Czechoslovakia is one of the few countries of Central Europe which has not succumbed to a dictatorship. Its President, Thomas G. Masaryk, has governed his country wisely. The Jew has prospered and the country has welcomed German refugees. It has consistently repelled Nazism, a policy executed under its Foreign Minister, Eduard Benes. At the request of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Dr. Benes has prepared a New Year’s greeting in which he views the state of democracy in the world, twenty years after the beginning of the World War.
Today, although seperated from the outburst of the World War already by the lapse of twenty years, we are again experiencing some very critical moments. The whole world is agitated and unable, after the great changes occasioned by the war in the political grouping and economic structure of the world, to attain political and economic equilibrium.
One may justly believe that reaction against the state of things as set up by the peace treaties, and therefore the struggle to overturn the international legal order of Europe, too, have reached their climax. Culminating also are the attempts at getting out of the economic despair attempts which manifest themselves throughout the world in the efforts of individual states towards an economic self-sufficiency and towards substituting the system used hitherto with various anti-liberalistic and corporation experiments.
Today it is, however, possible to observe that these experiments in economics do not lead to the mastering of the depression. Similarly, those were disappointed who believed that the only medium for overcoming the hardships of the present was the introduction of authoritative regimes.
Every one can see today, and it is markedly noticeable in Central Europe, that even dictatorships have their obstacles, and that these obstacles are often greater than those which democracies meet. It is apparent now that no change in political nor in economic regimes is able to bring the longed-for wonders.
In Central Europe, Czechoslovakia remained true to the forms of democratic government. She also has had no reason to regret this. The Czechoslovak democracy is surely, though not without hardships, overcoming the serious difficulties of these grave times, solving all differences among parties by compromise, and experience shows that these means often attain better results than the application of an authoritative will by abolishing civic rights, or civil war.
The Czechoslovak democracy is carrying forward her constructive methods also in international politics. Czechoslovakia and her allies of the Little Entente—Rumania and Yugoslavia—always followed the policy of peace in Central Europe. She always supported the policy of the League of Nations, the policy of mutual agreement, international collaboration and peaceful settlement of conflicts.
Even in these serious times Czechoslovakia is continuing her collaborations with France and the states of the Little Entente in this policy of peace. A recent manifestation of this policy is the concluding of the Balkan Pact and then the collaboration with Soviet Russia in the matter of the Eastern Pact, which is destined to lessen the present tension in Central Europe.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
