CZECHOSLOVAKIA'S FRONTIERS
MANY not particularly well-informed criticisms of the action of the Peace Conference in giving Czecho- slovakia its present frontiers have been expressed recently in various quarters. The Conference had in fact perfectly good reasons for the decision it took, and they are relevant still. It happens, moreover, that they have been stated clearly and succinctly by a quite impartial authority, Dr. R. H. Lord, of Harvard, who was a member of the American Delegation at the Peace Conference, in a lecture given at Harvard in 1920, long before the present storms and contro- versies arose. The following passages from it still deserve quotation.
" Not without hesitation, the Peace Conference decided to preserve the historic frontiers of the old kingdom of Bohemia. That decision has occasioned much criticism ; and indeed, among the decisions of the Conference, there is scarcely any other instance where so large a number of people have been placed under the sovereignty of another race. Nevertheless, I think that there is much justification for this settlement.
" First and foremost, it should be observed that a strictly ethnographic frontier would have given an almost impossible and fatal configuration to Czechoslovakia. Even as it is now constructed, this State presents a somewhat fantastic appearance on the map. It looks like a tadpole. It is a narrow couloir about 600 miles in length, but in its eastern districts hardly 6o miles wide ; and in Moravia, the province which forms the link between Bohemia and Slovakia, it is only too miles across. Now, if the frontier had been drawn on the ethnographic basis, these defects would have been aggravated in very dangerous fashion. Prague, the capital, would have been brought within about 3o miles of the German frontier. The Moravian link would have been little more than 5o miles wide. The State would have been constricted in the middle until it had much the shape of an hour-glass. Czechoslovakia occupies a very perilous position. It is a wedge thrust into the side of Germany. For a thousand years the Czechs have been engaged chiefly in beating off the German onslaughts, and it is to be feared that in the future they will not be free from the same danger. Sur- rounded as they are on three sides by Germany and German Austria, they, would, indeed, be in the gravest peril if, in the case of a conflict, their enemies needed only to join hands across a gap of 5o miles wide in order to cut the Czechoslovak State in two. If this State was to be created at all, it had to be created in a shape that would give it some guarantees of viability.
" In the second place, if there are any cases where historic rights ' deserve to be respected, this is probably one. The Czechs were the first of the two races to settle the country. It was they who founded and maintained the kingdom of Bohemia, which had so glorious a history in the Middle Ages and down to the time when it succumbed to Hapsburg despotism in the seventeenth century. Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia were the three constituent parts of this realm ; together they made up the lands of the Crown of St. Wences- laus ' ; and even the Hapsburgs admitted that they owed their sovereign rights over these lands solely to their position as kings of Bohemia. If in the nineteenth century the effort was made to sweep away all vestiges of that kingdom and to merge it in the Austrian Empire, the Czechs steadily refused to recognise these changes. They insisted that the kingdom of Bohemia still existed as a distinct entity, legally bound to the other Hapsburg lands only by the person of the common ruler ; and they have fought for this principle and for that of the integrity and indissolubility of their realm with such tenacity that these ideas have become veritable dogmas in their minds. In sanctioning a Czech State including the whole of Bohemia and Moravia and most of Austrian Silesia the Conference is not setting up a new and artificial creation ; it is merely renewing and confirming in its old territorial limits a State which existed for centuries and which de jure, perhaps, has never ceased to exist.
" The German populations in this State are in the main descended from settlers who were brought in by the kings of Bohemia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to clear and colonise the forests and waste lands, which then formed a girdle around the borders of the kingdom. These people voluntarily established themselves in a Czech land, and their descendants have always been subjects of the Czech State, save possibly during the last century or so when it is a contentious question whether a Czech State existed. At any rate, these Germans have never, since their immigration, belonged to Germany. And it may perhaps be doubted whether the presence of this German fringe is a sufficient reason for dismembering so ancient a State or a country so clearly marked out by nature to be a unit.
" For Bohemia (the territory chiefly in question) has an extraordinary physical unity—greater than is possessed by any other country in Central Europe. This appears in its unusual river system, with its radial convergence of all the water courses towards the centre of the country ; and not less in the mountain walls which guard the four sides of this natural citadel, especially the sides turned towards Germany. Were the political boundary to be removed from these moun- tains and carried down into the plain where the ethnographic frontier lies, this would mean exchanging a boundary that is excellent alike from the geographic, the economic and the strategic standpoint for one that is quite the reverse.
"Finally, it may be said that German-speaking Bohemia would suffer if cut off from the rest of the country. It is one of the most highly-industrialised territories of Central Europe, the chief manufacturing centre of the old Austrian Empire ; and as such it has always been dependent upon the Czech agricultural region for its food-supply and, in large part, its labourers. Moreover, it needs the markets which Czecho- slovakia can furnish it at home or can open up to it in the south-east. The natural economic ties are so strong that not a few German Bohemians have, since the Armistice, publicly declared that their future can lie only in union with the Czecho- slovak State, and that union with Germany would mean ruin for them. And from the Czech point of view, it is clear that the new State would have entered on its career with an almost fatal handicap, had it been deprived of its chief industrial districts and its main supplies of coal and other minerals?'
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