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Italian aggression against Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935 placed Czechoslovak diplomacy in a predicament. On the one hand, as a member state of the League of Nations, the First Czechoslovak Republic was obliged to preserve the integrity and independence of other League members, including Abyssinia, and to apply at least economic sanctions against any aggressor. On the other hand, as a product of the First World War, Czechoslovakia was highly interested in maintaining the post-war order in Central Europe against growing German revisionism. Here, apart from France and Great Britain, Czechoslovak diplomats put their hopes in Italy as well and were particularly anxious to gain Mussolini for the defence of Austria. In light of this dilemma, the article examines the attitude and behaviour of foreign minister Edvard Beneš, who was not only Czechoslovakia’s leading diplomat but also the country’s principal actor in the League of Nations, where the Abyssinian crisis had been on the agenda since the beginning of 1935. As far as Beneš’ role in the League is concerned, the study focuses on the sixteenth Assembly in autumn 1935, of which Beneš was elected president. While previous works on Czechoslovakia’s Abyssinian policy are mainly based on documents from the Archives of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry, this article also uses sources from the League of Nations Archives in Geneva and the Archives of the Masaryk-Institute in Prague.

The goal of the study is to describe the attitude of Budapest to the election of the President of the Republic in Czechoslovakia in December 1935, electing the successor to Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first President of the Czechoslovak Republic who had been in office long years. The election of the President of the Czechoslovak Republic in late 1935 was the first presidential election with active participation of the opposition and negativistic Hungarian minority legislators of the Czechoslovak National Assembly from both Hungarian minority parliamentary parties, the Land Christian-Socialist Party (OKSzP) and the Hungarian National Party (MNP) who had always cast empty votes in presidential elections until that time, to declare their negativistic attitude to the constitutional limits of the Czech Republic. In 1935, they even supported the presidential candidate Edvard Beneš, the Foreign Minister to whom the Hungarian minority political representation including the very Budapest had a very negative attitude as he had been one of the main architects of the Versailles rearrangement of Central Europe after World War I, refused by the Hungarians, as the Hungarian state had lost two thirds of its territory and about seven hundred and fifty thousand Hungarians landed in Czechoslovakia in position of national and non-state-constituting minority due to it. But in spite of that fact, the Hungarian minority legislators from OKSzP and MNP, with political support of Budapest, sided with Benešʼs candidacy; thus the Hungarian minority was the only one out of the two large negativistic national minorities of the Czechoslovak Republic of that time, besides the minority Germans whose representatives in the Czechoslovak Parliament, on behalf of the opposition and negativistic OKSzP and MNP parties took an activistic attitude, increasing the national-political and the foreign-political prestige of Edvard Benešʼs presidential mandate.

Italian aggression against Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935 placed Czechoslovak diplomacy in a predicament. On the one hand, as a member state of the League of Nations, the First Czechoslovak Republic was obliged to preserve the integrity and independence of other League members, including Abyssinia, and to apply at least economic sanctions against any aggressor. On the other hand, as a product of the First World War, Czechoslovakia was highly interested in maintaining the post-war order in Central Europe against growing German revisionism. Here, apart from France and Great Britain, Czechoslovak diplomats put their hopes in Italy as well and were particularly anxious to gain Mussolini for the defence of Austria. In light of this dilemma, the article examines the attitude and behaviour of foreign minister Edvard Beneš, who was not only Czechoslovakia's leading diplomat but also the country's principal actor in the League of Nations, where the Abyssinian crisis had been on the agenda since the beginning of 1935. As far as Beneš' role in the League is concerned, the study focuses on the sixteenth Assembly in autumn 1935, of which Beneš was elected president. While previous works on Czechoslovakia's Abyssinian policy are mainly based on documents from the Archives of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry, this article also uses sources from the League of Nations Archives in Geneva and the Archives of the Masaryk-Institute in Prague. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]