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Journal of Political Ideologies
ISSN: 1356-9317 (Print) 1469-9613 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjpi20
The new right in the new Europe? Unravelling the
ideology of ’ Czech Thatcherism’
Seán Hanley
To cite this article: Seán Hanley (1999) The new right in the new Europe? Unravelling
the ideology of ’ Czech Thatcherism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 4:2, 163-189, DOI:
10.1080/13569319908420794
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569319908420794
Published online: 19 Nov 2007.
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Journal of Political Ideologies (1999), 4(2), 163-189
The New Right in the New Europe?
Unravelling the ideology of 'Czech
Thatcherism'
SEAN HANLEY
CentreFor Russianand East European Studies,University of Birmingham, BQ15
2TT,UK
ABSTRACT The remarkable success of Vaclav Klaus and the 'Thatcherite' right
in the Czech Republic was an exception in post-communist Eastern Europe.
Explanations for its success have usually focused on policy performance, fixed
historical legacies or generalized understandings of post-communism, but have
largely ignored the role of ideology. However, despite differences of context,
'Czech Thatcherism', like its British precursor, can be seen in Gramscian terms
as an innovative, populist right-wing ideology linked to a hegemonic project of
social transformation. This article traces the importation of Anglo-American
neo-liberal and conservative ideas by intellectual counter-elites under the
communist regime. It then examines the 'revolutionary conservatism' formulated
by the Czech Right after 1989, focusing on its discourse of post-communist
transformation and attempts to ground imported New Right ideas in the Czech
context. Finally, the article considers the ideological tensions within 'Czech
Thatcherism' and discusses alternative Czech readings of conservatism.
Introduction
The political success of parties and politicians inspired by the Anglo-American
New Right in the Czech Republic has been widely remarked upon as unusual.
•While in other states in the region, governments committed to free-market
policies quickly faltered, lost support and were replaced by nationalist or
left-wing administrations, Czechs not only voted for the Right in large numbers
in 1992, but continued to support it solidly throughout much of the 1990s. The
success of what has been termed 'Thatcherism Czech-style'1
was above all
associated with the Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus and his Civic Democratic
Party (ODS). In the early-mid 1990s Klaus's party and its smaller coalition
partner, the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA),2
which shared its Western-derived
'Thatcherite' New Right ideology, seemed to enjoy a position of unassailable
intellectual and political dominance. Whilst the combined electoral support
1356-9317/99/020163-27 © 1999 Taylor & Francis Ltd
SEAN HANLEY
of the two parties never exceeded 35-36%,3
their political power and the broader
influence of their ideology reached well beyond their own electorates. At one
point in late 1993 their combined opinion poll rating rose as high as 55%. The
two parties also controlled key economic ministries and exercised considerable
influence in the Czech state bureaucracy.4
They faced a largely supportive and
uncritical media5
and a fragmented opposition seemingly unable to offer any
coherent alternative policies. After the split of Czechoslovakia in 1992, the
independent Czech Republic thus appeared to be an island of conservatism and
free-market radicalism in a sea of nationalism, populism and post-communism.
By 1996-7, however, the Czech 'Thatcherite' Right's era of dominance
was clearly at an end. The Czech 'economic miracle' showed signs of
increasing malaise6
and in elections in 1996 the right-wing coalition narrowly
lost its parliamentary majority. At the same time the Czech Social Democrats
emerged as a powerful electoral force, ushering in a period of minority
governments pragmatically accommodated by the opposition.7
The previously
united, self-confident Czech Right was increasingly afflicted by splits and
scandals and by a growing crisis of identity and direction. In December 1997 a
financial scandal in Klaus's ODS led to the final disintegration of the centre-right
coalition that he had led since 1992. Similar scandals precipitated the complete
disintegration of the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA)8
a few months later. In
January 1998 Klaus's opponents within ODS broke away to found a new
right-wing party, the Freedom Union (US).9
Although elections in June 1998
gave the former coalition a small theoretical parliamentary majority, it was so
acrimoniously divided that it was a minority Social Democratic government that
finally took office—the first centre-left Czech administration since the fall of
communism. In 1998 the Social Democrats also outpolled ODS for the first time
to become the largest Czech political party.10
While Klaus's ODS retained a
sizeable and loyal electorate and remained the main party of the right, polling
evidence suggests that it has lost the broad acceptability it once enjoyed among
the Czech public."
How then can we understand this pugnacious but short-lived East European
'Thatcherism'? Many analysts have examined 'Thatcherism Czech-style' as a set
of policy prescriptions or a display of political acumen by individual leaders.
Others have highlighted historical and conjunctural factors specific to Czechoslovakia
and the Czech Lands. However, little systematic attention has been paid
to the ideology of the Czech 'Thatcherite, Right per se and the way it articulated
and constructed the politics of post-communist transformation. In this article I
will argue that, in addition to policy-related and general contextual factors,
'Czech Thatcherism', like the British original can be understood best as a
political project articulated through an innovative ideology combining neo-liberalism
and a re-invented conservative tradition. Such an ideology was in both
cases first developed by intellectual elites on the social and political margins. I
will also discuss alternative readings of conservatism, which developed in the
Czech Lands both before and after 1989 and were in part also influenced by
Western ideologies.
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THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
'Czech Thatcherism' and post-communist politics: bringing ideology back in
Almost all analyses of the subject treat 'Thatcherism Czech-style' as an example
of East European liberalism or neo-liberalism, most viewing it as a set of policy
prescriptions. While some Czech economic policy failures can indeed be traced
to neo-liberal assumptions about a self-regulating free market,12
this approach is
of limited usefulness in understanding the political appeal of 'Thatcherism
Czech-style' and its ideology. Such policy-based analyses13
usually note the
divergence between the Klaus government's radical neo-liberal/Thatcherite
rhetoric and its more pragmatic, statist and corporatist political practice.14
Such
analyses then argue that this pragmatic pulling of economic punches, combined
with the relatively high living standards and macroeconomic stability Czechoslovakia
inherited from communism, made economic reform after 1989 painless
enough for the Czech 'Thatcherite' Right to maintain its political support.
However, although important, this insight alone is an inadequate explanation of
its political success. It does not explain, for example, why Czechs' support for
Klaus and his party was high and rising in 1991, when the post-1989 transformational
recession was deepest and when living standards in the Czech Lands fell
most sharply.15
Other authors have noted the greater public hostility to the former communist
regime in Czechoslovakia which, unlike its Polish and Hungarian counterparts,
stifled almost all private economic initiative and remained highly repressive until
its ultimate demise in November 1989.16
Neo-liberalism, it is argued, in fact
represented a 'neglected path of anti-communism'.17
The free market and the
minimal state were seen as polar opposites of totalitarianism and central
planning. However, as in other countries in the region, Czech populist anti-communism
initially took more direct and obvious forms: for example, demands that
(former) Communists be prosecuted or purged from public life and that the
Communist Party be banned.18
A further factor sometimes cited in explaining
support for 'Czech Thatcherism' is the split with the more left-leaning Slovaks
in 1992, which left the Right dominant in the newly independent Czech state,
cutting off the Czech Left from potential allies in Slovakia. However, while
again relevant, this explanation does not address the intrinsic appeal of the Czech
Right, whose rise took place in 1991-2 before the split of Czechoslovakia, an
outcome few seriously anticipated before mid-1992.19
Those analyses that do
address the content of the Czech Right's ideological discourse often remain
vague and over-general.20
Others have cited plausible sociological reasons
explaining the strong appeal of neo-liberalism in post-communist societies in
general21
without examining the appeal of neo-liberal ideas in any concrete
historical or national context. Moreover, few distinguish between the mass
appeal and the elite appeal of such ideas. None of these explanations explains
why Klaus and others should have invested such effort into presenting themselves,
not simply as liberals, but also as conservatives similar to the British
Tories under Mrs Thatcher. Indeed, there have been few sustained attempts to
analyse the role of either right-wing ideologies or ideology in general in
165
SEAN HANLEY
post-communist politics.22
Commentators on the Right or in the political centre
have generally considered the popularity of (neo-) liberal and conservative ideas
in East Central Europe as self-evident. Those on the Left have analysed these
ideologies more critically. However, while raising important issues, their explanations
have often lacked plausibility and sophistication, usually depicting
post-communist societies and their citizens as gullible or passive victims of
external manipulation.23
However, while ideology has been neglected in the analysis of both 'Czech
Thatcherism' and post-communist politics generally, it has loomed very large in
the study of the British politics of the 1970s and 1980s. In a now classic analysis
Stuart Hall and others drew on the ideas of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci,
to analyse the 1980s phenomenon of British 'Thatcherism'.24
The coming to
power of Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Party was, they argued, not a 'swing of
the pendulum' that would be reversed when the Left mobilized or the economy
deteriorated, but a historical 'project' based on a powerful, newly formulated
populist ideology, cementing together and mobilizing new popular constituencies.
Its ideology, initially developed in think-tanks and academia,25
had later
percolated into popular 'common sense, via the media and party politics. It was
an ideology with far-reaching ambitions. It sought to explain both current social
problems and past policy failures; to re-define politics so as to legitimize new
radical policies of social transformation and, at the same time, discredit existing
understandings of politics and other possible alternatives. Disconcertingly for
many on the Left, Hall argued that Thatcherism was not so much imposed or
foisted on people as accepted, consented to and supported by them even when
their 'real' interests lay elsewhere. Its success lay above all in the way its
ideology defined, addressed and explained the specific problems of Britain in the
1970s.
I would like to argue that a Gramscian model of the type developed by Hall
to analyse British Thatcherism can be fruitfully applied as a heuristic device to
'Thatcherism Czech-style' and perhaps to post-communist politics generally. For
a number of reasons, Gramscian approaches to politics and ideology can be seen
as highly relevant to post-communist politics. This is because (1) while oneparty
systems suppressed the public sphere and monopolized political discourse,
the more pluralistic and democratic political arrangements that have replaced
them now make securing long-term consent by a range of social groups a newly
important aspect of holding power; (2) because the sudden extinction of the old
(communist) regimes requires not only the creation of new institutions but also
of new understandings of politics and of new political identities to provide a
meaningful framework for political action; and finally (3) because the very
absence of civil society or well-articulated alternative ideologies creates a
vacuum that can and must be filled in the early post-transition period.26
Is it, however, really legitimate to speak of two 'Thatcherisms' and to
compare the post-war politics of Britain with the post-communist politics of the
Czech Lands? Despite Hayek's warnings, few would seriously equate the
totalitarian-inclined, bureaucratic-authoritarian, communist regime in Czechoslo-
166
THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
vakia between 1948 and 1989 with the British post-war settlement of Keynesian
welfare capitalism and mildly corporatist liberal democracy. Moreover, while
Britain's post-war settlement rested on a more or less meaningful social and
ideological consensus, Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, with the brief exception
of 1968, was based on a coercive monopoly of political power, rendering
both ideological and political discourse and the 'public sphere' itself largely
meaningless.27
While Mrs Thatcher's conservatism reacted against one particular
form of capitalism and liberal democracy and offered an alternative model,
post-communist political and economic change in Czechoslovakia and the Czech
Republic involved a wholesale change of regime?* Finally, it should be noted
that Czech 'Thatcherites' in the early 1990s were not confronted by well-established
institutional and ideological consensus, but by a confusing partial vacuum
of institutions and ill-defined political and ideological buzzwords. In so far as
there was any 'established' consensus it was the vague civic ideology—'a hybrid
of romantic, Heideggerian metaphysics and liberal jurisprudence ... which had
evolved in resistance to the state'29
—embodied by President Havel and the Civic
Forum movement, which emerged in 1989 and sought to be a non-ideological,
social-cwm-political organization. Nevertheless, despite enormous differences of
context, both 'Thatcherisms' can be seen as having certain similarities.
