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Institutionalizing Party Systems in Multiethnic States: Integration and Ethnic Segmentation in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1992

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Carol Skalnik Leff  and
Susan B. Mikula
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Abstract

A country’s multinational diversity does not by itself predict the way this diversity will be reflected in the party system. The pattern of party politics also depends on the context: electoral and institutional rules, differential political assets, and different incentives to cooperate or dissent. To demonstrate variations in the dynamics of ethnic politics, this article examines the divergent ways in which Slovak political parties were organized within the larger political system in two periods—the interwar unitary Czechoslovak state and the postcommunist federal state. Differences in political resources and institutional setting help explain why interwar Slovakia had a hybrid party system composed of both statewide and ethnoregional parties, while the postcommunist state saw the emergence of two entirely separate party systems in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In turn, differing patterns of party politics in these two cases had different consequences for the management of ethnonational conflict in the state.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , Summer 2002 , pp. 292 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2002

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References

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2 Some might argue that Slovakia has experienced four such transitions: after 1918, 1945, the Velvet Revolution of 1989, and independence in 1992.

3 The experience of the interwar republic suggests that it takes several election cycles to clarify the shape of an emergent party system. The better-established Czech parties experienced a fairly narrow range of electoral fluctuation from the beginning. It took three election cycles in Slovakia (1920, 1925, 1929) for the patterns of party support to stabilize at the lower Czech level of electoral fluctuation. See Leff, Carol Skalnik, National Conflict inCzechoslovakia: The Making and Remaking of a State, 1918-1987 (Princeton, 1988), 66–67 Google Scholar.

4 Even as the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) won seats with a statewide constituency in 1990, it already included a separate Slovak party organization in the communist era. Later that year, the KSC formally federated into two Czech and Slovak organizational entities, each subsequently contesting its own territory.

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16 Herbert Kitschelt speaks of a process of mutual signaling between electorate and party elites that makes intelligible the character of the bargain between voter and candidate. See Kitschelt, , Mansfeldova, Zdenka, Markowski, Radoslaw, and Töka, Gábor, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge, Eng., 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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18 By contrast, in multinational Austria, the Habsburg goal was the preservation of the state rather than its national transformation. In fact, imperial interests favored containing German nationalism, and one way to do this—within carefully defined parameters— was to tolerate other forms of national expression. The Czechs were able to capitalize on this as well as to benefit from a political system with the increasingly more complex class-religious interests of an industrializing society.

19 The Slovak participant in the wartime liberation triumvirate of Edvard Beneš, Tomáš G. Masaryk, and Milan Rastislav Štefánik was in fact an expatriate. At home, the Czech political elite was closest to Vavro Šrobár, who was not personally representative of, or in sympathy with, several of the most important Slovak political tendencies.

20 Interwar Czechoslovakia never possessed institutional bases for Czech-Slovak bargaining. The Slovak National Council was formed in the summer of 1918 in response to the need for concerted action at war's end; the Martin Declaration was a product of its first meeting. Although formed to serve as an authoritative voice for Slovak interests, it never took the initiative in transforming itself into an administrative body. See Susan Mikula, “Milan Hodza and the Vicissitudes of Slovak Nationalism” (paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Washington, D.C., October 1990). On the Czech experience, see Harna, Josef, Politický systém a státni politika vprvnich letech existence Československé republiky (1918-1923) (Prague, 1990)Google Scholar. The Club of Slovak Deputies (1918-1920) was the first of several failures to develop a formal structure through which Slovaks could channel their political activities and speak for Slovak interests. Organized by Vavro Šrobár, amidst considerable controversy over the political and religious balance of a disproportionately small and Protestant delegation, it thus lacked a legitimating principle more powerful than elite cooptation. See Lipscher, Ladislav, Kvyvinupolitickej spravy naSlovensku v rokoch 1918-1938 (Bratislava, 1966)Google Scholar.

21 The level of communication remained stunningly restricted at war's end. The Czech and Slovak declarations of independence in a common Czechoslovak state took place days apart in late October 1918, but in isolation from one another; the Martin delegates were unaware of the Czech action. Limited in contact to a few trusted Slovak collaborators, Czech politicians were unaware of Slovak expectations, even in the general form manifested in the Martin declaration, and Slovaks remained unaware until the summer of 1919 of the wartime Pittsburgh Pact of May 1918 that pledged to Slovakia its own autonomous institutions. For a general history of the Slovak national movement, see Kirschbaum, Stanislav, A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. For individual Slovak leaders who were instrumental in shaping Slovak activity during the collapse of the monarchy, see Kováč, Dusan, Muži Deklárdcie (Martin, Slovakia, 1991)Google Scholar.

