious were the potential conflicts arising from tensions among ethnic groups. Going back to at least the late nineteenth century, these conflicts were exposed by the founding of the new states, most notoriously the disputes between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia. After 1918, the ‘third party’ in the dispute – the Habsburg government in Vienna, formally neutral and prepared to act as go-between – dropped out of the equation; the two groups now faced each other directly. The struggle was fundamentally about political predominance, though it often took the form of squabbles over education and the use of language. This antagonism persisted after 1918, but the war and the founding of the new state transformed it.Footnote ¹⁷

However, when considering post-1918 developments it is not altogether helpful to talk in terms of a monolithic Czech bloc confronting an equally monolithic German bloc. This is important not only because both ethnic groups included a host of different attitudes and political orientations, but also because there still was a ‘third party’, whose interventions substantially shifted the fulcrum of the dispute. This was the Czechoslovak government, which had a ‘nationalising’ effect even if the results were modest compared with what was achieved in Poland.Footnote ¹⁸ Nonetheless government bodies working on behalf of the whole state had to act differently from Czech nationalist parties or protective associations – with which the government, in view of its nationality policy, seemed bound to clash. The last problem that became acute after 1918 related to the concept of the nation per se. If Czechoslovakia, a combination of two populations, was to succeed as a nation then it had to be recognised as such by both Czechs and Slovaks. As soon as the war was over it became clear that the first priority was to persuade two radically different regions to combine into a single state, and that this would not be easy – a fact that emerged progressively with regard to the movement for Slovak autonomy.Footnote ¹⁹

Despite this host of problems, the First Czechoslovak Republic managed to secure its allotted territory relatively quickly and to pacify the state internally. What was more, under the guidance of the foreign minister, Edvard Beneš, Prague soon began to punch well above its weight in international politics. After some years of comparative stability Czechoslovakia emerged, in the changing circumstances of the 1930s, as an ‘island of democracy’ in a sea of states which, by common consent, had fallen victim to dictatorships or authoritarian regimes as an indirect result of the war and a more direct result of the conflicts inherent in the post-war order.Footnote ²⁰ Nonetheless, Czechoslovakia faced a series of latent problems that were to become acute in the altered political climate of the later 1930s. This article considers the question of what factors contributed to stabilising the newborn Czechoslovak state and pacifying a multi-ethnic society deeply marked by the war and by radical political change. I shall begin by examining concepts of peace during the state-building period and the practical steps taken by the Czechoslovak government to solve the problems bequeathed by the war.

Changing concepts of ‘peace’

If we are to examine the Czechoslovak government's actions post-1918, we first need to analyse the ideas that circulated before the foundation of the new state and the specific factors that arose during the actual foundation. The idea of a Czechoslovak state first emerged during the Great War. Its future president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and foreign minister, Beneš, had both spent the war in exile, bombarding the governments of the Entente with demands for the creation of such a state as an alternative model to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Originally, the aim had been simply to make Bohemia independent of the Habsburgs; Masaryk even contemplated a Bohemian state under the protection of Tsarist Russia.Footnote ²¹ As the war dragged on, however, the Czech movement in exile circulated increasingly negative images of the monarchy, accusing it of intense militarism, anti-democratic structures and the oppression of the Slav nations in east-central and south-east Europe. In November 1915 the Czech exiles committee issued a statement to the effect that

For Masaryk, the region would not experience a lasting peace until the Habsburg monarchy had been dissolved. That is why Czech political exiles strove to propagate their vision of political freedom for small nations against a background of democratic, pacific international politics. In the last year of the war these ideas were mooted in Prague itself. The ‘Three Kings Declaration’, pronounced on 6 January 1918 by Czech deputies in Prague, voiced a strong desire for peace but also stressed that a permanent peace could only be achieved if the nation's right to liberty was guaranteed.Footnote ²³ This idealism was of the same order as Woodrow Wilson's in his ‘Fourteen Points’ promulgated in January 1918.Footnote ²⁴