• Both sought to re-define radically the relationship between market, state and
civil society as a means of reversing long-term economic stagnation and
perceived moral decline, and to make a radical break with the past, and more
specifically with their respective 'post-war settlements'.
• In both cases, Thatcherite 'organic intellectuals' formulated their ideology on
the margins, largely undetected. In Britain these intellectuals were academics
and researchers in right-wing think-tanks. In the Czech case they consisted of
intellectual counter-elites committed to neo liberalism and conservatism,
which emerged in communist Czechoslovakia from the mid-1960s and early
1970s as 'dissent' and as informal networks in official research organisations
engaged in 'crypto-opposition'.
• Both were predominantly identified with one political party led by a charismatic
and forceful leader supported by a centralized state and support in the
media.
• Both legitimized and explained themselves through innovative popular (or
populist) right wing ideologies combining neo-liberalism and conservatism,
ideologies which projected their policies as reflecting a historical imperative
to which there was no viable alternative.
• Both used such ideologies to define and mobilize broad new, heterogeneous
popular constituencies (in Gramscian terms 'historic blocs'). In doing so, both
drew on aspirations for social mobility and personal advancement, rather than
conventional social or class divisions. In the Czech case, given the social
levelling of the Communist era and the uncertain impact of economic reform,
such divisions were largely undefined and perhaps even undefinable.30
• Both enjoyed periods of intellectual and political dominance, before suffering
167
SEAN HANLEY
sudden decline, revealing not only policy failure but also ideological exhaus-
tion.
In using a loosely Gramscian framework, I am also suggesting that 'Czech
Thatcherism', like its British precursor, can be understood as a 'hegemonic
project'. I do not wish to suggest, however, that it successfully established such
a hegemony in Czech society. Such a judgement, which would require broader
analysis and greater refinement of concepts, is beyond the scope of this article.
Rather, while touching on the role of 'organic intellectuals' and the role of
ideology in mobilizing social constituencies and shoring up power structures in
state and civil society, my main focus will be on the articulations of the ideology
of 'Czech Thatcherism' as an innovative attempt to ground neo-liberalism in a
re-invented post-communist conservatism. In doing so, I deal mainly with its
popular and 'common sense' articulations, rather than its coherency in rigorously
philosophical terms.31
Such an analysis of 'Czech Thatcherism' shows, I believe, that although
historically rooted in responses to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and the
regime of 'normalization' that followed, it possessed a number of underlying
weaknesses. Such weaknesses stemmed above all from the lack of a strong
pre-communist Czech conservative tradition, inducing a reliance on imported
neo-liberal models, largely legitimated by the prospect of a 'Czech economic
miracle'.
The Czech lands: a cold climate for the right?
Stuart Hall argued that what was striking in British Thatcherism was the way it:
brilliantly combineswithin a single political ideology an organic conservative emphasis on
the values of tradition, family, monarchy, patriarchy and the nation with a 'neo-liberal'
emphasis on the gospel of the free market, (...) and the private sphere of the citizen against
the 'creeping socialist' threats to liberty from an overweening state and an overextended
welfare system.32
However, Czech political traditions, unlike those of Gleat Britain, lacked either
a strong belief in the 'gospel of the free market' or well-established organic
conservative ideologies. Indeed, viewed historically, the Czech Lands seem an
unlikely setting for an East European post-communist New Right revolution. It
is true that by the late 19th-century economic and political liberalism was firmly
rooted in the Czech Lands, drawing support from an increasingly important
Czech commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. As in much of 19th century
Europe, Czechs looked to Britain and the United States for both practical and
intellectual models of liberalism.33
However, such Czech liberalism was always
historically highly 'impure', suffused and intertwined with both nationalism and
metaphysical and moral concerns and was increasingly crosscut by the simultaneous
rise of mass class-based politics.34
Liberal institutions—parliamentarianism,
constitutionalism, free trade, the free market—were thus often viewed
168
THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
as a means of achieving national autonomy or social goals rather than as ends
in themselves. Moreover, like the Czech national programme itself, such institutions
remained largely unrealized until the creation of an independent Czechoslovak
state in 1918.
Historically, the meaning of 'conservatism' in the Czech Lands was still more
obscure. The word had little historical resonance for Czechs except as a
synonym for reactionary 19th-century Austrian rulers, whom traditional Czech
national historiography viewed as holding back the Czech nation. Indeed, the
social composition of Czech society and its lack of a native aristocracy was
usually viewed as making the Czech nation inherently 'plebeian' and democratic.
The typical historical and social basis of the Right in many European
countries—the aristocracy, authoritarian integral nationalism, and political
Catholicism (what Anthony Giddens terms 'old conservatism'35
)—were thus
weak or absent in the Czech Lands, in marked contrast to, for example,
pre-communist Hungary and Poland. In these 'gentry nations' native aristocracies
and oligarchical social structures co-existed with strong authoritarian
nationalist ideologies linked with Catholicism and nativist or ruralist political
traditions.36
Apart from the more chauvinistic anti-German manifestations of
Czech nationalism, the closest equivalent to a historic Czech conservatism was
perhaps a line of Catholic-oriented, political thought associated with Josef Pekaf
(1870-1937). This current of thought challenged the progressive democraticallyoriented
Czech nationalist ideology developed by Masaryk from the earlier ideas
of Frantisek Palacky.37
It was sceptical of both the mythopoeia and liberal-democratic
orientation of such Czech nationalism and critical of the new Czechoslovak
state's policy of demonstratively breaking with the Austrian past through,
for example, land reform and hostility to the Catholic church. Czechoslovakia's
inter-war political establishment was attacked for somewhat different reasons by
a small fronde of right-wing nationalist intellectuals. In the view of these
thinkers the new state's leaders placed too much faith in the West and in the
historical inevitability of liberal-democratic values and paid too little attention to
asserting Czechoslovakia's self-interest, national self-confidence and self-de-
fence.38
In the highly fragmented multi-party coalition politics of democratic inter-war
Czechoslovakia the 'right-wing' was represented by an array of parties with
different historical roots, which in other countries had merged into stronger
right-wing traditions. The three most significant were Czechoslovak National
Democracy, the declining successor to the classical Czech nationalist parties of
the 19th century; the Catholic-based People's Party, whose support was restricted
to rural regions in the East of the Czech Lands;39
and the Agrarian Party,
which evolved from a party representing agricultural interests to a political force
representing inter-war Czechoslovakia's closest equivalent to a broad party of
the right. The Agrarians played a pivotal role in inter-war coalition-building and
had a firm implantation not only in rural civil society, but also in business and
the state apparatus. Under the leadership of Rudolf Beran in the 1930s the
Agrarians even adopted a conscious strategy of making their party the core of
169
SEAN HANLEY
a right-wing conservative bloc. However, their efforts met with little success
and, despite being the largest party for much of the inter-war period, the
Agrarian vote never exceeded 15%. In inter-war Czechoslovakia the right-wing
thus remained fragmented, organizationally undeveloped and intellectually marginalized
and failed to develop a broad appeal. Attempts after the 1938 Munich
Agreement, in the Second Republic' (1938-9) and the Nazi-controlled Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia (1939-45), to create an authoritarian pro-German
Czech national ideology based on a corporate state were even less
successful.40
After 1945 the Czech electorate and Czech politics as a whole swung
markedly to the Left. Even in the short democratic interlude before the
communist takeover in February 1948, two of the three historic 'right-wing'
parties—National Democracy and the Agrarians—were banned for alleged
wartime collaboration.41
Discussion of right-wing or conservative elements in
Czech political history, other than those assimilating them to Fascism or
reactionary foreign rule, remained a taboo subject in official communist histori-
ography.42
Further confusion was caused in the 1960s by the use of the term
'conservative' to describe Communist opponents of Dubcek's (and in the 1990s
of Gorbachev's) reforms.43
However, it is in reactions to Dubcek's reform
communist project, Czechoslovakia's 'Prague Spring', and its suppression during
and after the Soviet-led invasion of 1968 that the roots of the Czech
post-communist 'Thatcherite' right are to be found.44
On the trail of the Czech New Right
(1) Dissident 'Neo-conservatives' and 'Tories'
For both communist and non-communist reformers, the 'normalization' regime
established in Czechoslovakia after 1968 ended any meaningful prospect of
working through the existing 'socialist' political institutions and ideology. Many
opposition thinkers, most famously Vaclav Havel, stressed the idea of human
rights, legality and a semi-philosophical 'non-political politics' of 'living in
truth'. Some, however, thought in more political terms of continuity with a better
national past. Many turned to the democratic heritage of the inter-war
Czechoslovak Republic, which also served as a general source of moral inspiration
for Havel. Others pursued the idea of 'Central Europe' as a 'kidnapped
West',45
carrying it over into a generalized nostalgia for the supra-national,
hierarchical, Catholic monarchical conservatism of the pre-1918 Hapsburg Empire.
Such thinkers presented the revisionist view that Czechs had steadily
prospered under Hapsburg tutelage and that in establishing an independent,
socially progressive Czechoslovakia in 1918, had merely created a weak,
vulnerable state, whose egalitarian ethos paved the way for communism.46
However, as Marlene Laruelle argues, such nostalgic conservative Central
Europeanism implied little in practical political terms after 1989 (other than
viewing the Czech Lands as part of the Germanic world and a pro-German
170
THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
orientation in foreign policy). Moreover, it represented a radical deconstruction
of the Czech national identity as it had evolved since the mid-19th-century.47
However, given that for most Czechs the Nation is still a central category for
understanding politics,48
the popular appeal and political potential of such a
'Central European' conservatism after 1989 was virtually nil.
Western-derived neo-conservative orientations in the Czech Lands originate
largely from a group of young Catholic-oriented intellectuals centred around
Pavel Bratinka and Daniel Kroupa. This grouping emerged in the early 1970s.
