Britain withdraws recognition of Slovakia

According to popular chronologies, on 5 September 1939 Britain ceased to recognise the Slovak Republic, the state which four days earlier had attacked Poland together with Germany. On 8 September London announced that it regarded Slovakia as territory under enemy occupation. The British position was set out most precisely in the House of Commons on 9 October by the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Richard Austen Butler. He recalled that in May 1939 the government had obtained the consent of the authorities in Bratislava for a British consul to take up his post, “thereby according de facto recognition to the Slovak Government”, and had then admitted a Slovak consul in London. In August the Germans had extended their military control over the whole of Slovakia, on 2 September the British consulate in Bratislava had been closed, and on 8 September Slovakia had been “proclaimed to be territory under enemy occupation”. Butler made no mention of a separate act of 5 September. His account suggests that British recognition lapsed gradually over the first week of the war, and that its formal conclusion was the decision of 8 September. A few days later, on 16 September, the Soviet Union recognised Slovakia de jure.

Recognition in May 1939

From its first days the state of the priest Jozef Tiso, proclaimed on 14 March 1939, sought international recognition. Hungary and Poland recognised it immediately, Germany on 16 March, and after them Italy, Japan, the Vatican, Switzerland and more than ten other states. Britain and France initially refused. In March the two powers protested in Berlin against the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia as a breach of the Munich Agreement and announced that they would not recognise the territorial changes in the former Czecho-Slovakia. The Soviet Union and the United States sent similar notes, without reference to Munich.

London soon decided, however, that it was better to have its own eyes and ears in Bratislava. On 4 May 1939 it asked the Slovak government for an exequatur, that is, permission to exercise his functions, for the consul Peter Pares, who had previously served in the Sudetenland. On 15 May Butler stated in the House of Commons that this amounted to de facto recognition. Milan Harminc arrived in London as Slovak consul general. In July France followed suit. At the same time the Czechoslovak legations in London and Paris continued to operate, their heads having refused to hand them over to the Germans, and the United States never recognised either the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia or the Slovak state.

De facto recognition meant acknowledging that a government exercising effective power existed in Bratislava. It did not mean recognising its legitimacy. The point of this distinction was soon blurred. The treaty of protection of March 1939 had given the Wehrmacht a strip of land in western Slovakia; in August a separate agreement defined the status of this “protected zone”, and in the last days of August German divisions deployed on Slovak territory for the attack on Poland. Butler could therefore claim that by the outbreak of war the whole of Slovakia was already under German military control.

Slovakia at war with Poland

On 1 September 1939 the Slovak field army “Bernolák”, some 50,000 strong, under the defence minister, General Ferdinand Čatloš, crossed the Polish border in Podhale, the Nowy Sącz region and the Bieszczady Mountains. Slovakia did not declare war on Poland. The government in Bratislava presented its part in the campaign as the recovery of lands in Spiš and Orava that Poland had taken in 1920, 1924 and 1938. For Britain, bound to Poland by alliance, the matter was clear. A state that had attacked a British ally together with Germany could not be treated as a neutral neighbour.

Not all Slovak diplomats followed their government. The consul general in London, Harminc, and the Slovak minister in Warsaw, Ladislav Szathmáry, protested against Slovakia’s participation in the attack and placed themselves at the disposal of the Czechoslovak exiles gathered around the former president, Edvard Beneš. In Poland the Czech and Slovak Legion had been forming since 3 September. Butler said in October that the government still recognised Harminc “as the Slovak representative in London”, because the consul had protested against the German occupation of his country and declared that the aims of Britain and France accorded with the aspirations of the Slovak nation. Asked by the Labour MP Arthur Henderson whether this meant that London still recognised the government in Bratislava, he replied: “Slovakia is under enemy control and must be treated as such.”

8 September: occupied territory

The formula of 8 September suited London. The British did not have to declare war on Slovakia, nor to accept that it was an independent ally of Hitler. They treated it as part of the area that had fallen into enemy hands, like Bohemia and Moravia. In practice this meant that in trade, shipping and the naval blockade Slovakia was treated in the same way as the Reich. The formula was also in keeping with the position of the Czechoslovak exiles, according to whom the Slovak state was merely a German creation on occupied Czechoslovak territory, and Czechoslovakia had not legally ceased to exist. France likewise closed its consulate and stopped treating Slovakia as an independent state.

16 September: recognition from Moscow

The Soviet Union went the opposite way. In March 1939 Moscow had protested against the dismemberment of Czecho-Slovakia and tolerated in its capital the Czechoslovak minister, Zdeněk Fierlinger, who had formally lost his post but from the summer in practice represented Beneš’s authorities in exile. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact this policy lost its point. On 16 September 1939 the USSR recognised Slovakia de jure; some sources, including the Polish Wikipedia, give the date as 17 September. The recognition came on the eve of the Soviet attack on Poland and was one of the gestures by which Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov showed that they accepted the German order in Central Europe. For Bratislava it was a success: recognition by a great power that was not Germany’s ally strengthened the position of a state that London and Paris no longer recognised.

The two sides exchanged ministers. The Czechoslovak mission in Moscow was finally wound up, and on 14 December 1939 Fierlinger was asked to leave the USSR. The Slovak minister in Moscow was Fraňo Tiso, a relative of the president. Slovak diplomats hoped that relations with the USSR would allow them to offset their dependence on Germany at least a little, but in July 1940 Hitler forced the removal of the foreign minister, Ferdinand Ďurčanský, who had pressed hardest for independence.

What followed

The parting of the ways between London and Moscow in September 1939 lasted less than two years. In July 1940 Britain recognised the provisional Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London, with Beneš as president, and until the end of the war it treated Slovakia as part of occupied Czechoslovakia. In November 1940 Slovakia joined the Tripartite Pact, and when Germany attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941 it broke off relations with Moscow the next day and sent troops east. The Soviet Union then withdrew its recognition and in July 1941 recognised the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. More than ten of the states that had recognised Slovakia in 1939 also withdrew their recognition in time; in 1945 Tiso’s state vanished together with the Third Reich, and Slovakia returned to a restored Czechoslovakia.

This brief episode of September 1939 showed how the war changed the meaning of diplomatic formulas. De facto recognition, granted in May in order to have a consul in Bratislava, lost its point the moment Slovak troops entered Poland. Soviet recognition on 16 September, by contrast, was part of the same policy that a day later led the Red Army to march into Poland’s eastern lands.