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Csaba Zahorán: Edvard Benes: A Man of Contradictions
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HISTORICAL COMPROMISE
For the Germans who were affected in their persons, and for the Hungarians, he symbolises the destructive, murderous emotions which only extreme nationalism is able to provoke, and thus they consider him guilty. For the Czechs he remains one of the champions of the Czech national idea.
A new statue unveiled amid protests
Over the last few months a few events have put the personality of Edvard Benes once again in the limelight. For the last few years this attention was centred around his famous decrees concerning Germans and Hungarians, subjecting him to the criticism of certain German, Austrian and Hungarian political circles, while he was defended by a number of Czech politicians and intellectuals. Historians Eva Hahnová and Hans Henning Hahn believe there is a danger that under the influence of the criticisms coming from organisations comprising repopulated Sudetan Germans, an unbalanced image of this politician will emerge in Germany which combines a Czech war criminal with a demonic figure. This is also likely to cause difficulties in the Czech-German dialogue. (Lidové noviny 2004. IV. 5.)
Edvard Benes: a contradictory image
Edvard Benes's appraisal is ambivalent even in his own home country, now called the Czech Republic. Born in 1884, Benes played a considerable role in the emergence of the Czechoslovakian state and is still seen by the majority of Czechs as a symbol of the democratic system of the First Republic that existed between 1918 and 1938, and of anti-German resistance. His merits were recently commemorated in a special decree by the Czechs. Many people even refuse to condemn the repopulation of the Germans from Czechoslovakia as illegal or at least unfair. However, there are also a great number of people, particularly among the intelligentsia, who show a more critical vein in analysing the activity of this politician and statesman. These people are frequently accused of being 'in the pay' of the Germans. Until 1935 Benes was Foreign Secretary to Czechoslovakia, then he went on to become the second President of the First Republic. Many condemn the role he played in 1938 when, pressurised by Czechoslovakia’s western allies, he relinquished to Hitler the Sudetanland, an area mainly inhabited by Germans. However, he regained his popularity when during WW II he came to be the head of the Czechoslovakian emigrant movement and managed to effect that the victorious powers should restore Czechoslovakia in the same form as it had before Münich. Benes also managed to procure the support of the allies for the repopulation of the Germans which was indeed carried out. This is why those deprived of their rights, together with their descendants, claim that he used equally inhuman means in 'settling' minority affairs after the war as the Nazis.
Defenders of the politician do not fail to highlight the fact that the repopulation of the Germans was a consequence of the anti-Czechoslovakian sentiments of the Sudetan Germans and of the monstrous acts of a war that had been provoked by the Germans. And also that over the recent years the Czechs have also become gradually more conscious of the negative phenomena associated with the repopulation of the Germans. In the domestic politics of the post-1945 years Benes was unable to resist the surge of communists supported by Moscow who grabbed power in 1948 with an unexpected coup d'etat. Benes remained in office for a brief period, then resigned and died the same year. His far-from-glorious presidency after the war also renders him a target of criticism as the home-maker of communism in Czechoslovakia. Furious criticism and equally passionate defence are usually based on one-sided and rather inconsistent opinions. For the Czechs, Benes, together with Masaryk and Stefánik, is one of the founders of the independent Czechoslovakian state and is also associated with the country's reconstruction after Nazi occupation. For the Slovaks he is the man who secured them a kind of equal nation status after a thousand years of Hungarian rule and even procured relatively favourable national boundaries for them at the Paris peace talks. In this way, for many Germans and Hungarians the emergence of Czechoslovakia meant separation from the mother country and the denial of the principle of sovereignty, while for the Czechs and Slovaks it meant the fulfilment of their national ambitions. This opposition was deepened by the consequences of WW II: what one side saw as being stigmatised with collective guilt and persecuted in organised or unorganised forms or being cast into a lawless state for an extended period of time was seen by the other side as the consolidation of the nation state. According to Czech historian Antonín Klimek, 'Benes became a legend, a symbol and a magic spell. The Czechs no longer see him as a flesh-and-blood human being. When they argue about Benes today, they are arguing about their own viewpoints projected onto Benes. People like to personify history.' (Interview by Lukás Beldík, Lidové noviny, May 28, 2004.) The personality of this politician certainly gives ground for heated debates even today, but these rarely amount to more than parallel monologues and hardly ever constitute a genuine dialogue.
Building a nation state in Czechoslovakia
After its establishment following the Second World War, Czechoslovakia ended up with rather a high number of various minorities. (In 1930 the rate of the minority population within the total population was 23.8%.) This partly had to do with Benes's diplomatic creativity. However, attaining a Czechoslovakia as large and powerful as possible proved a tricky victory, as after a while the multinational character of the state rendered it impossible to handle ethnic problems. The Czechoslovakian elite tried to compensate for the instability of the country and the vulnerability of the Czechs by using the idea of the 'Czechoslovakian nation,' but this proved an unviable notion. It was an even graver mistake to try to build a Czech(Slovakian) nation state within this multinational state. The situation was made more complicated by the Slovak efforts at emancipation which strained against the Czech predominance noticeable during the time of the First Republic (similar to that of the Serbs in Yugoslavia or of the elite of the old kingdom in Romania). However, the Prague-based centralists, many of them Slovakians, rejected the strivings of the Slovakians (and Rusins) toward autonomy, as they did not consider either of these nations ripe for self-governance - and we must note that this judgement was not entirely unfounded. This, on the other hand, inevitably led to the worsening of hostilities between an ever more conscious Slovakian population and Prague, in other words, to enmity within the nation that had been proclaimed as the majority nation. Germans and Hungarians living in a minority were also dissatisfied with their position. As one time ruling nations, they were displeased with the ethnic policy of the Czechoslovakian leadership, even though it was rather tolerant for its time, particularly in an international comparison. Still, Czechoslovakia was not the 'Switzerland of the east' that Benes and his partners had promised at the peace talks. Zdeněk Kárník, Czech historian, states that eventually the Czech political elite only granted its minorities the rights which the Czechs once enjoyed (and were dissatisfied with) in the Monarchy. Nor does it do any harm to remember that on the final balance they only turned against the Monarchy when the Czechs were denied equal rights: this was what led to them abandoning the Monarchy and trying their luck along different paths. Several Czech historians recognise today that the only chance for Czechoslovakia would have been an expansive self-government system or a federation.
