Czechs and Slovaks 1998

Abstract

For Czechs, 1998 is a year of anniversaries. In April Charles University celebrates the 650th year of its founding by Charles IV in 1348 when the Kingdom of Bohemia was at its peak. Three hundred years later, in 1648, the end of the Thirty Years War marked the victory of the counter-reformation and sealed the fate of Bohemian independence. Two centuries after that, in 1848, the year of the Spring of Nations throughout Europe, the revolt in Prague, although crushed, played a modest role in setting out Czech demands for autonomy and democracy.Nineteen ninety-eight is also the anniversary of more recent dramatic events which are better known to the contemporary world 1918, when the first independent Czechoslovak state was founded; 1938, the year that state was dismembered after appeasement at Munich, followed in March 1939 by the establishment of a separate Slovakia and the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands; 1948, the communist coup d'etat in February; and 1968, the Prague Spring which was crushed by Soviet troops' in August. In April 1969 Gustav Husak assumed power and the long period of 'normalization' began. While 1978 and 1988 were not memorable, the latter marked the beginning of more active Czech opposition which culminated in the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Four years later, in 1993, seventy-five years after the founding of a common state, Czechoslovakia broke into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.Twenty years ago, on a similar anniversary, I wrote that this series of events illustrated the discontinuity of Czechoslovak history and the decisive impact of external forces on its fate and demonstrated the frequent failure of Czech and Slovak leaders, and both peoples, to face these crises effectively.(f.1) I argued that the Czech tradition of pluralism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was rudely interrupted and only briefly and partly restored during these repeated crises. Only in 1998, almost a decade after the Velvet Revolution, does it appear that at least the Czechs, by their own efforts and in a favourable international environment, have achieved a relative degree of political and economic stability based on pluralism. The Slovaks, although they shared in the Velvet Revolution and later gained independent statehood, have been less successful in establishing a stable democratic order.Some Czechs think there is something auspicious about the numeral 8 in their history. In fact, these anniversaries are artificial milestones that do mark, at least symbolically, decisive turning points in the fortunes of Czechs and Slovaks. The Slovaks have their own crucial dates, such as 1939, 1944, and 1993. In both countries, each date marks fundamental transformations in the lives of these two small nations and reflects basic shifts in the power relations in Europe and the world. Because for some Czechs there is something auspicious about the number 8 in Czechoslovak history they hoped that the year of the double eight, 1988, would bring a new turn toward freedom and independence. It is useful from the vantage point of 1998 to look again at the sequence of events and to analyze the interplay of domestic and international forces which produced these recurrent cycles -- usually every twenty years -- in the troubled history of Czechoslovakia and its constituent nations.(f.2)1918 -- IndependenceIn 1918 the Hapsburg monarchy came to an end, and, with the endorsement of the principle of national self-determination at the Paris peace conference, a number of small states, among them Czechoslovakia, were established in central and eastern Europe. This was possible because the Western powers triumphed in World War I; Germany was vanquished and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was dismantled; with the October 1917 revolution and subsequent civil war, Russian power was destroyed; and the Anglo-French alliance dominated Europe after Versailles. Although Czechoslovak independence came about largely because of the policies of the Western powers, it was a culmination of the struggle for national rights of Czechs and Slovaks within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. …