Its informal political discussions both continued certain debates of the 1960s
reform era and reacted to the collapse of the reform communist project and the
onset of 'normalisation'.49
Kroupa, for example, has noted the formative
influence on him of the 1968-69 debate between Vaclav Havel and Milan
Kundera over the meaning of the Prague Spring. While Kundera considered the
reform communist project of 'democratic socialism' a unique and heroic Czech
contribution to world politics, Havel saw it as a failed and half-hearted attempt
to return to political normality.50
Endorsing Havel's view, the small, isolated
group around Bratinka and Kroupa made a conscious effort to find a wholly
non-socialist social and political philosophy. A second source of inspiration for
such right-wing dissidents was the phenomenological philosophy of Jan Patocka,
whose central preoccupation was examining the 'natural world' or 'life world'
undistorted by power, ideology or technology.51
From an early stage, however, the Bratinka-Kroupa group drew on the
thinking of the Anglo-American New Right. Kroupa, for example, recalls how
'Bratinka studied Anglo-Saxon literature and was enchanted by the American
neo-conservatives. At the beginning of the 1970s he used to translate articles,
which we pored over, as we were left to our own lonely reflections, because
there was no one to talk to and virtually no literature which might have guided
us'.52
Pavel Bratinka mentions G.K. Chesterton, the Austro-American philosopher
Eric Voeglin, and the American Catholic writer Michael Novak, as key
political influences. The group's initially purely philosophical project became
gradually more political,53
markedly so from the mid-1980s when they discovered
Hayek and came into direct contact with British right-wing intellectuals
such as Roger Scruton,54
editor of the Salisbury Review, one of the leading
voices on the 'social authoritarian' wing of the British New Right.55
As a result
of contacts established by Scruton, the Salisbury Review and other Western
(neo-)conservative journals were widely known (sometimes as translated samizdat)
among dissident intellectuals in Czechoslovakia. In the 1980s, the Czech
dissident intelligentsia thus became more consciously 'right-wing'. In February
1988, Vaclav Havel, for example, told an English visitor of 'new moods' in
dissent and of a drift to the right reflecting a 'worldwide wave of neo-conservatism,
which has reached here also. Such moods have mainly affected Catholics
of the younger generation'.56
The Bratinka-Kroupa group were later 'founding
fathers' of the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA), a junior partner in the 1992-7
Klaus government.
Another important dissident thinker influenced by English Toryism was Petr
171
SEAN HANLEY
Pithart, later Czech Prime Minister (1990-1992) and Speaker of the Czech
Senate (1996-1998). Pithart's cautious, balanced, self-doubting reflections set
him within a long tradition of scepticism in Czech political thought.57
His 1978
samizdat book of reflections on 1968, for example, took up Havel's interpretation
of the era, sceptically dissecting many of the reform communist illusions
of the period.58
Nevertheless, his outlook has been strongly influenced by British
conservative thought and the 'British political style', which he first discovered
in a moment of revelation during a study visit to St Antony's College, Oxford
in 1969 where
... I quite literally found myself. Everything I had philosophically and politically only
sensed, I discovered in place and precisely expressed.59
Pithart developed his dissident intellectual 'conservatism' more consciously in
the 1980s when he explored the historic conservatism of, for example, Pekaf as
well as that of Scruton, whose The Meaning of Conservatism he translated into
Czech.60
However, it was traditional Tory ideas—the importance of historical
continuity, the immutability of human nature, the need for a sense of place,
pragmatic non-ideological statecraft,61
the importance of a judiciary independent
of political control—which attracted him, rather than Scruton's militantly socialauthoritarian
stance.62
Unlike philosophically or religiously inclined dissidents or
Hayekian liberals, Pithart was also deeply concerned with critically understanding
the continuities and discontinuities of Czech history. In particular he was
concerned with understanding the appeal of ideologies which had sought to
break with and 'undo' the past, including the mass support and legitimacy
communism enjoyed in 1945-8 (and to a lesser extent 1968).
Thus, despite the absence of a conservative tradition, conservative concerns—
order, historical continuity, morality, identity, a sense of the particular—were
abundantly present in Czech dissident politics. Such concerns fell into three
broad areas: (1) the problem of historical (cultural) continuity63
; (2) the need to
restore 'traditional values' and 'natural' social forms; and (3) a suspicion of
populism and mass democratic politics. Both anti-political dissidents and British
conservatives thought of their respective societies as in essence natural, organic
communities. Many dissidents, including 'anti-political' thinkers such as Havel,
saw the communist regime as promoting soulless modern consumerism and
moral decay and longed for an authentic, 'natural' society and a return of
'decency' {slusnost), public spiritedness and spiritual values.64
Pithart, for
example, wrote in 1979:
The authorities are creating a social climate characterized by the social decay (pokleslosti)
of traditional values of human solidarity, honesty (poctivosti)and decency. But the reverse
is also true: this climate in return creates ... conditions which fertilize, reproduce and
reinforce the present authorities.65
Similar preoccupations with moral decline have animated many Western neoconservatives.
However, dissident concerns were more communitarian than
conservative. The 'traditional values' whose loss they mourned were more those
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THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
of the 'civic culture'—traditions of co-operation and trust—than those of
patriarchy and a monolithic national culture. These, paradoxically, had been well
maintained in socialist Czechoslovakia where communist authoritarianism had
enforced a social and cultural conformity and insulated the country from much
of the cultural pluralisation and 'permissiveness' of the West.66
Like many
traditional conservative ideologies, much dissident thought linked authenticity
and human identity with the renewal of the local, parochial and small scale. In
the Czech context, however, such concerns reflected less a preoccupation with
authority than a reaction against communist gigantism and strong traditions of
localism, which identified the community {obec) with the commune (obec).
Third, throughout virtually the whole of the communist regime most
Czechoslovak dissidents lived in a tiny ghetto of opposition intellectuals. Despite
their commitment to democracy, many regarded the possible mass entry of the
Czech public into politics with distinct apprehension. A sudden collapse of the
regime would, they feared, bring not meaningful democracy, but an outbreak of
vengeful demagogic anti-communist populism. This was particularly the case
with thinkers such as Pithart, who, while aware of the dangers of dissident
ghettoization, were acutely conscious of how democracy had 'malfunctioned' in
the Czech Lands in 1946, when (uniquely in Eastern Europe) the Communist
Party had won a sweeping election victory in relatively free elections. It had then
taken power in 1948 with mass support in an outwardly legal and constitutional
manner.67
Pithart was determined that post-communist transition should not take
the form of an 'anti-1948', populist anti-Communist purges masquerading as
parliamentary democracy, but in reality ignoring the rule of law. Many Western
conservatives historically and some neo-conservatives in the present day have
been sceptical of democracy. Scruton, for example, has referred to it as a
'contagion'.68
However, they have typically been more concerned with preserving
traditional (unelected) authority, than stemming popular mobilization. Thus,
while Czech dissident (anti-)political thought undoubtedly did have certain
common preoccupations with Western neo-conservatism, these affinities should
not be overstated. Vaclav Havel, for example, commented in 1988 that '... I am
irritated with Roger Scruton, who has said in the Salisbury Review that I am a
typical neo-conservative. It is not true, and everybody who knows me knows
this'.69
Close affinities were confined, in fact, to a relatively distinct dissident
'right-wing'.
(2) The neo-liberalism of the 'Young Economists'
Let us now turn to the neo-liberalism of 'Czech Thatcherism'. This too, was
anything but a set of 'designer ideologies'.70
The penetration of Western
neo-liberalism was a direct consequence of the 1960s reform era and its
traumatic suppression in August 1968. In the search for ideas to reform and
modernize the Czechoslovak economy in the 1960s, academic elites were
allowed access to previously unavailable Western social science literature. In
this context, a narrowly generationally defined group of 'Young Economists'71
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emerged, including Vaclav Klaus, Tomas Jezek (Czech Privatization Minister in
1990-2) and other important figures after 1989, who even by the late 1960s had
come to reject not only orthodox Marxist central planning, but also officiallybacked
ideas of a 'socialist market' developed by Ota Sik and his team at the
Economic Institute of the Academy of Sciences.72
The 'Young Economists'
quickly gravitated from the Keynesian 'neo-classical synthesis' towards neo-liberalism
of the Austrian and Chicago schools (Hayek, Friedman).73
For example,
Klaus, in the 1960s a researcher in the Economic Institute in a department
devoted to the study of non-Marxist economic theory, recalled:
Paradoxically, I was being paid to study contemporary international economics and clearly,
for a graduate of the Economic University [in Prague] which was simply untouched by
contemporary international economics, this was simply a revelation and I was completely
hooked. I had entered a completely different intellectual world and toying with official
Czechoslovak economics just never entered into consideration.
In the 1960s the political impact of young neo-liberals was minimal. Following
the 1968 invasion, some 'Young Economists' including Klaus were dismissed
from academic posts. They were, however, allowed to work in technical roles in
financial and economic institutions (Klaus, for example, in the State Bank).
Others such as Jezek were untouched by the post-1968 purges.74
During the
years of 'normalization' these economists and others working within official
structures (the Institute of Economics, State Bank, the Forecasting Institute) were
largely left alone by the authorities and were able to make use of the resources
and opportunities afforded to engage in 'crypto-opposition'. Such activity largely
consisted of quietly promoting and discussing free-market economics and
economic reform.75
During the Velvet Revolution certain of these elites became
important political actors in the Civic Forum-led transitional government (Klaus,
for example, became Federal Finance Minister).
Klaus, Jezek and the Young Economists were attracted to neo-liberalism and
monetarism in the 1960s for very practical reasons. Firstly, the Austrian School
of Hayek and Von Mises had from the 1930s elaborated a critique of the idea
of planning, and in particular of the idea of socialist central planning, which it
rejected as an impossibility given the nature of human knowledge. Secondly,
monetarists such as Friedman focused on the dangers of inflation, which Klaus
and others realized was a major, but hidden, feature of socialist economies given
the distortions, shortages and a 'monetary overhang' created by administratively
fixed prices.76
Such neo-liberals drew their inspiration almost exclusively from
foreign sources (mainly Hayek and Friedman, but also thinkers such as Michael
Novak and James Buchanan and the Virginia 'Public Choice' school).77
Jezek,
by contrast was a convinced Hayekian and the foremost Czech exponent (and
translator) of Hayek's works. Klaus consciously dismissed traditional Czech
social, political and economic thought (including that of the democratic inter-war
Czechoslovak Republic) as uninteresting, unproductive and parochial.
