Prejudiced Asylum: Czechoslovak Refugee Policy, 1918–60

Abstract

This article examines Czechoslovak refugee policy and particularly reactions to the refugee crises of the late 1930s, after the Anschluss with Austria and the Munich Agreement. As well as facing waves of refugees from Austria, the Sudetenland and elsewhere, Czechoslovakia by the late 1930s was changing from a place of refuge into a refugee-generating country as its own citizens were forced to flee. The article will focus on the relationship between successive refugee crises (and the introduction of a highly restrictive and anti-Jewish refugee policy) and the decline of a multiethnic society (measured by the concept of citizenship). Particular attention will be paid to the radical shift post-Munich from the limited tolerance of interwar Czechoslovakia to the nationalist, ethnically-exclusive, antisemitic and authoritarian Second Czecho-Slovak Republic. These developments will be traced against the background of the history of the refugee policy of interwar Czechoslovakia and other refugee-receiving countries in Europe. The link between the refugee crisis of 1938 and the emergence of an ethnically intolerant Czechoslovak state post-Second World War will also be explored.