A Cautionary Tale of Ethnic Nationalism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Sometimes you shouldn’t give in to someone who might, according to the political zeitgeist of the time, be technically in the right – because you know they have evil motives and aggressive intentions and this will only make them stronger.

I’m referring to one of the tragedies that led up to the Second World War – Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the only democratic state in eastern Europe between the two world wars.

It’s been twenty years since Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved into two states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a few years after the end of Communist rule. The Czechs and Slovaks went their separate ways following the decision in July 1992 to disband the country; their “velvet divorce” was easy.

But things were very different in 1938-1939, the first time the country disintegrated .

When the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire or “Dual Monarchy” collapsed at the end of the First World War, most of the German areas became part of the new republic of Austria.

However, many Germans were incorporated into a newly formed country, Czechoslovakia, which comprised the lands of the former Habsburg-ruled Bohemian Crown -- Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia-- and the Slovak and Ruthenian parts of the old Kingdom of Hungary.

The population consisted of Czechs (51 per cent), Germans (23 per cent), Slovaks (16 per cent), Hungarians (5 per cent), Ruthenians (4 per cent), and Jews (1 per cent).

These Germans, living in the border regions of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, were included in the new country against their will by the victorious Allies who carved up the old Habsburg Empire.

Some had lived in these areas – which became known as the Sudetenland -- since the 12th century and they even set up a short-lived entity known as German Bohemia.

This became a recipe for disaster once Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 and created his “Third Reich.”

Using the nationalist argument that people with a common language and ethnicity should belong to the same political state, Hitler, who paraded as the champion of pan-German nationalism and a “Greater Reich,” had already grabbed Austria in March of 1938, in an enforced union known as the “Anschluss.”

Now he turned his sights on the Sudetenland. At the infamous Munich conference of September 1938, Hitler got his way and incorporated the region into Nazi Germany. And indeed, the vast majority of Sudeten Germans welcomed Hitler’s takeover.

In March of 1939, Hitler grabbed the rest of the old Crown lands of Bohemia and Moravia, turning it into a Nazi-ruled “protectorate,” while Slovakia became a German puppet state.

Czechoslovakia, reconstituted after Germany’s defeat in 1945, “solved” the problem of its Sudeten German minority through “ethnic cleansing.” About three million Germans were expelled, thousands more were killed or died, and the Czech lands became ethnically homogeneous.

The Slovaks, though, still have a restive minority to deal with to this day – the ethnic Hungarians, 8.5% of Slovakia’s population, and concentrated mostly in the southern part of the country, next to the border with Hungary.

Will this become a future Sudetenland-style crisis? Only time will tell.