Klaus recalled, for example, that the approach of James Buchanan and the
Virginia Public Choice School:
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THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
... is very close to mine, and to that of the small group of people around me, who used to
meet in the 1980s. We never romanticized politics. I believe that the view of our leading
dissident elites on political matters drew on completely different intellectual sources and
roots. It drew on a much more traditional view of the problem, or came out of a not very
pragmatic philosophy. It certainly did not draw on the more rigorous, exact and markedly
liberal standpoint which culminated in the Public Choice school.78
Whereas the philosophy of Jan Patocka was a formative influence on Kroupa and
neo-conservatives in Charter 77, Klaus dismisses Patocka as 'indisputably one of
the blind alleys of Czech philosophy'.79
The broader public appeal of (neo)liberalism in the Czech Lands after 1989
is at one level not difficult to state: economic efficiency, prosperity, the freedom
to pursue one's own individual goals and interests denied under communism. All
these points were made by politicians of the right.80
In August 1992 Tomas
Jezek, shortly after leaving the post of Czech Privatization Minister, even
predicted
... that just as in thefiftiesand sixties people spoke of a German economic miracle, soin
five years time, or maybe sooner, people will be talking about a Czech economic miracle.81
In some ways such promises merely represented a renewal and re-negotiation of
Czechoslovakia's unwritten 'social contract' which 'more or less worked for the
regime' in the years of 'normalization'. The 'social contract' the regime then
offered its people has been summed up by Timothy Garton Ash thus:
Forget your democratic traditions. Forget that you were once citizens with rights and duties,
Forget politics. In return we will give you a comfortable, safe life. There'll be plenty of
food in the shops and cheap beer in the pubs. You may afford a car and even a little country
cottage—and you won't have to work competitively. We don't ask you to believe in us or
our fatuous ideology. By all means listen to the Voice of America and watch Austrian
television (sotto voce: so do we). All we ask is that you outwardly and publicly conform.82
The neo-liberal vision, however, offered not a shabby, limited socialist consumerism
in exchange for political quiescence, but the glossy lifestyle seen on
Austrian and German television in return for electoral support. As early as 1988
Neal Acherson recognized that the Central European intelligentsia's 'dream of
escape' would most probably in practice be more a world of 'BMW salesmen
and German blue movies'.83
For, as the exiled left-wing philosopher, Ivan
Svitak, put it still more brutally: '[p]eople are attracted by the lifestyle of
prosperous societies, not the ideology of freedom; by being able to travel, not the
moral defence of human rights; by the video shop with a shelf full of porn, not
the values of humanism'.84
The neo-liberal promise of an economic miracle
recognized and catered for such appetites.
However, at both mass and elite level Anglo-American neo-liberal ideas—and
especially those of Hayek—had a wider normative appeal than simply abstract
efficiency or getting-rich-quick. Jezek, for example, recalled his pre-1989 vision
of a Czech 'market society' thus:
I personally dreamt of a little, clean, orderly Austrian town with white houses, small inns
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and a sense of spiritual balance. I imagined people coming out of church onfineSundays,
all the houses whitewashed, all the fences mended and all the lawns mown. Nothing that
wasn't carefully looked after by someone—simply boring old Europe (tanudnd Evropa)?5
Unlike many Anglo-American liberals Hayek was less interested in the idea of
individual freedom than in the problem of social order}6
The Hayekian idea is
one of the market and market society as a 'spontaneous order', guaranteeing the
emergence of a stable, well-ordered and moral society—with morality promoted
by individual choice not state coercion. This was an idea deeply appealing to
many Czechs, who had retained both a Central European sense of petit-bourgeois
propriety and a suspicion of the state, rooted in the experience of both
communism and foreign rule before 1918.87
In a sense, Hayek's philosophy thus
served as the basis of a kind of economistic, liberal anti-politics, paralleling the
moral and philosophical anti-politics of Havel and others.
However, given the dearth of conservative traditions, dissident conservatives'
underlying fear of popular mass democratic politics and the neo-liberals' outright
rejection of Czech political traditions, combined with a hard-headed recognition
of the appeal of consumerism, why and how did a would-be post-communist
conservatism emerge, rather than simply a right-wing free-market liberal ideol-
ogy'?
Getting Grounded: The Meaning of Post-Communist Conservatism?
Always known for his firm free-market views, Vaclav Klaus emerged as the
dominant figure on the Czech Right in late 1990. He initially defined his views
as a right-wing 'genuine liberalism', outlining a Hayekian view of politics as
opposing collectivist social engineers and individualist liberals.88
Klaus admired
the British Conservatives, toyed with the idea calling his party (founded in
March 1991) 'conservative'89
and encouraged delegates and activists at the ODS
founding congress to see it as a Czech equivalent of the British Tories. However,
the conservative label lacked resonance even among the party's grassroots
supporters90
and the idea of a Czech conservative ideology was not at first
pursued. Nevertheless from 1992 onwards—beginning with the essay 'Why I am
a Conservative'—reversing Hayek's famous postscript 'Why I am not a con-
servative'91
—the erstwhile neo-liberal Klaus made a sustained effort to argue
that ODS represented Czech conservatism.92
The party's 1992 programme
identifies it as 'a conservative party attempting to preserve and renew for our
future the fundamental values of European Christian civilization and Czechoslovakia's
democratic traditions'.93
Why did this ideological turn occur?
The issue went deeper than choosing a political label comprehensible to the
Czech public.94
For, despite the emphasis it laid upon rapid economic transformation,
in order to mobilize political support an effective ideology had to offer
more than a well-packaged set of policies or principles. In other words,
neo-liberal ideas had to be ideologically 'grounded' both in Czech culture and
history and at the same time in the post-communist context of Czech politics.
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THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
Given that imported ideological models, whose main element was neo-liberalism,
were seen as superseding dissident and traditional (pre-communist) Czech
political thought, such a 'grounding' would have to take a different route from
the usual mix of morally and metaphysically tinged liberal nationalism, humanism
and nostalgia for inter-war Czechoslovakia. Moreover, as we have seen from
Jezek's evocation of a 'small Austrian town', liberal considerations of a Free
Society inevitably slipped into concealed normative considerations of the Good
Society. In his battles of 1990-1 to assert his concept of economic transformation
and transform Civic Forum from a loose movement into a disciplined party
with a clear ideology, Klaus had stressed not only their greater efficiency, but
deployed a range of normative arguments, above all the idea that parties and free
markets were 'standard' and 'classical' European institutions.
It was the recognition of the need to ground and adapt foreign models to the
Czech context that led to the elaboration of the ideology of 'Czech Thatcherism'—what
Czechs refer to as a 'liberal-conservative' {liberdlne konzervativni)
orientation. This was partly a conscious ideological project and partly a response
to unforeseen events such as the split of Czechoslovakia. For as Jan Strasky, then
Deputy Chairman of the Civic Democratic Party noted in 1993
British conservatism and the British conception of the market economy, although wemight
take notice of and respect them as much as possible, are things we will definitely never
succeed in creating. Rather, it could be said that the Czechification (pocesteni) of the
conservative programme, which we have taken on is something which will emerge.95
Let us now examine how neo-liberalism was in fact grounded and 'Czechified'
and at the same time consider alternative Czech readings of conservatism after
1989.
The meanings of post-communist conservatism
(1) Klaus and Kroupa 'Traditionalizing the Revolution'
While Czech neo-liberals sought to emulate the 17th-century English Whigs who
had 'sanctified their revolution by traditionalizing it',96
would-be Czech (neo)conservative
politicians after 1989 faced the same problem from a different
angle. It was difficult in the Czech context to identify what (if anything) was
genuinely 'traditional'. As we have seen, this was a problem which had already
occurred in more intellectualized form in dissent. In the Czech Lands after 1989,
as one Czech journalist noted, 'just about anything can be conserved, starting
with the Golden Age of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and ending with the
revolutionary 'conquests' of Victorious February [1948—the communist take-
over].'97
Moreover, as Daniel Kroupa conceded in 1990 '... we have very few
values we should conserve, in the past forty years most of them have been
shattered' leaving only 'a certain [Czech] popular feeling {lidovost) and straightforwardness
(civilnost).'98
To speak of the 'traditional values of European
civilization and its traditional institutions. (...) the family ... the nation or
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religion'99
was both vague and uncontentious in a society which, while less
socially conservative than Poland or Slovakia, was hardly 'permissive' or
multicultural. This, coupled with a political atmosphere that understood political
change after 1989 in terms of extending rather than restricting freedom, would
have made the importation of the social authoritarian discourses on, for example,
race, gender and sexuality, typical of Anglo-American neo-conservatism, both
problematic and inappropriate for the Czech Lands.
Inter-war Czechoslovakia, whilst broadly inspiring as a democratic, Westernstyle
market economy was, however, too socially progressive and etatistic to
offer inspiration to either neo-conservatives or neo-liberals. The 1945-48 interregnum
was also unattractive as a period of pro-Soviet stances and left-wing
policies such as nationalization, which many historians view as preparing the
ground for the Communist takeover in 1948.100
This ideological dilemma led to
the formulation of a 'revolutionary conservatism',101
which made a number of
key ideological claims:
(i) It offered a reading of communism as an 'unnatural order',102
a period of
discontinuity in Czech history and an artificial break imposed by a putsch, for
which external forces and a minority of Czechs (Communists) were responsible.
The 1968 era was dismissed as simply a power struggle between communist
elites over misconceived and naive ideas of reforming the unreformable, which
were in the worst Utopian traditions of Czech national messianism. Mass public
support for the Communist Party or socialism in 1945-8 or 1968 (as well as tacit
mass collaboration with 'normalization') were glossed over, a key ideological
silence. Subsequent legislation pushed through by the Right such as the Czech
'Lustration' Law (1991) or the Law on the Illegality of Communist Regime
(1993) make sense less in terms of their practical or judisprudential effects, than
as a symbolical enactment of this reading of communism.103
(ii) It defined a special post-communist conservatism turning on the idea that
in the post-communist context conservatism was not concerned with evolutionary
change but with recovering 'values' via a revolutionary break with the
immediate past. As Klaus put it:
The credo of conservatism is not a longing to hold on (uchovdvat)at all costs to everything
old, but an attempt to conserve (zachovat)the genuine, tried and tested values on which our
civilization was for a long time based and on which we want it to be based in the future.104
... when society rests firmly on well-anchored pillars of 'conservative' values, when it
senses them thoroughly and is governed by them (...) ... conservatives act in a very
'unrevolutionary' way, as guardians of what exists, in such situations they want in the true
sense of the word to conserve what is. However, in a society in which true values have been
violently interrupted ... the goal of conservatives is to return to true values, and their means
of doing so is to make every possible effort to re-establish them. It is for this reason that
the conservatism of our time, of our present time, is revolutionary in the extreme(navysost
revolucni), and for this reason that it is wholly, and as a matter of policy (programove),
lacking in moderation (neumirneny).m
Or, in Kroupa's words:
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THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
Whilst British conservatism is both structural and value-oriented (hodnotovy),our conservatism
cannot be structural, in the sense of trying to preserve the existing social order ...
