Security, Public Order and Paramilitarism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1918–1920: Comparative Considerations

Abstract

This article investigates the struggle for control over the violence that the Second Polish Republic and the First Czechoslovak Republic fought during their early independence in 1918. As violence had spread throughout the European continent during World War I, it became a crucial post-war question to control its expansion throughout the societies, as different paramilitary groups started to take the law into their own hands, either to protect their co-citizen's interests, or to enforce their own political or economic ambitions, and very often both at the same time. Thus, the use and limitation of violence were ambivalent: the newcomer states often relied on paramilitary units as policing forces and instruments to expand their state power into contested, ethnically mixed border areas. On the other hand, these emerging states faced difficulties to control paramilitary groups, which challenged the state's authority and followed their own – often criminal – agenda. This article aspires to comparatively examine the use of violence and its attempted regulation in Poland and Czechoslovakia during the first years of their existence. Furthermore, presenting the Polish-Czech conflict over Cieszyn Silesia, it aims to show how, immediately after the Great War, ethnopolitical tugs-of-war, fought between regular soldiers and paramilitaries of neighbouring states over borderlands created civil war-like scenarios and put the ethnically mixed population in these regions between a proverbial rock and a hard place.