The New Central Europe

During the Second World War Edvard Benes, the exile, reached the zenith of his long political career. The contempt which so many of his countrymen had felt for him after Munich, when they considered him the grave-digger of Czechoslovakia and bankrupt as a statesman, had given way to the greatest popularity he had ever enjoyed. He embodied his people's hopes for liberation from Nazi tyranny. Benes achieved also the greatest possible recognition by all the nations, East and West, allied in the struggle against Hitler.

He occupied, in fact, a unique position among members of the Grand Alliance. He represented a country whose democracy was highly respected in the West, and whose betrayal at Munich had become the symbol of past mistakes. He represented a country on whose behalf he was cooperating most successfully with Soviet Russia, an achievement which was then considered the symbol of victory and future peace.

During the period of Nazi- Soviet cooperation, Benes did not join the Western chorus of indignation against Russia, nor did he share the disappointment which so many Western friends of the Soviet Union experienced. Rather he viewed the Nazi- Soviet cooperation as a temporary, though indeed ugly, consequence of Munich. Moscow had broken off diplomatic relations with the Czech exiles, while recognizing the pro- Nazi Slovak government in Bratislava. The Czech Communists, at that time, denounced Benes as a "bourgeois chauvinist"and an "agent of Anglo- American capitalism" who sought to bring about "tragic clashes between the Czech nation and the German revolutionary working class. " | Nevertheless Benes did not lose hope that ultimately Soviet Russia would become an ally in the war against Nazi Germany.

When Hitler attacked Russia, and Russia became an ally of the West in the war against Hitler, Western pro- Soviet sentiment began to fall in line with that of Benes. The motivations, too, were similar, such as a belief in the changing nature of communism and the need for a Slavic counterpoise to the Germans in Europe. On the other hand, Czech national aspirations gave to Benes's Russian policy very distinct characteristics which were only vaguely understood in the West.

Benes often said that repudiation of Munich by the Great Powers was "the sole remaining aim" of his life; but actually he wanted much more than the mere repudiation of Munich. He aimed, by expelling the Germans and Hungarians, who comprised over 30 percent of pre- war Czechoslovakia's population, to make the country into a "homogeneous" Slav national state. This was a program of territorial expansion, in disguised form, since the land made available by expulsion of Germans and Hungarians was to be colonized by Czechs and Slovaks.

With his ability to get along with both East and West, an aim cherished by many but attained by few, Benes was successful in gaining both Eastern and Western support for Czechoslovakia's two chief post- war objectives: restoration of the pre- war frontiers and expulsion of the minorities.2 The avowed aim of his policy was to establish post- war Czechoslovakia as a "bridge" between Western democracy and Eastern communism. But his main concern was to make Czechoslovakia safe from German aggression. He was convinced that no Munich could have occurred had the Western Powers and the Soviet Union been friends and allies. Moreover it was his conviction that should East- West cooperation fail after the Second World War "the world would race towards a new catastrophe, or rather, we should face another Munich and then the world would be plunged into another catastrophe." Therefore he believed "our main task is to bring about lasting understanding between the Anglo- Saxons and the Soviet Union."3 Benes was proud of his contribution to the successful conclusion of the British- Soviet treaty in 1942.4 He was eager to follow up the British- Soviet treaty with a Czechoslovak- Soviet treaty, which he accomplished in December 1943. And he rejoiced when General Charles de Gaulle's provisional government concluded a twenty- year French- Soviet treaty of alliance and mutual assistance in December 1944, patterned after the British- Soviet treaty.

