7
Introduction: Czech Exceptionalism
Why should outsiders care about the Czech people and their politics? Though
the country styles itself the heart of Europe, its objective importance is hard to
see. It is the 85th
largest country in the world by population (between Benin
and Portugal), the 116th
by area (between UAE and Serbia), the 40th
by GDP
per capita (just behind Greece and Estonia), and the 50th
by total GDP (between
Qatar and Peru).1
By almost any standard measure, the Czech Republic is an
ordinary country – not too big or too small, not too rich or too poor.
But the Czech Republic does have reason to claim our attention. Czech
politics presents in refined form some of the major forces shaping the modern
world – whether nationalism, democracy, multiculturalism, the dilemmas of
being a small state, communism, state division, economic reform, and coming
to terms with the past. By virtue of being in the heart of Europe, the Czech
lands have experienced in the most direct way possible the vicissitudes of the
past two centuries. Czech politics can thus serve as a microcosm for
understanding these world-historical forces.
This chapter, however, will argue that Czech politics has an even stronger
claim on our attention. In many ways, the Czechs are not just a microcosm or
an exemplar, but a trailblazer and a model. Czech politics has pioneered new
and unprecedented ways of dealing with just about all of the phenomena
described in the previous paragraph. At the least the Czechs show us new
possibilities, and at the most they reveal better ways forward. For those who
wish to understand politics, it is not just interesting but essential to know
something about the Czech experience. This introduction will attempt to make
the case for the study of Czech politics by describing this Czech
exceptionalism and what it teaches us about politics.
The birth of the Czech nation in the 19th
century is in many ways typical
of Europe of the time. Czech nation builders closely followed the example of
their German neighbours in building an imagined community based on
language and culture and relying on print media and schools to spread their
message. But the result of these struggles was very different than elsewhere.
Most importantly, Czech nationalism was far less militant and far more
flexible than the nationalism of its peers. Indeed, most of the early nationalists
were content to remain a part of the Habsburg Empire, and Czech resistance to
imperial rule was almost entirely passive up to the very end. Czech nationalism
is even one that does not take itself too seriously – witness national icons like
the Good Soldier Švejk or the fictional inventor Jára Cimrman. What explains
this? One factor may be that Czechness was created in a fairly well-off people
living in a relatively liberal empire. Life was good enough, so why rock the
1
These rankings are approximate and vary across sources.
8
boat too much. Regardless of the cause, Czech nation building challenges the
stereotypical view of militancy and violence that came to be associated with
nationalism, particularly in peripheral countries. It shows the possibility of an
ethnic nationalism without virulent xenophobia or armed struggle.
The creation of the independent state of Czechoslovakia in 1918 had its
own peculiarities. Czech nationalism did not lead directly to a Czech state.
Instead, Czechs found themselves a part of a multi-ethnic state that included
Germans, Slovaks, and Hungarians. While this did, of course, lead to conflict,
the newly-formed Czechoslovak Republic was far more functional than one
might expect. It is going too far to see interwar Czechoslovakia as an ideal of
interethnic harmony, but the state was unique for its time and place in
protecting the civil rights of minorities and giving them political
representation. And it did this under less than ideal circumstances. Interwar
governments frequently had to deal with ethnic provocations from both inside
and outside the country. All, of course, did not end well, but for two decades
one of the most diverse countries in Europe worked. It was peaceful and
prosperous and democratic.
Even more interesting is the way the leaders of the state created a new
“ethnicity”, the Czechoslovak. There was nothing natural or obvious about this
designation. Czechs and Slovaks had last been united in the 10th
century and
for most of modern history Czechs had been ruled from Vienna while Slovaks
were under the thumb of Hungarians. Their ethnic identities and national
mythologies had also emerged separately. Yet, most Czechs ultimately
embraced the Czechoslovak state and even the Czechoslovak identity. This was
not a case of either/or, they were both Czechs and Czechoslovaks. In short,
Czech politics can teach us lessons about the possibility of multi-ethnic
democracy and even the mutability of ethnic identity.
Another exceptionalism from this era was Czechoslovak democracy.
While all of its neighbours were succumbing to communism, military rule, or
fascism, Czechoslovakia remained a home for free elections. While revisionist
accounts point to the blemishes on interwar democracy, there is little question
that it met the basic standards of democracy for the time. To get a sense of the
achievement, consider how many democracies today are completely
surrounded by authoritarian regimes. Mongolia might be the only current
example. And the international environment of the time was far less supportive
to say the least. The reasons for the survival of democracy are still debated.
One explanation might be the absence of forces who had the ability and desire
to seize power – the army had new leadership, the nobility had been stripped
of its titles and much of its property, and neither communism nor fascism fit a
country that was predominantly a middle-class mostly-Slavic state. Again,
interwar Czechoslovak politics can teach us lessons about the possibilities of
democracy under very inauspicious circumstances.
9
The fall of this republic at Munich has become a historical touchstone
because it raises debates about how to deal with expansionist dictators. The
dilemma of appeasement versus pre-emptive strikes is well-known. Besides
this issue in international relations, Munich also lays bare the dilemma of small
states. Chamberlain has been derided, probably too severely, for his
appeasement of Hitler, but what about Czech leaders who decided to surrender
without a fight? Should they have fought even after their allies had abandoned
them or after they had ceded the Sudetenland? They would have lost, but they
could have put up a fight (they had a large armaments industry and before
Munich good fortifications on the borders) and this might have had positive
consequences for their national character. Or were their leaders correct in
seeing the writing on the wall and avoiding bloodshed and even greater
repression? Regardless of the correctness of this choice, it is hard to name
many small countries who have taken the decision to lay down their arms
without a fight that the Czechs did.
The communist takeover presents another unique aspect of Czech politics.
Communists won a plurality in mostly free elections after the war. This put
them in a position to lead the government and by 1948 they were able to seize
power in a mostly legal way and with the support of much of the population.
Czechoslovakia may thus be the first and only case of communism coming to
power through democratic means and with considerable popular support. This
has its reasons – the disappointment of Munich, liberation by the Red Army,
and skilful manipulation by the Communist Party – but it does present a very
different perspective on communism in the satellite states than the standard
vision of Soviet imposition.
While communist rule mostly followed the Soviet model in terms of
ideology and institutions, the Czechoslovak experience shows a reversal
unknown elsewhere. While the typical Soviet satellite saw a hard-line period
followed by a gradual thaw, Czechoslovakia experienced a revival of hard-line
rule after Stalinism had receded. The thaw here of course culminated in the
Prague Spring and the second hard-line period occurred after the Soviet
invasion and was called normalisation. This latter period from 1969 to 1989
took the country back to the ideological rigour and cadre politics of the fifties
but in a less violent way.
It also created a type of communism that was more or less unique (East
Germany may be the only other example). Linz and Stepan (1996) call it
“frozen post-totalitarianism” and Kitschelt et al. (1999) label it “bureaucratic
authoritarian communism”. Its uniqueness lay in the combination of Stalinist
politics with an advanced economy and a near complete loss of faith in
communist ideology. That hard-line communism could be reimposed under
these conditions and that cynicism and opportunism were enough for
communism to work after a fashion again tell us something new about the
nature of political regimes.
10
The postcommunist period has provided the Czech Republic with new
ways to show its exceptionality. One can begin with the revolution itself. It has
been given the moniker “velvet” in part because of how easy it was. After a
clash between police and a regime-sponsored parade, the seemingly most
stable regime in the region simply melted away. Though a rapid transition was
not uncommon in the region, the contrast between before and after was easily
the most extreme in Czechoslovakia. The country went from the depths of
totalitarianism to a democratic poster child led by a former dissident almost
overnight. Indeed, Czechoslovakia had the greatest one-year improvement in
Freedom House scores in the more than forty-year history of the index.2
It was not just the speed and thoroughness that distinguished the Czech
transition. Many scholars have argued that the fall of communism brought little
that was new. No new isms emerged. These countries simply overthrew
communism and replaced it with standard-issue liberal democracy. Krapfl
(2013), however, argues that Czechoslovakia did bring new ideas into the
revolutionary tradition. These were the ideals of humaneness and dignity
which had never before been at the centre of a revolution. The Czech lands and
dissidents like Havel were ground zero for these ideas which have since gone
on to enrich the democratic lexicon in other democratic transitions.
Like the democratic transition, the breakup of Czechoslovakia created a
new model for state division. It is hard to think of another state division that
was so smooth and amicable as to deserve the title Velvet Divorce. This was
not because both sides wanted divorce. A majority in both nations wanted to
stay together and certainly passions had been inflamed by the time the decision
was made. Yet just as Yugoslavia was descending into chaos, the ability of
Czech and Slovak politicians to negotiate an end to a state that existed for 70
years was exceptional and suggests that secession and state division may not
be quite so difficult and painful as existing theories predict. Indeed, it was not
just the division that was painless. Ever since, relations between the two
countries have been more or less problem-free. Each considers the other its
strongest ally.
