Authors

Jonathan Parker¹;  ¹ Independent Scholar, United States

Discussion

When Czechoslovakia was founded in the final months of 1918, it represented many things to its newly minted citizens. Almost all wished to leave the horrors of the Great War behind and build a new future, although they did not agree on what that would look like. Some called for a more democratic and humane society, others for a radical overhaul of social relations, and others still for a simple restoration of order, minus the Habsburgs of course. It was in this context that the recently rebranded Czechoslovak gendarmes and state police (most of whom had recently served the Habsburgs) sought to maintain some semblance of order. While many of these men in the state security services shared the widespread desire for a more democratic and humane society, they were also concerned simply with doing their jobs. Their work entailed not only policing petty crime and maintaining public order, but also, in the wake of the First World War, suppressing real and imagined existential threats to the republic. While the War had made the founding of Czechoslovakia possible, it had also enabled a wide range competing political movements, including rival nationalists as well as communists inspired by the Russian example. In an effort to enforce the existence of their new state and to prevent further radical re-imaginings of the Central European political landscape, the Czechoslovak state security services embraced new technologies and expanded existing ones in order to reinforce the state’s presence in local communities. However, in many ways these new technologies introduced their own logic of state security, creating a feedback loop that progressively expanded the needs of state security.  
    The proposed paper extends the author’s doctoral dissertation. It explores the use of technology in the Czechoslovak security services in the period 1918-1924, showing how the police and gendarmes inadvertently undermined the development of democratic norms in their efforts to secure the nascent republic. These technologies of state security encompassed a mixture of physical equipment and practices, such as railroads, telegraphs, and telephones, and also maps and tables of statistical data. In addition to facilitating the work of the security services, these also created new security imperatives by expanding and documenting the state’s own vulnerabilities. For example, while a new telephone line might make it easier for local officers to communicate with their superiors and neighboring districts, it also represented a new potential strategic point of failure, in the event that rebellious citizens should take control of it. This telephone line would then create a need for additional security measures to protect it from being compromised. In this fashion, state security became self-reinforcing and self-propagating, i.e. it created and expanded its own self-justifications.