In addition to working as a diplomat and politician for East- West cooperation, Benes distinguished himself also as an ideologist of East- West rapprochement. In the enlarged edition of his wartime book DemocracyToday and Tomorrow, he developed a program which foresaw the progressive disappearance of the differences between a democratic and a Communist state. If a democracy turned "left," that is to say if it nationalized its basic industries and expanded social reform, then it would achieve, economically, that progress which he thought had been made in Soviet Russia. On the other hand, he argued, the Soviet regime ought to develop and expand the sphere of political and cultural liberty, thereby turning, as he expressed it, "to the right."5 Along the same lines of East- West synthesis, in his essays on New Slav Policy, he reached the conclusion that the two most important factors favoring the liberty of the Slavs were the ideas of the American democracy, in the form of President Wilson's program of national self- determination which had liberated the Slavs after the First World War, and the social ideas of the Soviet revolution.6 However, notwithstanding his hopes and theories about East- West unity, and his views on Czechoslovakia's role as a "bridge" between East and West, Benes's policy was "east" of the center of the "bridge." He not only foresaw, but welcomed, Soviet Russia's dominant position in post- war Eastern Europe. To be sure, he also saw the Western Powers' disengagement from the affairs of the Middle Zone. But he did not merely adjust his policy to an inevitable situation; Benes was the advocate of a policy which was Russian- oriented in any case. He hailed the rebirth of Russian nationalism. Slav solidarity, he believed, would be the leading tenet in Soviet post- war policy. Under Russia's protection, he thought, the Slavs would be safe forever from German aggression, from whose threat the Western Powers in the past had been either unable or unwilling to protect Eastern Europe. Moreover "the new Slavism," as Benes liked to call the new age of Slavic policy, promised a fulfillment of Czechoslovakia's future, the transformation of pre- war heterogeneous, multinational Czechoslovakia into a homogeneous Slav national state. The United States and Britain had also approved Benes's plan to expel Czechoslovakia's non- Slav nationalities. But they did it rather reluctantly and in vague terms. Benes was bound to know that this plan, so obviously a violation of all rules of democratic state- making, could be carried out, if at all, only with the full support of Soviet Russia. Indeed Benes's ideas about the revival of Czechoslovakia were poles apart from the Western democratic ideas which had inspired the founding of the state under Thomas G. Masaryk.

The Czech democrats, like many progressive democrats the world over, believed in the democratic potentialities of Soviet tyranny. But it was extreme nationalism, above all else, that drove Benes and his followers into the arms of Soviet Russia. Had they not found their extreme nationalistic aspirations so perfectly in harmony with the new Slav course of Soviet policy, they probably would have been much more cautious.

Instead of being cautious, however, Benes went ahead tirelessly to propagate the goodness of Russia's intentions. Apparently, having so successfully cemented friendly relations between his own country and the Soviet Union, he minimized the troubles which others (especially the Poles) were having with the Soviets. Those troubles, if carefully scrutinized, could have served to warn him of the dangers Czechoslovakia too might eventually face. But as Otto Friedman a Czech democrat who did not come under the spell of Benes's uncritical Russophilism, said: "He [Benes] kept on persuading others, including President Roosevelt that Russian interference need not be feared. . . . Thus, instead of warning others of the dangers that his country was likely to face, he was one of those who inspired that credulity towards the Russians which is mainly responsible for the post- war crisis in Europe."7 Benes seemed to believe he could set the pattern of post- war cooperation between Soviet Russiaand the countries of Eastern Europe. With this idea in mind, he went to Moscow in the winter of 1943- 44, signing there a treaty of friendship, mutual assistance and post- war cooperation between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The plan of the treaty was only reluctantly approved by the United States and Great Britain.

The Western Powers saw in it a return to the pre- war system of bilateral agreements, and a deviation from the global security system to be achieved through the United Nations. The British Foreign Office was especially critical lest the Czech- Soviet treaty isolate the Poles. The Polish government in exile shared this fear. The Poles opposed the Czech plan because, as Benes admitted in his memoirs, they saw in it the end of their plans for a Central European federation. Nevertheless, Benes, although a partner to the earlier Polish- Czechoslovak federation treaty, did not hesitate to supersede it with a Soviet- Czechoslovak treaty, believing that "if we are able to achieve complete accord with the Soviet Union, we shall be able to use this as an example. I expected that this would bring the Great Allies closer, that it would lessen and dispel the groundless suspicions."8 The Soviet- Czechoslovak treaty, signed on December 12, 1943, contained a so- called "Polish clause," which anticipated that similar treaties The New Central Europe 190

would be concluded between the Soviet Union and Poland on the one hand, and between Czechoslovakia and Poland on the other. These treaties and many more, between Soviet Russiaand the countries of the Soviet orbit, were signed later; but instead of guaranteeing national independence as Benes hoped, they were only instruments in the cynical game Soviet diplomacy was playing in Eastern Europe.

