Independence of Czechoslovakia
On 28 October 1918, as the Habsburg state disintegrated under military defeat, the Czechoslovak National Council in Prague proclaimed an independent republic uniting the Czech lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia with Slovakia and Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. The new state was recognised by the Allies and confirmed at the Paris peace conferences, with Tomáš Masaryk becoming its first president and Edvard Beneš its foreign minister. Czechoslovakia was the interwar's most successful parliamentary democracy east of the Rhine — industrially developed, constitutionally stable, and possessed of the Škoda works and Bohemian industrial base that made it one of the ten largest industrial economies in the world. It nonetheless inherited a structural contradiction: of its 13.5 million citizens, only 6.8 million were Czech, with large Slovak, Sudeten German (3.2 million), Hungarian, and Ruthenian minorities. The Sudeten Germans' grievances — over their exclusion from a state whose very name they did not appear in — would be exploited by Hitler at Munich twenty years later.
- Year: 1918 CE
- Category: Political