The chance of settling the question of national minorities eventually fell prey to Czechoslovakian nation building. Parallelly with the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy, the ethnic Germans of the Czech Republic also tried to use the 'right of self-governance of nations,' but their ambition was vanquished by the more powerful striving of the Czechoslovakian state for integrity. After the ethnic Germans withdrew into insulted passivity, together with the Hungarians who refused to see the annexation as anything but temporary, they were simply left out of state building and the creation of the constitution. This did not the relationship of the state forming nation and its minorities any better.
These slowly thawing tensions, made worse once more by the great economic recession, were exploited by the Nazis from the 1930's onwards, even in the case of the Slovakians. It is true that Czechoslovakia was eventually exploded not by its German (and even less by its Hungarian) minority but by an external threat, still, the problem was an excellent vehicle for Hitler's ambitions for world rule. The dissatisfaction of the Sudetan Germans (and the Hungarians) also served as excellent excuses for the Germans to lash out against Czechoslovakia and for the unwillingness of the Western powers to stand up for their one time favourite ally. This is not to mention the fact that, with several million citizens of dubious nationality within its boundaries, the Czechoslovakian state itself became quite vulnerable.
It is easy to see in retrospect that Benes's greatest mistakes before WW II were mainly to do with not recognising the instability of the Versailles system, the shortcomings of its own alliance policy and, most of all, just how poisonous the minority problem had grown. It also proved a grave mistake that Czechoslovakia was unable to settle her territorial hostilities with Poland which was potentially a natural ally. Thus the Republic was left alone at the moment of crisis. As far as the minority question was concerned, Beneą would have had to be a statesman of genuine grandeur to solve the problem of minorities not merely under the pressure of outside circumstances (and still lagging behind the times, as did the Hungarians in the summer of 1849 and in the autumn 1918), but on his own initiative after recognising the problem. Or at least to try to solve it, as all of this was only partly within his competency (he had little time left as head of state, since by 1935 the extreme nationalists had come to dominate among the Sudetan Germans).
Naturally, Benes's responsibility should be shared by those Czech nationalist forces which were against what they called overly liberal allowances all along. This is true even if in retrospect we know that the leaders of the Sudetan Germans had no vested interest in finding an agreement as they, under Hitler's instructions, were aiming at the destruction of Czechoslovakia at all costs.
Similar remarkable grandeur would have been required for Benes to act in a more sober and fair way instead of taking revenge after the Second World War. Benes's critics, however, often mention the fact that this politician lacked such genuine grandeur as a statesman. His main aim, in possession of his Munich experiences, was to prevent a repeated dismemberment of the country. He hoped to attain this by more potent guarantees of security on the international sense and by settling the minority question as far as the domestic scene was concerned. Moreover, the Czech and the Slovak population, remembering the days of Nazi occupation, were enthusiastic supporters of the punishment of Germans and Hungarians ('traitors of the republic'), thus sharing responsibility with their leaders. Czech(oslovak) nation building was carried on upon new foundations: the notion of the 'Czechoslovakian nation' was dropped and replaced by the need to create a 'purely Slavic' state. A state which is no longer jeopardised from within by 'alien elements.' Depriving Germans and Hungarians of their belongings and evacuating them also meant a considerable gain for the Czechs - new, free lands in the middle of densely populated Europe. Nonetheless, it is without doubt that the question of minorities reached the extremes of ugliness during the war, actually becoming a matter of life and death and provoking brutal responses in the opposing party. Collective stigmatisation of the minorities and their removal after the war thus brought the triumph of blind and fanatical nationalism.
The scapegoat of the idea of nation states
Thus the fault is probably to be found in the foundations of the nation state which Benes himself was also eager to lay. In other words the misconception that it is possible to create a unified Czech-Slovakian state out of an aggregations of areas inhabited by Czechs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Rusins and Poles has proved untenable as far as foreign political guarantees are concerned. Thus Edvard Benes who drew the conclusions of the war in the form of the forced repopulation of minorities can fairly be seen as a captive of the idea of the nation state, a scapegoat of, often blind and merciless, striving for that ideal. For the Germans who were affected in their persons, and for the Hungarians, he symbolises the destructive, murderous emotions which only extreme nationalism is able to provoke, and thus they consider him guilty. But for the Czechs he remains one of the champions of the Czech national idea.
The remarkable rift between these two viewpoints can only be reduced by a detailed awareness of the events that took place, by a nuanced and self-critical view of the facts and their context. Only after such an understanding can we attain anything by dialogue.
The author is a Czech and History graduate of ELTE, University of Budapest.