Hans Kohn saw the Czechoslovak- Soviet treaty in its proper historical perspective when he called it another Munich. The "justification" for both Munichs lay in the strategic situation; in 1938, at the time of the first Munich, Hitler was in as favorable a position in Central Europe as was Stalin later, when Benes became partner to another Munich. Moreover, as Kohn pointed out, "the Czech liberals trusted, as Neville Chamberlain had in 1938, in the case of Hitler, that Stalin would keep the agreement and that the collaboration between communists and liberals was possible"; whereas, of course, the Communists stood as little by their agreements as Hitler had stood by his.9 However, those who trusted respectively the Fascist and Communist dictators also gave evidence of a remarkable degree of nationalist blindness. In the autumn of 1938, for instance, the Hungarians and Poles, unaware of the true meaning of the Munich tragedy, in a triumphant nationalist mood carved out from Czechoslovakia territories which they considered their rightful share. Likewise, in the winter of 1943-44, Benes was in high spirits because his agreements with the Russians satisfied all his aspirations, including the ultra- nationalistic demand that the Germans and Hungarians be expelled from Czechoslovakia.

"We came to a complete agreement about everything!" These were Benes's words, recorded by his secretary, after his return from the final talks with Stalin.10 Among the agreements was of course the Soviet pledge not to interfere in Czechoslovakia's internal affairs. And Benes was especially hopeful that his agreements with Stalin would pave the way to a Soviet- Polish understanding. But when Czech- Soviet cooperation did not help to improve the relations between Russia and the other nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and when Soviet interference had blotted out one by one the independence of these nations, Benes and the Czech democrats continued to hope for Soviet Russias good intentions toward them. This hopefulness was not just a naive trust on the part of liberals, but was derived rather from the blindness of self-centered nationalists.

The great celebrations of Slav brotherhood which accompanied the signing of the Czech- Soviet treaty, inspired Benes to make new declarations of faith in Soviet Russia's evolution toward democracy. For instance in a message to Jan Masaryk he said: "The ideological development since 1935 [when Benes visited Moscow], and especially since the war, is great, genuine, and final. It would be a fundamental error to consider the dissolution of the Comintern, the new attitude towards religion, cooperation with the West, Slav policy, etc., merely as tactical moves. A new, definitive development is undeniable: it points towards a new Soviet empire which will be decentralized and will give each nation in the Soviet Union its firm place in the spirit of a new peoples' democracy. Out of the war a new Soviet Union will emerge, which will maintain the economic and social structure of the Soviet system, but will be completely new politically: it will be the leader of the Slavs and thereby a new place in the world will be secured both for the Soviet Union and for the Slavs. . . . They consider the treaty with us as the beginning of a new, very important political phase, and it may well serve as a pattern for all the Slavs."11 On his way back to London from Moscow, Benes remarked to his secretary: "T. G. Masaryk persistently refused to believe that the Soviet regime would last. I wonder what he would say now?"12 T. G. Masaryk would surely have been impressed by Soviet Russias heroism and power of resistance during the Second World War, as was every true foe of fascism. But it is impossible to imagine President Masaryk in Benes's role as a totalitarian Slav nationalist. True, Masaryk too, as a Slav and Czech nationalist, believed that a Slavic Central Europe, allied with Russia, would serve as a counterpoise to Germany. Before the Russian revolution he thought that "a Russian dynasty, in whatever form, would be most popular" in Bohemia; and even after the Bolshevik revolution, in his book New Europe: The Slavic Point of View, he wrote in 1918: "Europe, humanity, needs Russia, a free and strong Russia." 3 But he had never mistaken the Soviet Union for a free Russia. As a humanist and democrat, he never changed the opinion he had originally formulated as an eyewitness of the Bolshevik revolution. He thought of the Bolsheviks as Cicero thought of Caesar's murderers. They killed the Tsar, Masaryk once said, paraphrasing Cicero's famous saying on tyrannicide, but they did not kill tsarism.14

The resurrection of Czechoslovakia in 1945 under President Benes's totalitarian nationalism differed considerably from the founding of the state in 1918 under President Masaryk's liberal- nationalist leadership. This difference represented the shocking degeneration of Central European nationalism under the impact of inter- war rivalries, nazism, the new war, and finally communism. But the greatest shock after the Second World War was that of all people the Czech democrats should take the lead in inciting the orgies of chauvinism.

President Masaryk too had believed in the nation- state, but more as a step toward a higher union among nations than as exclusively an aim in itself. After the First World War, Masaryk preached moderation as he led the return of the exiles from the West to the liberated homeland. He was determined to make Czechoslovakia into a model state, avoiding the errors of old Austria. Although in mapping out the boundaries of Czechoslovakia Masaryk too fell victim to nationalist excesses, nevertheless within the boundaries of the new state he condemned chauvinism and ethnic oppression.

