Abstract
The article focuses on two sets of autonomist demands that the far-right Sudeten German Party (SdP) in Czechoslovakia put forward during 1937–38. Its central thesis being that both sets were marked by a profoundly close interplay between territorial and non-territorial approaches at accommodating national diversity, it sets to explore this relationship, highlighting the underlying dynamic. Although the 1937 Volksschutzgesetze posed as an ostensibly “pure” case of non-territorial autonomy, whereas the 1938 Skizze über Neuordnung der innerstaatlichen Verhältnisse entailed major territorial provisions, in both cases the practical end-goal implied territorial autonomy. A closer look into their inner logic and intellectual origins however, also reveals a shared, essentially non-territorial underpinning. While the SdP agenda was firmly centered on national territory, its specific völkisch and organicist understanding of nationality manifested a clear preponderance of non-territoriality. Both sets of autonomist demands may thus be treated as a potentially maximalist combination of territorial and non-territorial arrangements resting on a fundamentally non-territorial notion of Volkspersönlichkeit. Encompassing all the members of the national group, the latter was simultaneously conceived as the basic carrier of political will. Volksschutzgesetze and Skizze thus represented clear examples of illiberal (re-)conceptualization of national autonomy, informed by contemporary völkisch sociological, legal, and political thought.
Territorial and Non-territorial Aspects in the Autonomist Proposals of the Sudeten German Party, 1937–38
