The Partition of Czechoslovakia
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V/ The Partition of Czechoslovakia Abigail Jane Innes (Ph.D. Thesis) London School of Economics and Political Science UMI Number: U105555 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Disscrrlation Publishing UMI U105555 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ONV ivDîinod dO ^ S5H Thesis abstract The subject is the post-communist state, examined through an analysis of the break-up of Czechoslovakia. The thesis argues that the separation was not merely a symptom of the transition, of the multiple stresses afflicting the state, but that it was manufactured by the Czech right as a technocratic partition and sold to the Czech electorate as the cost of continuing reform. The thesis considers the Czech right’s definition of a ‘functioning federation’, its basic insensibility to Slovak national grievances, its roots in neo-liberal conceptions of economic reform, and the impact of this definition in blocking constitutional negotiations. The research charts how Slovak party politics developed in response to this dominating Czech vision of the future state. Persistent, broad-based public opposition to separation is found to have been deflected and neutralised by the under-developed nature of party competition, by the profound weakness of the federal parliament and by the absence of constitutional norms. The thesis opens with an introductory history. Chapter two provides a scene-setting account of the last six months of the Czechoslovak federation, the ‘endgame’ during which the separation was arranged and completed. The third chapter maps out six competing explanations for the split, to be tested in subsequent chapters. Chapter four considers the merits of a nationalist conflict analysis, and concludes that this theoretical emphasis tends to over-determine the separation, overplaying as it must the slim evidence of assertive nationalism in either republic. Chapter five argues that identifiably transitional imbalances in the party system prohibited the clear mediation of Czech Slovak relations. Chapter six examines the character of the constitutional deadlock up until June 1992. The penultimate chapter addresses economic aspects of the Czech Slovak conflict after 1989. The final chapter concludes. Table of Contents Thesis Abstract 2 List of Tables 4 Acknowledgements 5 1 The Sources of Discontent 6 2 Ends Justify Means - Arranging the Czechoslovak Separation 45 3 Competing and Complementary Explanations of the Partition 87 4 The Weakness of Nationalism in the 1992 Elections 120 5 The Impact of Party Development on the Separation of the State 152 6 The Legal Deadlock 188 7 Sweetening the Reform Pill - the Uses of Conservatism 224 8 Partition...With Honour? 260 Bibliography 291 Appendix 1: Federalism in comparative perspective 308 Appendix II: Political parties represented between 1990 and 1992 319 Appendix III: Interviews 320 List of Tables 1.1 Party strength in the First Republic by region 21 1.2 Electoral fortunes in Slovakia in the First Republic 23 3.1 Inevitability argument 95 3.2 Inequality argument 100 3.3 Démocratisation argument 104 3.4 Institutional argument 110 3.5 Party competition argument 114 3.6 Realist argument 117 3.7 Thesis argument 119 4.1 Electoral performance of nationalist parties in the Slovak National Council 133 4.2 Results of the 1992 elections - Federal Assembly 138 4.3 Results of the 1992 elections - National Councils 139 5.1 Results of the 1990 elections 154 Acknowledgements There are many people who, through their generous help, have been invaluable to the completion of this thesis. First of all I am beholden to my hardy supervisor, Brendan O’Leary, at the London School of Economics. His always excellent advice and accommodation of my geographical and intellectual wanderings has been much appreciated. I must thank Chris Pomery, Christoph Bartmann, Anja Tippner, David Rehak, Michaela Kaplankova, Jan Hanzl and Quentin Reed in Prague for their constant help and wonderful company. I also benefitted enormously from the office space provided by the Czech Centre for Economic Research and Graduate Economic Studies. I am indebted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for providing me with the privilege of ‘Visiting Scholar’ status. In particular I would like to thank Jason Wittenberg of MIT, Anna Gryzmala-Busse of Harvard and Shari Cohen of Berkeley for their spirited fight through various parts of the manuscript, and Grzegorz Ekiert at Harvard for being a constant source of great advice and support. My parents, Jean and Michael Innes, as ever, provided every imaginable form of assistance and comfort, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart. Similarly, I could not have done without the day to day support of my partner, Denis. I thank him for being - it must be said - the perfect antidote to studying divorce. Finally, I would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for their funding of this project. Chapter 1 The Sources of Discontent Introduction On 1st January 1993, the Federative Republic of Czechoslovakia (CSFR) died. Its successor states were the two independent republics of Czechia and Slovakia. The decision to separate followed just over two years of negotiations over alternative state forms, which had ended in deadlock. The divorce occurred after the subsequent general election in June 1992. The new Czech and Slovak Premiers, Vaclav Klaus and Vladimir Meciar, settled the dispute at breakneck speed. No shot was fired and no borders questioned. So apparently punctilious and rapid was Czechoslovakia’s end, that it was set down as a model abroad: an exemplar of the frictionless parting of nations. This thesis will attempt to explain the break-up of post-communist Czechoslovakia, and to assess its alleged merits as the perfect divorce. Surprisingly few authors have analysed Czechoslovakia in anything approaching its historical entirety^ (1918-1992), and until recently, anyone reading Czech Slovak history has faced an unusual burden of ideological ‘decoding’. As several post-Second World War studies pointed out, Slovakia had tended to be subsumed within histories of the First Republic (1918-1938) as if it represented no more than a province of the Czech dominated whole. Though a fair objection, this perception of neglect spurred an alternative but often equally polemical literature, particularly from émigré Slovaks and their descendants^. Within the country, a complete hijacking of the history of the state followed the communist takeover in 1948. Until communism’s collapse in 1989, analysis and analysts alike were dragged into a disinformational maze constructed by the Communist Party. While it might be instructive of the Central European experience to observe how the far left and far right have portrayed national differences over time, it is also important to note how ill-served would-be mediators in the national dispute ' The exceptions being Carol Skalnik Leff and Frederic Wehrle. ^ Frantisek Vnuk, a nationalist historian sympathetic to Slovakia’s wartime clerico-fascist regime stands at the more extreme end of the spectrum whilst Stanislav Kirschbaum, son of a postwar émigré and author of one of the few comprehensive works in English on Slovak history, clearly has strong nationalist leanings. 7 have frequently been by the overburdened narratives within Czechoslovakia’s school books. F. Wehrle and C.S. Leff have done much to explain the foundations behind these evidently “diverging constructions of history” (Wehrle 1994:241), applying important anchors to the historical record with their explorations of both the Czechand Slovak sides to the story. Their attention has rested on the abiding constitutional and economic inequality of the two regions, and the repercussions in Slovak perceptions of the Czechs as colonisers and betrayers of the constitutional promise of equality, and in Czech readings of the Slovaks, conversely, as opportunistic and ungrateful ‘younger brothers’. The thesis presented here, though drawing a great deal on these same issues, does not represent just another consideration of Czech and Slovak relations but rather seeks to consider the national conflict as a vehicle for exploring the wider, and more regionally comparable issues of democratic consolidation following the collapse of communism in 1989. By examining the dénouement, the separation process between 1989 and 1993, the thesis seeks to isolate ‘national’ from other underlying weaknesses in the structure of the new democratic state. A history of stereotypes This introductory chapter concentrates on the ostensibly all-important, stereotype- forming moments in the history of the state: on national provocations before 1989. By considering those affairs conventionally recognised as conflicting in Czech and Slovak memory the aim is to sensitise the reader to some of the fuller implications of political rhetoric after 1989. A first chapter thus structured implies a question: were these Czech and Slovak differences when democratically released an irreconcilable clash in a resurgent