Authors

Discussion

In some former Habsburg territories, the post-war period was an uncertain time for the newly installed authorities. This was the case in Slovakia, where the Czechoslovak authorities were able to settle only gradually and incompletely during the winter of 1918-1919. The Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia (MPS), acting as the Czechoslovak executive body in Slovakia, was permanently confronted with a combination of human and material resources problems that impacted its political and material control capacity.

After a brief review of the initial strategies of the MPS, the paper focuses on the period following the final withdrawal of the Hungarian armies (summer 1919). Its aim is to map the depth of the human resource and competence problems that remain at the top of the local administrative apparatus (župa level) until the spring 1920 parliamentary elections. What strategies are preferred to deal with them? How is the flow of information and the decision-making process organized? In particular, how does the MPS adapt these strategies to local realities that remain heterogeneous? The hypothesis is that the sustained lack of resources forces the MPS to rely to a large extent on civil servants from the former Hungarian regime.

The paper is mainly based on archival material from the Slovak National Archive, Bratislava (namely fonds of the Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia (MPS), and several personal fonds of Slovak ministers in Bratisl