Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

An American in Vienna told me that Czechoslovakia was “a Bologna sausage impossibly sprawling across the map,” and expressed in no uncertain terms his belief in the approaching collapse of a country “without natural frontiers and economic or geographical raison d’être and made up of a congeries of races among which the Czechs are in the minority.” An Austrian cabinet minister added, “The old racial and irredentist problems of this part of the world were not solved by the treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon; they were only transferred from Vienna to Prague.”

If one considers the question of the viability of Czechoslovakia from the strict point of view of geography and ethnography, there would indeed seem to be little hope for the future of this curiously composite state. Czechoslovakia is long and narrow, and part of her frontiers are arbitrary. Out of a population of less than 13,000,000, there are more than 3,000,000 Germans and nearly 1,000,000 Hungarians. Ruthenians or Ukrainians number 500,000. And there are Jews and some Poles. Whether the Czechs are outnumbered by “alien races” depends upon the classification of the two other branches of the Slav family in the body politic. Are Moravians and Slovaks different people from the Czechs? Even if they be counted as the same or similar, possessing common historical traditions, using kindred languages, sharing common aspirations, and being willing to throw their lot in with the Czechs, there is a difference in culture—a striking difference. The Slovaks and the peoples of other regions ceded by Hungary to Czechoslovakia contain a large percentage of illiterates. The Czechs in the Kingdom of Bohemia are virtually all literate. The wife of a cabinet minister told me that she had never in her life met anybody who could not read and write. What American could say the same?

President Masaryk is a Moravian, and General Stefanik is a Slovak. These two men, together with Dr. Benes, a Czech, were the leaders in securing the recognition of Czechoslovak independence, and have succeeded in retaining the confidence of their people during the formative years of the new republic. This fact in itself, however, is not indicative of a real fusion of the Slavic elements. It will be remembered that even during the war some of the most prominent Austrian statesmen were Czechs, notably Count Czernin. The Czechs make up 46 per cent of the population of the new state, and even with the Slovaks amount to only 60 per cent. The two million Slovaks have insisted upon autonomy from the very beginning of the national life, and only their cultural inferiority has prevented them from acting as the Croats have acted in Jugoslavia.

The greatest problem is that of the Germans, who live in a more or less compact mass in regions contiguous to Germany and Austria. Were it not for two saving factors in the situation, the natural mountain frontier separating the Germans of Bohemia from Germany and the cultural equality of the Czechs with the Germans, the presence in the body politic of a German bloc, comprising 27 per cent of the total population, would make Czechoslovakia a hopeless proposition. For, after the collapse of the Central Empires, the Germans of Bohemia declared themselves united to Austria and opposed to the bitter end the determination of the Peace Conference to put them under Czech rule in defiance of the right of self-determination. The Germans form a separate party in the Czechoslovak parliament, and use their own language in addressing the chair and in debates. They assert that they are citizens of Czechoslovakia against their will and that they had no part in forming the new constitution under which they are governed. They resent the sudden change of fortune of the Teutonic master race. Their new position is humiliating.

But powerful material considerations have led them to make the best of a bad business and to accept the fait accompli. Austria is in a sorry plight, and the condition of Germany is not much better. The Germans of Czechoslovakia are far better off, although politically depressed, than Germans in any other part of the world. Comparatively speaking, the country of which they are now citizens is prosperous, and they form a large enough element to be able to stand up for their rights in the new state. The danger to Czechoslovakia of containing so large a German population will come only when Germany has rehabilitated herself, or if Austria succeeds in reaching a degree of prosperity equal to that of Czechoslovakia.

On the other hand, despite the large minorities, Czechoslovakia has an excellent chance of lasting and, by a steadily increasing prosperity, making her unwilling citizens content with their lot. Czechoslovakia is the only new state formed wholly out of the Hapsburg Empire. Prague does not have the problems of Bucharest, Belgrade, and Warsaw, where peoples separated through centuries and impregnated with different cultures and radically divergent political ideals and political experience have been brought together under a new roof. Not a portion of the Czechs but all of them have had political education and have been familiar with suffrage and parliamentary life. The Czechs had their quota of functionaries in the Hapsburg Empire, which gives them trained men for government service. Without intending offense, one might say that the Czechs are the most promising of the newly emancipated people because they are German-trained in public life, administration, and education, as well as in business. They possess a German mentality—in the better sense of that term—and this is the reason they have made such wonderful progress in five years and present to the visitor the picture of a state functioning without confusion and possessing all that makes for durability.

From large portions of Jugoslavia and Rumania it is going to take a long time to obliterate the four centuries of subjection to Ottoman rule. Rumania and Poland have elements that remained for centuries under the Russian yoke. Bohemia was in slavery, but gentle slavery. The Slavs were discriminated against, it is true, but not in a way fatal to their cultural or economic development. The country was not partitioned, and Austrian rule could not be compared with that of Turkey or Russia. The territories that go to make up Czechoslovakia shared the prosperity of the last half-century of the Hapsburg Empire, and they contained—already developed—factories, mines, and agricultural and forest industries second to none in Europe. Mark the words “already developed.” When you go to Bucharest or Belgrade or Warsaw you are told what the people hope to do, and the potential wealth of the country is impressed upon you. Foreign capital is essential, and there is the constant anxiety that its introduction be not accompanied by political subserviency to the great powers and economic dependence upon them. But at Prague you do not have to visualize the future. The actual wealth of the country and its existing machinery for production are sufficient guarantees of its ability to live alone. Railways do not have to be built: they are already there. Men do not have to go through the painful stages of learning parliamentary manners, and officials are not running around madly with more good will than knowledge. Czechoslovakia is the one going concern created by the Paris Conference.

In several respects the birth of Czechoslovakia differed from that of Poland and Jugoslavia and from the formation of Greater Rumania and Greater Greece.

Alone among the smaller peoples subject to the Central Empires or influenced by them, the Czechoslovaks from the beginning of the World War made up their minds that their bread was buttered on the side of an Entente victory. Unlike the Poles and Jugoslavs, they deserted from the Austro-Hungarian armies on every occasion, and when they went over to the Entente they risked being shot for treason if captured when fighting in the Entente armies. They rendered appreciable services by this technical disloyalty, and before the end of the war they had under arms divisions on three battle-fronts and an army in Siberia. Their leaders who managed to escape from the country burned their bridges behind them, and those who stayed at home, like Dr. Kramar, first premier of the new state, almost lost their lives by insisting during the war upon the resurrection of Bohemia as one of the conditions of peace.

Added to loyalty to the cause of those to whom they looked for emancipation was an amazing sense of moderation, unique among the liberated peoples. Before the emancipation the Czechs were willing to be guided by the councils of the great powers, and after the liberation they took a sensible view toward minorities. They did not combat or attempt to override the decisions of the Peace Conference. Curious as it was, their new state was spontaneously formed by the recognition of the Bohemian claims to statehood by Austria just before the collapse, and by the voluntary adhesion of national councils in Moravia, Silesia, Slovakia, and Russina to the nucleus of a common government already formed at Prague. The Prague authorities gained no territory by conquest, and arms did not have to be used against the German and Hungarian minorities, whose incorporation in the new state was provided for by the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon.