In general, the Czech Republic of the last decade is a country that
has experienced a very successful populist mobilization. Different
from other countries in and outside the region, the successful Czech
populists have not articulated a national conservative programme.
The economic cleavage of right and left, previously the most important conflict, has been replaced by a choice between ‘populist
challenge’ versus ‘defence of liberal democracy’, but this cleavage
does not directly imply a choice between liberals and conservatives/
nationalists. The reasons are both due to the appropriation of some
liberal motifs by populists and because of the conservative elements
of their opponents. Some aspects of rule of law are under serious attack, and the quality of democracy has deteriorated through the concentration of power and its misuse by the populist leader. However,
there is no explicit programme of ‘illiberal democracy’ and, up to
now, no important attack on the division of power has taken place.
Nevertheless, the fact that the triumphant form of populism cannot be characterized as national conservative does not indicate an
absence of national conservative or xenophobic stances and agendas
in the Czech public debate. The Czech Republic is very Eurosceptic –
the most Eurosceptic country in the European Union – and, during
the migration crisis, the country declared strong solidarity with other
members of the Visegrád Group (V4) in its position against the remainder of the European Union as regards refugees. The Roman
Catholic Church has entered the public sphere with a conservative
agenda, which is a change from its weak, conformist and relatively
liberal voice of previous decades; but, at the same time, the Catholic Church is of much smaller relevance than in Poland, Slovakia
or Croatia. Neither same-sex marriage nor the Istanbul Convention
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 159
have been passed or ratified at the time of writing, and homophobia
and attacks on ‘gender ideology’ are still accepted by the government and parliament. At the same time, there is a strong discourse of
the Czech Republic as a ‘tolerant’ and ‘liberal’ country – often this
‘tolerance’ means lenience and an aggressive defence of sexism, but
still.
This leads to two possible alternative depictions: (1) the Czech
situation is subsumed by narratives of a ‘liberal democracy backlash’
and a national conservative revolution, which makes its specifics
invisible and can therefore be understood through frameworks defined mostly by the Polish and Hungarian situations (cf. Brubaker
2017), or (2) it is depicted as a completely ‘special case’, where some
important elements are missing (for example, a ‘conservative civil
society’; Hanley and Vachudova 2018), and thus, it needs special
analytical treatment (Pehe 2018).
To find a balanced way between both of these possibilities,
the main research questions of this chapter are as follows: Can we
consider the Czech case to be ‘populism without culture wars’, as
a situation where the rise of populist political forces was driven
mostly by an ‘apolitical’ technocratic ideology of competence, efficiency and performance, without conservative undertones? Moreover, does it mean the reaction against it also cannot be understood
in terms of a liberal reaction to conservative values? Or, should we
consider it a locally adapted version of the same phenomena, only
with some aspects muted or variated? What is the role played by
long-term patterns of national identity and medium-term development of post-communist democratic politics, and how are those
resources used and transformed by contemporary actors? To answer
these questions, I will outline the political conflicts of the third postcommunist decade, with a focus on those in which the content is
the relationship of the society towards (1) democracy, (2) the nation,
(3) the West, (4) gender and (5) the Catholic Church. Schematically posed, I will argue that the relationship towards (1) democracy
and (3) the West were key to structuring the debate. While the key
political cleavage was created around questions connected with
democracy (its meaning and quality), the change of relationship to
160 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
the West worked more on a level of the ‘definition of the situation’
rather than on a level of ‘political opinion’. The question of (2) nation was, to some degree, a ‘missing link’ in both debates; its vague
and weak concept prevented the formulation of a stronger national
conservative position, but, at the same time, it played some role in
various moments to underscore some anxieties. In the case of (4)
gender topics and (5) the position of the Catholic Church, these issues did not become central in political cleavages; however, their
changes can inform us about correspondences with broader trends
in Central Europe and the whole West.
This case study starts with the most important conflicts, which can
be framed as culture wars, and with their contextualization. Where
explanation was needed, I trace the roots of the medium-term postcommunist development and the long-term trajectory of the Czech
political culture to see which sources were actualized and how and
what change occurred in the 2010s. Thus, the goal is to find a deeper
historical context for the development of the Czech political culture
and its various path-dependencies, but without essentialism or determinism – from a perspective which will see them open to historical
development and reactualization in new political constellations and
relationships. In addition, I also map how these five selected topics in
the Czech culture wars overlap with the politics of identity, politics of
memory and politics of morality so as to discuss it in conclusion.
Defence of Democracy without a Democratic Political Culture?
At the beginning of the 2010s, the Czech Republic looked like
the promised land of right-wing versus left-wing competition. This
competition structured not only the conflict between the most
important parties, the Civic Democratic Party (ODS; Občanská
demokratická strana) and the Czech Social Democratic Party
(ČSSD; Česká strana sociálně demokratická), but also the positions
of the other parties. In 2010, the electoral triumph of right-wing
neoliberal parties was followed by the creation of a government of
austerity reforms, which then faced anti-austerity opposition from
the left-wing parties, trade unions and civic initiatives. In 2013, two
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 161
elections took place: In the first direct election of the president,
the candidate of the governing party, Karel Schwarzenberg, was
defeated by the former chairman of ČSSD Miloš Zeman. Then, after the fall of the right-wing government (because of a corruption
scandal), ČSSD won the parliamentary election, and its chairman,
Bohuslav Sobotka, became prime minister. Both elections could
be interpreted as a continuation and confirmation of the prevalence of the right-left cleavage. In fact, we can identify strong elements in these elections which make it possible to consider them
not only as a turning point in the culturalization of politics but
also as a problematization of our perception of the previous developments and the right-left cleavage in Czech politics. Why?