From this perspective, the foundation of Czechoslovakia appears as the culmination of the political development of Czech nationalism since the nineteenth century. The journalist Ferdinand Peroutka, who described the development of the Czechoslovakian republic in his wide-ranging book Budování státu (The building of the state), argued that the Czechs’ aspirations, unlike those of nineteenth-century Russia or Ireland, had focused on ‘schools’ rather than ‘swords’.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, between the revolution of 1848–9 and 1914 there was no revolutionary movement in Bohemia with a nationalist agenda. Rather the focus was on the peaceful development of a modern nation whose representatives were mostly interested in achieving ‘national’ aims under the aegis of the Habsburg monarchy. As Jiří Kořalka has pointed out, the pre-1914 Czech nation had all the makings of a modern nation:Footnote ²⁶ an extensive educational system, multiparty politics, an advanced economy and a rich cultural heritage.Footnote ²⁷ The only element that was missing was sovereignty, coupled with a tendency to domination by pressure groups and a certain distance from the seat of monarchic government and its institutions.

Idealistic demands for independence became strident during the Great War, overshadowing the question of how this independence would work in the world of real politics. Prior to 1914, action by pro-Czech parties in Bohemia had focused on improving the legal rights and social opportunities of the Czechs. This issue was connected to the question of how to coexist with the German population, and no comprehensive model had ever emerged. Plans developed during the war did not include any detailed consideration of how to deal with Germans living inside the historical frontiers of Bohemia that were now being reclaimed. After 1918 the focus on creating a Czechoslovak nation involved dismissing all other ethnic groups as minorities; there was little attempt to fit them in to an overall socio-political context.Footnote ²⁸

During the war Masaryk and other Czech activists in exile not only called loudly and publicly for a Czechoslovak state, they also promulgated a political vision of a peaceful Europe. These ideas are expounded in Masaryk's Nová Evropa (The new Europe).Footnote ²⁹ However, while there were plenty of general suggestions of how to create a modern democracy, there was no consistent idea of how best to ensure peaceful coexistence between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia. Masaryk concluded that it was better for 3 million Germans to be under Czech rule than for 9 million Czechs and Slovaks to be under German rule.Footnote ³⁰ Talk of creating a ‘Switzerland in the east’, on the other hand, was never more than a slogan for the transitional period and never influenced plans for the actual state-building. Nor was it ever clearly explained how union with the Slovaks within a single state was to be achieved, however much it had been demanded and anticipated during the years of exile.Footnote ³¹

Overall, then, the Czechoslovak concept of peace and the political ideas circulating among the activists were based very largely on concepts that could not be put to the test until they were implemented in actual political practice. They could serve as models during the state-building period, but in the real world they caused problems. Some elements of post-1918 Czech society, influenced by the integrative effect of the newborn state, were reluctant to accept any adjustments to these models in the light of real politics. This affected concrete proposals as well as long-term attitudes. The Washington Declaration of 18 October 1918 called, among other things, for the separation of church and state, the repudiation of Austrian war loans and the creation of a militia system; in other words, the demand was for a clean break with the Habsburg monarchy. The introduction of a militia, in particular, had been on the wish list of internal Czech socialist parties since before 1914. It was, among other things, a token of opposition to Austro-Hungarian militarism. It was published before the agreement of all Czech stakeholders had been obtained and thus became a symbol of the lack of co-ordination between the Czech movement in exile and political circles actually in Bohemia. And yet, throughout the twenty-year history of the First Czechoslovak Republic the wording of these aspirations never varied from that in the Declaration.Footnote ³²

Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the government and military leadership came to the conclusion that it was impossible to introduce a militia. Both the internal and the international situation did not appear to favour such an arrangement. With a standing army it was possible to create a solid, centrally administered military organisation, whereas the militia system would confer a degree of autonomy on regional contingents. When in 1920 the National Assembly debated the Armed Forces Act, the defence minister, Václav Klofáč, described the probable consequences:

At the same time Beneš was writing newspaper articles warning against any such ‘pacific experiments’.Footnote ³⁴ In the end, although the idea of a militia model remained enshrined in the Armed Forces Act, Czechoslovakia endowed itself with a standing army.Footnote ³⁵

