Mary Heimann: The Pittsburgh agreement and nationalism
10. December 2013 14:00
Mary Heimann in conversation with Marie Fišerová
On 31 May 1918, Masaryk and delegates representing Czech and Slovak groups in the United States put their signatures to a document that determined the relationships between Czechs and Slovaks. The unfulfilled agreement became „a rallying cry for Slovak nationalists.“
Czechoslovakia was created on the principle of national self-determination. Nevertheless, it has been argued that it was de facto the Czechs’ self-determination, whereas the other national groups within the new state were confronted with a fait accompli situation…
Czechoslovakia was not created solely on the principle of national self-determination, but on the selective application of two different principles: national self-determination (which was applied to the Czechs and Slovaks, but not to the Germans and Hungarians) and the historic rights of Habsburg Crown lands (territorial rights which were upheld in the case of the Bohemian kingdom, or lands of the Crown of St Wenceslas; but not in the case of the Hungarian kingdom, or lands of the Crown of St Stephen).
There were pragmatic reasons for these inconsistencies: the German population, which made up approximately one third of the Bohemian Crown Lands, was too large to enable the Czech majority to claim the territory on the grounds of national self-determination. Only by joining up with the Slovak speakers of Upper Hungary, and by defining Czechs and Slovaks as part of a single ‘Czechoslovak’ nation or people, could a case be made for creating a new ‘Czecho-Slovak’ state on the basis of ‘nationality’. This was how the Germans of Czechoslovakia, though more populous than the Slovaks, came to be classified as a minority. It also helps to explain why Slovak nationalist politicians, who freely decided to join in the Czechoslovak state in 1918, nevertheless came, over the course of the First Czechoslovak Republic, to see it as threatening to their Slovak national identity.
What in particular did the Pittsburgh Agreement guarantee to Slovaks and which of the conditions were eventually met?
The Pittsburgh Agreement indicated that Slovakia would have autonomy (its own diet, administration and judiciary) within a Czecho-Slovak Republic, together with Slovak language rights. Czecho-Slovakia did indeed become a republic; and Slovak was made one of the official dialects of a notionally ‘Czecho-Slovak’ language. Autonomy, however, was granted to Slovakia only in 1938, after the Munich Agreement forced the central Czechoslovak government to cede its majority German-speaking territories to Germany and to ‘resolve’ its outstanding minorities problems with Poland and Hungary. Ruthenian autonomy, which (unlike Slovak autonomy) was guaranteed in the 1920 Czechoslovak Constitution, also had to wait until 1938.
Taken from the Slovaks’ point of view, what was the meaning of the formation of Czechoslovakia? In which aspects was the alliance convenient for them?
In the now famous Martin Declaration, three Slovak political parties announced, on 30 October 1918 (just before Hungary seceded from the Austro-Hungarian Empire), their view that ‘the Slovak nation’ was part of ‘one Czecho-Slovak nation’. Other self-appointed National Councils, of which hundreds sprang into existence across Hungary in 1918 and 1919, made other, rival declarations, including pro-Hungarian ones. It is problematic to generalise about ‘the Slovaks’ as if all shared the same opinion. One would need at the very least to ask: which Slovaks? Catholic? Protestant? Nationalist? Magyarone? And one would also need to know: when? In the immediate aftermath of the First World War? During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919? During the brief period of military dictatorship that followed the First World War? After the passage of the first Czechoslovak constitution in 1920?
Some prominent Slovaks who in 1918 supported the idea of liberation from Hungary became disillusioned with the Prague regime, and were especially sensitive to what they saw as its anticlericalism. Andrej Hlinka supported the Czechoslovak cause at Martin on 30 October 1918; but changed his mind after finding out about the Pittsburgh Agreement, whose existence had not been widely known in Slovakia. By the 1930s, implementing the terms of the Pittsburgh Agreement became the main raison-d’être of the Slovak People’s Party under Hlinka’s leadership. And this was the political party that won the vast majority of the Slovak vote in the 1935 elections.
After all, 1918 did not offer many alternatives. In German-controlled Mitteleuropa Czechs would be, in comparison with their position in Austria-Hungary, merely a minority, which would mean a decline in all respects compared to the situation before 1914. An alternative for Slovaks to live in independent Hungary would be even more complicated than before 1914.