• The 2013 presidential election, the first by popular vote, could
be considered a conflict between the Left and the Right, since
Karel Schwarzenberg was the candidate of an austerity government and Miloš Zeman was a former chairman of the social democratic ČSSD and architect of its electoral victory in
1998 (he left the party in the 2000s). Karl Schwarzenberg had
the image of a liberal candidate, with the support of the urban
middle class, and played loosely both with his aristocratic
background and the image of a free-minded Bohemian liberal
(presented both as ‘punk’ and a ‘duke’ (kníže) by his supporters). Miloš Zeman, on the contrary, presented himself (as in
the 1990s) as a ‘candidate for the ten million underprivileged’
citizens. Supporters of both candidates culturalized and moralized the conflict to a considerable extent. Schwarzenberg’s
supporters worked with value, social, generational and aesthetic stigmatization of Zeman’s voters, depicting Zeman as
a ‘country bumpkin’, representing the worst the Czech Republic had to offer. Schwarzenberg meanwhile was presented as
the symbol of a better, middle-class and cosmopolitan Czech
Republic and at the same time open-minded. While the Duke
had a metropolitan and cosmopolitan image and was perceived as the candidate of Prague and the cities, Zeman was
presented as the candidate of ‘the rest’ and the countryside.
162 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
• Zeman used plebeian stylization and populist rhetoric. Even
before his candidacy, he had repeatedly presented strong Islamophobic views (‘There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim, just as there is no such thing as a moderate Nazi’), and,
during the electoral campaign, he spoke out against unemployed Roma and used anti-German nationalism. According
to some analyses, this (above all the exploitation of Sudeten
German expulsion topic) was the decisive strike which helped
Zeman win. After his victory, both Zeman and his liberal,
middle-class opponents – labelled and sometimes self-styled
as the Pražská kavárna (Prague coffee house) – continued their
polarizing strategies. President Zeman used a classical populist repertoire of various tools against elites, openly supported
the Islamophobic movement during the refugee crisis, tried to
use his competences beyond constitutional limits, supported
some right-wing populists (including Austrian president candidate Norbert Hofer) and presented himself as the ‘Czech
Trump’. His opponents continued to describe him as the representative of a worse, ‘boorish’ Czechia, as morally and even
aesthetically undeserving of being president of the republic.
• The parliamentary election in 2013 also looks like a continuation of the right-left competition, with ČSSD winning. But,
in fact, ČSSD gained just 20.45%, while 18.65% was gained by
ANO (‘Yes’ in Czech), a new political party beyond the left
and right spectrum, based on anti-corruption and technocratic populism which was founded by the second richest
businessman in the country, Andrej Babiš. While ČSSD presented themselves as a left-wing alternative to neoliberal austerity, ANO reacted against ‘corruption’ as a systemic problem
in Czech politics as a whole; they presented themselves as
a ‘new’ alternative to the ‘old’ political parties in their entirety.
Together with ANO, this populist accent was also presented
by Dawn of Direct Democracy (Úsvit přímé demokracie),
the party of Czech-Japanese businessman Tomio Okamura
that intended to return the Far Right to the Czech parliament,
where it been absent since 1998; the party gained 6.88%.
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 163
• But the rise of Andrej Babiš’s ‘anti-political’ populism was
a much more important challenge. Due to his vast wealth,
Babiš was able to skilfully connect economic, political and
media power (by buying a huge media group including
the most important serious daily newspaper) and produce
political marketing. His campaign rhetoric was based on
the binarity of a positive societal image as a whole and
the corruption of politicians. ‘We are not like politicians, we
work hard’, claimed Babiš in one slogan, adding the values
of efficiency, technocratic solutions and operative decisionmaking. His political style implies a high level of disgust
with the division of power. But this disgust was not articulated in ideological terms. He stressed that he is a ‘liberal
democrat’ who deserves to be salonfähig as his private business is an important beneficiary of EU subsidies.
• Even after some of these subsidies were problematized both
by domestic media, the opposition and police as well as by
the European Union, and Babiš’s relationship towards the union subsequently worsened, he still kept a relatively centrist
position and never formulated a political vision which would
mean an alternative to liberal democracy or contemporary
forms of European integration.
Both Zeman and Babiš confirmed their viability – Babiš won the 2017
parliamentary election and became prime minister, and Zeman defended his position and won a second term in 2018. During both of
these elections, the right-left cleavage was lost and replaced by another: that of ‘populists’ and ‘defenders of liberal democracy’.