President Benes on the other hand, when he led the exiles back from the West after the Second World War, instead of acting as a moderator, headed and supported the instigators of national hatred in liberated Czechoslovakia. He made common cause with the Communists who were the leading force behind the gruesome atrocities committed in the German borderlands of Bohemia. In a frenzy of Czech nationalist fraternization with the Communists, Benes did not suspect that Communist cruelty against the Germans would soon be turned against himself and his Czech democrats.

There was of course plenty of genuine and justifiable hatred against the Nazi German oppressors and their accomplices. However, the persecution of the minorities, aiming at their complete liquidation, was not a spontaneous outburst of bitterness. It was the result of a carefully prepared policy of vengeance carried out by the government. It was directed against both the Germans and the Hungarians. Both nationalities were treated as collectively guilty of fascism and complicity in the destruction of the state in 1938- 39. The charge of collective guilt levelled against the defeated was as absurd as the title of collective innocence to which the victors were laying claim. The case of the Slovaks against the Hungarians was especially without foundation, because in 1938- 39 Slovak resentment against the Czechs was one of the causes of Czecho- slovakia's dissolution, and afterwards the Slovaks set up a Fascist state of their own.

Incited to violence by the government's program for an ethnically pure Slav Czechoslovakia, the Czechs and Slovaks outdid each other in acts of terrorism against the Germans and Hungarians. These atrocities led to such excesses that the Russian authorities interfered several times in order to stop them. The Czech democrats, while invoking the "humanitarian ideals of Masaryk, " simultaneously incited the spirit of intolerance. President Benes himself, at the height of the terror, delivered inflammatory speeches (for instance in Bratislava on May 9, and in Lidice on June 10, 1945), demanding that the country be cleared of minorities. The Czechs and Slovaks, he said, wished no longer to live in the same state with Germans and Hungarians. His notorious "presidential decrees," depriving the Germans and Hungarians of their citizenship rights, outlined the strategy by which Czechoslovakia was to be made into a "homogeneous" national state.15 While after the First World War Masaryk tried to avoid the errors of the Habsburgs, Benes after the Second World War chose forms of vengeance akin to Hitler's methods. Czechoslovakia had travelled a long road from Masaryk's ideals by 1945, when a British observer, F. A. Voigt, made this sad commentary on the state of Czech democracy: ". . . The Czechs, who were amongst the most submissive of all the nations under German rule, have developed an unbridled nationalism. They have accepted a racial doctrine akin to Hitler's (with the Slavs, instead of the Germans, as the "master race") and methods that are hardly distinguishable from those of fascism. They have, in fact, become Slav National Socialists. 16 This censure of post- war Czechoslovakia was rather an isolated one, however. Millions of citizens were being expelled and their properties confiscated without compensation, thousands being confined to concentration camps, the schools of the minorities closed, and the use of their languages forbidden on the street and in the church; yet the press of the West continued to bill Czechoslovakia as a democratic country, or indeed as the only democratic country of the Soviet orbit.

When Oscar Jászi, an exiled democrat from Horthy's Hungary and a friend of Masaryk's Czechoslovakia, revisited the Danubian countries in 1947, he was appalled by the "wholesale destruction, both physical and moral" of the national minorities in Czechoslovakia to which the enlightened public opinion of the world gave scarcely any attention. "Just forty years ago," Jászi wrote reminiscently, "R. W. Seton- Watson, the eminent English historian, published his book Racial Problems in Hungary, in which he denounced the sins of Hungarian feudalism against the national minorities of the country. This book became one of the strongest arguments for the dismemberment of Hungaryin 1918.... Yet today one hears only the feeble voice of the persecuted, which is easily silenced. No book is written today by an influential foreign authority on "Racial Problems in Czechoslovakia." 17 Professor Jászi, recalling his intimate personal contact with T. G. Masaryk, whom he deemed "the greatest man" of the First World War period, experienced his "greatest shock" after the Second World War in finding that the "successors of Masaryk . . . had adopted the philosophy of Hitler and Stalin." 18 The Communist coup in February 1948 ended the short marriage between Czech democrats and Communists. The Czechs who fled abroad accused Stalin of treachery. The apologists of Benes's Russian policy developed the theory of a double betrayal, according to which Benes was driven into the arms of the Russians by the West's betrayal at Munich, only to be again betrayed by Stalin. 19 Few Czechs had the moral courage to confess the betrayal committed by the Czechs themselves; few Czechs seemed to realize that their unusually successful cooperation with the Communists, while it worked, worked mainly because they had turned their backs on democracy.

