October 28 is the 108th anniversary of the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic, a new but old country wrenched from the talons of the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918.
September 30, meanwhile, marked the 88th anniversary of the Munich Agreement, when the country was abandoned by its allies, and its German-speaking borderlands sliced off and handed to Herr Hitler.
It’s always a time for soul-searching. Politicians, historians and the media ponder what went wrong in the 20 years after 1918, and what’s gone right in the 37 years since 1989.
These days, with a new war raging to the country’s east, the soul-searching can get fraught, and at times hysterical.
“We’re living in 1938. It’s just a question of which month,” is a typical response from doom-mongers on X scouring the horizon for signs of Russian tank divisions rolling past the Tesco’s in Prague 10.
“Never mind 1938. It’s already 1939,” say others, peering anxiously at the skies for drones.
It’s not.
Czechoslovakia’s fate was awful, but it’s hard to see any other outcome given the set of circumstances in which Central Europe’s sole surviving democracy found itself in 1938.
Certainly, the infamous Munich Agreement was a betrayal on the part of the country’s allies, in moral if not legal terms (Czechoslovakia had a treaty of mutual defense with France, not Britain, although Neville Chamberlain did much of the diplomatic legwork).
The document itself – signed by Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier in the Führer’s first-floor study – was the culmination of months of misunderstanding and miscommunication on one side, and malign intent on the other.
Neither did it come as a bolt from the blue to President Edvard Beneš.
It is barely remembered that the Czechoslovak president had dispatched a secret envoy to Paris in mid-September with a suggestion that Prague might agree to give up as much as 6,000 sq km (2,300 sq miles) of its territory if Germany would accept two million ethnic German citizens – roughly three-fifths of Czechoslovakia’s pre-war German population.
This formed the basis for a rash of increasingly disastrous diplomatic decisions which culminated in four men standing around a table at 1.30 in the morning, peering down at a map of Czechoslovakia’s borderlands, then known as the Sudetenland.
By the time they had breakfast, all four believed they had got what they wanted. All four, in different ways, would be proved wrong.
When Chamberlain waved his little piece of paper on his return to Heston Aerodrome that afternoon, he was brandishing a naive promise of peace that lasted less than a year.
Back in Prague, the Czechoslovaks were rightly fuming at being frozen out of the conference, but the mood was one of despondency.
Weeks later, Beneš fled to London, and the much-reduced (and newly federalized) Czecho-Slovakia slipped into a sort of ghastly simulacrum of democracy.
The leaders who stayed to oversee what is now called the Second Republic introduced a series of increasingly draconian laws, including a ban on Jews in the civil service.
The final blow came on March 15, 1939, when Hitler’s tanks rolled into Prague.
But some historians argue that the direct cause of Czechoslovakia’s destruction was the siren call of nationalism seducing all Europeans in the 1930s, not just the Sudeten Germans.
After all, it was the conflict between Prague and the autonomous Slovak and Ruthenian governments — champing at the bit for greater independence from the hated Czechs — that provided the internal breakdown that Hitler was able to exploit.
And suddenly Czechoslovakia was no more.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but famously it does rhyme.
Or so they say. I don’t hear any iambic pentameter in today’s politics.
The Czech Republic remains a vibrant liberal democracy.
It’s buffeted by the same winds of populism as everyone else in Europe. It’s faced numerous political crises, but its institutions are stable and function just fine.
The upper house does things the lower house doesn’t like, but the lower house knows it has the final word.
The president — a former NATO general — is the living embodiment of Euro-Atlantic security, and will surely be re-elected if he runs again in early 2028.
The current populist government of Andrej Babiš is taking aim at the well-respected public broadcasters and its license fee funding model. But let’s face it, they’re not alone. Governments elsewhere in Europe are doing the same thing.
The far-right plays a part in government, but the dismal results of Brexit have silenced their calls for Czexit; no one talks now of leaving the EU (although euro adoption remains a long way off).
The prime minister sometimes says foolish things about NATO and Ukraine, but the 380,000 or so Ukrainian refugees here are mostly welcome.
Modern Czech democracy has lasted longer than the First Republic partly because Czechs built durable political institutions, and partly because they’ve lived in a safer Europe.
Perhaps that second advantage can no longer be taken for granted. But I wouldn’t write off Czech democracy just yet.
Rob Cameron is a Prague-based journalist and broadcaster, and author of https://www.basedinbohemia.com/ where he writes about Central Europe through reporting, analysis and long-form storytelling. He spent 22 years as the BBC’s correspondent in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, covering politics, business, culture and major breaking news across radio, television and online. He is a regular contributor to a number of international broadcasters, including Deutsche Welle, RTÉ and Monocle Radio. He has lived in Prague since 1993 and has reported extensively across Central and Eastern Europe.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