Economic reforms are another area where the Czech way was unique. This
is not the basic point about the unprecedented nature of the transformation
from communism to a market economy which is worth mentioning in its own
right. Other states in the region had to overcome similar obstacles. What
distinguishes the Czech Republic is the role of the public in these reforms and
its methods of privatization.
At the start of the transition most would-be reformers worried that the
public would come to oppose reform as soon as it began to take away the
2
This results from summing together the political rights and civil liberties scores.
Its improvement in the Polity index was the third largest in the entire dataset.
11
guaranteed employment and low prices that they had become accustomed to.
What makes the Czech Republic exceptional was not just that the public
endorsed the initial reforms – this occurred, albeit to a lesser extent, in other
postcommunist countries as well – but that it kept electing supporters of the
free market – a market without adjectives in Václav Klaus’s terms – long after
other countries had turned to social democrats and former communists to
express their disapproval. It took the Czechs eight long years to make such a
move and even then it was far from decisive.
The other aspect of reform that set the Czechs apart was their way of
divesting themselves of the enormous amount of property owned by the state.
The standard prescription was to sell these properties to the highest bidder. The
Czechs, however, pioneered two methods that had never been tried before and
have never been replicated to the same extent. The first was restitution of
property to its former owners from whom it had been seized. Despite the
manifest justice of this approach, it had generally been considered infeasible
and uneconomical until the Czechs tried it. The second was voucher
privatization. Every Czech citizen could purchase inexpensive vouchers which
they could use to become owners of state-owned enterprises, thus creating a
citizens’ capitalism. Though the success of both methods has been questioned,
the Czechs did show the world that there was more than one way to skin a cat.
Finally, the Czechs have broken ground in coming to terms with an
authoritarian past. Most postcommunist countries have found some way of
dealing with those who collaborated with the communist regime. Few,
however, have gone as far as the Czechs. Not only did the Czechs give us the
term now used for the practice of purging collaborators – lustration – but they
were the first to pursue it and have taken it farther than any other country. The
Czech policy of requiring occupants of high public office to submit evidence
that they had not collaborated with the secret police has vetted far more people,
introduced far tougher sanctions – exclusion from office – and extended far
longer in time than any other country. Naturally, it has its defects such as
banning the innocent along with the guilty, but it did open new horizons for
coming to terms with the past.
Every nation is exceptional in its own way. One could likely produce a
similar, though perhaps not quite so long, list of exceptional experiences or
policies for many other countries. And one could equally write of the ways that
the Czech Republic is a typical country both in general and for its particular
time and place. As suggested earlier, one could portray the Czechs as
exemplars of such processes as nation and state building, multi-ethnic discord,
totalitarian rule, democratic transition, economic reform, and coming to terms
with the past. Yet, the descriptions above suggest that unique events did happen
in the Czech lands and that they are worth studying.
One of Vaclav Havel’s (1993) books was entitled The Art of the
Impossible. Czech politics gives a sense of this art by uncovering possibilities
12
that have been absent elsewhere in the world, possibilities that are thought to
be impossible. They include the possibility of a relatively benign and peaceful
nationalism, the possibility of creating a multi-ethnic identity, the possibility
of a democratic and multi-ethnic state in the interwar period, the possibility of
laying down one’s arms when faced with a more powerful foe, the possibility
of democratically chosen communism, the possibility of a hard-line communist
regime even after people and elites had lost faith in communism, the possibility
of a rapid and peaceful democratization and state breakup, the possibility of a
popular (in both senses of the word) transition to the market, and the possibility
of coming to terms with a brutal past through a comprehensive policy of
lustration. These possibilities were not always good ones – though they were
often better than the more conventional alternatives – but they should be of
interest to any student of politics who wishes to understand how societies are
and can be governed. That, in short, is the case for caring about Czech politics.
***
The aim of the chapters that follow is to explore many of the issues outlined
above. They are not intended to make the case for Czech exceptionalism as I
have above, but simply to provide a better understanding of Czech politics.
They represent the work of political scientists and so the emphasis is on
conceptual and causal analysis. While the book does attempt to describe the
basic who, what, where, and when of Czech politics over the last two centuries,
it is not a history per se. Rather its focus is on conceptual understanding – for
example, of regime types, party systems, and institutions – and causality – the
main forces behind the course of political events in the Czech lands and the
consequences of these events.