At first glance, there were no strong culture wars around this
populist rise. Both Miloš Zeman and Andrej Babiš used, above all,
the rhetoric of leadership, competences and economic improvement.
They principally attacked the political parties and politicians (and,
especially in the case of Miloš Zeman, journalists and humanist
intellectuals), often with sweeping and moralist accusations, above
all of corruption. Their majoritarian populism also included some
attacks on ethnic or religious minorities and outsiders but no more
164 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
than was standard among other political forces (only Zeman’s Islamophobia was much higher than this standard). Both brought about
depoliticization based on a rhetoric of corruption in the political
class, economic performance (Babiš’s ‘running the state like a company’) and technocracy.
Much closer to culture wars were the conflicts around Zeman. He
was repeatedly described as a liar, a drunkard, a boor and an agent
of Russia and China. He provoked liberal intelligentsia through
various attacks like attacking the twentieth-century liberal journalism icon Ferdinand Peroutka and openly attacking mainstream
journalists, and providing support to communist or far-right tabloid
journalists with exclusive interviews.
In the case of Babiš it was more complicated. In the beginning,
this incredibly wealthy man – holding a fortune estimated to be
worth $1.4 billion in 2011 and thought to be $5 billion as of this
writing – articulated the widely shared discontent of many Czech
citizens with corruption and political parties. With large corruption
scandals touching almost all parties, even mainstream journalists and
a large part of liberal civil society have described Czech politics as
‘Palermo’. This selective view of corruption among politicians (and
not among businessmen) led to the fact that the second richest Czech
oligarch could become the leader of an influential anti-corruption
movement. To anti-corruption was added the rhetoric of ‘hard work’
and ‘pragmatic solutions’ (technocratic centrism against traditional
party politics), a mixture which was successful, especially because
it presented newness in comparison with the discredited political
class. As Babiš became more successful (in the end, he won the 2017
election decisively and marginalized the Left), the liberal, anticorruption civil society, which had partially paved his way, criticized
Babiš for his accumulation of economic, media and political power;
his populist rhetoric; and his technocratic style (Závodský 2019).
During the refugee crisis, Zeman and Babiš had fairly different positions. While Zeman publicly supported the Islamophobic
movement, Babiš waited for some time. His party included both
anti-refugee politicians as well as a few human rights liberals – its
minister of justice declared that the Czech Republic should accept
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 165
tens of thousands of refugees, much more than an EU refugee
quota would imply. It took some time for Babiš to understand that
the anti-refugee position was completely dominant in Czech society
and to therefore adopt a radical anti-refugee stance – and even then,
he signalled some openness to dealing with the rest of the European
Union (possibly in return for agricultural subsidies). In the end he
declared the defeat of refugee quotas to be his success.
A strong movement of social protest mobilized against both Zeman and Babiš. It culminated in large demonstrations organized
by the initiative A Million Moments for Democracy, which repeatedly drew over a hundred thousand participants. The movement
attempted to renew the ethos of the Velvet Revolution and in many
aspects – a stress on anti-corruption and depoliticization but motivated more by moralism than by pragmatism – mirrored some traits
of Babiš’s movement.
One party opposing the goverment of Babiš and the Left also
shared anti-corruption, centrism and a distance from the traditional
right-left competition: ANO’s main challenger, the Czech Pirate
Party (Pirates; Česká pirátská strana) – the most successful pirate
party in the European context and the first or second highest polling party between 2019 and 2021 – combined generational revolts
and a focus on ‘free internet’ with an ideology of anti-corruption,
transparency, centrist expertism and professionalism. Additionally,
their minor political partner, the centre-right Mayors and Independents (STAN; Starostové a nezávislí), emphasize practical municipal
experience against ‘politics’. The second oppositional grouping,
SPOLU (Together), is a mixture of right-wing conservatives, rightwing liberals and Christian democrats. The main party, ODS, is
a post-Thatcherite neoliberal conservative party cooperating with
the Polish Law and Justice (PiS; Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) party
in the euro-critical club of MEPs. The other parties, TOP09 and
the Christian Democratic Union (KDU; Křesťanská a demokratická
unie), work together in the Christian democratic club of MEPs.
Thus, the party, which is a key part of the ‘democratic bloc’ against
ANO’s populism, at the same time sides with the Polish national
conservatives in European politics.
166 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
It was political dynamics that forced Babiš to convert from an
opportunist ‘third party’ in the culture wars to a promoter of their
conservative pole. Trouble with EU control over investigations into
the misuse of subsidies from the union, as well as the Eurosceptic
positions of a large contingent of the Czech electorate had already
enticed him to take on the role of a strong defender of Czech national interests in the European elections. Electoral competition
with the Pirates and the desire to downplay his spectacular failure
during the COVID-19 crisis pushed Babiš to use culture war as one
of the main frames of his 2021 electoral campaign. His book preceding this campaign, titled Sdílejte, než to zakážou! (Share it before they
ban it!), is a rather paradoxical title for a book under the declared
authorship of the prime minister, but it is emblematic of the book
and campaign’s spirit. Babiš declared his will to ‘defend Czech interests’ against the EU elite and the ‘crazy neo-Marxists’. He has
held a firm anti-immigrant position, stressed the need to raise natality and has a good relationship with his ‘friend Orbán’. While this
tendency could become deeper and transform the identity of ANO
(depending primarily on the election results), in the run up to the
election it looks more like a tactical manoeuvre rather than an unchangeable expression of political identity.
