In Czechoslovakia after World War II, the broadcasts that politicians had made from London during the conflict were celebrated in poetry and literature, while the sound of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was integrated into state broadcaster Czechoslovak Radio’s output through staff recruitment and program style. But what had these wartime broadcasts actually contained, and what had they omitted? Erica Harrison reconstructs both points with precision and care in Radio and the Performance of Government. Her well-balanced book is relevant not only to historians of radio, East Central Europe, diplomacy, and nationalism studies but also to historians of Britain, on account of the challenge it poses to jingoistic myths about Britain pluckily “standing alone” throughout the conflict.

The tightly structured work consists of an introduction and four chapters. The introduction explains the project’s development from a PhD project into its finished form and defines and defends terms such as “propaganda” employed throughout the book. Chapter 1 allows Harrison to explore what she calls the “performance of government” undertaken by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile through wartime radio broadcasts. She shows how President Edvard Beneš and fellow government ministers argued for the “authority of legality” in radio broadcasts and political meetings alike, insisting upon the illegality of the Second Czechoslovak Republic following the Munich Agreement and their resulting resignations. In radio broadcasts to the occupied Czech and Slovak territories, moreover, they harnessed the “authority of tradition” by invoking founding President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk with astounding frequency. Last, minister-reporters—most notably Masaryk’s son, Jan—used their personal charm to cultivate the “authority of charisma” among listeners.

Harrison then turns to on-air depictions of the Czechoslovak nation in chapter 2, noting, for example, how older tropes juxtaposing “Prussian militarism” with innate Czech(oslovak) democracy were reworked and promoted in broadcasts. Chapter 3 focuses on the limited role afforded to Slovakia in this radio output, concluding that the government-in-exile developed “a policy of negative propaganda” to rubbish the validity of an independent Slovakia, without presenting many positive arguments for the alternatives they favored. Finally, in chapter 4, Harrison examines broadcasts to and about Subcarpathian Ruthenia—the First Czechoslovak Republic’s (1918–38) easternmost region—in order to analyze Czechoslovak-Soviet wartime relations. Here, she flags the dangers of what she terms “propaganda divorced from policy” through an examination of how ministers in London continued to proclaim the territory a Czechoslovak possession in reports at the same time as the region was being annexed by the USSR (240–44). These last three chapters move the reader progressively eastward, noting the London exiles’ increasing deficit in “knowledge and understanding” as they go (227). They additionally move the reader progressively forward in time, from chapter 2’s narratives of the Czechoslovak past to the contemporary reality of the Slovak State in chapter 3, to broadcasts about “the future of Czechoslovakia” (and whether this would or would not include Subcarpathian Ruthenia) in chapter 4.

Throughout, Harrison challenges the idea of radio as “background noise,” arguing that “when listening to foreign radio could carry heavy prison sentences or even the threat of execution … the broadcasts from London could not become part of the mundane background of listeners’ lives” (117). My own work reinforces her findings, also suggesting that the preoccupied, domestic listener has been over-extrapolated in radio literature, and does not apply particularly easily to midcentury Central European audiences who listened to the radio to trace loved ones displaced by war, used radio as part of graded schoolwork assignments, and developed techniques and technologies to circumvent jamming (Johnston, Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1969 [Stanford, 2024]). Radio and the Performance of Government further intervenes in radio history by insisting upon the centrality and effectiveness of radio in nation-building drives—when historians have tended to follow scholars such as Benedict Anderson or Miroslav Hroch in understanding the printing press (and earlier periods) as the crux of media-instigated nation-building (108–9). These arguments would be further enhanced by considering reception in more depth. While audience reactions are not Harrison’s main focus (250), the listener accounts that she does include shine, and they simultaneously provide a solid basis for her claims about radio’s broader social roles.

Harrison underscores the role played by Beneš’s government-in-exile in “rabble rousing” or stoking anti-German hatred and, indeed, vigilante violence at the end of World War II, concluding that the government broadcasts betray “an increasingly savage and vengeful tone in all mentions of the Czechoslovak Germans that began well before [their] transfer … and later contributed to the apparent legitimization of public acts of aggression” (106). She therefore complicates simplistic narratives of first Nazis and then Communists bearing responsibility for the sum total of atrocities committed on Czech and Slovak territory. By focusing on the content of broadcasts from London, she is moreover able to excavate the democratic pre-histories of “established myths in the Communist era” (208). Noting, for example, the government-in-exile’s increasingly uncritical on-air praise for the Soviet Union as a model, Harrison acknowledges how multiple different actors, some avowedly anti-Communist, contributed to the formulation of socialist-era propaganda staples (on this, see also Bradley Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism [Lanham, MD, 2004]).

Showing how the Czechoslovak government-in-exile’s work in the United Kingdom sheds light on British history, Harrison is similarly nuanced. Here, she contests several myths permeating British popular discourse today. First, this book highlights the transnational aspect of what has been termed “the London moment” alongside “the reality of a multicultural and multilingual wartime capital” (12). This complicates “the Churchillian image of Britain standing alone against Germany,” promoted by the wartime prime minister himself and, more recently, the politicians appropriating his biography (12). Second, Harrison acknowledges that the BBC had a heyday of sorts during the conflict (referencing Asa Briggs, The War of Words: The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 3 [Oxford, 1995]), but stresses that even then, the BBC and British propaganda more broadly were characterized by sloppiness (“inefficiencies” is her polite expression), alongside “disinterest” toward Czechoslovak affairs—upon which the exiles were able to capitalize (29). Third, Harrison captures how British political institutions came to be of diminishing importance to the Czechoslovak exiles in London once the Soviet Union entered the war and as the conflict increasingly came to sap British resources and limit British aspirations (248). Finally, Harrison suggests that, despite the massive importance of these broadcasts for listeners in Central Europe, they were judged by those same listeners to “stagnate” over time (251). Harrison therefore shows how the superlatives in which discussions of this period can tend to be couched by Britain’s politicians and its tabloid and broadsheet press alike fail to capture the ironies, contradictions, collective disappointments, and personal victories characterizing daily life in wartime Britain. Tuning into these instead, Harrison shows that wartime radio could present its listeners at once with epic dramas and didactic morality plays, and an altogether more complex performance of government.