The Threatened Republic: Treason and Disloyalty in Interwar Czechoslovakia
Research Project | 4 Project Members
This project investigates legal and political strategies to protect democracy and state integrity in interwar Czechoslovakia. The First Czechoslovak Republic was the most democratic and the most precarious among the new Central European states established in the wake of World War I. Both domestic political groups and neighboring states were hostile either to the state’s very existence or to its liberal-democratic constitution. In defending their state, Czechoslovakia’s elites faced the dilemma of struggling against right- and left-wing extremism without sliding into authoritarianism themselves. To preserve national unity and the “democratic-republican order,” they enacted far-reaching legislation to counter seditious activities, most importantly the 1923 Law for the Protection of the Republic. This research project will examine the workings of Czechoslovakia’s “militant democracy” by focusing on treason trials. Trials against alleged traitors and enemies of the state were not only legal procedures but also theaters for societal debates about the meaning of loyalty and the threshold between legitimate and illegitimate political dissent. As judicial and discursive arenas, these trials laid bare the anxieties of the state’s defenders and the hopes of its enemies. Using a broad source base including prosecution files, legal commentaries, political pamphlets, and the period press in several languages, the team members will reconstruct trials in detail and analyze the political debates that they generated. In doing so, they will draw theoretical inspiration from sociological treason and enmity studies, nationalism studies, and securitization studies. Case studies conducted by the team members will discuss investigations and legal trials against representatives of five major threats to Czechoslovak statehood and democracy: Hungarian irredentism, communism, Czech fascism, Slovak autonomism, and Sudeten German National Socialism. By combining multiple categories of political extremism in a common analytical framework, this project will produce a new political history of the First Czechoslovak Republic through the lens of the groups that did not find – or want – a place within the democratic system. It will contribute to the historiography of the transition from an imperial order to nation-statehood, to nationalism studies, and to the history of democracy and the rule of law. As a liberal society amidst a continent drifting toward authoritarianism, the First Czechoslovak Republic illustrates the political challenge of defending democracy with democratic means as well as the broader interwar struggles between authoritarianism and democracy. This story is also highly pertinent to our own time, when democracy in many Western countries is under simultaneous threat by authoritarian movements within and by foreign autocratic states intervening in political processes. By offering a nuanced account of how the Czechoslovak authorities defended – and at times compromised – their democracy, this study illuminates enduring challenges in the pursuit of democratic resilience. The goal of the project is to produce three monographs (two of which will be PhD dissertations), several peer-reviewed articles, and an edited volume based on the final conference and dedicated to comparative perspectives on treason and disloyalty in interwar Europe.
