The Czechoslovak Problem

Abstract

Since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, an increasing number of Czech voices have suggested that the nation would have been better off in a federalized Austria-Hungary. While the Czechs would have survived and, most likely, prospered in such an arrangement, it was necessary for the Slovak national survival to severe the nation's ties with Hungary. As it happened, the Czechoslovak Republic, proclaimed on October 28, 1918, lasted for merely twenty years — a short span in the life of both nations. The collapse of the Republic has been blamed by various writers on France and England, the national minorities, the rise of Nazism in Germany and others. But, in the last analysis, the responsibility has to be placed on the shoulders of the leaders who did not have the foresight to secure the state externally and internally and/or were unwilling to fight for its territorial integrity in the fall of 1938.