Our conservatism must be value-oriented. There is a charming paradox; conservatism is
becoming a revolutionary force.106
The special situation of post-communism thus justified the temporary and special
dispensation of using 'revolutionary' means for conservative ends. On similar
grounds a temporary reversal of Hayekian principle took place in allowing an
extensive initial economic role for the state in kick-starting the 'spontaneous'
market order.107
(iii) It defined the market and liberal institutions as 'traditional values' (and
vice versa). Any conflict between conservatism and liberalism, it was argued,
was now purely historical. The restoration of 'traditional' liberal institutions
could and would restore and recreate other traditional moral values.108
Liberal
institutions were traditional not only because, as one ODS billboard put it in
1992, 'Doing business is natural' but also, as Hayek had argued, because they
were the 'tried and tested' product of a long evolutionary process. This Hayekian
view was extended beyond legal and economic organisation and applied to other
'normal' institutions such as, for example, 'standard' political parties. As
Bratinka, for example, argued
Czechoslovak conservatism has to dig back more than 41 years into the past to find a time
when parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, market economics and civil society were
established features of this country. Bringing these things back to life will indeed be an
extremely 'conservative' undertaking.109
Or, in Klaus's view
Conservatism today is characterized by the linking of classical liberalism, promoting
individualism, freedom and the market with a certain traditionalism calling for the
restoration of the moral values of the past."0
Although Hayek rejects the notion of social justice, the idea of the market-as-tradition
or 'natural state' helped legitimise restitution as a form of privatization,
a moral and historical approach at odds with strict liberal economic rationality.1
"
(iv) The free market, it was argued, was not only a natural and 'traditional'
institution offering a source of mass opportunities ('Everyone has the right to
succeed' as a 1992 ODS election slogan ran). The market and its mass
opportunities were also projected as grounded in the Czech national character
and cultural traditions. For Czechs political and economic transformation, it was
stressed, represented not simply a 'return to Europe' but also a 'return to
normal', a rediscovery and restoration of their national tradition and identity,
which would logically benefit all Czechs. The market and liberal institutions
were thus projected not so much as mechanisms of political and economic
co-ordination and mediation, but as an expression of Western and European
culture—a culture with which Czechs supposedly had special affinity.112
Such an
ideological view of the market was partly linked with the adoption of mass
coupon privatization—the Czech version of 'popular capitalism'"3
—an econ-
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SEAN HANLEY
omic strategy explicitly intended to minimize foreign ownership and lay the
basis of Czech capital and a Czech entrepreneurial class.114
This theme of the 'Czech Way' (Ceskd cestaU5
) of socio-economic transformation
became more explicit with the split of Czechoslovakia. As something of a
historical novelty the new Czech state required historical and ideological
justification. It could, however, be directly and favourably contrasted with
Slovakia. Nevertheless, as Kieran Williams notes, Klaus was ill at ease with
many of the historic symbols and myths of Czech nationhood:"6
the folk
legends, saints and writers of traditional Czech nationalism, or the humanism of
Masaryk, the first president of independent Czechoslovakia after 1918. Rather,
it was Czech economic success, a post-communist 'economic miracle' that was
to be the new content of Czech nationalism. This practical hard-working and
entrepreneurial Czech character—what Czechs call their 'golden hands' (zlate
ceske ruce)—had made them solidly prosperous in the past and would do so
again. It was thus perhaps not coincidental that Jezek cited the German
Wissenschaftswunder into which traditional romantic German nationalism had
been sublimated. However, despite the absence of explicit historic references,
post-communist Czech 'national liberalism' had strong echoes of the nationalistic
Czech economic liberalism of the late 19th and early 20th century, which saw
the creation of a prosperous market economy and strong Czech financial and
industrial sectors, above all as an expression of national independence.117
The result was thus an ideological synthesis which, like all effective ideologies,
united diverse themes and reconciled apparent contradictions into a coherent
narrative."8
This was a narrative of a Czech post-communist transformation,
whose central content would be economic and which would restore an interrupted
national continuity and dormant national values through a radical 'revolutionary'
break with the immediate past. Such a conservatism included notions
of both progress and tradition. It advocated overturning old institutions and
creating new ones, but was nevertheless 'conservative' because it was recreating
and reconnecting with what had historically evolved before the historical rupture
represented by communism. 'Revolutionary conservatism' thus anchored the
rationalistic principles of an imported academic neo-liberalism firmly in the
Czech context. As Klaus himself put it: 'Conservatism is a wider world view
than liberalism and has a richer programme. Liberalism is contained within
conservatism'."9
(2) The Non-Ideological Evolution of Civil Society and The Market
For Klaus and Kroupa post-communist conservatism logically implied a liberal,
anti-communist 'revolution' because conservatism in the conventional sense
would mean preserving large elements of 'real socialism'. However, in the view
of Czech conservatives such as Petr Pithart, this did not make traditional
conservative thinking and its scepticism towards blueprints for radical change
any less valid or in some sense 'left-wing'. A cautious, pragmatic, evolutionary
approach need not imply a commitment to state interventionism or egalitarian-
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THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
ism, and was in fact more likely to result in genuine social change than a hurried
'revolutionary' approach which underestimated the need for a firm rule of law
and the growth of a civic culture.
Pithart and others argued after 1989 that the concept of a revolutionary break
with the past was itself both 'left-wing' and inherently dangerous. It raised
expectations which, given the practicalities of politics and the frailties of human
nature (of which Pithart took the traditional pessimistic conservative view),
could not be met. This would result in frustration, disappointment and a
'Jacobin' phase of militant radicalism directed against imaginary internal enem-
ies.120
As with Poland's Solidarity in 1980-1 and mid-1989, Czechoslovakia's
'Velvet Revolution' had been necessarily 'self-limiting'. However, this was not,
as in the case of Poland, to avoid provoking Communist repression or Soviet
intervention, but because to establish democracy and the rule of law it was
necessary to avoid 'total victory and total defeat, that roundabout of threats,
violence, discrimination and arbitrariness'.121
Indeed, Pithart saw the very notion
of revolution (including that of a 'Velvet Revolution' in November 1989) as a
myth. In November 1989, he argued, rather than Czechs wining their own
liberation 'the rotten roof of the regime simply collapsed'.122
The 'Velvet
Revolution' had been both confined in scope to Prague and other major towns
and cities and belated when compared to other countries in East Central Europe.
In accordance with more traditional understandings of 'conservatism' Pithart
always took the sceptical view that 'changes [after 1989] would be slow,
necessarily "impure", that is not very fair'123
and 'that the old and the new would
for a long time be distastefully intermeshed, that in short we would carry into
the future much more of the past than we would like'.124
In contrast with the idea
of a clean, revolutionary break, Pithart argued that it was regrettable but
inevitable that many beneficiaries of the old regime would also benefit disproportionately
from the new democratic order and emergent market economy.
Moreover, he argued, many ordinary people too would retain the asocial, cynical
get-rich-quick mentality necessary to get along under 'real socialism', rather
than developing the ethic of hard work and social trust necessary for a
flourishing market economy.125
The relatively inefficient and corrupt nature of
post-communist Czech capitalism could be seen as the price to be paid for the
cynicism and lack of moral integrity many Czechs had developed to cope under
'normalization'.126
However, while injustices stemming from communist-era
connections and clientelism could have been minimized, this, too, would have
had a price: either slowing the pace of economic reform (Pithart's favoured
approach), or establishing a powerful, intrusive regulatory bureaucracy.127
As
well as gradualistic change within adequate regulatory and constitutional frameworks
(e.g. a functioning Senate and reformed legal code128
) Pithart has also
advocated a serious and realistic reconsideration of Czech history. In his view,
'[f]or many Czechs, the future is not just uncharted territory, it is enemy
territory'. Only an honest public acceptance and awareness of the national past,
including uncomfortable truths (for example, the widespread belief in 'socialism
with a human face' in 1968) could re-establish a necessary sense of historical
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SEAN HANLEY
continuity.129
If Czechs could honestly embrace their own past in its entirety,
Pithart argued, this would not only increase national self-confidence, but also
allow Czechs to contribute something positive to a united Europe.130
By contrast,
failure to 'return the historical dimension to the time we live in' will leave a
lingering post-communist anomie, in which Czechs will inhabit 'a cynical world
that we do not understand and Czech society will lack fundamental cohesion.131
What does such an 'evolutionary conservatism' imply in practice? In 1990-2
when he was Czech Prime Minister, Pithart's conservative principles led him to
favour a relatively gradualistic model of economic reform and to give priority to
reaching a pragmatic constitutional settlement with the Slovaks. He was also an
outspoken opponent of demands for anti-communist purges in the state apparatus
and the economy which for reasons explained above he saw as dangerous. More
generally, we might also highlight the transformation strategy of Civic Movement
(OH)—the loose centrist grouping of Klaus's opponents wiped out in the
1992 elections, which viewed transformation as a gradual multi-faceted process
deeply embedded in the cultural and social realia of post-communist society.
OH's political programme emphasized the complex interdependency of social,
cultural, legal and economic change.132
While many OH leaders had a social
liberal or social democratic outlook, the party's policies were consistent with the
'evolutionary conservatism' represented by Pithart (who was a Deputy Chairman
of OH).
Interest in this brand of post-communist conservatism has, however, increased
among parties on the Czech Right since 1995. For example, the third party in the
1992-7 Klaus coalition government, the Christian Democratic Union (KDUCSL),
has since 1995 promoted the concept of a German or Austrian-style
'social market economy'.133
In doing so the Christian Democrats have challenged
Klaus's conservatism as an Anglo-American import inappropriate to the
Czech Lands and its Central European traditions.134
Similar ideas were also
quietly promoted by Klaus's opponents inside his own party (ODS), such as
Foreign Minister Josef Zieleniec in 1995-6,135
and later featured prominently in
the programme of the breakaway Freedom Union (US). The new party's
programme emphasizes not a sudden break with the past, but the need to build
adequate social and moral foundations for the market economy by promoting
civil society and a Czech middle class.136
Petr Mateju, a Freedom Union Deputy
Chairman, for example, has spoken of the party's outlook as one of 'realist
liberalism' which, in contrast to the 'orthodox liberalism' of Klaus, sees
transformation not as revolutionary process which is now 'basically over' but as
stretching ahead 'for several generations'.137
While Czech neo-liberal and neo-conservative intellectuals found considerable
common ground in the revolutionary conservatism of 'Czech Thatcherism' in the
early 1990s, their views of Czech politics are now increasingly divergent.138
While conservatives (along with the Czech Left) have blamed the problems of
the Klaus era on excessive economic liberalism and a neglect of morality, social
cohesion, state authority and law-and-order, neo-liberals see the period as one of
half-hearted compromise, unprincipled pragmatism and state intervention—a
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THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
missed opportunity for genuinely radical free market reform. While neo-liberal
economists advocate the full-blooded unleashing of market forces into the Czech
economy and public sector,139
neo-conservative intellectuals have embarked
upon a strikingly fundamentalist anti-liberal agenda centring upon the reassertion
of religious values, morality and authority.140
However, in a secular and
increasingly transformation-weary Czech society, with continuing expectations
of a paternalistic state,141
neither radical stance would seem to have great
potential appeal.
