Illiberal Forms of Non-Territorial Autonomy: The Sudeten German Party Case

Abstract

The paper aims to present an illiberal variant of non-territorial autonomy (NTA) by focusing on the historical example of the autonomist proposals developed during the 1930s in Czechoslovakia by the far-right Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP). Known under the joint title Volksschutzgesetze (Laws for the Protection of Nationality), the six draft laws that the SdP presented to the Czechoslovak Parliament in 1937 foresaw a far-reaching re-organisation of the state along national lines and on a purely non-territorial basis. As such, the SdP’s legal demands can be treated as a clear example of NTA. At the same time, they may also be viewed as an instance of a radical nationalist and openly illiberal adaptation of the concept. Informed by contemporary völkisch sociological, legal and political thought, the bills aimed at transforming Czechoslovakia into a federation of largely autarchic ethno-national communities. This was to be done on the basis of an involuntary, binding and essentialising definition of nationality and a fundamentally illiberal conception of collective rights, in which the rights of the national group came before those of their individual members. The envisaged scope of national self-rule was furthermore meant to extend far beyond the confines of culture and education, encompassing a wide array of other spheres of life also considered to be essentially ‘national’. Lastly, the Volksschutzgesetze also effectively negated Czechoslovakia’s self-understanding as a nation-state by transposing the notion of sovereignty from the whole of its citizenry to the individual ethnic groups inhabiting it. In clear contrast to the 1925 Estonian Law on Cultural Autonomy as the model interwar example of NTA, they were thus effectively at odds with both liberal democracy and the nation-state.