Just as problematic as the question of the militia was the sceptical attitude of Czech society towards the military, nourished by the experience of the Great War and by anti-militaristic sentiments springing from entrenched attitudes towards the Habsburg monarchy and its pre-1914 army.Footnote ³⁶ In the 1920s this attitude was so widespread that army commanders were advised not to march through towns in order to avoid hostile demonstrations by the inhabitants.Footnote ³⁷ In the changing political climate of 1930s Europe, which made the population of Czechoslovakia more amenable to the idea that armament and defence were a necessity, Beneš tried to popularise a distinction between ‘anti-militarism’ and ‘pacifism’. Pre-war anti-militarism had been directed against Austria-Hungary and had been anarcho-socialist and nationalistic in nature. It had been against the army per se. In the peculiar historical circumstances of the time such anti-militarism had been justified, but in a democracy it was not.Footnote ³⁸ Pacifism, on the other hand, Beneš argued, was based on a long spiritual tradition and its goal was a fair and just international order in which conflicts among states could be settled peaceably. From such a ‘pacifist’ viewpoint, said Beneš, a democratic army, committed entirely to defence, was necessary to head off undesirable tendencies.Footnote ³⁹

This conception reveals more than just an intention to reorient Czechoslovakia's foreign policy in line with changes taking place in 1930s Europe. There was also an attempt to steer society towards a positive image of state institutions that had evidently been perceived rather negatively hitherto. This was particularly true of the army, which was now to be seen not as a tool of militarism, but as a democratic peacekeeper. This was stated very emphatically by army chief of staff Jan Syrový in a lecture to the Czechoslovak Army Officers’ Association in January 1932: ‘We must bear in mind that today's army is our national army: its remit is quite different from that of the previous army. It is time that everybody was aware of that.’Footnote ⁴⁰

Syrový's declaration fails to address one problem that arose from the sharp ideological contrast between life under ‘foreign’ rule before 1918 and life in the Czechoslovak state. Under the Habsburgs, pro-Czech political endeavours had focused on protecting and developing the Czech ‘nation’ as part of a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional empire; during the Great War the Czech movement in exile had fought to make that ‘nation’ independent. Now that it actually existed, it was clear that, in the real world, all these expectations could not be realised at the stroke of a pen. Distrust of government institutions, nourished during the war by the behaviour of the authorities in Bohemia and deepened still further by the radical changes that the war brought in its wake,Footnote ⁴¹ was supplemented by critical attitudes towards the nation and the idea of living peacefully alongside other ethnic groups inside one state.

Before 1918 this question had not really been asked. After 1918 it was no longer possible to resolve conflicts by compromises such as the ‘Moravian Settlement’ of 1905.Footnote ⁴² The focus on the ‘Czechoslovak’ nation, which was supposed to envisage complete union between Czechs and Slovaks, did not initially include any specific planning for other ‘nationalities’. This void in the notion of nation-statehood stimulated nationalism within Czechoslovak society, and that could lead to violence. For example, just after the war veterans of the Czechoslovak Legion in predominantly German-inhabited towns pulled down memorials recalling previous Austrian domination and the German hegemony they associated with it.Footnote ⁴³ This was a symbolic demonstration of the idea that Czech hegemony should prevail even in border regions.

In order to understand the Czechoslovak state's concept of ‘peace’, and how it was translated into action by government and government institutions during the consolidation process, we need to bear in mind that this consolidation was a compromise between fundamental national concepts dating back to during and before the war, the social attitudes deriving from those concepts and the constraints of real politics. The primary task of the authorities in Prague was to stabilise the new state in the eyes of the world and also to consolidate it internally, in the eyes of its own population. In view of the social upheaval engendered by the war and the threat of conflict over unresolved territorial questions, this implied a complex process of pacification.

Consolidating the state and pacifying the border regions

As recent research on the history of political violence after the First World War has shown, there was no direct link between the violence of war and the emergence of political violence in the post-war years. Benjamin Ziemann has suggested that instead of considering the specific situation produced by the war, it might be more productive to look closely at violence per se. He sees little point in distinguishing between ‘structural violence’ by organisations, ‘personal violence’ by individuals and ‘cultural violence’, meaning structural discrimination against certain groups.Footnote ⁴⁴ Following the sociologist Heinrich Popitz, Ziemann prefers to apply a ‘phenomenology of violence’ to account for the actual occurrences of various forms of violence.Footnote ⁴⁵ This approach encompasses not only gradations of violence – from a box on the ear to waging war – but also the reasons for using violence and the circumstances in which it was used. We can then ask what range of possible behaviours actually occurred in a particular case, and at what stage the use of violence becomes virulent and what ‘cost’ it may have had. We can then deduce in what circumstances violence was explicitly not used – that is, was there, alongside a disposition to violence, also a clear disposition to avoid violence based on a calculation of the potential ‘consequential loss’ from pacification? In what follows, this article investigates whether the state itself employed violence, and if so in what way, when it came to stabilising the apparatus of state, integrating the border regions and the absorbing the eastern territories.

