Ambivalent Liberation: Building a Czechoslovak Security Service in Slovakia and Subcarpathia, 1918-1924

• In Event: Waiting for Liberation: Authoritarian Rule in Slovakia

Abstract

One of the challenges of building a new state in Czechoslovakia after the First World War was establishing a police apparatus that would conform to the democratic and nationalist principles of the new republic. In Slovakia and Subcarpathia this state-building was further complicated by the Hungarian legacy, which had allowed few Slovak-speakers to enter into the state administration without assimilating. In addition, the conflicts between Prague and Budapest, as well as a short-lived communist revolution, meant that there was little of the pre-war security infrastructure left for the Czechoslovak state to take over. This paper therefore examines the challenges of building the police and gendarmerie in Slovakia and Subcarpathia in the early interwar period. It shows that the new authorities extended or replicated existing structures from the Bohemian lands in Slovakia and Subcarpathia, while seeking to remove Hungarian officials who still remained even as they struggled with systemic personnel shortages. It therefore highlights the tension between the ideological aspirations of the new state and the practical realities of policing in the aftermath of imperial collapse.

Author

• Jonathan Richard Parker, U of Texas at Austin