Medium-Term Trajectories
Mobilization politics. To understand how this right-left cleavage was
replaced by a populism vs liberal democracy cleavage, we must
understand the nature of the original division. Both sides were
products of mobilization with strong populist elements. The most
important right-wing party, ODS, was founded in 1991 by Václav
Klaus and started by disseminating the idea that a neoliberal
economic transformation is a chance for everybody, through anticommunism, nationalism (the ‘Czech way’ to privatization) and
a critique of post-dissident liberal elites. Klaus’s political style in
this aspect was described as ‘mobilization politics’ (Žák 1997) as
it perpetually posed a basic question as to the nature of the new,
post-communist order and connected it to his own political
interest.
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 167
The opposite side of this cleavage was formed by Miloš Zeman
in the mid-1990s by a large-scale political campaign where he articulated resentment and frustration with the transformation. He expressed deep disgust with the nouveau riche and right-wing political
parties, and he was rather skilful in connecting it with a pro-Western
social democratic, humanist, populist vision and programme for
the ‘lower ten million’ – with an approximate population of ten
million in the Czech Republic, this implied a presumed high level
of inclusivity as well as exclusion of the rich in society (‘Upper ten
thousand’). To some extent, the left-wing politics both in the Social
Democratic Party and, a fortiori, in the Communist Party (KSČM;
Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy) were connected with some
level of conservative values, which were made even stronger by another strong personality, ČSSD chairman Jiří Paroubek.
Majoritarianism vs moral populism. Between 1992 and 2013,
the main competitions in parliamentary elections were between right
and left. But, at least for the duration of the 1990s, there was also another political polarization personified by post-dissident President
Václav Havel and by Václav Klaus. Havel inspired moral criticism of
Klaus’s politics. While he did not have alternative arguments to his
economic policy (his criticism of the state and ‘structures’ was even
somehow compatible with neoliberal concepts – cf. Eyal 2000), he
did present a strong moral critique of its results: the ‘bad mood’ in
Czech society. Two mobilizations in 1999–2001, to large extent inspired by him, tried to revive the ethos of the Velvet Revolution and
defend the transformation reforms, but they demanded an end to
the compromised representatives of both the right and left parties.
These movements often considered themselves liberal movements
against the excessive power of the political parties and for the defence of ‘civil society’ and the independence of public media. But,
at the same time, they also had a strong element of ‘moral populism’
(Znoj 2017) and ‘mobilization against politics instead of political
mobilization” (Bělohradský 2000).
What gave these mobilizations their strength was an agreement
between the right-wing ODS and the left-wing ČSSD that the ODS
would tolerate the Social Democrat minority government in 1998.
168 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
This agreement was described as a cynical corruptive calculus and
a dangerous power cartel. While the citizens’ mobilization was full
of moralist contempt for the political class, Klaus and Zeman’s rhetoric contained contempt for the ideology of civil society and posited the absoluteness of electoral legitimacy. In their imagination,
democracy should be reduced to an electoral competition between
strong individuals and their parties, similar to market competition in
the economy. Their world was a world of winners and losers, where
the majority delegates its power to a strong party which should not
be limited in its power to govern. The moral populism of the movements met here the majoritarian arrogance of the democratic political parties’ populist leaders.
Anti-communism without nationalism and the revolt against postcommunism. Anti-communism was a strong element of the Czech
political culture after 1989. To a large extent, it was a reaction above
all against the previous two decades of decaying actually existing
socialism connected with the Soviet military occupation and largescale social cynicism. But anti-communism also homogenized
the highly repressive 1950s and social euphoria of the 1960s in one
image of ‘criminal communism’. This anti-communism was mobilized by the Right not only against the Communist Party – in coalition with the left-wing bloc, it was the second largest party in 1992
and maintained its strength as a party with 10–14% of the electorate
until 2017, when it fell to 7.76% – but also against the post-dissident
liberals from Civic Movement (OH; Občanské hnutí) in 1992 and
against ČSSD (Koubek et al. 2012). After 2002, anti-communism
was mobilized once more, declaring it a moral scandal that the Communist Party still legally exists.
This anti-communism was the Czech version of the politics of
memory, and it included a strong conservative dimension, including
rhetoric of a struggle for the ‘national memory’. However, its predisposition was more liberal than conservative, and it had problems
with nationalism as Czech communism had been rather successful
at integrating nationalism into its ideology; thus, anti-communism
had to be very critical of many aspects concerning the dominant version of national identity. Some versions of anti-communist rhetoric
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 169
contained strong dissatisfaction with the post-communist reality,
especially thanks to elements of continuity with the previous era,
but also because there was a widespread tendency to defend postcommunist liberal democracy and capitalism against any radical
criticism. Anti-communism therefore did not become the basis for
connecting conservativism and nationalism as it did in Poland or
Hungary, where memory veins and political opportunities worked
in a different way. Moreover, the role of both the conservative party
in articulating frustration with the transformation and the position
of the older generation and the lower strata of society was already, to
some extent, taken by the Czech Communist Party.
Long-Term Trajectories
One of the constitutive Czech political self-images is a story about
the ‘long democratic tradition’ of the Czech nation. We can find
some indirect predecessors of this image in Romantic nationalism
and the essentialist idea of ‘Slavic democracy’, which was the undertone of mainstream historical conceptions in the nineteenth century
(cf. Havelka 2001). A new version of this image was paradoxically
created at this time by Tomáš G. Masaryk, who criticized both
the pan-Slavic sentiments and historical falsifications which had
helped to infuse the story of ancient Slavic democracy into the country’s historical knowledge. In his quasi-universalist, Western-centric
conception, he considered democracy, together with other ‘values
of humanity’, to be at the core of the Czech national programme
(Masaryk 1927, Havelka 2001, Slačálek 2019). This reflected
the interwar period and the Czechoslovak Republic’s standing as
‘the only one democratic state in Central Europe’, in contrast to
Hungarian, Polish and, at the end of this period, the Austrian and
German dictatorships. In 1945–8 and again in the 1960s, these moments in the ‘Czech democratic tradition’ worked as the argument
for a ‘specific path to socialism’ and, in the 1980s and 1990s, as an
argument for a Western democratic identity against violent inclusion in the Soviet Bloc. Reference to 1968’s Prague Spring worked as
substitution for 1948, hiding an important component of the Czech
democratic tradition: Unlike in other Central European countries,
170 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
Sovietization of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia had strong democratic legitimacy given that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ; Komunistická strana Československa) was the winner
of the 1946 election. This image of a ‘unique democratic past’ was
complemented during the 1990s by images of the Czech Republic as
a Central European ‘star pupil’ (premiant) in democratic transition
and economic reforms.
Upon critical re-evalution of some parts of the dissent, as well as
part of Czech historiography in the 1990s, this myth of the democratic tradition has considerable ruptures, and some of them may
contribute to explaining the contemporary situation. Petr Pithart et
al. (Podiven 1991) underlined the fact that democratic politics was
developed very quickly under a framework of ethnic nationalism,
and the ethnic principle mostly prevailed over democratic values.
In fact, interwar Czechoslovakia (the ‘First Republic’) could be described as a Czech ethnocracy based on privileged positions among
the Western allies. The loss of this position in the context of Nazi
expansion caused two corrections of ‘democracy’: an authoritarian,
conservative, Catholic and racist short-lived ‘Second Republic”
(1938–9) and a pre-Stalinist ‘Third Republic’ (1945–8) based on antiGerman national unity and a redefinition of democratic essentialism
to socialist essentialism.
The Czech political culture was mostly a ‘nation in opposition’ to
Habsburg empire, if we can summarize the main approaches characteristic of its formation. According to historian Jan Tesař (1989/2001),
a strong element of gesture, theatrical pose, moralization and aestheticization of politics were also present in the political culture of
the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918–38. Formal democracy (corrupted by party oligarchies) was complemented by the extraordinary
position of its leaders, Masaryk and then Beneš. They had to embody
the ‘values’ of ‘democracy’, and their ‘enlightened despotism’ was
to some extent legitimate and necessary; however, their ‘personality
cult’ to a large extent prevented the development of a real democratic and civic culture. In Klimek’s reconstruction (1996, 1998), formal party democracy was corrected and complemented by a shadow
network of presidential influence called ‘the Castle’.
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 171
These elements in the Czech democratic tradition were reinforced
by forty years of state socialist dictatorship, which made it, for
the most part, impossible to develop a democratic political culture
in the public sphere. The perverted concepts of ‘unity’, ‘equality’,
‘the masses’ and ‘the people’ were mostly present in the public
sphere instead (Fidelius 1998). Meanwhile, in dissent, various
concepts of democratic political culture competed. Many of them
(‘solidarity of the shaken’, ‘antipolitical politics’ or ‘parallel polis’)
underlined not only the characteristic ‘nation in opposition’ but also
a small, moral minority in opposition to the opportunist behaviour
of the majority. This would prepare part of the ground in the society
for competition between aggressive majoritarianism and moral populism (Žák 1997, Znoj 2015, Slačálek and Šitera in manuscript).
National Exclusivism without Nationalism?
The refugee crisis represented a turning point. Yes, there was a culture war around it, but there was also a lot of consensus:
• There was no single party in the parliament which could be
considered pro-refugee or even pro–EU refugee quotas. Relatively small Islamophobic mobilizations (from hundreds to
thousands in the numbers of demonstrators) were strongly
supported by media coverage, by politicians (like President Zeman, who supported Islamophobes, or others who distanced
themselves from them but at the same time refused EU refugee
quotas) and by opinion polls – in 2016, only 23% of respondents declared their country should help refugees, the smallest
number in the EU (Standard Eurobarometer 86, 2016).
• The Islamophobic movement had two parts which shared
the essentialization of the ‘Muslim Menace’ (Slačálek and
Svobodová 2018, Čada and Frantová 2019). While the weaker
portion of the movement was connected with the Far Right,
a stronger segment stressed the incompatibility of Islam
with the liberal values of Europe. This more important sector of the movement found some level of societal support
172 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
under the leadership of associate professor of biology Martin
Konvička and commercial sociologist Petr Hampl. Where these
factions of the Islamophobic movement did not differ was in
their belief of the necessity for a brutal reaction against political Islam and its European allies. While far right leader Adam
B. Bartoš publicly threatened to hang ‘traitors’ with nooses at
a demonstration on 1 July 2015, Martin Konvička wrote in some
social media debates about the necessity for Muslim ‘concentration camps’ in the near future and about grinding Muslims
into ‘meat and bone meal’. Both factions of the movement also
shared a criticism of the liberal, permissive and tolerant West
and especially of human rights, anti-racist NGOs and feminism.
• President Zeman openly articulated his support for the goals
of the movements. On the national holiday of 17 November
2015, Zeman organized an event where he spoke on a stage
together with the most important individuals in the Islamophobic movement, including Konvička. Zeman here openly supported the Islamophobic movement against a ‘media massage’
concerning the migration crisis, and he identified his voice with
the ‘voice of the nation’. Only after Konvička’s more unacceptable statements (about ‘concentration camps’ and ‘meat and
bone meal’) were published did the president distance himself
personally from Konvička, but not from support of the movement.
• Former president Václav Klaus was even more radical. While
for a long time he never accepted the Islamophobes demonization of Islam, he completely shared their criticism of the European Union. He even published a short book with Petr
Weigl, Stěhování národů, s.r.o. (2015; translated as ‘Migration
period inc.’ but published in English as Europe All Inclusive,
2017) where they described mass migration as the weapon
the EU elites use to destroy European nation states and
the ethnic majorities inside them and to ‘create a new man’ in
a transnational framework (Weigel and Klaus 2015: 51). Klaus
also actively supported the German AfD and personally participated in the election campaign of the party.
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 173
• Some parts of liberal and left-wing milieus criticized harshly
the racist and Islamophobic positions. Nevertheless, they
mostly accepted some part of their definition of the situation.
Much more present was solidarity with the rest of the European Union than the will to accept a substantial number of
Muslim refugees. In the 2018 presidential election, Miloš Zeman defended his position by using his image as a defender
of Czech ‘national interests’ against the EU and their refugee
quotas. Even his main rival, the former head of the Czech
Academy of Sciences and the liberal camp’s presidential candidate, did not support the acceptance of refugees. What is
more, he even criticized Zeman for his role in accepting Muslim refugees during the Kosovo War in 1999.
During the refuge crisis, the movement was sometimes seen as
a return to ethnic nationalism. The movement used the Czech flag
and sometimes rhetorically employed the ‘defence of the nation’.
The president, for his part, claimed, ‘This country is ours’, even using it as the name for a book of his interviews. We can also find
some national moments in the context of the movement; for example, some of its participants also took part in the movement against
Barnavernet in Norway. Together with the question of the rights
of parents and conspiracy theories about ‘juvenile justice’, it was
also connected with the idea of somebody wanting to steal and denationalize Czech children – sometimes with a strong reference to
the memory of this practice’s use during the Nazi occupation.
Can we explain this all as a return of ethnic nationalism? One
of the main arguments of this chapter is that ethnic nationalism is
not the most important part of the explanation. On the contrary, it
is only a partial and subordinate function; a much more important
part is declinism, an ideology resting on the decline of the West as
a whole which must be recognized and faced. It does not mean that
nationalism is not present. But it does mean, much more so, that this
ethnic nationalism is somehow void and contentless; Islamophobes
used Czech flags and sometimes other symbols, they spoke about
‘our country’, but this did not indicate specific content beyond
174 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
the defence of sovereignty (Slačálek and Svobodová 2018). The discourse of the Czech Islamophobes can hardly be considered ‘local’
or ‘national’; it is adopted from Western sources. Even the harsh criticism of the Czech Islamophobes towards the European Union was
in fact proof of their complete integration into the West and the EU;
they considered the problems of these entities as their own problems.
Medium- and Long-Term Trajectories:
An Absence of Resources for Czech Nationalism?
The most important characteristic which can be attributed to Czech
nationalism since 1945 is that it is saturated, and thus, it is only banal (in a Billigian sense – cf. Billig 1995),1
especially in comparison
with other Central European countries – no lost Kresy like Poland,
no Trianon like Hungary, no humiliation under Czech tutelage like
Slovakia. Ladislav Holý (1996) described Czech nationalism as having two typical modes: (1) as a nationalism based on self-denial, on
the idea that, unlike others (for example, backward Slovaks or other
Central European or Balkan nations), the Czechs are not nationalists, that they are modern, universalist (i.e., Western) citizens, who
overcame nationalist backwardness, and (2), as a nationalism of little men, connected with distance from politics, an idea of apolitical
truth and self-conception that, unlike others (especially Germans),
Czechs do not have ideas of national greatness – it is connected
much more with self-defence or with small apolitical values.
According to some critics (Kelly 1996), Holý’s description omits
the ethnic and potentially aggressive aspects of Czech nationalism,
with its long tradition leading up to the Young Czechs at the end of
the nineteenth century. They are covered under the strata described
by Holý, but they sometimes erupt. For Kelly, one such eruption was
the popularity of violent racist skinheads in the 1990s.
This debate corresponds with two streams present since the fin
de siècle: On the one hand, there is the ethnic particularism represented by the Young Czechs and connected with anti-German
and sometimes antisemitic positions. On the other hand, there is
1 I owe this charakterization of Czech nationalism to Pavel Barša.
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 175
something that we can call ‘strategical quasi-universalism’ connected with Masaryk – the founding of the independent state in
progressivist democratic ideology,2 ‘Western universalism’ (and
the power of the Allies). His attempted humanist reinterpretation
of nationalism left many problems unsolved, including the dilemma
between ethnic and political nationalism (Rádl 1928/1993). Thus,
the First Czechoslovak Republic could be understood as a Czech
ethnocracy that oppressed other nationalities – mainly Germans.
The failure of this project in Munich 1938 led to a national trauma.
The rise of nationalism coincided with the first year of Nazi occupation with a new form of nationalism both at home (Rataj
1997, Tesař 2006; Šustrová 2020) and in the foreign resistance.
At the end of war, the result was a ‘Slavic’ reorientation – all but
guaranteeing the 1945 ethnic cleansing – found in an alliance with
the USSR. We can conditionally accept Holý’s description but with
emphasis placed on the elements made visible by Kelly. Often here
we see a self-denial of nationalism and its suppression through
quasi-universalist positions. At the same time, these positions are
connected with a strongly felt national interest: be it Masaryk’s embrace of Western universalism in connection with the establishment
of the new state (and guarantees against Austro-Hungarian or German revisionism), be it Czech acceptance of communism pertaining
to the approval of the expulsion of Sudeten Germans (and guarantees against German revisionism) or be it Havel’s new Westernism
2 If we consider one of the key ‘culture wars’ at the end of the nineteenth century to have been the conflictual
relationship of various national societies to the Jews and antisemitism, then the Czech equivalent of the Dreyfus
affair is the trial of Leopold Hilsner (1899–1900). Tomáš Masaryk, later to become the Czechoslovak president,
fought against the accusation of blood libel that was made against the Jews. His minority position later be‑
came a lieu du mémoire and, retrospectively, Masaryk won the struggle over national orientation in spite of
the fact that during the actual struggle he had defended an unpopular position against a massive antisemitic
wave. The argumentation he used is important: He attacked antisemitism as stupid, non-Western and unmodern
(Strobach 2015). Antisemitism remained an undercurrent in Czech nationalism and was expressed in times of
crisis – at the beginning of the republic (Frankl and Szabó 2015) or after its fall (Rataj 1997). But the later success
of Hilsner’s defender, Masaryk, and his central position in the Czech national pantheon, as well as the post-Ho‑
locaust discreditation of antisemitism, contributed to the fact that the Communist Party, at the beginning of
the 1950s and in the 1970s, was not very successful in its efforts to use antisemitic elements, nor were antisemi‑
ties after 1989 (e.g., Dolejší’s ‘Analýza 17. listopadu 1989’, Týdeník Politika or Adam B. Bartoš).
176 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
connected with Western integration (and guarantees against possible Russian revisionism).
As we have seen in the previous section, since the Czech nation
can be considered a ‘nation in opposition’ after 1848 and especially 1867, there was also a strong concept of ‘oppositional unity’,
especially against the Germans. After 1945, this will for unity was
strongly present – politically in an almost consensual violent expulsion of Sudeten Germans – and it was instrumentalized especially
by the Communists. Their intellectual mastermind, Zdeněk Nejedlý, connected a reinterpreted nationalist tradition, Stalinism and
the neo-Romantic Völkisch concept of ‘the people’ into one of the key
ideological bases of communist legitimacy (Nejedlý 1946, Kopeček
2019, Křesťan 1996, 2012). Of course, the most important part of this
ideology was unity against the German ‘revanchism’.
After the failure of a national socialist synthesis, hopes for national democratic socialism in 1968 lost their legitimacy. The regime’s nationalism became an ideology of what was in fact a national
humiliation and imperial occupation.
After 1989, with many other societal shocks, a debate about
Czech-German relations took place. Nationalist forces on both
the far left (Communists) and the far right (Republicans) margins of
Czech politics used this topic as one of the key agitation instruments.
But, in the end, mainstream Czech politicians united in accepting
some level of agreement with Germany while remaining resolute in
defence of the Czech view of common history and in a refusal to
dialogue with Sudeten Germans. This, together with the populist
style of the Czech social democratic leader Miloš Zeman, contributed to the end of the far-right Republicans (SPR–RSČ; Sdružení
pro republiku–Republikánská strana Československa) in the Czech
parliament after the 1998 election.