Unlike other multiethnic regions of east-central Europe, in which the appearance of new states and their frontiers after the First World War had a high potential for conflict, the Bohemian lands (that is, the western half of Czechoslovakia) were not forced into actual warfare with other states competing for its border territories, or with nationalistic organisations. The border regions, where Germans were in the majority, were occupied, peacefully on the whole, by the newly formed Czechoslovak army in November and December 1918.Footnote ⁴⁶ Attempts to set up separate political entities in German-Bohemian and German-Moravian areas and unite them with Austria, in opposition to the state being established in Prague, proved fruitless. Neither Germany nor Austria had much interest in these regions, and their capacity to intervene was much reduced.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, these would-be statelets had no real infrastructure, and veterans returning from the war were disinclined to fight for an autonomous German Bohemia.Footnote ⁴⁸ The founders of Czechoslovakia were quick to take over the (largely still intact) military and administrative structures of their predecessors, and Prague was an established centre of government and communications, whereas German Bohemia had no supra-regional structures. This is clear from the very fact that there were no fewer than four attempts to organise a German Bohemian state, in four different regions.Footnote ⁴⁹

In some urban areas such as Ústí nad Labem (Aussig) in northern Bohemia, which had a predominantly German population, the municipality was eventually driven to call in Czechoslovak troops to counter the threat of looting and unrest.Footnote ⁵⁰ For structural reasons, therefore, and because no ‘exterior’ power was willing to intervene, it never came to actual war. Apart from a few vigilante groups intent on the prevention of looting, no armed bands appeared and no radicalised Freikorps like those seen elsewhere in this part of Europe. The war-weary Czechoslovak troops sent in to occupy the frontier regions may have been difficult to control.Footnote ⁵¹ But they clearly felt no inclination to commit excesses or indulge in looting; for one thing, they do not seem to have perceived these Bohemian or Moravian borderlands as ‘foreign’ and had some awareness of the historical unity of the Bohemian territories.

Nonetheless, however peaceful the takeover of these border regions, this in no way meant that they had been fully integrated. Attempts to involve Germans in the construction of Czechoslovakia failed largely because, amidst the upsurge of ethnic nationalism that marked the birth of the new state, neither side was enthusiastic about them. It was during this transitional phase that the German parties called for demonstrations against the new state on 4 March 1919. In some places the two sides came to blows and Czechoslovak troops fired on demonstrators, causing fifty-four casualties. This was an isolated incident, but it had a negative impactFootnote ⁵² on the first tentative political contacts and disputes between Czech and German politicians. Moreover, it became a cause and a symbol of emerging Sudeten German nationalism.Footnote ⁵³ This emerges clearly, for example, in an editorial that appeared in the German-language newspaper Bohemia in 1920, when the first German recruits were enrolled in the Czechoslovak army:

It is still not entirely clear why Czechoslovak soldiers fired on demonstrators in a number of towns. Evidently it was not so much the result of an order from the high command as a reaction to specific local circumstances. Very often the shooting was explained as a spontaneous reaction by overstressed soldiers. It is equally evident, however, that the Czechoslovak government feared a planned revolt.Footnote ⁵⁵ This reaction was normal enough at a time when the Great War was still very present in people's minds and wars were still going on in a number of regions, convincing the government that separatist unrest could break out at any moment and was nothing unusual; but it was to have unforeseen consequences.