I wouldn’t agree with the premise that there were ‘not many’ political alternatives in 1918 – on the contrary, the immediate aftermath of the First World War – when empires were collapsing and democratic and socialist revolutions being tried all over Europe -- was one of the most ‘open’ periods for political change that occurred in modern European history. If what you mean is that Czech and Slovak politicians pursued in 1918 what they perceived to be their national self-interest, that is surely right. Whether they were correct in believing that their national self-interest would be better served in a newly created Czechoslovak republic than in any other possible alternative polity, such as a federalised Habsburg or Austro-Hungarian Empire, is harder to judge. The way that the first Czechoslovak Republic ended in 1938 (with Germany, Hungary and Poland annexing substantial portions of its territory in accordance with the imposed Munich Agreement) and the way that the Second Czecho-Slovak Republic collapsed in 1939 after the Slovakia declared independence (leaving Bohemia-Moravia to the mercy of Nazi Germany, Ruthenia to be annexed by Hungary, and Slovakia dependent on German goodwill) suggest that in the short term the Czechoslovak solution failed Czech, and arguably even Slovak, national self-interest. In 1939 it was not possible to foresee that the Czechoslovak state would ever be resuscitated. In the longer term, the fact that Czechoslovakia was revived at the end of the Second World War as an independent state helped to pave the way for the creation of independent Czech and Slovak republics in 1993, so in that sense it ultimately proved to be a success for the Czech and Slovak nations. But the fact that things turned out this way does not mean that the creation of a Czechoslovak state was the only alternative open to the Czech and Slovak nations in 1918.
The agreement became a source of tension between the Czech and Slovak sides. You argued that presumably the Pittsburgh Agreement advanced the rise of Slovak nationalism, which would not have happened had the agreement not existed. Hence, do you agree that from the very outset the agreement did not only initiate the birth of Czechoslovakia; it planted a seed of its inevitable collapse at the same time.
In a recent interview for Czech Television I did say just that: that the Pittsburgh Agreement contained the seeds of both the Czechoslovak state’s creation and its destruction. The Pittsburgh Agreement was crucial to the state’s creation in that it found a way to combine Czech and Slovak national interests and circumvent rival German and Hungarian national interests. On the other hand, the fact that the granting of Slovak autonomy was repeatedly delayed by Prague meant that Slovak national resentment came to redirected towards the Czechs. In the end, autonomy was seized, rather than granted, by the Slovak People’s Party as soon as the Prague administration was weakened by the Munich Crisis. Worse still, it was the (albeit partially extorted) declaration of Slovak independence on 14 March 1939, caused in part by a mishandled attempt by Prague to rein in Slovak autonomy, that gave Hitler the excuse to take over Bohemia-Moravia and establish a German Protectorate on 16 March 1939.
It is tempting to imagine that the Prague government could have avoided the long chain of events that culminated in the Munich Crisis had it implemented the terms of the Pittsburgh Agreement (and, indeed, granted Ruthenia the autonomy it was promised in the 1920 Constitution) from the start. But the perceived difficulty was that, should Slovakia and Ruthenia have been granted autonomy, the so-called Sudetenland would have demanded the same rights. So the bigger question is whether Czechoslovakia might have done better to establish itself, right from the beginning, either as a federation; or else copied the Swiss canton system (which, as it happens, Beneš strongly implied would be the case when he put forward his arguments for a new Czecho-Slovak state to the Great Powers at Versailles in 1919). But of course it is easy to be wise after the event.
The so called “German question” later became a very acute geo-political problem in the Czech lands. Most of the Czech Germans refused the constitution of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, they unsuccessfully attempted to annex the border areas to Austria. What do you think were the main causes of the escalation in their relationship?
In the immediate aftermath of the release of Emperor Charles’ Manifesto (16 October 1918), literally hundreds of National Councils sprang into existence across Habsburg territory, all aware that a Peace Conference would be convened to settle up after the war. The Cisleithanian (Austrian) territories fractured along Czech-German lines in Bohemia and Moravia; across German-Polish-Czech lines in Silesia; across Slovak, Hungarian, Jewish and Romanian lines in Upper Hungary.
Out of the bewildering number of claims and counter-claims that were made at the time, we tend to remember only those which ultimately succeeded: history is written by the winners. Between the now famous declaration of Czecho-Slovak independence issued by the Czech National Committee on 28 October 1918 and the pro-Czecho-Slovak Martin Declaration issued by the Slovak National Council on 30 October 1918, declarations (among many others) were also made, on 29 October, by four so-called German ‘Provisional Governments’. The first to request inclusion in the newly proclaimed state of German Austria (as announced on 30 October 1918) was the Provisional Government of Deutschböhmen based at Liberec or Reichenberg. So from the very first day of Czechoslovak independence, Bohemian unity was hotly disputed. This is hardly surprising, given that Czech-German national rivalry went back at least as far as 1848, and had become a serious problem from at least the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The fact that the last days of the First World War were so chaotic and the future of the region so unclear meant that just about every national grouping imaginable made a bid for autonomy or independence at this time, no doubt encouraged by Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Emperor’s Manifesto to think that autonomy or independence was within their immediate grasp and anxious to take what they could before the Peace Conference had a chance to convene.
Mary Heimann. Born in 1962 in Hague, Netherlands. She was educated at Vassar College and the University of Oxford and published widely in the field of British religious history—before dropping everything, learning Czech and moving to Prague for two years to conduct intensive research in the StB archives—in order to validate her fascination with Czechoslovakia. Mary Heimann is Reader in Modern History at the University of Strathclyde and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.
Translated by Lucie Vermach Drvotová