The Rise of Authoritarian 'Hybrid' Democracy after the 'Great War': Colliding National Identities and Democracy in Upper Silesia, Teschen and Orava

Politics of nationalization collided after the “Great War” with politics of democratization in Europe's post-imperial states. Both politics were inspired by US-President Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points. However, democratic principles were in the interwar period gradually supplanted by nationalist ones. In this analysis it is shown for three disputed border regions (Upper Silesia, Teschen and Orava) on a broad source basis (central state and regional authorities as well as journalism) how this already became apparent in the first postwar years. Against the background of the demographic constellation of national majorities and minorities in these regions, we evaluate empirical material on processes and events, in which the collision of these principles becomes particularly clear: in the council movement of 1918/19, the censuses, plebiscites on border issues as well as in the first democratic elections. It is outlined how the contradiction between democratizing and nationalizing measures in these regions already at the beginning of the 1920s stoked distrust of the new order and provided fertile ground for the rise anti-democratic forces of “hybrid” authoritarian democracies.