To avoid matters escalating again as they had on 4 March, the government needed to take steps to build confidence. Where the western half of the country was concerned, the international situation and the mature existing structures were both of assistance to the Prague government. Although the převrat (coup) at the end of the war was subsequently described as a revolution, the change from Habsburg hegemony to the new republic had, all in all, been a moderate process.Footnote ⁵⁶ The new government was aware that it had inherited a mature administrative structure and strove to win the loyalty of its representatives; as a result, the incorporation of new elites into the apparatus of state was again a moderate process. Recent research has shown how many government employees simply continued in post. They included a substantial number of Germans, although their numbers decreased sharply in the 1920s owing to regulations requiring the use of Czech in official business and a drive for internal ‘homogenisation’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Continuity was also assured in the parliamentary system: a large proportion of Czech deputies post-1918 had already had political experience under the Habsburg monarchy.Footnote ⁵⁸ One of the first new laws to be passed stipulated that a large number of existing laws and ordinances should continue to apply, at least for the time being.Footnote ⁵⁹ This enabled the newly constituted government to ensure security not just in its heartlands but also on its borders. In addition, it was possible to offer help when necessary and maintain a local presence.

In this absorption and pacification of the western borderlands, whose inclusion in the new state was justified with reference to the historic frontiers of the Bohemian lands as well as by strategic arguments and references to current economics and infrastructure,Footnote ⁶⁰ the Prague government was further assisted by the conflicting tangle of protests voiced by the German-speaking population. Some nationalists aimed at uniting ‘German’ border areas with Austria or Germany; others had social revolutionary aspirations or merely voiced a generalised social discontent that was equally detectable among the Czechs themselves.Footnote ⁶¹ It was not clear how these social tensions would develop. Supply shortages during the war had provoked spontaneous protests leading to waves of strikes, which continued in heavy industry after 1918. For quite some time, until the unrest died down in the early 1920s, it seemed that the protests would not be confined to strikes.Footnote ⁶²

Nobody could tell whether these overlaps, which were typical of early post-war societies, would be conducive to a broad political consensus. No definite nationalistic movement developed at this time among the Bohemian Germans. A policy of moderate change included the introduction of socio-political measures such as improved social insurance and an eight-hour day among a population that was already sharply socially differentiated.Footnote ⁶³ This won a measure of trust from people in the western half of the country and undermined radicalism. While the new provisions inhibited nationalism among even German workers, they fell on more fruitful ground among the Czechs, just as national euphoria (which had initially covered a multitude of sins) was beginning to decline and the chorus of critical voices was becoming more insistent. In 1919 the German ambassador to Prague reported on the mood among the Czechoslovak population: ‘The people feel that the hopes they had placed in independence have on the whole been disappointed.’Footnote ⁶⁴ For German entrepreneurs, the relative stability was an argument in favour of staying in Czechoslovakia, since union with Germany would have faced them with increased competition in the long term and a virulent threat from Bolshevist unrest in the short term.Footnote ⁶⁵

This relative continuity, and the visibility of the state apparatus which it implied, enabled a comparatively rapid pacification of the region. Despite national antagonisms, the formative power of Bohemia's traditional unity had been clearly demonstrated. The Prague government evidently reposed great hopes in this effect; it was doubtless aware that the use of force would have further envenomed the political atmosphere and might have led to an eruption of violence outside the borderlands. The government had the advantage that in this time of transition it alone had the potential to ensure tranquillity and stability. It also tried to exploit this position symbolically in its foreign relations. For example, in the run-up to the demonstrations planned for 4 March 1919, the military inspector for western Bohemia issued placards entreating the German population to remain calm and describing those who intended to oppose the existing order as ‘disturbers of the peace’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Coupling stabilisation measures with a respect for administrative continuity, the practical consolidation of the new state came up against a problem that was inseparable from the very idea behind that state. It had been conceived as an ethnically based Czecho-Slovak state, but the concrete reality it had to grapple with was a multiethnic one. The Czechoslovak Legion, which carried with it a potential threat of violence born of its experiences in the Great War and the Russian Revolution, also stood for the Czechoslovak ideal, which its members felt had been insufficiently realised, particularly in the border regions. They reacted by destroying monuments and with other forms of violence. Moreover, some legionaries returning from Russia up to 1920 had acquired political attitudes which did not always square with those of the nation-builders, even if they shared the same basic ideas of what that nation should be. While most legionaries supported the government, some were committed to social revolution. Other, extreme nationalists, called on Masaryk to establish a dictatorship.Footnote ⁶⁷ In July a group of dissatisfied legionaries even tried to launch a ‘march on Prague’ from the west Bohemian border town of Zelezná Ruda (Eisenstein), although it quickly fizzled out.Footnote ⁶⁸ This remained an isolated occurrence, but it was one of a series of events that indicated how difficult it would be to demobilise, and integrate into post-war society, returning veterans with all their variety of experience, particularly ex-POWs who had lived for years amid the upheavals of the Russian Revolution.Footnote ⁶⁹

