Political Parties of Eastern Europe: A Guide to Politics in the Post-communist Era

A Guide to Politics in the Post-communist Era

Janusz Bugajski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000161359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive one-volume guide to politics in Eastern Europe provides a wealth of information on the region. The author outlines the emergent political spectrum of parties and coalitions, which are described in the 20 country chapters that make up the heart of the book. Parties are classified across the political spectrum and discussed individually in terms of programs, leadership, and political activity. Tables at the end of each country chapter present basic political data and electoral results. A concluding essay evaluates democratic development in the region.

Czech Republic

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The Czech territories were inhabited by an assortment of tribal groups before the establishment of permanent Slav settlements in the fifth century AD. The ancestors of the Czechs lived in present-day Bohemia and Moravia. In the sixth century AD the area was overrun by Avars, who established an empire between the rivers Elbe and Dnieper. A loose and short-lived Slavic empire emerged in the seventh century AD that is believed to have been centered in Bohemia. It disappeared after the death of its ruler, Samo, in 658 AD.¹

The eastern Moravian territories witnessed the creation of the first durable and coherent Slavic state after the Czech tribes of Moravia helped Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, destroy the Avar Empire. Early in the ninth century AD, the Slavic chief Mojmír created the Moravian Kingdom. His successors expanded the Kingdom to include Bohemia, Slovakia, southern Poland, and western Hungary, and this entity became known as the Great Moravian Empire.

Roman Christianity came to the Czech lands through incursions by Germanic settlers and missionaries. Mojmír was baptized but his successor Rastislav initially turned to Byzantium for fear of German domination. The Orthodox Slavic monks Cyril and Methodius visited Moravia to spread the Eastern rite liturgy in the newly devised Slavic alphabet. However, Rastislav’s successor, Svatopluk, chose to ally the kingdom with German clerics. After the death of Methodius in 885, the Great Moravian Empire entered the sphere of Roman Catholic influence.

With the arrival of Hungarian tribes in Central Europe in 896 AD, the Moravian empire disintegrated. The Bohemian Czechs broke away from Moravia and formed an alliance with the Franks. The Bohemian Kingdom emerged in the tenth century when Czech tribes, under the Premyslid chiefs, established a more centralized political system. The Kingdom would play an important role in forging Czech identity. Following conflicts with Hungary and Poland, the Bohemian Kingdom acquired Moravia in 1029; but for the next five centuries Moravia’s ties with Bohemia were periodically severed because of subordination to either Hungary or the Holy Roman Empire.

In the thirteenth century, the Bohemian rulers acquired through marriage upper and lower Austria and a part of Styria; the rest of the region, up to the current Slovenian border, was also conquered. But the Austrian Habsburg dynasty began to reassert its authority and all of Bohemia’s Austrian possessions were lost by 1276. Large-scale German migration into the Czech lands took place during the course of the thirteenth century and proved a source of major conflict throughout Czech history.

The reign of Charles TV in Bohemia (1342–1378) was considered the golden age of Czech history. The powers of the Czech nobility were curtailed; Bohemia gained the territories of Brandenburg, Lusatia, and Silesia; and the capital, Prague, became a major imperial center. The Hussite movement swept Bohemia at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries. It constituted both a national Czech movement against German imperialism and a religious assertion against papal authority and church corruption and wealth. It was led by the Czech Jan Hus, a reformist preacher who promulgated the anti-Vatican teachings of Englishman John Wycliffe, and it precipitated the Protestant Reformation.

Hussitism gained a stronghold in Bohemia, but Hus’s followers were persecuted by the clergy and Hus himself was condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake in 1415. His death sparked decades of religious warfare between Catholic and Hussite Czechs with the intervention of German and Hungarian Catholics. In 1490, the Polish-Lithuanian Jagiellonian kings gained control over Bohemia, but the Czechs maintained a high degree of independence. However, in the early part of the sixteenth century, Bohemia fell under almost three centuries of Habsburg rule when its nobles elected Austrian Archduke Ferdinand as king. Conflicts quickly materialized as Vienna pursued a policy of centralization and a struggle ensued for the preservation of Czech national identity. The Czechs lost a major part of their native aristocracy, the Czech Reformed Church (Hussite) was persecuted during the Counter-Reformation, and the use of the Czech language was undermined. Periodic revolts by the Czech nobility were crushed by the Habsburgs. The most decisive Czech defeat occurred in November 1620 at the Battle of White Mountain.

During the seventeenth century, all Czech lands were declared the hereditary property of the Habsburgs and large-scale German immigration into Bohemia strengthened Vienna’s controls. In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia confirmed the incorporation of the Bohemian Kingdom into the Habsburg imperial system. Vienna’s control was challenged by a resurgent Prussia, which in the 1740s seized the highly industrialized Silesian territories in the northern part of the Czech lands. The remainder of Bohemia was merged into the Habsburg’s Austrian provinces and the separate administrative status of Moravia was abolished in the eighteenth century.

A Czech national revival took place during the nineteenth century. For example, Matice Česká (Czech Motherland) was established by Czech intellectuals in the 1830s to publish scholarly books and to develop Slavic learning and culture. Among the most notable figures were František Palacký, the leading Czech historian. Palacký proposed the federalization of the Austro-Hungarian empire as a buffer against both German and Russian expansionism. During the national revolutions of 1848, Czech intellectuals made increasingly bolder political demands for self-government but were rejected by Vienna.

New activists came to the fore at the turn of the twentieth century, including Tomáš Masaryk, who campaigned for national autonomy, universal suffrage, and parliamentary democracy. He also advocated the idea of a “Czechoslovak” entity as contacts between Czech and Slovak intellectuals intensified. During World War I, the idea of a fully independent Czechoslovak state emerged. In 1916, together with the Czech Eduard Beneš and the Slovak Milan Štefánik, Masaryk created the Czechoslovak National Council (CNC). With the collapse of the Habsburg empire in 1918, the CNC was recognized as the supreme organ of an emerging Czechoslovak government. Czechoslovak independence was formally proclaimed on 28 October 1918, and Czech troops reoccupied the Sudetenland region, which had been seized by German forces during the war.

The new state encompassed the historic Bohemian Kingdom (Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), together with Slovakia and Ruthenia, which were taken from Hungary. Czechoslovakia developed into a parliamentary democracy held together by the authority of President Masaryk. Although the country had a fairly liberal minorities policy, there was significant disquiet in Slovakia, which was denied autonomy under the 1920 constitution. However, the most destructive opposition was among the German population in the Sudetenland, which increasingly supported the expansionist pan-German policies of the Nazis. Under intensive pressure from Berlin and with Western acquiescence, Prague surrendered the Sudetenland to Germany in October 1938. In March 1939, German forces occupied all of Bohemia and Moravia and declared these territories a German protectorate. Meanwhile, Slovakia declared its independence, and Ruthenia was taken by Hungary.

Soviet forces overran the country at the close of World War II. Local national committees took over the administration and expelled the bulk of the German population—over two and a half million fled to Germany and Austria. While the Soviet Union annexed Ruthenia and incorporated it into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the rest of pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Map
• Table of Contents
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Pluralism and Democratization
• I. Baltic Region
• II. Danube Region
• III. Adriatic Region
• IV. Black Sea Region
• Conclusion: Roads to Democracy
• List of Abbreviations of East European Political Party Names
• Index of Names
• Index of Party Names