PARIS 1919: CZECH/SLOVAK POSITION PAPER

War Experience

During the years of the First World War, Czechoslovakia took concrete form. Through the efforts of the sociologist Edvard Benes (1884-1948), who would serve as one of his country’s delegates to the Paris Conference, as well as the philosophy professor Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the nation-state emerged on the map by the end of the conflict. Arriving in Paris from Prague in 1915, Benes represented a group calling itself the Czechoslovak National Council. As the many nationalities of the rapidly crumbling Austria-Hungary maneuvered to capture the attention and sympathies of the Entente powers in the last months of the war, Benes worked rigorously to present his case. His assurances to the French that his country, unlike its neighbors, was prepared to join the fight against Bolshevism, seemed to pay off. In June of 1918, the French foreign minister formally recognized his Council as the future government of an independent Czechoslovakia and proceeded to place pressure on its allies to do the same. Indeed, Benes later received permission to sit in at the Supreme War Council to discuss armistice terms with Austria-Hungary. By the time the Peace Conference opened, Benes had firmly established Czechoslovakia on the victorious side, its past as part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire to be noted only in passing and with much regret. Benes’s colleague, Masaryk, had recognized early in the war that Austria-Hungary no longer made sense, and that the future for Czechoslovakia (he assumed that it would include the Slovak lands) lay in independence, possibly under Russian sponsorship. The overthrow of the tsar in February of 1917 brought Masaryk to St. Petersburg (from Britain). He urged the shaky provisional government to renew its attack on the Austrian armies, and worked to transform Czech prisoners of war into an army that would fight side by side with the Russians. The Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 and V.I. Lenin’s decision to sue for peace, however, made those plans impossible. The Bolsheviks were nonetheless happy to send the Czech Legion, now 50,000 strong, on its way to the Western Front. The only feasible route was a roundabout one, six thousand miles on the Trans-Siberian railway to the Pacific port of Vladivostok, and then by boat to France. With assurances from Bolshevik leaders, Masaryk left first, in March 1918, confident that his troops would be right behind him. Partway across Siberia, however, the Czech Legion clashed with Hungarians heading west to join the Bolsheviks. The fighting spread, and the Czechs soon found themselves at war with the Bolsheviks. By the end of the summer, Czech forces were effectively in control of most of the railway and, by chance, the gold reserves of the tsarist government. By this time the war was winding down in Europe, and the Czechs were more useful where they were. The Allied forces that had landed at Vladivostok in August might well want to move westward against the Bolsheviks. Embroiled in the Allied intervention in the Russian civil war, the soldiers were condemned to another two years in Siberia. Benes, however, was not sorry to see this development, for he extracted a promise from the grateful British to recognize his Czechoslovak National Council. As for Masaryk, after leaving Russia, he crisscrossed the U.S. lobbying for the Czech cause. On September 3, 1918, the United States finally recognized the Council as a de facto belligerent government. By the autumn of that year, Austria-Hungary was clearly finished. From Paris, Benes sought to create facts on the ground. On October 28, Czech politicians took power from the demoralized

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Austrian administration. Benes urged the Allies to evacuate the German and Hungarian forces from the Czech lands and Slovakia, and to bring in Allied forces. Since the latter had few troops to spare, Czech forces largely undertook the occupation, acting under Allied command. In January 1919, Masaryk was back in Prague, installed as Czechoslovakia’s first president. In spite of complaints from the inhabitants, Czech troops moved into the German-speaking borderlands, where Bohemia met Austria in the south and Germany in the north. In Slovakia the French military authorities ordered the Hungarian government to withdraw its troops behind a line that conveniently coincided with the border the Czechs desired. Conference Expectations At the Peace Conference, Benes sought to push out the borders of what Czechoslovakia already possessed, laying claims to morsels of Poland, as well as a slice of Hungary stretching along the Danube and extending towards the Carpathian mountains. He planned to ask for pieces of German and Austria territory north and south of the old Bohemian and Moravian frontiers in order to provide Czechoslovakia with a smoother and more defensible border. At the country’s tail in the east, Benes sought to acquire the largely Ukrainian-speaking territory on the south side of the Carpathians on the grounds that the locals, largely Ruthenians, were like the Slovaks. Leaving them under Hungarian rule, when Czechoslovakia was prepared to take them under its wing, was simply unkind. Adding that piece of territory would also give Czechoslovakia a border with Rumania, a friendly state. All too well, Benes recognized Czechoslovakia’s need for friends, surrounded as it was on three sides by Germans and Hungarians. Perhaps the Allies could even provide for a corridor of land running southward between Austria and Hungary to link his country with Yugoslavia, reflecting Masaryk’s dream of a Slav federation. The Czech delegation made preparations to downplay potential ethnic conflicts. Although Slovakia would contain some 650,000 Hungarians, 350,000 Slovaks would be left outside the country. The Hungarians could not complain; they had tried, with little success, to turn Slovaks into Hungarians. German speakers lived along the borders with Austria and Germany in the west of old Bohemia (the Sudetenland), but Benes was going to show that the pre-war Austrian figures of several million were quite untrustworthy, for his data demonstrated only one and a half million Germans to probably three times as many Czechs. Benes would argue that the Bohemian Germans did not wish to see their businesses submerged by the more powerful German economy. If some of them talked of joining Germany, or perhaps even Austria, Benes would point out that such sentiments resulted from outside agitators. Most importantly, however, Benes planned to show that Czechoslovakia could not survive without the Sudetenland’s sugar refineries, glassworks, textile mills, smelters and breweries, as well as mountains and hills as defensible frontiers. The Czechs aimed to harness other arguments to back their claims: a glorious past, a love of freedom and democracy, and a reputation for industry. In addition, while everyone around them seemed to be succumbing to Bolshevism, the Czechs stood fast. Neither the British nor the Americans were particularly interested in the new little country. The French, however, were invested in the new state due to security concerns, for the former desired a country robust enough to join with Poland and Yugoslavia in order to balance both Russia and Germany. 2

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