Czechoslovakia, the State That Failed

While Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks were fighting their bloody wars over the corpse of Yugoslavia, another “Versailles creation”, the state of the Czechs and Slovaks, was also disintegrating and splitting along ethnic lines.

The peaceful nature of that collapse, however, nicknamed the “Velvet Divorce”, only confirmed to Western opinion-formers that the Czechs and Slovaks were worthy and suitable partners to Western Europe’s democracies while, further to the south, Serbs and Croats were… not.

Mary Heimann’s controversial account of the history of the Czechoslovak state takes aim at the mythology erected around the Czechs’ vaunted democratic values, and paints a very different portrait of the eight-decade union of the Czechs and Slovaks from the received version.

After reading her account, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Czechs are the great survivors and master self-publicist of Europe. Having demanded and obtained large amounts of ethnically Hungarian and German territory to which their title was at best dubious and at worst nonexistent, Heimann says they proceeded to govern these lands with harshness, planting Czech settlers and bureaucrats everywhere and discriminating vigorously against the Sudeten German community in particular.
 
It is correct to point out that, unlike King Alexander’s Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia preserved the outward forms of democracy until 1938. But Heimann says that while this democracy was not quite a sham, it was not all it seemed, either. In reality, power oscillated throughout the period between a small group of Czech parties, all committed to maintaining the ethnic and political status quo.

Heimann suggests an aggressive spirit of Czech supremacism formed the ideological core around which the interwar state revolved. Until 1945, realpolitik – living next door to a powerful German state - prevented this ideology from realising its potential – but with liberation in 1945, the gloves came off rapidly.  

Several million Germans, about 30 per cent of the population of Bohemia, were then expelled amid scenes of fantastic brutality – a campaign of ethnic cleansing that was epic in scale and never reversed or compensated for. The Hungarians would have followed them out of the country had it not been for the Communist takeover.

The extraordinary thing about this horrific affair, which spared neither old, young nor anti-Nazis, is that it took place right under the eyes of the victorious Allied powers, none of whom so much as murmured.  On the contrary, once the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans was complete, the episode was consigned to a footnote in most history books.
 
Heimann’s account is important reading for any student of Balkan history, principally because it serves as an important corrective to the idea, still worryingly prevalent, that brutal bouts of ethnic cleansing are a Balkan speciality – proof of the backward and tribal mentality of the peoples of the region.

Heimann has incurred criticism for failing to point out the economic and material gains of the interwar Czechoslovak state. That may be so. But by lifting the lid on the darker, lesser-known side of the story, she reminds us that driving people out of their homes on account of their language or religion is as much a part of the history of the Slavic peoples of Central Europe as it is of their counterparts in the Balkans.

Czechoslovakia, the State That Failed by Mary Heimann, Yale Press