A Milestone or Mistake of Progress? The Death Penalty and State Consolidation in Austria and Czechoslovakia after 1918

Abstract

This article takes a comparative approach and deals with the issue of the death penalty in Austria and Czechoslovakia after the First World War. Whereas both successor states strived for progressive reforms that would delimit them from the discredited old regime, each of them found a different response to the experience of extreme violence and massive use of the death penalty during the First World War. While Austria abolished the death penalty by law in 1919 and anchored this abolition into its constitution in 1920, Czechoslovakia, despite expectations to the contrary, gradually embedded this punishment within the process of national state consolidation in the post-war chaos. This article argues that this difference was not only a result of an actual dominance of retentionists or abolitionists, but it had its deeper roots in the relation of the new states to the vanquished empire and the values of the regime change. Austrian Social Democrats, alongside other politicians, saw a way out of the state collapse and the post-war legal nihilism through laying down the state's new foundations and by the abolishing the death penalty, which they regarded as unjustifiable. In Czechoslovakia the death penalty was dismissed as a means of national repression under the Habsburgs but it proved useful in maintaining military discipline in the Czechoslovak Army and managing its peripheral regions where the state had little representation. It also served as a penal instrument to control the skyrocketing criminality that occurred amidst the post-war chaos. While the misery of defeat called for a fresh start in Austria, the death penalty turned out to be irreplaceable for securing the national independence and future prospects in victorious Czechoslovakia.