Conclusion
The ideology of 'Czech Thatcherism', like that of British Thatcherism, can be
seen as an innovative attempt to combine neo-liberalism and conservatism to
mobilize electoral and social support for a project of far-reaching political and
social transformation. Both were initially absorbed and formulated into a
coherent ideology over a period of decades by marginal intellectual elites
seeking an alternative to the very different forms of post-war settlement in
Western and Eastern Europe. Neither fully resolved the inherent ideological
tensions between individualistic market liberalism and the conservative imperatives
of identity, history and authority, between the Free and the Good.142
Both
'Thatcherisms' were ideologies of social and national transformation whose
initial appeal and coherence were arguably undermined, not only by the
inevitable gap between promise and performance, but also by their very success
in bringing about rapid social transformation.143
However, in the Czech case both neo-liberal and neo-conservative currents of
thought were (re)invented on the basis of ideas imported from the Anglo-American
New Right. Despite precursors in pre-communist history, Czech 'revolutionary
conservatism's' only substantive link with traditional Czech political
thought is arguably its (submerged) nationalism. Whilst the historical absence of
strong or broad-based right-wing traditions in the Czech Lands facilitated—and
perhaps required—the articulation of innovative new post-communist ideologies
drawing on imported ideas, their adoption and popularization after 1989 must
also be seen as a deliberate attempt to break with the past. Despite the continued
popularity of radical neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideas with sections of the
Czech intelligentsia, the only coherent ideological alternative on the Czech right
would now seem to be the second more sceptical, cautious evolutionary form of
post-communist conservatism.
Notes and references
1. Peter Rutland, 'Thatcherism, Czech-style: Transition to Capitalism in the Czech Republic' Telos, no. 94
(1992-93), pp. 104-129.
2. The third party in the coalition was the more centrist Christian Democratic Union-Czechoslovak People's
Party (KDU-ČSL) The tiny Christian Democratic Party (KDS) was the fourth partner until its merger
with Klaus's ODS in March 1996.
3. In elections to the Czech parliament in 1992 Klaus's ODS received 29.7% and ODA 5.9%. In 1996 these
figures were respectively 29.6% and 6.4%.
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SEÁN HANLEY
4. For example, these parties' close links with emergent business elites, endorsement by celebrities, support
from the intelligentsia and latterly Western-style think-tanks such as neo-conscrvative Civic Institute
(founded 1991) and the neo-liberal Liberal Institute (founded in 1992).
5. See Steve Kettle, 'The Czech Republic struggles to define an independent press', Transition, 6 October
1995.
6. These problems came to a head in spring 1997 with the devaluation of the previously stable Czech crown.
In March 1998 The Economist Intelligence Unit reported that worsening macroeconomic results, serious
concerns about market regulation and inadequate microcconomic reform had caused the Czech Republic
to fall behind Hungary and Poland. 'Poláci a Maďaři mají lepší klima k podnikání', Mladá fronta Dnes,
27 March 1998.
7. After June 1996 the Klaus-led coalition continued as a minority government 'tolerated' by the opposition
Social Democrats. The minority Social Democratic government formed in July 1998 has in turn been
'tolerated' by Klaus's ODS.
8. There were concealed business donations to ODA and allegations that ODA-controlled ministries had
traded (and even demanded) donations in exchange for favours in privatization. 'ODA přiznala, že i ona
měla falešného sponzora', Mladá fronta Dnes, 7 February 1998, pp. 1 and 2.
9. 'ODS se definitivně rozdělila, vznìkají nové strany', Lidové noviny, 14 January 1998, p. 1.
10. The former coalition regained a theoretical majority of one. While Klaus's ODS lost support in 1998, the
Freedom Union and the centrist Christian Democrats polled well. All parties gained scats as result of the
small, far-right Republican Party's failure to re-enter parliament.
11. For example, exit polling after the June 1998 elections. 'Občanská demokratická strana měla letos
věrnější voliče než komunisté', Hospodářské noviny, 22 June 1998, p. 22.
12. Most notably, 'perverse effects' of coupon privatisation and the Klaus government's tardy and laissez
faire attitude to regulatory frameworks and the completion of economic transformation. This allowed
corruption and the emergence of powerful rent-seeking groups. See Jiří Večerník, Markets and People:
The Czech Reform Experience in a Comparative Perspective (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996); Martin
Potůček, Nejen trh: role trhu, státu a občanského sektoru v proměně české společnosti (Prague: SLON,
1997).
13. See, for example, Mitchell Orenstein, The Political Success of Neo-Liberalism in the Czech Republic
(Prague: CERGE-EI Working Paper Series no. 68, 1994); Stephen Holmes, 'The politics of economics
in the Czech Republic', East European Constitutional Review, 4 (1995), pp. 52-5; Martin Dangerfield,
'Ideology and Czech transformation: neoliberal rhetoric or neoliberal reality'?, East European Politics
and Societies, 11 (1997), pp. 436-467.
14. Such 'inconsistencies' are attributed either to Klaus's sensitivity to social issues and skilful 'transplantation
of Thatcheritc principles to East European soil', Rutland, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 107, or, alternatively,
to Klaus being held in check by 'social-liberal' institutions inherited from the 1990-1992 Civic
Forum/Public Against Violence government. On the latter see Mitchell Orenstein 'Vaclav Klaus:
revolutionary and parliamentarian', East European Constitutional Review 7 (1998), pp. 46-55.
15. Sec Martin Myant, Transforming Socialist Economies: The Case of Poland and Czechoslovakia
(Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993).
16. ibid., p. 453.
17. Sec Jerzy Szacki, Liberalism After Communism (London and Budapest: Central European University
Press, 1995).
18. See J. F. Brown, 'Goodbye (and good riddance) to de-communization', Transitions, 4 July 1997, pp.
28-34.
19. An additional factor explaining the dominance of the Czech Right in 1990s is the slowness of the Czech
Left to crystallize. This is partly traceable to Czech Communists' failure to become a post-communist
social democratic party. See Seán Hanley, 'The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia: A
neo-communist "subcultural" party' in András Bozóki (ed.), The New Democrats: Socialists in Power in
East Central Europe (Budapest: Central European University, forthcoming).
20. Stating, for example, that Klaus appealed to 'Czechs' self-perception as Europeans and willingness to
shoulder collective sacrifices', Rutland,op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 128, offers little enlightenment.The same could
be said of virtually all leading Czech politicians after November 1989, including Klaus's defeated
opponents.
21. Plausible sociological reasons for the appeal of neo-liberalism in Eastern Europe include (1) its role as
theoretical blueprint of capitalism, Szacki, op. cit., Ref. 17, p 148-49; (2) its sharing similar radically
economistic assumptions to those of all-pervasive official Marxism, Illja Šrubař, 'Neoliberalismus,
transformace a občanská společnost', Sociologický časopis, 32 (1996), pp. 67-78; or (3) the fact that the
Hayekian vision of a society of isolated, self-interested individuals without wider social bonds corre-
184
THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
sponds closely to the reality of atomised post-communist societies. See Hilary Wainwright, Arguments
For a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994).
22. At best there have been discussions of 'political culture'. See, for example, George Schopflin, 'Culture
and identity in post-Communist Europe' in Stephen White, Judy Batt and Paul Lewis (Eds.), Developments
in East European Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 16-28; Andrew C. Janos,
'Continuity and change in Eastern Europe: strategies of post-communist politics', East European Politics
and Societies, 8 (1994), pp. 1-31.
23. Most stress the manipulation of East European publics by intellectual and technocratic (ex-nomenklatura)
elites with a hidden pro-capitalist agenda. See, for example, Alex Callinicos, The Revenge of History:
Marxism and the East European Revolutions, (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 50-81 or James Petras,
'Eastern Europe: restoration and crisis', Critique, no. 25 (1993), pp. 13-45. Others stress the imposition
of free-market shock therapy by Western-dominated international organizations. See, for example, Peter
Gowan, 'Eastern Europe, Western power and neo-liberalism' New Left Review, no. 21 (1996), pp 129-40.
24. See amongst others Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988) and Mark Hayes, The
New Right in Britain: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1994).
25. See Radhika Desai, 'Second-hand dealers in ideas: think-tanks and Thatcherite hegemony', New Left
Review, no. 203 (1994), pp. 27-64 and Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the
Economic Counter-Revolution 1931-1983 (London: HarperCollins, 1994).
26. Points made by Jeremy Lester, Modern Tsars and Princes: The Struggle For Hegemony in Russia
(London and New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 1-24. See also Renata Salecal, 'The crisis of identity and the
struggle for new hegemony in the former Yugoslavia' in Ernesto Laclau (Ed.), The Making of Political
Identities (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 205-232 for a more 'post-Marxist' application of Gramscian
concepts to post-communist politics.
27. A point famously made by Václav Havel in his essay 'Power of the powerless', in Jan Vladislav (Ed.),
Living in Truth (Faber and Faber: London and Boston, 1989), pp. 36-122.
28. For a discussion of this distinction (which he conceptualizes as levels of 'state crisis') see Colin Hay,
Restating Social and Political Change (Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1996),
pp. 85-90.
29. Jaroslav Veis, 'King Klaus', East European Reporter, (September-October 1992), pp. 12-13.
30. On this point see Zdeněk Mlynář's analysis of Klaus's support as the mobilization of a revolutionary
movement. 'Kdo potřebuje "druhou revoluci"?'. Rudé právo, 27 November 1991 reprinted in Proti srsti:
politické komentáře 1990-1995 (Prague: Periskop, 1996), pp. 42-50. In the Czech case it was first
necessary to mobilize an internal constituency of Civic Forum (OF) activists, enabling the election of
Klaus as OF Chairman in October 1990 and the creation of the Civic Democratic Party on the base of
OF's grassroots base in 1991. See Magdaléna Hadjiisky, La fin du Forum civique et la naissance du Parti
civique démocratique (janvier 1990-avril 1991) (Prague: Documents du travail du CEFRES no. 6, 1996).
31. I leave unexplored the conflicting preoccupations of the different Western neo-liberal thinkers cited by
Klaus and other Czech 'Thatcherites' and the accuracy of their interpretations.
32. Stuart Hall, 'Variants of Liberalism' in James Donald and Stuart Hall (Eds.), Politics and Ideology
(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), p. 67.
33. See Ivan Pfaff, Česká přináležitost k Západu v letech 1815-1878, (Brno: Doplněk, 1996), pp. 19-30, pp.
69-88 and pp. 205-241.
34. See Otto Urban, 'Český liberalismus v 19. století' in Milan Znoj, Jan Havránek and Martin Sekera (Eds.),
Český liberalismus: texty a osobnosti (Prague: Torst, 1995), pp. 15-27.
35. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: the Future of Radical Politics (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995),
pp. 23-7.
36. See George Schopflin, 'The political traditions of Eastern Europe', Daedalus, no. 1 (1990) and
'Conservatism and Hungary's political tradition', Problems of Communism, nos. 1-2 (1991).