The book is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on Czech politics up to
1989. Chapter 1 analyses the formation of the Czech nation, Czech politics
under the Habsburg Empire, and the creation of an independent state. Chapter
2 focuses on politics during the democratic First Republic (1918-1938) which
has been mythologized as a paradise lost and has served as an inspiration for
much of current politics. Chapter 3 covers the half century of non-democratic
or partially democratic regimes from 1938 to 1989 with most attention on Nazi
and Communist rule. All of these chapters describe the political traditions that
influence politics to this day. Chapter 4 explains the fall of communism and
the creation of a new democracy. Chapter 5 considers the roots and process of
the breakup of Czechoslovakia.
Part II analyses the quarter century of democratic rule since the fall of
communism in 1989. Chapter 6 analyses the new Czech constitutional order –
its main institutions, their powers, and their effect on Czech politics. Chapter
7 focuses on elections and electoral systems as the country has now become
13
the site of near constant elections. Chapter 8 deals with political parties and the
party system, especially the recent breakdown in both. Chapter 9 tackles the
thorny issue of economic reforms and economic policy. Chapter 10 describes
the foreign affairs of the Czech Republic with a particular focus on NATO and
the EU. Chapter 11 concludes with a larger view of the last two centuries of
Czech politics.
The authors wish to thank Oldřich Krpec of Masaryk University for his
valuable comments and Michal Kubát of Charles University for his careful
review of the manuscript. Štěpán Kaňa’s excellent work as translator warrants
our deepest gratitude. Finally, we wish to express our appreciation to the
Masaryk University (MUNI/A/1110/2015, MUNI/A/1113/2015,
MUNI/A/1342/2014) for the generous financial support of this project. Our
hope is that this book inspires debate and helps to bring Czech politics closer
to the centre of research in political science.
14
15
1. The birth of modern Czech politics: 1848-1918
The task of understanding the Czech political tradition prior to the founding of
the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 is not easy for a historian, let alone a
political scientist. The issue is not only finding a suitable starting point in time;
more important is the fact that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, Czech history has frequently been politicised and subject to various,
often antithetical, interpretations. Understandably, this chapter cannot promise
to be completely objective and neutral, but it will seek to describe Czech
political developments until the end of World War I by employing a perspective
that sheds light on the capabilities and deficiencies of Czech society and its
political elites. The patterns that emerged before 1918 served as a basis for the
many types of regime and society that followed.
1.1. Czech society and the Czech national revival: a
difficult transition from serfs to citizens
A useful place to begin is Rokkan’s conceptual map of Europe. He attempted
to categorize the distribution of European nations and ethnic groups which
sought to construct a modern nation at the threshold of the nineteenth century
(Rokkan 1999b: 135-147). Although Rokkan’s model is primarily focussed on
a ‘Europe of Celtic, Latin and Germanic peoples’, its usefulness goes beyond
that. The conceptual map places European states and regions along two axes.
The ‘West-East’ axis combines economic and territorial (geopolitical) criteria
(centre vs. periphery, strength of city network), whereas the ‘North-South’axis
is determined by Catholic (South), mixed (centre) and Protestant (North) areas.
This second axis differentiates the conditions of nation-building, whereas the
‘West-East’ axis emphasises those of state-building.
Rokkan’s map shows that the most successful and earliest nation-states
were to be found in the European geopolitical centres: Catholic France, Spain
and Portugal; the religiously mixed Netherlands; and the Protestant Britain,
Denmark and Sweden. Unsuccessful nations, by contrast, were located on the
peripheries of European politics. As a religiously and linguistically mixed
territory and part of the Habsburg Empire, the Czech lands faced an uneasy
path towards the establishment of a full political nation. This was to various
degrees a result of disputes between its Czech- and German-speaking
populations, opposition to Czech national aspirations from the Catholic
Church, and the fact that Protestants, drawing from German culture, were not
necessarily supporters of Czech nationhood (as they sometimes were in
Western European countries).
16
Of key importance for both the Czech and the wider Central European
experience was the process of modern nation building, often described in
Czech historiography using the somewhat imprecise, but poetic and
nationalistically tinged expression národní obrození – national revival or
renascence. The term suggests the pre-existence of a Czech nation in a distant
past. Czech national mythology interprets the Battle of White Mountain as the
symbolic beginning of Habsburg rule and the suppression of Czech
nationhood. The nation gradually revived itself, beginning in the late
eighteenth century.
