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Czechoslovakia Historical Setting
Orava Castle in Slovakia, dating from the third century A.D.
CZECHOSLOVAKIA WAS ESTABLISHED in 1918 as a national state of
the
Czechs and Slovaks. Although these two peoples were closely
related, they had undergone different historical experiences. In
the ninth century A.D., the ancestors of the Czechs and Slovaks
were united in the Great Moravian Empire, but by the tenth
century the Hungarians had conquered Slovakia, and for a
millennium the Czechs and the Slovaks went their separate ways.
The history of Czechoslovakia, therefore, is a story of two
separate peoples whose fates sometimes have touched and sometimes
have intertwined.
Despite their separate strands of development, both Czechs
and Slovaks struggled against a powerful neighbor that threatened
their very existence. Both nations showed resilience and
perseverance in their search for national self-expression. The
Czechs had a much richer tradition of self-rule. From the tenth
to the fifteenth century, the Czech-inhabited Bohemian Kingdom
was a powerful political and military entity. The immigration
into Bohemia of a large number of Germans, however, created
tension between Czechs and Germans.
Perhaps the greatest moment of Czech self-expression came
with the Hussite movement in the fifteenth century. In 1403 the
Czech reformist preacher Jan Hus challenged papal authority and
precipitated a broadly based anti-German rebellion. The Hussite
religious reform movement developed into a national struggle for
autonomy in political and ecclesiastical affairs. For over two
centuries the Czechs were able to maintain political self-rule,
which was expressed by the Bohemian estates (an assembly of
nobles, clergy, and townspeople representing the major social
groups in the Bohemian Kingdom) and the Czech Reformed Church.
The failure to establish a native dynasty ultimately doomed
the Bohemian Kingdom. In 1526 the Bohemian estates accepted a
Hapsburg ruler as monarch. Soon this voluntary subordination was
transformed into the hereditary rule of an alien absolutist
dynasty. The Bohemian estates resisted, but their defeat by the
Hapsburgs at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 had dire
consequences: the entire Czech leadership was either killed or
went into exile, the reformed Czech religion was gradually
eliminated, and even the Czech language went into decline. As the
remnants of the Bohemian Kingdom were abolished, the Czech lands
were incorporated into Austria. From self-rule, the Czechs were
reduced to an oppressed peasant nation.
New forces at work in the nineteenth century dramatically
changed the position of the Czechs. A vigorous industrial
revolution transformed a peasant nation into a differentiated
society that included industrial workers, a middle class, and
intellectuals. Under the influence of the Enlightenment and
romanticism, the Czechs experienced a remarkable revival of Czech
culture and national consciousness. By the mid-nineteenth
century, the Czechs were making political demands, including the
reconstitution of an autonomous Bohemian Kingdom. Because of
Austria's parliamentary system, the Czechs were able to make
significant cultural and political gains, but these were
vigorously opposed by Bohemia's Germans, who feared losing their
privileged position. On the eve of World War I, the Czech leader
Tomas Masaryk began propagating the Czechoslovak idea, i.e., the
reunion of Czechs and Slovaks into one political entity.
The Slovak road to nationhood was even more difficult than
that of the Czechs. After incorporation into the Kingdom of
Hungary in the tenth century, the Slovaks were reduced to being
serfs of their Hungarian overlords. Having no forum for political
expression, the Slovaks lacked a strong national consciousness.
They did maintain their language and folk customs. On occasion,
the Slovaks were able to renew contact with the Czechs. In the
fifteenth century, Czech Hussite armies had briefly occupied
parts of Slovakia. In the sixteenth century, Czech Protestant
literature was circulated in Slovakia, and the Czech language
became the literary language of educated Slovaks.
National revival came late and more hesitantly to the Slovaks
than to the Czechs. Slovakia was not industrialized until the end
of the nineteenth century; therefore, the Slovaks remained
primarily a rural people led by a small group of intellectuals.
The Slovak leadership had first to decide on the nature of Slovak
identity. Some outstanding Slovak scholars, e.g., Pavel Safarik
and Jan Kollar, viewed Slovaks as merely a long-separated part of
a single Czechoslovak nation. By the 1840s, however, L'udovit
Stur emphasized the distinctiveness of the Slovak language and
people; subsequently, Slovaks viewed themselves as a separate
Slovak nationality. As the Slovaks attempted to establish
cultural institutions and make political demands, they were
blocked by the Hungarian ruling aristocracy. The Slovak national
revival was severely repressed, and, on the eve of World War I,
the Slovaks were struggling to preserve their newly found
national identity.
After a millennium of separation, the Czechs and Slovaks were
politically reunited in 1918 in the Czechoslovak Republic. As a
parliamentary democracy surrounded by hostile neighbors, the
Czechoslovak Republic not only survived for twenty years but also
prospered. Yet the republic was not able to withstand the
combined pressure of its dissatisfied minorities and the
aggressive designs of its neighbors. Tension was most acute in
the German-populated Sudetenland. The rise of Hitler, who became
chancellor of Germany in 1933, led to mounting German nationalism
in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and provided a pretext for
Hitler's demand for annexation of this highly industrialized
area. Czechoslovakia's major allies, Britain and France, were
anxious to avoid a war with Germany. To appease Hitler, they
signed the Munich Agreement on September 29, 1938, ceding the
Sudetenland to the Third Reich. Bowing to the inevitable,
Czechoslovak President Eduard Benes accepted the Munich decision.
In March 1939, Nazi troops occupied all of Bohemia and Moravia,
and the Slovaks declared independence. Czechoslovakia ceased to
exist.
After World War II, Czechoslovakia was reconstituted as an
independent state but again faced the threat of a powerful
neighbor. President Benes had made major concessions to the
Communist Party of Czechoslovkia, hoping to satisfy it and the
Soviet Union while, at the same time, attempting to preserve
Czechoslovakia's democratic, pluralistic political system.
Benes's hopes were not realized, and the communists overthrew his
coalition government in 1948. Czechoslovakia soon was placed
firmly into the Soviet orbit, and Stalinization followed.
Czechoslovakia's democratic tradition had been suppressed but
not destroyed. In 1968 the struggle for democracy reemerged
within the party itself. While remaining loyal to the Soviet
Union and the Warsaw Pact, the leadership of the party under
Alexander Dubcek attempted to introduce within Czechoslovakia a
more democratic form of socialism. The ensuing Prague Spring of
1968 was crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion. Subsequently, the
leadership of the party was purged, and Gustav Husak, the new
general secretary (the title changed from first secretary in
1971), introduced a "normalization" program. Despite Czech and
Slovak dissent, as of 1987 Husak continued to enforce an antireformist course.
Data as of August 1987
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