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23 Yet this situation did not present an insuperable obstacle to later German participation as junior partners in governance. After 1926, German parties that organized along class lines consonant with the Czech spectrum and accepted the new state won inclusion in governing coalitions, thus acquiring leverage in the allocation of state budgetary resources.

24 The interwar republic is illustrative of Paul Warwick’s “returnability” principle, the finding that “government termination rates increase with the likelihood of the same parties returning to office.” Warwick, , Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), 134 Google Scholar. The frequent reshufflings of interwar cabinets maintained considerable continuity in both partisan composition and personnel. The Czechoslovak system bears a strong family resemblance to Warwick’s characterization of the French and Italian parliamentary systems: “beneath the apparent instability of governments lies a profound stability of ministers. Governments change frequently but they are largely made up of the same parties and the same individuals” (3). This shock-absorbing mechanism allowed for midcourse adjustments in policy and party participation, while assuring core leadership continuity. See Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia, 59-64

25 See Felak, James, “At the Price of the Republic“: Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, 1929-1938 (Pittsburgh, 1994)Google Scholar. For a broad analysis of Slovak party politics in the First Republic, see Slovensko v politickom systéme Československa (Bratislava, 1992).

26 The emergence of the agrarians as the single largest party in a highly industrialized central European state falls beyond the scope of this analysis. Contributing factors, how ever, include: the flexibility and skill of party leadership and the successful outreach effort to build an electoral base on Slovakia’s more agricultural economy. Despite his shortcomings, Slovak agrarian leader Milan Hodža, the interwar republic’s only Slovak prime minister, was perhaps the most politically adept of the Slovak politicians.

27 Scholars generally agree that the postindependence generation in Slovakia was for the most part more radical in its national aspirations than its predecessors. Generational replacement is well recognized in the western literature as an impetus to realign party identities; in the case of Czechoslovakia, however, growing Slovak national assertiveness was balked of full expression in the existing party system by the dilemma of state loyalty.

28 See especially Susan Mikula, “The Political Language of Slovak Agrarianism” (paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Philadelphia, November 1995).

29 The Slovak social democrats had evolved within the framework of Hungarian social democracy, which was initially more liberal and accommodating to differential national interests than other Hungarian political currents. Later this party too became engulfed in the Magyarization drive.

30 Marxist historians would later pillory interwar Slovak politicians for allowing the right wing to “preempt” the national issue. The possible alternative, a closer working relationship with minority-based political tendencies (Hungarians and Germans in particular) also proved problematic, in part because it meant crossing the boundary that separated Slovaks as a statotvorné people from minority groups and raised further issues of loyalty to a joint Czech-Slovak state. See Felak, “At the Price ofthe Republic“; Kramer, Juraj, Slovenské autonomistické hnutie v rokoch 1918-1929 (Bratislava, 1962)Google Scholar; and Gosiorovský, Miloš, “K niektorym otázkam vzt’ahu Čechov a Slovákov v politike komunistickej strany Československa,” Historický časopis 16, no. 3 (1968): 354–68Google Scholar.

31 Cited in Janacek, František, “Poznámky hodnocená Českoslovakismu v odboji,” in Cesar, Jaroslav and Snitil, Zdenek, eds., Československa revoluce 1944-1948 (Prague, 1979), 79 Google Scholar.

32 Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia, 77-78.

33 Ibid., 282-97.

34 In fact, this bifurcation of the dissident community predated 1989; contact between dissident Czechs and Slovaks was limited by the government. Slovak dissidence had a lower profile and a more religiously and environmentally oriented agenda.

35 Lijphart, Arend, “Democratization and Constitutional Choices in Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, 1989 -91,”Journal ofTheoretical Politics 4, no. 2 (1992): 207–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 In this regard, a long-standing pattern of individual Slovak cooperation with Czech politicians responsive to a Czech perspective made its mark. This pattern, well established in the interwar republic, gained further reinforcement with the perception that a series of Slovak communist politicians had succumbed to Pragocentrism in the name of party discipline. Nationally assertive Slovaks, then, tended to regard the central government, federal or not, as a Czech government.

37 Gordon Wightman notes the greater differentiation of Slovak politics in that electoral outcome. See his Party Formation in East-Central Europe: Post-Communist Politics inCzechoslovakia (Brookfield, Vt, 1995).

38 See, for example, Dellenbrant, Jan, “Parties and Party Systems in Eastern Europe,” in White, Stephen, Batt, Judy, and Lewis, Paul G., eds., Developments in East European Politics (Durham, 1993), 147–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 It has been noted that the Mečiar party’s geographic electoral base strongly resembled that of the interwar Hlinka party. For further discussion of electoral continuities with the First Republic, see, for example, Wightman, Party Formation in East-Central Europe, 62-64.

40 See Abby Inness, Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye (New Haven, 2001).