Among the new states established in Central Europe on the ruins of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918, Czechoslovakia was both the most democratic and the most precarious. Forged from disparate territories with a diverse population, Czechoslovakia was a parliamentary republic that came under pressure from various authoritarian currents on both the right and the left. Political groups ranging from communists through Sudeten German nationalists and Nazis, Slovak autonomists, and Hungarian irredentists to Czech fascists seriously opposed either the state’s very existence or its liberal-democratic constitution. Several neighboring states – Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union – were hostile due to irredentist aspirations, territorial disputes, or ideological antagonisms. These very real threats to the state’s territorial integrity and democratic constitution created a dilemma for Czechoslovakia’s elites. Even as they styled their state as a tolerant democracy, they limited political freedom by outlawing certain critiques of and actions against the political system, turning the state into an early example of what Karl Loewenstein described as “militant democracy.” 

Czechoslovakia inherited the penal legislation and judicial institutions of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and had to repurpose them for a republican state. A key step in this direction was the promulgation of the 1923 Law for the Protection of the Republic (Zákon na ochranu republiky), which codified a of anti-state offenses ranging from violent coups against the constitution to insults against the president and incitement against Czechoslovakia’s “democratic-republican” state form. The Czechoslovak courts punished offenders harshly, and even more so after a series of legislative amendments passed in the 1930s in reaction to the rising threat of National Socialist Germany. This repressive side of Czechoslovakia’s policies exemplifies Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance,” which states that a liberal society that is too tolerant of authoritarian groups among its population will ultimately see the collapse of the liberal order. Conversely, this means that such a society must paradoxically resort to certain authoritarian methods in order to prevent a slide into authoritarianism

This project aims to investigate how the Czechoslovak authorities addressed political threats within the population, what impact their actions had on those accused of disloyalty, and how the attempt to protect the “democratic-republican” system figured in societal debates on state security, nationhood, citizenship, and democracy. In doing so, it will provide a new political history of the First Czechoslovak Republic from the margins of the democratic system. More broadly, it will contribute to the historiography of Central Europe’s post-imperial transition, nationalism studies, and the history of the rule of law and the defense of democracy against its declared and covert enemies. Taking seriously the attempt to build a democratic state in a time of rising authoritarianisms, the project will at the same time consider the post-imperial continuities and dynamics of repression that conflicted with the state leadership’s democratic self-image. As such, the experience of the First Czechoslovak Republic as a liberal society amidst an increasingly authoritarian continent remains emblematic of the political challenges of Europe’s interwar years, and, more generally, of defending democracy with democratic means.