Abstract
AbstractThe article focuses on two sets of autonomist demands that the far-right Sudeten German Party (SdP) in Czechoslovakia put forward during 1937–38. Its central thesis being that both sets were marked by a profoundly close interplay between territorial and non-territorial approaches at accommodating national diversity, it sets to explore this relationship, highlighting the underlying dynamic. Although the 1937 Volksschutzgesetze posed as an ostensibly “pure” case of non-territorial autonomy, whereas the 1938 Skizze über Neuordnung der innerstaatlichen Verhältnisse entailed major territorial provisions, in both cases the practical end-goal implied territorial autonomy. A closer look into their inner logic and intellectual origins however, also reveals a shared, essentially non-territorial underpinning. While the SdP agenda was firmly centered on national territory, its specific völkisch and organicist understanding of nationality manifested a clear preponderance of non-territoriality. Both sets of autonomist demands may thus be treated as a potentially maximalist combination of territorial and non-territorial arrangements resting on a fundamentally non-territorial notion of Volkspersönlichkeit. Encompassing all the members of the national group, the latter was simultaneously conceived as the basic carrier of political will. Volksschutzgesetze and Skizze thus represented clear examples of illiberal (re-)conceptualization of national autonomy, informed by contemporary völkisch sociological, legal, and political thought.
Highlights
The two legal and organizational principles underpinning autonomist and similar arrangements for accommodating diversity – the territorial and the personal – represent two opposing ways of defining the carrier(s) of autonomy
On the other hand, is essentially non-territorial, as it is the national group per se, regardless of where in the entire state territory its members may reside, that acts as carrier of autonomy
While the practical end-goals to a major extent aimed at territorial autonomy, the essentially non-territorial fundament of the Sudeten German Party (SdP) demands were rooted in deeper ideological reasons and theoretical considerations
Summary
Common to both intellectual streams was an underlying basic understanding of nationality, which was an illiberal, völkisch, and organicist one. Together with the ethnographer Karl Christian von Loesch Boehm in 1925 co-founded and afterwards led the “Institut für Grenz- und Auslandsstudien” in Berlin, whose activities were directed at challenging the post-WWI nation state order in East Central Europe, informing the work of numerous German-speaking legal theoreticians and minority politicians across the region Both Boehm and Loesch politically counted among “traditionalists” from the “young conservatives” camp. Counterposing the “state principle” with the “ethnic principle” (das volkliche Prinzip), Boehm conceptualized the Volk as an entity of essentially political nature, “independent, politically and historically active agent [eigenständige, in die Politik und Geschichte hinwirkenden Wesenheit]” (Boehm 1932, 9), which was at the same time primordial and whose organization was more fundamental than that of the state. A letter sent by the SdP Amt für Nationalitäten und Völkerbundfragen to Hasselblatt in November 193540 thanking him for sending them a copy of “Das eigenständige Volk” thereby confirms that SdP was familiar with Boehm’s theories as early as 1935 and that the channel through which they acquainted themselves with them had been the international networks of minority activism
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