Eventually, the majority of legionaries were successfully pacified, mainly because they were treated as a national, pro-government elite. This occurred symbolically, by stressing the importance of their potential contribution to consolidating the new state, and socio-politically, by granting them certain privileges.Footnote ⁷⁰ This politico-symbolic approach meant, however, that there was no place for veterans of the Austro-Hungarian army in the culture of state commemoration of the Great War. German veterans, in particular, took this to mean that no active efforts were being made to integrate them, and it became the starting point for a distinct interpretation of the war – as can to some extent be gathered from war memorials.Footnote ⁷¹

Another manifestation of the tension between founding ideology and reality was the difficulty of creating a Czechoslovak army. How could the creation of a conscript army representing the multiethnic state, not just the ‘nation’, be legitimised in the eyes of society? The problem becomes clear if we consider the building of barracks as evident locations of the state's monopoly over violence in the borderlands. After 1918, financial constraints and new approaches to military planning required a redeployment of the military presence and the establishment of permanent garrisons. National groups were quick to exploit the problem for their own ends. German nationalists opposed the creation of new garrisons in areas with a predominantly German population as a form of ‘occupation’ and ‘Czechisisation’, while Czech minority groups called for an extension of the military presence to protect the Czech population and promote permanent ‘de-germanisation’.Footnote ⁷²

At this juncture the attitudes of the army high command and of local commanders remained ambivalent. Although many nationalistically motivated calls for the establishment of a garrison were turned down on strategic or financial grounds, there are also examples of collaboration, or at least a commonality of interest, between Czech vigilante groups and army command posts. It was frequently unclear whether the army, as the guardian of the state's monopoly on violence, was committed to the interests of the whole state or to the ideals of the Czechoslovak movement.Footnote ⁷³ Despite this acute problem, the leaders of the new state, however they might laud the achievements of the Legion, did manage to impose an image of the army as a defence force. The overriding priority was to stop it from becoming a state within a state, hence the stress on its symbolic value as ‘the school of the nation’ and the linchpin of democracy.Footnote ⁷⁴ It was not to be a starting point for authoritarian ambitions, as happened in a number of east-central European states between the wars.

Nevertheless, all these attempts at the even-handed exercise of state power and the creation of political structures that would allow a measure of co-determination,Footnote ⁷⁵ and all the economic advances of the 1920s, were insufficient to produce lasting integration. This became only too clear when the global economic crisis of the 1930s shattered one of those stabilising pillars. The Bohemian Germans were disproportionately affected by the crisis because the export-dependent light industries of the borderlands were exceptionally hard-hit by collapsing markets. It was then that the failure to find a successful approach to integration after the war really made itself felt. Nonetheless it was the vortex of an aggressive Nazi Germany that finally made it impossible for Germans and Czechs to continue to live together in the Czechoslovak state.Footnote ⁷⁶

The integration of Slovakia and Carpathian Russia

Unlike the Czech borderlands, Slovakia and, to an extent, Carpathian Russia were not incorporated without some fighting.Footnote ⁷⁷ Up to 1918 both regions had been integral parts of the Kingdom of Hungary and so subject to Hungarian law. This, plus the Magyar component of the population in numerous Slovakian cities and in the south of the territory claimed by Czechoslovakia, not forgetting the large numbers of Hungarian civil servants and ‘Magyarones’ (politically pro-Hungarian Slovaks), was a major obstacle to rapid integration.Footnote ⁷⁸ At that time few leading Slovaks felt any enthusiasm for the idea of a Czechoslovak state, nor was the idea very popular with the Slovak population at large.Footnote ⁷⁹ If political attitudes in Slovakia were to be transformed, it was up to Prague to do it.Footnote ⁸⁰ At first the Czechoslovak movement assumed that the Slovak population would welcome the new ‘national’ ideology, making it relatively easy to reconcile them to incorporation into the new state. Once that was done, the founders believed, a region that had suffered for decades from an undemocratic, ‘Magyarising’ policy, and from the heavy cost of war, would be able to develop peacefully. Quite soon, however, it became apparent that it was not enough to send Vavro Šrobar as ‘state commissar’ with seventy gendarmes to Slovakia,Footnote ⁸¹ to set up a new administration in a region whose people were facing not only an uncertain political future but also acute supply problems and banditry carried out by gangs of ex-soldiers and POWs.Footnote ⁸²

In the early stages, the Hungarian government successfully exploited existing structures and the inherited loyalty of some Slovaks. Numerous Slovak reservists first called up in 1896–1900 were never demobilised and were called upon to defend what had hitherto been ‘Upper Hungary’ against the claims of Czechoslovakia.Footnote ⁸³ Prague had to call on international support, and on the legionaries returning from various theatres of the Great War, in order to occupy the region. In Bohemia the war in Slovakia was unpopular, which did not make it any easier to mobilise an enthusiastic army.Footnote ⁸⁴

After the proclamation of the Bolshevik Hungarian Republic in March 1919, the Czechoslovak government imposed martial law in Slovakia for fear of Hungarian influence – which now meant communist influence.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Czechoslovak army seized the initiative and strengthened its strategic position by crossing the agreed demarcation line.Footnote ⁸⁶ This was the start of a war between Czechoslovakia and Hungary which was to test severely Czechoslovak concepts of statehood and peace. The army, composed chiefly of Czechs, adopted a belligerent attitude and showed little consideration for local conditions. In some places they were hailed as liberators, but in others the population suffered from requisitioning, plunder or anti-Catholic attitudes on the part of some soldiers, that in some cases went as far as demolishing churches.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the light of Alan Kramer's suggestion that western Europe managed to ‘export’ its potential for violence after the First World War, it would be worth examining to what extent Czechoslovakia itself ‘exported’ violence along with the Czech soldiers it sent into Slovakia. The territory claimed by Czechoslovakia was finally secured thanks to the support of the Entente powers, particularly France, although not until troops from the ‘Hungarian Soviet Republic’ had penetrated far into Slovakia and the Czechoslovak army was on the brink of defeat.Footnote ⁸⁸ Martial law was imposed in Carpathian Russia in June 1919 and not formally replaced by civilian government until January 1922; it was introduced against a background of threatened anarchy, communist agitation and very active Hungarian influence.Footnote ⁸⁹

This aspect highlights that the structural and cultural differences between western and eastern Czechoslovakia led to the adoption of different approaches to the pacification and to the exercise of power in a region that had been traumatised by years of war and political instability. The debate over Slovakia and its consequences clearly showed that it was going to be harder to realise the presumed unity between Czechs and Slovaks than the founders of the state had originally imagined. The resort to military force undermined attempts at national integration; ‘pacification’ was to have a cost. We should not, however, jump to the conclusion that the problem of integrating Slovakia, contrasting it with the relative ease of Bohemian integration, was solely due to the lack of structures that could be rapidly consolidated and used as a basis for state-building. More important is the fact that external forces were far readier to challenge the claims of the new state in Slovakia than they were in Bohemia or Moravia. The gradual decay of old Hungarian institutions, coupled with Czechoslovak mistrust of Hungarian officials, meant that the new administration had little existing organisation to fall back on. Prague's willingness to adopt temporarily a wide range of Hungarian laws for the sake of stability during the changeover had only a limited effect.Footnote ⁹⁰

We also need to ask how the Czechoslovak government tried to organise the exercise of power and protect the republic against both internal problems and potential conflicts with its neighbours. Next to the support of the victorious Allies, the most important instrument for safeguarding the newborn state was its equally new army. After the passing of the Armed Forces Act, the defence minister, František Udržal, considered that the country's strategic situation would compel the government to ‘refer the really hard questions about the defence of the Republic to the Foreign Ministry rather than the Ministry of War’. Nonetheless, the defence measures adopted at the time make the parameters for the exercise of power at that time very clear, and also show that Czechoslovakia had a unique set of priorities for conflict resolution.Footnote ⁹¹ However, the experiences of the immediate post-war years led to a rather different medium-term horizon that was also to influence the constitution of the armed forces. In fact, the events of those years became a central argument in favour of a standing army and the rejection of the less overtly militaristic militia system.Footnote ⁹²