Soon after the First World War broke out in 1914, both in the country and abroad a movement was formed aimed at establishing an independent Czecho-Slovak state. It was hoped that Austria-Hungary would collapse and Germany be defeated. To reach its goal, the independence movement had to obtain the support of Czechs and Slovaks abroad, mainly in the USA, France and Russia, as well as benevolence of the Entente Powers. Initially, the decisive influence of Russia was taken into consideration, which resulted in the postulate to preserve monarchy. As Russia’s position was weakening, the Czecho-Slovak resistance movement became more oriented towards Entente’s western powers and gradually, especially abroad, emphasized the vision of the future state as a republic and its democratic system. In order to understand the establishment of the Revolutionary National Assembly in Prague in 1918, the origin of its founding must be presented and a reference made to Austro-Hungarian parliamentarism. On 19 November 1916 information was published on founding the Czech Union comprising Deputies of the Austrian Parliament — the Imperial Council (Reichsrat) in Vienna. It was a group of Deputies of nine political parties, who committed themselves to act in accordance with the principle of majority in national-political and constitutional-legal matters. Simultaneously, the National Committee was founded as a permanent body associating representatives of Czech political parties. It was to support the Czech Union as the highest authority in those matters of political life that transgressed competences of Deputies to the parliament. Initially, the Czech Union was loyal to the Austrian government and even distanced itself from the Czecho-Slovak resistance movement abroad. Among the Czechs important organizational elements were established, which contributed to the creation of the union and became a catalyst of the Czech political life.
The study examines the role of the Czech National Council and the Slovak National Council in the political development of the Czechoslovak federation. It presents the two republic parliaments as hitherto overlooked institutions, where significant processes toward their transformation into parliaments of independent states – the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic – were taking place. It emphasizes that the formally identical status of both National Councils was hiding different realities, practices and evolutionary dynamisms of the two bodies, which were a result of a not very fortunately chosen institutional architecture of the federation. Prague’s twin role as both federal and Czech capital made the Czech National Council act as a regional authority, while its Slovak counterpart in Bratislava was playing a key role in Slovakia’s political life. The two authors illustrate the situation using two documentary probes. The first of them concerns the Slovak struggle for their own constitution promised to both republics in the new constitutional order in 1968. It shows that a majority of the Slovak National Council adopted a requirement for an autonomous constitution as early as in the first weeks after the fall of the last Communist government and kept insisting on it until the end of the federation. The second probe into documentary sources indicates a different dynamism; it presents the formation of nuclei of the Czech foreign policy through the Foreign Committee of the Czech National Council, the body established only in the spring of 1991, which subsequently became one of the institutional pillars of Czech separatism in the next year and a half.
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