Each week, the Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is "Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed" by Mary Heimann. Published in 2009, the book explores the history of Czechoslovakia from its founding in the aftermath of World War I to its dissolution in 1993. Heimann challenges the glorified view of the country as a successful democratic experiment in Central Europe, and she questions the assumptions that Czechoslovakia’s dissolution was merely a result of post-communist political transitions. Her book details Czechoslovakia's inherent weaknesses and the deep-seated causes that led to its fragmentation.

Czechoslovakia was formed from territories inhabited by a variety of ethnic groups, including Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Hungarians and Ruthenians. As Heimann points out, the creation of a cohesive state out of such diverse peoples immediately posed a challenge to the state's founders, Tomáš G. Masaryk and Edvard Beneš. Western liberal public opinion ignored the deep ethnic tensions that tore at Czechoslovakia from the beginning, preferring instead to propagate the happy tale of a Central European model state in which diverse people united to forge a democratic republic.

According to Heimann, the first Czechoslovak republic of Masaryk spectacularly failed to integrate its ethnic minorities, particularly the Slovaks, Germans and Hungarians, into a cohesive national identity. She argues correctly that the 1938 Munich Agreement revealed the fragile nature of Czechoslovakia. Internationally, Czechoslovakia was weak because it had come to rely on some vague security promises on the part of the Great Powers. Domestically, Czechoslovakia was weak because its leadership had failed to protect the state from external threats. The decision not to resist Germany was taken in Prague, not in London or Paris.

Following the surrender of the Sudetenland to Germany, Czechoslovakia disintegrated as a state. Contributing to this collapse was Slovakia's desire for far greater autonomy, or even complete independence. As Heimann points out, the tensions between Czechs and Slovaks.were not only about ethnicity or regional identity but also about political and economic disparities. Increasingly, the Slovaks had come to see the Czech-dominated government as neglecting Slovak interests. Slovakia's political leaders—particularly those under the leadership of Jozef Tiso—eagerly sought out collaboration with Nazi Germany. This culminated in the establishment of the Slovak Republic in 1939, a puppet state under Nazi influence, marking the end of the first republic of Czechoslovakia.

Following the communist coup of 1948, the rulers in Prague both repressed dissent and used propaganda to present Czechoslovakia as a model socialist state. Heimann argues that the imposition of Soviet-style socialism exacerbated the country’s ethnic and political divisions, particularly the treatment of Slovaks as second-class citizens under a Czech-dominated communist leadership.

Heimann also discusses the infamous Beneš Decrees, issued by Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš after World War II. The decrees sought to solve once and for all the problems of Czechoslovakia's ethnic Germans and Hungarians, whom Beneš saw as collaborators or potential threats to the state, due to their ties to Germany and Hungary. These decrees, included provisions for the expulsion of ethnic Germans and Hungarians from Czechoslovakia, along with the stripping of their citizenship and property.

As Heimann correctly points out, Beneš was seeking to "ethnically cleanse" the country in order to ensure that Czechoslovakia would remain an ethnically homogeneous state. This process was especially significant in the Sudetenland, which had been inhabited by a large ethnic German population before the war, and in the regions of Slovakia and the border areas where Hungarians lived.

Approximately 2.5 million Germans were forcibly removed from Czechoslovakia after the war. The expulsion was brutal and marked by widespread violence, deprivation and hardship for the expelled populations. Heimann points out that while the Czechoslovak leadership, under Beneš and others, justified the expulsions as necessary for national security and the protection of the newly re-established state, the expulsions seriously damaged Czechoslovakia’s international reputation. The expulsion of Hungarians from parts of Slovakia, further deepened the ethnic divides in the region and contributed to the poor relations between Czechoslovakia and Hungary during the Communist era.

Heimann argues that the Beneš Decrees, though seemingly politically expedient at the time, failed to address the root causes of the ethnic divisions within Czechoslovakia and contributed to the destabilization of the state in the years that followed. Not only was the expulsion of ethnic Germans morally repugnant, it was also strategically shortsighted, as it deprived Czechoslovakia of a skilled labor force and disrupted the country’s social fabric.

Heimann also discusses the role Prague Spring leader Alexander Dubček's Slovak ethnicity played in the events of 1968. The Slovaks had been politically marginalized not only in Masaryk and Beneš's Czechoslovakia but also in Communist Czechoslovakia. As a Slovak, Dubček was acutely aware of the ethnic and political disparities between the two nations. His reforms during the Prague Spring sought to address long-standing Slovak grievances about their subordinate position. By promoting federalism and greater autonomy for Slovakia, Dubček sought to empower Slovaks politically and culturally, positioning them as more equal partners within the Czechoslovak state.

When it comes to the final demise of Czechoslovakia, Heimann critiques the conventional narrative that presents the end of communism as the sole cause of the state's dissolution. Instead, she argues, ethnic and political divisions—especially the long-standing tension between Czechs and Slovaks—that had been simmering for decades led to divisions becoming insurmountable after the fall of communism.

Mary Heimann’s "Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed" is an intellectually-stimulating examination of the history of Czechoslovakia. It challenges the idealized perceptions of the state as a successful democratic experiment, offering a much-needed revisionist account of the ethnic, political and historical factors that led to the state's collapse.