History of Czechoslovakia (1918–1938)

The First Czechoslovak Republic emerged from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in October 1918. The new state consisted mostly of territories inhabited by Czechs and Slovaks, but also included areas containing majority populations of other nationalities, particularly Germans (22.95 %), who accounted for more citizens than the state's second state nation of the Slovaks, Hungarians (5.47 %) and Ruthenians (3.39 %). The new state comprised the total of Bohemia whose borders did not coincide with the language border between German and Czech. Despite initially developing effective representative institutions alongside a successful economy, the deteriorating international economic situation in the 1930s gave rise to growing ethnic tensions. The dispute between the Czech and German populations, fanned by the rise of Nazism in neighbouring Germany, resulted in the loss of territory under the terms of the Munich Agreement and subsequent events in the autumn of 1938, bringing about the end of the First Republic.

Independence

Following the Pittsburgh Agreement of May 1918, the Czechoslovak declaration of independence, created in Washington, was published by the Czechoslovak National Council, signed by Masaryk, Štefánik and Beneš on 18 October 1918 in Paris, and proclaimed on 28th October in Prague.

Initial authority within Czechoslovakia was assumed by the newly created National Assembly on 14 November 1918. Because territorial demarcations were uncertain and elections impossible, the provisional National Assembly was constituted on the basis of the 1911 elections to the Austrian parliament with the addition of 54 representatives from Slovakia. National minorities were not represented. Hungarians remained loyal to Hungary.