What made them do this? National chauvinism, which wiped out their sense of justice, such was the diagnosis arrived at by a Czech exile who remained true to Masaryk's critical thinking. And he added: "Injustice is the common denominator of communism and national chauvinism."20

Edvard Benes played a role unique in Central Europe's tragic history from the monarchy of the Habsburgs to the tyranny of the Soviets. Out of the failure of evolution which frustrated attempts to transform the Habsburg Empireinto a democratic federal union of equal nations, Benes emerged as a leader of national revolution in Central Europe. For three decades he remained a dominant figure in European politics. He triumphed over the Habsburgs, the dynasty with the longest record of uninterrupted rule in European history.He took vengeance on Hitler, who destroyed national independence in Central Europe in an insane bid for Continental hegemony and German world domination. But Benes's triumph was subverted by Stalin, who subjected the nations of Central Europe to his triumphant tyranny, while carrying out the old plans of Russian imperialism on the one hand, and making a new bid for Communist world domination on the other. The irony of the tragic end of Benes's career lay in the great trust which he placed during the last years of his life in Stalin's Russia. Certainly this trust was interspersed with occasional doubts: but Benes's trust in Russia was not shaken until it was too late to escape the consequences of his credulity.21 The deeper cause of Benes' failure lay in the fundamentally false pattern of his policy. This pattern was not of his invention. It was the product of the age of nationalism. Its aim was the nation- state, an aim which sooner or later had mesmerized all the nations of the Habsburg Empire. It was an impossible aim, so far as being a solution of the problem of Central Europe was concerned, because it denied the principle of equality among nations, therefore tending to sharpen and perpetuate their rivalries instead of paving the way for peaceful cooperation among them. The greatly inflated dreams of the nation- states appeared to be possible, however, when the smaller nations of Central Europe had allied themselves with superior powers against their rivals.

This pattern of policy was first applied successfully by the Hungarians. By allying themselves with the Germans of Austria in the Compromise of 1867, the Hungarians assured their own supremacy over rival nationalities. This arrangement was supported by the ascendant power of imperial Germany until its defeat in 1918. Between the two world wars, Czech supremacy in Central Europe was maintained by an alliance system which Benes's foreign policy built and manipulated; this system collapsed, however, when its cornerstone, France, failed to live up to her assigned role. After the Second World War, Benes hoped, by substituting Russia for France, that he had found the perfect security for the Czech nation- state. Hence his daring advocacy of the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, for he was not afraid that the German nation, though almost ten times bigger than the Czech, would ever be in a position to take revenge. He seemed to believe both in the lasting paralysis of defeated Germany and in Czechoslovakia's permanent protection under the wings of the powerful Soviet ally.

Although Benes's policy toward the minorities differed fundamentally from President Masaryk's liberal program, Benes's ideas concerning the security of Czechoslovakia were not altogether different from those advocated by the President Liberator. When Masaryk, during the First World War, arrived at the conclusion that an independent Czech national state could become viable, he based his optimistic views about Czechoslovakia's security on assumptions similar to Benes's during the Second World War. Rejecting the idea of preserving the Habsburg Empire in any form, and arguing against the objection that small nations cannot protect and support themselves, Masaryk anticipated a general diminishing of "military spirit and oppressive propensities," among the European nations; he hoped for a "longer time of peace" during which Czechoslovakia could "easily be consolidated"; and above all, he was confident that the new state could get its necessary protection "from alliances."22 What distinguished Czech nationalism up to the Second World War from that of the other nations of Central Europe was its democratic character, rooted, incidentally, in the petty- bourgeois Czech social traditions of the much disparaged Habsburg era. Admittedly the Czechs never acknowledged their rivals' equal rights to national self- determination; but the democratic environment of Czechoslovakia after the First World War ensured for the nationalities under Czech rule at least some measure of fair treatment. After the Second World War, led by Benes and allied to the Communists, the Czech democrats earned for themselves a very different type of distinction. They were the authors of the perverted idea of the homogeneous nation- state, to be achieved by the totalitarian method of population expulsion.

Czech democracy was a unique product of the Habsburg era of Czech history. Its decline proved what havoc nationalism can create. Its collapse revealed the depth of disintegration, both political and moral, which the two world wars of the twentieth century had produced in Central Europe.

The New Central Europe