This story is not, however, the historical truth. Modern nations are the
product of historical developments, which could have taken – at some stages
at least – alternative paths. As Jiří Kořalka (1996: 19-66) reminds us, in the
early-nineteenth-century Czech lands there were no fewer than five alternative
(and not necessarily exclusive) national-political collective identities: Austrian
(a patriotism linked with the Habsburg dynasty); Greater German (a nationalist
idea that brought together the German-speaking citizens of the Habsburg
monarchy with those of what would later become Germany); Slavic (which
sought the future of Czech existence in a close alliance with other Slavic
ethnicities, counting largely on a political leadership role for Russia);
Bohemian (based on territorial rather than linguistic differences – by analogy
we might also speak of Moravian patriotism, involving both the Czech- and
German-speaking inhabitants of Moravia); and, finally, Czech (which
emphasised the ethnic and linguistic construct of the Czech nation). Not all of
these notions were of equal relevance. The dynastic Austrian and Bohemian
identities, disregarding as they did linguistic differences, enjoyed the support
of very narrow social bases of civil servants and certain intellectuals. Slavic
patriotism was more of a political tactic than a truly shared identity. And so the
Czech and German linguistic nationalisms emerged during the nineteenth
century as clear winners. Czech nationalism spanned the territorial boundaries
of the historical lands of Bohemia and Moravia, whereas German nationalism
extended beyond the borders of the Habsburg monarchy.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Czechs were becoming
a fully-fledged modern nation.3
They underwent a process typical of most of
Europe at the time, with Herder’s linguistic and ethnic notion of nation and
German nationalism serving as paradigms.
3
For non-ruling ethnic groups like the Czechs, building a modern nation involved
three processes: (1) overcoming cultural and linguistic inferiority by cultivating
and developing a literary language and a national culture; (2) overcoming political
subjugation by obtaining the right to participate in political decision-making; and
(3) abolishing the inferior social standing of their members vis-à-vis the ruling
nation (Hroch 1996:10-11).
17
As Miroslav Hroch (1999) has argued, the Czech national movement
enjoyed a good starting position in that it could refer to the long tradition of
independent statehood in the medieval and early modern period. Indeed, early
advocates of Czech nationhood frequently based their arguments on historical
rights. Scholarly interest among the Czechs in their language, history and
ethnography emerged at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In
the context of the Habsburg monarchy, this was relatively early. The interest of
scholars during the Enlightenment was soon complemented by, and later
replaced with, political demands. The period until the mid-1840s was a time of
cautious national campaigning by patriotic activists on behalf of Czech cultural
and political ideas.4
The campaign won the support of more and more Czech
speakers. With the revolution of 1848, Czech nationalism became a truly mass
movement, which gradually built up a Czech social structure and formulated
more radical demands – not just nationalist but also democratic.
As suggested above, geopolitics was a factor influencing to what degree
Central European political systems were able to democratise themselves. Of
equal weight were events that were connected with attempts to establish
democratic and liberal ideas not only in Central Europe, but on the whole
continent. The Revolutions of 1848 were, naturally, a symbolic moment.
Unlike their predecessors in the 1820s and 1830s, they immediately influenced
the nations in Habsburg-ruled Central Europe. And, unlike the exports of the
French Revolution, in this case the reception in Central Europe of the new
political currents was favourable.
The year 1848 was a milestone on the road to modern democratic politics
in Central Europe. In terms of the preconditions for the liberalisation and
democratisation of political and social life, the Revolutions of 1848 separated
Central (Habsburg) Europe from Eastern (Romanov) Europe and SouthEastern
(Ottoman) Europe, which never received the ideas of the revolution.
The year 1848 was also important in that it was still the era of risorgimento
nationalism, when demands for the liberalisation and democratisation of
political life went hand in hand with calls for national, cultural and political
emancipation. The tendencies to Germanise, to replace Slavic languages with
German both in intellectual endeavours and daily life, failed to prevent the
progress of the nation-building project among the Czechs, but as a result these
projects were clearly pitted against the Germans or, symbolically, against
Vienna (Claval 2000).
An even more important legacy of the revolution was that it started the
process by which serfs were transformed into citizens. The revolution in fact
abolished for some time the prerogatives of the aristocracy, many of which
were not restored during the neo-absolutist period of 1849-1860. An
4
The important Czech historian Jiří Štaif (2005) describes Czech national leaders of
the pre-March 1848 period as ‘a cautious elite’.