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Jan Rychlík – Co se nestalo – ale co se stát mohlo

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  • Type: Štúdie/Papers
  • Title in original language: Co se nestalo – ale co se stát mohlo
  • Author: Jan Rychlík
  • Title in English: What did not happen, but could have happened
  • Journal: Česko-slovenská historická ročenka, 26, 2, 2024, pp. 119-142
  • Abstract: When pursuing history as a discipline, we must simply accept that things happened as they did, and we can only examine what factors caused the events to unfold as they have. On the other hand, all historians are inevitably led by their profession to consider counterfactuals when examining historical events. When we consider counterfactuals, we must be aware that we can never safely say what the consequences of a different decision would have been. However, we can usually be fairly accurate in describing the options that existed and, above all, in identifying what would not have happened. After examining all the circumstances, we can draw certain, more or less probable, conclusions based on similar developments elsewhere. This text provides a reflection on five well-known events in Czech and Czechoslovak history and their counterfactuals: a different outcome of the Battle of White Mountain fought on 8 November 1620; the non-acceptance of the Munich Agreement by the Czechoslovak government on 30 September 1938; the retention of the German minority in Czechoslovakia after World War II; the non-acceptance of the resignations, submitted by non-communist ministers, by President Edvard Beneš on 25 February 1948; the absence of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968; and the absence of the police crackdown on the student demonstration in Prague on 17 November 1989. The conclusions arrived at are as follows: the victory of the Bohemian Estates in the Estates Revolt would have, with a high degree of probability, produced in the Czech lands a situation similar to that of neighbouring Poland with the prospect of an aristocratic anarchy; the non-acceptance of the Munich Agreement would have led to a war with Nazi Germany, which Czechoslovakia would have surely lost in the long run, but the resistance would have been of great moral significance for the future; the retention of the German minority in Czechoslovakia would have gradually created a situation similar to that of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia; the acceptance or not of the resignations, submitted by non-communist ministers, by the president in February 1948 would have had no practical effect on the further development of the state, as a communist dictatorship would have been established in any case; in the absence of the Soviet intervention in 1968, it is impossible to say unequivocally whether the socialist regime in Czechoslovakia would have been transformed or completely dismantled; the police crackdown on the student demonstration in Prague was only a trigger and the dismantling of the communist regime would have taken place anyway, given the general developments in Eastern Europe.
  • Keywords: alternative history; White Mountain; Munich Agreement; communist coup, fall of the communist régime
  • DOI: DOI:10.5817/cshr.2024.26.2.7
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Česko-slovenská komisia historikov je bilaterálna komisia, ktorá vznikla v roku 1994. Jej členov menuje Slovenský národný komitét historikov pri Slovenskej historickej spoločnosti a Český národní komitét historiků. Komisia sa venuje propagácii českých a slovenských dejín, spolupráci českej a slovenskej historiografie, organizuje vedecké semináre a vydáva Česko-slovenskú historickú ročenku.

Česko-slovenská komisia historikov bola v čase od mája 2011 do apríla 2012 koordinátorom štandardného grantu Medzinárodného vyšehradského fondu č. 21110109 (International Visegrad Fund, ID 21110109) s názvom Formy nacionalizmu v strednej Európe v 20. storočí (Forms of Nationalism in Central Europe in the 20th Century)
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