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In-Depth Information
Austria-Hungary's industry intact. Prague regained its position at the centre of the country's
political and cultural life, and in the interwar period was embellished with a rich mantle of
Bauhaus-style buildings. Less enviable was the diverse make-up of the country's population
-amelangeofminoritiesthatwouldintheendproveitsdownfall.Alongwiththesixmillion
CzechsandtwomillionSlovakswhoinitiallybackedtherepublic,thereweremorethanthree
millionGermansand600,000Hungarians,nottomentionsundryotherRuthenians(Rusyns),
Jews and Poles.
That Czechoslovakia's democracy survived as long as it did is down to the powerful polit-
ical presence and skill of
Masaryk
, the country's president from 1918 to 1935, who shared
executive power with the cabinet. It was his vision of social democracy that was stamped
on the nation's new constitution, one of the most liberal of the time (if a little bureaucratic
and centralized), aimed at ameliorating any ethnic and class tensions within the republic by
means of universal suffrage, land reform and, more specifically, the Language Law, which
ensured bilinguality to any area where the minority exceeded twenty percent.
The elections of 1920 reflected the mood of the time, ushering in the left-liberal alliance of
the
Pětka
(The Five), a coalition of five parties led by the Agrarian, Antonín Švehla, whose
slogan,“wehaveagreedthatwewillagree”,becamethekeystoneoftherepublic'sconsensus
politics between the wars. Gradually all the other parties (except the Fascists and the Com-
munists) - including even Andrej Hlinka's Slovak People's Party and most of the Sudeten
German parties - began to participate in (or at least not disrupt) parliamentary proceedings.
On the eve of the Wall Street Crash, the republic was enjoying an economic boom, a cultural
renaissance and a temporary modus vivendi among its minorities.
The 1930s
The 1929 Wall Street Crash plunged the whole country into crisis. Economic hardship was
quickly followed by
political instability
. In Slovakia, Hlinka's People's Party fed off the
anti-Czech resentmentthatwasfuelledbyPrague'smaniccentralization, consistentlypolling
around thirty percent, with an increasingly nationalist/separatist message. In Ruthenia, the
elections of 1935 gave only 37 percent of the vote to parties supporting the republic, the rest
going to the Communists, pro-Magyars and other autonomist groups.
But without doubt the most intractable of the minority problems was that of the Sudeten
Germans, wholived inthe mountainous borderregions ofBohemia andMoravia. Nationalist
sentimenthadalwaysrunhighintheSudetenland,manyofwhoseGerman-speakersresented
having been included in the new republic, but it was only after the Crash that the extremist
parties began to make significant electoral gains. Encouraged by the rise of Fascism in Aus-
tria,ItalyandGermany,andaidedbyrocketingSudetenGermanunemployment,thefar-right
Sudeten German Party
(SdP), led by a bespectacled gym teacher called Konrad Henlein,
was able to win just over sixty percent of the German-speaking vote in the 1935 elections.
