Jaromír Smutný, the Chief of Cabinet of the Czechoslovak exile President Edvard Beneš, remarked in March 1940 that “we live in an atmosphere of constant, general and persistent mistrust, struggle, controversy, competition for authority, in a war of all against all” (257). There is much in this study of exile politics in London during the 1940s that would lead readers to agree with Smutný’s private comment. Exile—unwilling or willed, or more often somewhere in between—was rarely a positive experience: grand gestures of official statements and improvised ceremonies did not disguise the impotence of exile leaders, obliged to find through the surrogates of internecine negotiations, the compilation of policy programs, and the small change of minor military contributions some recompense for their larger powerlessness to influence the course of the war, the policies of the major powers, or the politics of their native lands. Exile during the Second World War was often peculiarly demoralizing, which marked those who participated in it, albeit rarely, for the better.

As the essays in this collection well demonstrate, the actions of the exile authorities have a historical interest that transcends their modest contemporary impact, or indeed the culture of bickering and self-importance through which they were often conducted. Exile became a screen on which were projected the legacies of past conflicts for political power as well as the major issues of state organization, social welfare, and economic reform, which it was anticipated would constitute the challenges of the future. Amid these backward and forward projections, however, exile was also an experience lived very much in the present tense, in which the leaders of the exile authorities sought to benefit from the fast-moving currents of military and political fortunes generated by the war itself.

As its title indicates, the principal focus of the volume is on Czechoslovakia. A number of brief contributions on the other exiled governments, notably those of Poland and the Low Countries, are largely synopses of previous publications, and only a fascinating article by Blaž Torkar on the intense conflicts among the exiled Yugoslav armed forces conveys the way in which exile provided the opportunity to conduct civil war by other means. In contrast, the contributions to the Czechoslovak case draw on the substantial research that has been undertaken in recent years on this most complex and internally-riven of the exile authorities. As is well known, the very existence of the Czechoslovak government in London rested on very uncertain ground. Beneš had resigned as the Czechoslovak President after Munich, and the locus of legal authority rested with the authorities of the Second Republic in Prague, and somewhat less certainly with the Slovak National State in Bratislava. Consequently, as the authoritative articles by Vít Smetana and Radosław Paweł Żurawski vel Grajewski trace, Beneš was obliged to create a mirror legality out of the actions of others. He was assisted in this by the actions of the German occupation authorities in Bohemia, in demolishing the relics of the legal government in Prague; but also by his consistent lobbying of his British hosts to recognize the Czechoslovak National Committee as the Provisional Czechoslovak government in July 1940, and finally in July 1941 as the full Czechoslovak government. This last step was much assisted by the Soviet authorities who, encouraged by Beneš’s consistently conciliatory stance towards Soviet ambitions in central Europe, decided to recognize his government in July 1941, effectively obliging the British authorities to follow suit.

Recognition was one thing, but real authority was quite another; and the government always struggled to establish itself as the official interlocutor with the British authorities. In comparison with other exile regimes, the Czechoslovak government had few military or financial resources at its disposal; and, as articles on British policy by Mark Seaman and Richard Overy demonstrate, the different components of the British military and propaganda authorities essentially conducted their own policies towards Czechoslovakia. In doing so, they intervened directly in Czechoslovak internal politics—including most notoriously the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942—without seeking the approval of the exile government which had little substance to its claims to speak in the name of the population of the occupied country. Thus, as the interesting article by Jan Lániček illustrates, the exile government held back from denouncing Nazi persecution of the Jewish population in the Czech lands for fear of going against supposed anti-Semitic attitudes among the population. Nor even was the authority of the Beneš government over the fissiparous exile groups assured. As a spirited contribution by Dušan Segeš documents, there remained voices within the Czech and Slovak exile communities who regarded Beneš as an unelected dictator. Though the pamphlets and newspaper articles these dissidents published constituted no real threat to the authority of Beneš, the disproportionate ire they provoked in the ranks of the Czechoslovak authorities (and their attempts to get the British authorities to suppress them) provided ample demonstration of the insecurity which haunted the government.

The weaknesses of the present could be compensated for by planning for the future; and, in common with other exile governments, the Beneš regime spent a disproportionate amount of its time contemplating the post-war era. This concerned above all the vexed and inter-related problems of borders and minorities. Articles by Martin Brown, and jointly by Jan Kuklík and Jan Němeček, reconstitute the complex path by which Beneš tried to nudge the Allied authorities towards reversal of the Munich agreement, and some form of ethnic reorganization of central Europe. Here again, however, the space for maneuver by the Czechoslovak government was limited. It was the British, and in the later war years, the Soviet authorities who made the key decisions, finally deciding to reconstitute the pre-Munich borders of the state and implement the large-scale resettlement of those deemed to be ethnic Germans to occupied Germany. As Brown remarks, it is this last policy which ironically has accorded an unfounded prominence in much western historical writing to the actions of Beneš by displacing responsibility for these expulsions from the Allied authorities to lobbying by the exiled Czechoslovak authorities. Even their alleged excesses were not, in truth, their own work.