37. The Masaryk-Pekař debate is often termed the 'Dispute over the meaning of Czech history'. See Miloš
Havelka (Ed.), Spor o smyslu českých dějin (Prague: Torst, 1997), pp. 7-43 (preface).
38. See Petr Pithart, ' "Fronta" proti Hradu' in his Dějiny a politika (Prague: Prostor, 1990), pp. 105-164.
39. See Les Blackwood, 'Czech and Polish national democracy at the dawn of independent statehood
1918-1919', East European Politics and Societies, 4 (1990), pp. 469-488; Milan E. Hapala, 'Political
parties in Czechoslovakia' in Miroslav Rechcigl jr. (Ed.), Czechoslovakia Past and Present (The Hague:
Mouton, 1968), pp. 124-140; Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars
(Seattle, WA and London: University of Washington Press, 1974, pp. 95-113.
40. Jan Rataj, O autoritativní národní stát: ideologické proměny eské politiky v Druhé republice 1938-1939.
(Prague: Karolinium, 1997).
41. The People's Party was allowed to contest the (free) elections of 1946 along with three left-wing parties
(the Communists, National Socialists and Social Democrats). The elections were won by the Commu-
185
SEÁN HANLEY
nists, who polled 40% of the vote in the Czech Lands. After the Communist takeover, the People's Party
became a 'satellite' party. After 1989 it developed into the Christian Democratic Union (KDU-ČSL)
discussed elsewhere in this article.
42. See Jan Křen, Bílá místa v našch dějinách? (Prague: Lidové noviny, 1990), pp. 95-101.
43. Václav Klaus, První zpráva (Prague: Cartoonia, 1993), p. 55.
44. The most recent general history of the Prague Spring published in English is Kieran Williams' The
Prague Spring and its aftermath: Czechoslovak politics 1967-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
45. Famously set out by Milan Kundera in his essay 'The tragedy of central europe' New York Review of
Books, 26 April 1984.
46. Such 'central European' positions are also detectable in Jan Patočka's writings on Czech history which
evoke the Holy Roman Empire as a golden age of European spiritual unity. Sec Patočka's 1969 Co jsou
Češi?/Was sind die Tchechen? (Prague: Panorama, 1992) Ivan Chvatik and Pavel Kouba (Eds) and also
Aviezer Tucker, 'Book Review of Jan Patočka: Essais heretiques sur la philosphie de l'histoire', History
and Theory, 31 (1992), pp. 355-363 and also his Fenomenologie a politika: od J. Patočky k V. Havlovi
(Olomouc: Votobia, 1997), pp. 94-118. English publication forthcoming (New York: St. Martins Press).
The idea of 'reinventing' pre-1918 Central Europe was most explicitly taken up in the mid-1980s by
intellectuals around the samizdat journal Střední Evropa ('Central Europe'). See Marlène Laruelle,
'Střední Evropa': Une autre écriture de la nation? (Prague: CEFRES Documents de travail no. 4, 1996).
47. See Laruelle op. cit., Ref. 46.
48. See Ladislav Holy, The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation: National identity and thepost-communist
social transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 55-72 and passim.
49. See Daniel Kroupa, Svoboda a řád (svátéční rozhovory) (Prague: Éós, 1996).
50. Kroupa, op. cit., Ref. 49, p. 9. The Havel-Kundera exchange consisted of the following articles: Milan
Kundera, 'Český úděl', Listy, no. 7-8 (1968); Václav Havel, 'Český úděl?', Tváf, no. 2 (1969), reprinted
in Václav Havel, O lidskou identitu (Prague: Rozmluvy, 1990), pp. 187-193 and pp. 193-200. See also
Kundcra's riposte to Havel 'Radikalismus a exhibicionismus', Host do domu, no. 15 (1968-69).
51. Patočka's philolosophy also influenced Václav Havel's (anti-)political thinking. See Tucker, Fenomenogie
a politika op. cit., Ref. 46, and Ivan Blecha, Jan Patočka (Olomouc: Votobia, 1997).
52. Kroupa, op. cit., Ref. 49, pp. 11-12.
53. See June 1990 interview with Bratinka. 'Conservative reflections on Czechoslovak politics' in Tim
Whipple (Ed.), After The Velvet Revolution (New York: Freedom House, 1991), pp. 207-215. Kroupa
cites Eric Voeglin and Jan Patočka, op. cit., Ref. 49. On Patočka, see Tucker, op. cit., Ref. 46.
54. Underground seminars in Prague and Brno by Western academics and intellectuals and contacts
organized by the Jan Hus Educational Foundation. While many lecturers (e.g. Roger Scruton, David
Regan, David J. Levy) were politicaly, conservative, some (e.g. John Keane) were on the left. See Petr
Oslzlý (Ed.), Podzemní univerzita (Brno: Centrum pro studium demokracie a kultury, 1993).
55. The Salisbury Review acquired some notoriety during the 'Honeyford Affair' in 1983-84 over articles it
published attacking multi-culturalism in education. For a critical review of the 'Salisbury Group's'
agenda on race and other issues see Gill Seidal, 'Culture Nation and 'Race' in the British and French New
Right' and Miriam David 'Moral and Maternal: the Family in the Right' in Ruth Levitas (Ed.), The
Ideology of the New Right (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), pp. 107
and pp. 135.
56. Cited in David Selbourne Death of the Dark Hero: Eastern Europe 1987-90 (London: Jonathan Cape,
1990), p. 81.
57. See Peter Zajac, 'Úděl českého vzdelanca', Nová přítomnost (Prague), no. 7 1998, p. 24.
58. Petr Pithart, Osmašedesátý (Prague: Rozmluvy, 1990).
59. Petr Pithart and Jana Kusáková, Petr Pithart NADORAZ (Prague: Primus, 1992), p. 49. See also interview
with Pithart, 'Vstup do KSČ jsem vnímal jako romantické gesto', Lidové noviny, 26 March 1998, p. 11.
60. See Richard Štenďs preface to Pithart, op. cit., Ref. 38, pp. 7-16.
61. See Pithart's 1972 samizdat book Obrana politiky [The Defence of Politics] (Prague: Panorama, 1990).
62. Pithart supports the notion of multi-culturalism and sees the emergence of an ethnically homogenous
Czech Republic as a step backwards. See his 'Od multikulturality spějeme zpátky' in his Po
devětaosmdeśatém: Kdo jsme? (Bratislava and Brno: Kalligram/Doplněk, 1998), pp. 79-98 and other
essays in the same volume.
63. In 1984 Charter 77 published a document entitled 'A right to history' calling for a national history
undistorted by communist ideology. The document was slrongly criticized by left-of-ccntrc dissidents.
Charter 77 document no. 11/84 20 May 1984 'Právo na dějiny'. Excerpted in Vilém Prečan (Ed.), Charta
77-1977-1989 od morální k demokratické revoluci (Scheinfeld-Schwarzenberg and Bratislava: Čs.
středisko nezávislé literatury/ARCHA, 1990), pp. 254-7.
186
THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
64. Havel's romantic anti-modernism reflects the (indirect) influence of Heidegger and the direct influence
of Jan Patočka. While Heidegger was politically on the far right, Patočka's political vision was wholly
democratic. See Aviezer Tucker, 'The Heideggerism of Vaclav Havel', Telos, no. 85 (1990), pp. 27-38
and 'Patočka vs. Heidegger: the humanistic difference, Telos, no. 92 (1992).
65. Petr Pithart, 'Dizi-rizika' in Prečan, op. cit., Ref. 63, p. 90.
66. Western feminist ideas, for example, have received a distinctly cool reception among both Czech elites
and public. See Alena Heitlinger, 'Framing feminism in the post-Communist Czech Republic', Communist
and post-Communist Studies, 29 (1996), pp. 77-93 and Jiřina Šiklová, 'Feminism and the roots of
apathy in the Czech Republic', Social Research, 64 (1997), pp. 258-280.
67. See Jacques Rupnik, Histoire du parti communiste tchécoslovaque (Paris: Presses de la Fondation
nationale des sciences polítiques, 1981).
68. Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 2nd edition (London: Penguin Books, 1989) pp. 58-9,
citation, p. 59.
69. Cited in Selbourne, op. cit., Ref. 56, p. 81. Scruton took any interest in market economics, private
property, civil society or transcendent values as indicting a conservative outlook. See his 'The new right
in Central Europe I: Czechoslovakia', Political Studies, 36 (1988), pp. 449-62 and 'The new right in
Central Europe II: Poland and Hungary', Political Studies, 36 (1988), pp. 638-52. On the far left, Alex
Callinicos is equally inaccurate, labelling Havel both a 'conventional romantic neo-conservative' and a
'social democrat', op. cit., Ref. 23, p. 52 and p. 61. For a more insightful discussion of Havel's political
thought, see Aviezer Tucker, 'Waiting For Meciar', Telos, no. 93 (1992) and Tucker, op. cit., Ref. 46.
70. Francis Harris, 'Dressing to the left', Business Central Europe, November/December 1997, p. 22.
71. In 1968 the 'Young Economists' were organized in the Club of Young Economists (KMEN), which had
300-400 members. Klaus himself also wrote for in the radical opposition political-cultural magazine Tvař
in. Following the 1968 invasion both KMEN and Tvář ceased to exist. See Václav Klaus, Mezi minulosti
a budoucnosti (Prague and Brno: Nadace Universitas Masarykiana/Edice Heureka/Nakladatelství:
Georgetown/Nakladatelství Svoboda, 1996), p. 14.
72. The strength of neo-liberal ideas was more the result of generational differences than a shift of thinking
in the Czech economics profession in the 1980s as Dangcrfield suggests, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 441.
73. Klaus, op. cit., Ref. 71, pp. 1516.
74. Despite resigning his Communist Party membership in 1968, Ježek remained at the Economic Institute
throughout the 'normalisation period' before joining the Forecasting Institute in 1988.
75. For example, from 1980 to 1985 Klaus organised a series of economics seminars within the Czechoslovak
State Bank, papers from which were legally printed (100-200 copies) for internal use. Sec Jan Stráský,
Jan Stráský-prezident na půl úvazku (Prague: Irma, 1993) and Klaus, op. cit., Ref. 71, pp. 18-20. In the
late 1980s Klaus and other economists sometimes wrote pseudonymously for samizdat publications such
as Lidové noviny.
76. See Judy Batt, Economic Reform and Political Change in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1989).
77. Klaus looks to Friedman as a technical macro-economist and Hayek as ideologist and philosopher. See
Klaus's 'Žijeme v Hayekově době, in Rok málo či mnoho v dějinách země (Prague: Repro-Press, 1993),
pp. 31-4 and 'Rozhovor místo prologu' in Klaus, op. cit., Ref. 71, pp. 14-28. Elsewhere Klaus cites the
work of Michael Novak and James Buchanan.
