Officers versus disciplinary committees - disciplining and (self)reflection of professional honour in interwar Czechoslovakia
Abstract
The officer corps was a professional group, whose activity was fundamentally involved in shaping the image of the Czechoslovak armed forces and its relationship to the broader society of the interwar Czechoslovakia. This image and relationship were not only endured, but also actively constructed by individual officers and the army as an institution.
The military disciplinary code and the associated activities of disciplinary committees are tools with which we can examine these processes. The aim of this paper is to illustrate, using regulations and the analysis of disciplinary records, how officer honour, as part of military culture, was normatively defined, negotiated, enforced and defended.
We can reconstruct how officers were intended to be, and how they actually were perceived by the wider, non- military society, through the transfer of notions of officer honour into the practice of their disciplining.