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Clash of claims: Nationalizing and democratizing policies during the first parliamentary election in multiethnic Czechoslovak Ruthenia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2019

Sebastian Paul
Sebastian Paul*
Affiliation:
Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe — Institute of the Leibniz Association, Marburg, Germany
*
* Corresponding author. Email: sebastian.paul@mailbox.tu-dresden.de
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Abstract

This paper examines the question of why the countrywide 1920 parliamentary election in Czechoslovakia was postponed in its eastern borderland, Podkarpatská Rus, by putting this event into a context of simultaneous processes of democratization and nationalization, described here as the “double transformation.” The territory in question was inhabited by a Ruthenian majority, who received the support of the government in Prague; a Jewish population without clear preferences regarding their loyalties and aims; a still-influential Hungarian minority; and finally, a Czech-dominated state administration. The aim of the state administration was to let the ethnically mixed population of Ruthenia vote for its parliamentary representatives in the most democratic way possible. However, this intention clashed with the realities in place: old loyalties of the local population toward the Hungarian elites, Hungarian revisionism, a lack of governance, and security issues. Complicating the situation, Romanian troops still occupied the eastern part of Ruthenia as a result of the war among Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania in 1919; Romanians claimed part of the territory for their own nation-state. Faced with these thorny issues, the Czechoslovak state administration felt constrained to postpone the elections until 1924.

Keywords

Subcarpathian RusCzechoslovakianationalizationdemocratization
Type
Research Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 46 , Issue 5: Special Section: Between the wars , September 2018 , pp. 776 - 790
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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