78. Klaus, op. cit., Ref. 38, p. 49. Sec also Klaus, op. cit., Ref. 71, p. 22.
79. ibid.
80. While the 1990 Civic Forum programme promised a vague 'Return to Europe', the 1992 programme of
Klaus's Civic Democratic Party offered the benefits of a liberal order: 'Freedom and prosperity', Svoboda
a prosperita (Prague: ODS, 1992).
81. Tomáš Ježek, Budování kapitalismu v Čechách: Rozhovory s Tomášem Ježkem (Prague: Volvox Globator,
1997), p. 16. Ježek was then a member of the Civic Democratic Alliance, but joined Klaus's ODS in
1995.
82. Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity 2nd edition (London: Granta, 1991), p. 56. The French
historian Muriel Blaive has argued that even in 1950's the Czechoslovak regime's stability was due not
so much to intense repression and exceptional mass support (the conventional analysis) as relatively high
living standards. See her Scénario du film 1956 Le rendez-vous manqué de l'histoire ou Ie retour du Père
Noël en Tchécoslovaquie (Prague: CEFRES, 1997) and 'O Pražském jaru mluví jen komunisté a jejich
oběti', Lidové noviny, 25 July 1998, p. 28.
83. Neal Acherson, 'Dream of Escape' in Games With Shadows (London: Radius, 1988), p. 271.
84. Ivan Sviták, Voice of America radio commentary, 24 November 1989 reprinted in his Budoucnost bez
komunismu (Prague: Orbis, 1990), p. 150.
85. Ježek op. cit., Ref. 81, p. 15.
187
SEÁN HANLEY
86. See Andrew Gamble, Hayek: the Iron Cage of Liberty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
87. See Holy, op. cit., Ref. 48, pp. 180194.
88. Václav Klaus, 'Zamlčené předpoklady našich politických sporů', Literární noviny, 8th November 1990.
Klaus also became a member of the Mont Pelerin Society founded by Hayek in 1947 as a forum for
neo-liberal statesmen and intellectuals.
89. Both because the word 'liberal' was used by Klaus's opponents in Civic Forum (the 'Liberal Club') and
by analogy with the British Conservative Party, which Klaus admired as a broad integrative party of the
right. See Klaus, op. cit., Ref. 43, p. 55 and Václav Klaus, Current Challenges and Conservative
Solutions: The Czech Perspective (London: Conservative Political Centre, 1995).
90. See memoirs of Klaus's close aide and later ODS's first National Secretary, Petr Havlík. M. Stoniš and
P. Havlík, Klaus & ti druzí: Osobní inventura Petra Havlíka (Prague: Pallata, 1998), p. 84.
91. Václav Klaus, 'Proč jsem konzervativcem' in Klaus, op. cit., Ref. 71, p. 225. The title also echoes a
well-known essay by the Czech writer Karel Čapek: 'Why I am not a communist'. Hayek's postscript
appears in The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge, 1960).
92. Klaus took little personal interest informulating ideology and never attended the 'advisory group', which
wrote the 1992 ODS programme. This group was chaired by ODS Deputy Chairman Josef Zieleniec.
Klaus was, however, the new ideology's leading spokesmen. See Havlík and Stoniš, op. cit., Ref. 90, pp.
43-4.
93. ODS, op. cit., Ref. 80, p. 3.
94. The philosopher Václav Bělohradský, who attended meetings of the ODS 'advisory group' (see Ref. 92)
claims divisions between 'liberals' and 'conservatives' were visible even in 1991-92. 'Kolika hlasy může
strana znít', Lidové noviny, 17 August 1996, p. 8.
95. Stráský, op. cit., Ref. 75, p. 75.
96. Halí, op. cit., Ref. 32, p. 53.
97. Jan Štětka, 'Na konzervatismus zatím nenaladění', Mladá fronta Dnes, 20 October 1995, p. 12.
98. D Kroupa, 'Máme málo hodnot, které bychom měli konzervovat', Fórum no. 46 (1990), p. 16.
99. ibid.
100. See Rupnik op. cit., Ref. 67, and Karel Kaplan, The Short March: The Communist Takeover in
Czechoslovakia 1945-48 (London: Hurst, 1987).
101. A term coined by the Czech liberal philosopher Milan Znoj, 'Anatomie Klausova konzervatismu', Listy,
24 (1994), pp. 69-79.
102. Klaus, op. cit., Ref. 71, p. 225.
103. A point made by Tomáš Rychlý, 'Srovnáme si minulost do latě!', Orientace, supplement to Lidové
noviny, 28 March 1998, pp. i-ii.
104. Klaus, op. cit., Ref. 91, p. 224.
105. ibid., p. 225.
106. Kroupa, op. cit., Ref. 49, pp. 17-18
107. Václav Klaus, 'Systémová změna: vyážená směs úmyslného a spontánního (projev na valném shromáždění
The Mont Pelerin Society', Dopočítávaní do jedné, (Prague: Management Press, 1995).
108. A belief held especially firmly by Tomáš Ježek. See Ježek, op. cit., Ref. 81, pp. 274-9.
109. Bratinka, op. cit., Ref. 53.
110. Klaus op. cit., Ref. 91, p. 226.
111. Klaus resisted restitution in practice. See Ježek, op. cit., Ref. 81, pp. 117-126. On the normative basis
of Czech restitution see Hilary Appel, 'Justice and the reformation of property rights in the Czech
Republic', East European Politics and Societies, 9 (1995), pp. 26-40.
112. For a fuller discussion of Czechs' perceptions of the market and of their own (West) European identity,
see Holy op. cit., Ref. 48, pp. 149-158.
113. 'Your [privatisation] coupon book is voting for the Right' was another ODS election slogan in 1992.
114. Orenstein cites a strategy document presented by Klaus in April 1990, which spells this out explicitly.
op. cit., Ref. 14, p. 54. The need to limit foreign ownership of Czech industry was a tenet shared across
the political spectrum at this time.
115. 'The Czech Way' is also the title of a set of Klaus's writings: Česká cesta (Prague: Profile, 1994).
116. Kieran Williams, 'Václav Klaus's Czech Nation', unpublished paper presented at School of Slavonic and
East European Studies Seminar on Nationalism, 1995.
117. Orenstein op. cit., Ref. 14, pp. 54-5. Rutland, op. cit., Ref. 1.
118. On deeper narratives of transformation see Jiří Kabele, 'Mýtus, realita a transformace', Sociologický
časopis, 30 (1994), pp. 21-35.
119. Klaus, op. cit., Ref. 91, p. 229.
120. Petr Pithart, 'Co jsem slyšel před pěti lety růst', in Pithart, op. cit., Ref. 62, pp. 293-300 (especially pp.
293-6), first published in Český týdeník no. 6, 20-23 January 1995.
188
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THE NEW RIGHT IN THE NEW EUROPE?
121. ibid.,p. 295. Similar arguments were, however, advanced in Poland in the late 1980s by Adam Michnik,
who explicitly cited Edmund Burke. See Michnik's, 'Towards a new democratic compromise', East
European Reporter, 3 (1988) no. 2.
122. Pithart op. cit., Ref. 120, p. 296.
123. ibid., p. 297.
124. ibid., p. 299.
125. Petr Pithart, 'A trip through an unknown past' The New Presence (Prague), April 1998, pp. 6-7, citation,
p. 6.
126. Pithart, op. cit., Ref. 120, p. 297.
127. ibid., p. 297-8.
128. Petr Pithart, 'Senát jako konzervativní instituce', Lidové noviny 4 December 1996, reprinted in Pithart,
op. cit., Ref. 62, pp. 353-5.
129. Petr Pithart, '1956: Proč Češi byli tak hodní (rozhovor)' Listy, 26 (1997), no. 6, pp. 35-42; op. cit., Ref.
125, pp. 6-7, citation, p. 6 and 'Proč se stydíme za rok 1968', Lidové noviny 25 July 1998, p. 29.
130. Above all, an ability to warn against the temptations of left-wing political experiments. See Pithart, op.
cit., Ref. 125.
131. Pithart 'Proč se stydíme za rok 1968, op. cit., Ref. 129.
132. Program Občanského hnutí (Prague: OH, n.d.) and Jak dál k prosperitě? Hospodářský program
Občanského hnutí (Prague: OH, 1992).
133. See, for example, articles by the party's 1990-1998 leader, Josef Lux, 'Stavba založená na dvojici pilířů
Lidové noviny, 31 October 1995, p. 8 and 'Neztrácejme orientaci', Lidové noviny, 8 December 1995, p.
10.
134. Josef Lux, 'Politický koncept KDU-ČSLje zcela konkrétní, Lidové noviny, 11 May 1996. KDU-ČSL
supported Pithart's candidature to the Senate as an independent in 1996.
135. Zieleniec insisted on the adoption of a statement of long-term principles (the 'Political Programme')
Politický program ODS (Prague: ODS, 1996). See Bohumil Pečínka, 'ODS Příklon ke konzervatismu?',
Lidové noviny 18 August 1995; Josef Zieleniec, 'ODS by už neměla znít jen jedním hlasem, říká
Zieleniec', Mladá fronta Dnes, 5 August 1996, p. 4.
136. The programme is on the Freedom Union's internet site: http://www.uniesvobody.cz.
137. Petr Matějů, 'Česká transformace skončí až za několik generací', Lidové noviny, 8 April 1998.
138. See, for example, discussions at the 1992 'Liberalism at the end of the twentieth century' colloquium
organised by the nro-conscrvative Civic Institute. Jaromír Žegklitz (Ed.), Liberalismus konce 20. století
(Prague: Občanský institut, 1994).
139. E.g. Jan Macháček, 'Nezapomeňte na předvolební sliby', Respekt, 29 June-5 July 1998, p. 27.
140. Such neo-conservative intellectuals arc grouped in the Civic Institute think-tank, the Christian Academy
and the small Party of Conservative Accord (SKS), which broke away from ODA in early 1998. Recent
contributions to the conservative journal, Prostor, illustrate this agenda. Themes raised include: the need
for culture, tradition and ethics in politics; disillusion with the materialism and moral bankruptcy of the
West; scepticism towards mainstream Czech nationalism and nostalgia for Austria-Hungary; and
achieving a 'renaissance of Christian values' through educational and social policy and further decommunisation
measures. Michal Janata, 'Český stát na prahu třetího milénia' and Tomáš Vystrčil, 'Smysl krize
a krize smyslu. Prostor, no. 36 (1998), pp. 8-10 and pp. 17-19.
141. See Večerník op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 223-228 and 247-250.
142. See David Edgar, 'The Free or the Good', in Levitas op. cit., Ref. 55, pp. 55-79 and Gamble, op. cit.,
Ref. 86, pp. 101-125.
143. See Andrew Gamble, 'The end of Conservatism', New Left Review, no. 214 (1995), pp. 3-26 and John
Gray, 'The undoing of Conservatism' in his Enlightenment's Wake (London and New York: Routledge,
1997), pp. 87-120.