Britain recognises the Czechoslovak National Committee

On 20 December 1939 the British government recognised the Czechoslovak National Committee, set up in Paris in October by the former president Edvard Beneš. It did so through an exchange of letters between Beneš and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Britain took note of the Committee’s formation and recognised it as a body entitled to represent the Czechoslovak people – that is, the Czechs and Slovaks in exile – and to prepare the reconstitution of the Czechoslovak army, which was then being formed in France. It was a limited recognition, the same as that which France had granted the Committee five weeks earlier, on 13 November. The Committee could conclude agreements with the British government, but not on behalf of the Czechoslovak Republic. London did not recognise it as a government, nor Beneš as president, and did not withdraw its signature from the Munich Agreement.

London and Beneš

The attitude of Neville Chamberlain’s government towards Beneš had been cool since the autumn of 1938. After Munich and Beneš’s resignation on 5 October 1938, the British authorities, who received him in London, expected him to refrain from political activity. In February 1939 Beneš left for the United States, where he lectured at the University of Chicago, and from there, after the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia on 15 March, he announced that he regarded his resignation as having been extorted. In July he returned to Europe and settled in London. For the Foreign Office, however, he was an embarrassment. He was a reminder of the agreement that Chamberlain had signed and still had no intention of repudiating, and his programme – the restoration of the republic within its pre-Munich borders – implied a commitment towards the Sudeten Germans, the Slovaks and Czechoslovakia’s neighbours that the British government did not want to take on.

In the spring of 1939 London had, indeed, accepted the disappearance of Czechoslovakia from the map without much resistance. The government protested in Berlin against the breach of the Munich Agreement, but in May it recognised the Slovak state de facto, allowing an exchange of consuls. There was also an outcry in Britain over the Czechoslovak gold: in March 1939 the Bank for International Settlements transferred to the Reichsbank part of the Czechoslovak central bank’s reserves held at the Bank of England, and the revelation of this operation caused a storm in the House of Commons in May. Only the outbreak of war changed the position of the exiles. Britain withdrew its recognition from Slovakia, which had taken part in the attack on Poland, and began to treat it as territory occupied by the enemy. The Czechoslovaks in the West could become allies – and, above all, soldiers.

France first

France made the first move, since it was on her soil that the Czechoslovak army was to be raised. On 2 October 1939 the Czechoslovak minister in Paris, Štefan Osuský, signed an agreement on its reconstitution with the French prime minister, Édouard Daladier, and on 17 October Beneš, Monsignor Jan Šrámek, Osuský and Generals Sergej Ingr and Rudolf Viest announced the formation of the National Committee. A French note of 13 November recognised it as representing the nation and as the body directing the reconstitution of the army. On this basis the Committee concluded agreements with the French on the air force and on Czechoslovak military justice, and proclaimed the call-up of Czechoslovaks living in France.

London waited. The Foreign Office wondered whether Beneš really spoke for the whole of the emigration, given that in Paris Milan Hodža had founded the Slovak National Council on 22 November, and that Osuský, though a member of the Committee, was pursuing his own policy. British officials also feared that recognising the Committee would be read as a commitment to restore the pre-Munich frontiers. Practical arguments, however, spoke in favour of recognition. The Committee was the only centre that was building an army, and the great powers needed a partner with whom to discuss money, equipment and the status of Czechoslovak soldiers and refugees. Then there was solidarity with France: the two powers were waging a common war and did not want to differ on questions concerning the exiles from Central Europe.

The exchange of letters

On 20 December 1939 Beneš and Halifax exchanged letters. Replying to Beneš’s approach, Halifax wrote that His Majesty’s Government recognised the Committee as entitled to represent the Czechoslovak people and to make the necessary arrangements, in particular for the reconstitution of the Czechoslovak army in France. The British granted the Committee the right to conclude agreements but, like the French, did not regard them as concluded on behalf of the Czechoslovak Republic. The absence of that formula was no accident. It meant that Britain was not prejudging either the continuity of a state that had ceased to exist in March 1939 or its future frontiers.

Czech commemorations of this date sometimes speak of the Committee’s recognition as “the sole legitimate representative of Czechoslovakia abroad”. In political terms this was true, since London and Paris had chosen Beneš rather than Hodža or Osuský. In legal terms, however, the act of 20 December was more modest. The Committee did not become a government, and the recognition concerned the nation and the army, not the state. For the exiles, who since March had operated without any status at all, it was nevertheless a great change: their leaders ceased to be private refugees and became partners of the governments of great powers at war with Germany.

The difference is clear when compared with Poland. When in September 1939 President Władysław Raczkiewicz took office in Paris and General Władysław Sikorski formed a government, France and Britain at once recognised it as the government of the Polish Republic; it soon moved to Angers. Poland was the ally for whose sake the powers had gone to war, and its authorities had gone abroad in accordance with the constitution. Czechoslovakia had disappeared half a year earlier with the acquiescence of those same powers, and its president had resigned of his own accord. Beneš therefore had to win recognition step by step.

The army and the exiles

British recognition also had a practical dimension. The Committee could now deal officially with the Foreign Office and the War Office on matters concerning exiles and soldiers, and London – where Beneš lived with his associates, among them Hubert Ripka, and where the son of the first president, Jan Masaryk, was active – became the second centre of Czechoslovak politics alongside Paris. Meanwhile in France, at the camp at Agde, the 1st Czechoslovak Infantry Division was taking shape; it was officially formed on 15 January 1940. At home repression continued: after the demonstrations of 28 October and the funeral of Jan Opletal, the Germans closed the Czech universities on 17 November and sent more than a thousand students to a concentration camp. Every step the exiles took towards recognition was thus also a signal to the occupied country that the Czechoslovak cause had not been forgotten in the West.

Place in the war

The recognition of 20 December opened the road that Beneš followed over the next three years. After the fall of France in June 1940, the Committee and part of the army made their way to Britain. On 9 July Beneš informed Halifax that the Committee had been transformed into a Provisional Czechoslovak Government, and on 23 July Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced in the House of Commons that the British government had recognised it and established relations with it. This was still, however, recognition of a “provisional” government, without any explicit link to the pre-war republic. Full recognition came on 18 July 1941, when the new Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, agreed that agreements should be concluded in the name of the Czechoslovak Republic – on the same day that the Soviet Union signed an agreement with the Czechoslovak government in London. On 5 August 1942, after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, London declared that the Munich Agreement would not be binding in the post-war settlement of frontiers.

Czechoslovak airmen who reached Britain through France fought in the RAF, and Czechoslovak soldiers in the defence of Tobruk and at Dunkirk in 1944–1945. In London Beneš built a government-in-exile that worked with Sikorski’s Polish government on the project of a Polish–Czechoslovak confederation, but in 1943 concluded an alliance with the Soviet Union. In 1945 Beneš returned home as president, recognised by all the Allies. Halifax’s modest letter of December 1939 was Britain’s first step, however cautious, since Munich towards acknowledging that Czechoslovakia had not ceased to exist.