The absence of a far-right parliamentary party between 1998 and
2013 (and the position of 1990s far-right leader Miroslav Sládek
and the 2010s’ Tomio Okamura as both eccentric and clown) appears to confirm the saturated nature of Czech nationalism. But
there are some facts which problematize this view: Collective
anxieties connected with the Sudeten Germans, some of which were
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 177
almost consensual at the beginning of the 2000s; the popularity of
some nationalist artists (Daniel Landa); or the widespread racism
and anti-Gypsyism are all banal self-evidence of some ethnic ideas
of a nation prevalent in Czech society. We can connect it, in conclusion, through what seems to be a strong demand for the defence of
a not strongly declared national position. An implicit and unclearly
defined nation demands sometimes clear defensive stances.
Westernism (and Declinism) without Europeanism?
The 2015 refugee crisis was a decisive moment for the political imagination based on the image of Western civilizational decline. But
the opportunity created by it and by the rewriting of political cleavages was filled by broader declinist imaginations. Various actors
from different camps changed their political identity or offered new
ideas. A few examples:
• The sociologist Jan Keller, a long-time organic intellectual
of the environmental, alter-globalization, anti-war and antiausterity movements and then a social democratic MEP, wrote
prolifically during the migration crisis, warning against the acceptance of refugees and criticizing the supposed hypocrisy of
EU elites. Jan Keller even published in right-wing publications,
including the preface to a book by far-right sociologist and
activist Petr Hampl about the civilizational treason of the leftwing and liberal intelligentsia accepting migration – Hampl
actually prophesized civil war in Europe and urged the ‘natives’
to be more brutal than Muslims in that war (Hampl 2018).
• Security expert, former diplomat and human rights activist Tomáš Pojar – founder and former director of People in
Need, an important humanitarian and liberal NGO during the 1990s – expressed his anti-refugee sentiment within
the framework of European decline (and an inability to adopt
Israeli security standards; he even welcomed the supposed extra-judicial murders of migrant route organizers by European
security services). The former dissident and political prisoner
178 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
(and later intelligence officer) František Stárek, during his
senate election campaign, devised the slogan (Let’s start a)
‘European Guantanamo’. But the declinist diagnosis was not
limited to the refugee topic.
• The refugee crisis corresponded with the huge success of
a group of Egyptologists (Miroslav Bárta), historians (Martin
Kovář), a biologist (Stanislav Komárek) and a military officer
(Otakar Foltýn) who focus on past ‘collapses’ of civilizations
and prophesize a similar collapse in the case of contemporary
Western civilization. They started to formulate their diagnosis
in the context of the economic and eurozone crises. Some were
open supporters of austerity government, and they shared an
austerity explanation for the situation. However, soon after,
other crises during the 2010s gave this team a lot of material to
develop declinist prophecies.
• Alongside this, important media outlets, whether the far-right
tabloid Parlamentní listy or the serious portal Echo24 featuring top Czech right-wing journalists, started to promote a vision of the West as decadent, going beyond all proportionand
having lost exactly those values that made it attractive during
the Cold War and shortly after. Crazy left-wing ideas (or
‘communism’), according to these right-wing Czech journalists, ‘now are coming from the West’.
In many cases the feeling of declinism pre-dated the refugee crisis
and had different sources. Keller was long a prophet of deep environmental crises and then of deep social conflict based on capitalism’s
inability to escape a destructive level of social inequality thanks to its
destruction of the welfare state. But most of the declinist milieu has
a much more conservative neoliberal background or ideological inclinations; for example, biologist Komárek considered the welfare state
and even universal suffrage an ‘evolutionary disadvantage’ (2010).
After the refugee crisis, declinism became a firm and important
part of the public imagination. A huge part of the media and persons from various intellectual and political milieu started to share
a similar discourse.
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 179
Schematically posed, we can reconstruct these elements of declinist discourse:
• A decaying society with overly complex structures, including
the welfare state and sometimes even democracy, which loses
legitimacy and sees a decreasing economic performance, and
thus, it needs to be radically simplified. According to Egyptologist Miroslav Bárta (2019), there are laws to the development of civilization, one of which he calls Herakleitan: What
makes a civilization great also causes its collapse. In the case
of the Western civilization, it is above all bureaucracy.
• This complexity sometimes also has a moral dimension:
Norms are not clear but very complicated, which causes
the loss of legitimacy and makes important the role of lawyers
and/or moral specialists.
• Elites are disconnected from the people, and a reunion is
needed to prevent societal collapse.
• New and unprecedented challenges demand new decisive political figures and maybe also extraordinary measures.
• The society loses its traditional sources of vitality, above all
its traditional gender order of aggressive masculinity and submissive femininity. We have lost the repressive but stimulating
Vaterland and now live in a caring Mutterland, depriving us of
any responsibility (biologist Stanislav Komárek).
Medium-Term Trajectory: The Development of Czech Euroscepticism
If we want to find the sources for declinism, we must focus on (1)
the change in relation to the West and (2) the roots of Czech Euroscepticism.
First, we can see a broad fascination with the West throughout
the 1990s and the will to ‘return to Europe’. Criticism was already
present at this time, as it was present in the work of forerunners of
this discourse like Kundera (1983). The Czechs sometimes presented
themselves as a nation which proved loyalty to Western values under harsh conditions of dictatorship and Eastern occupation, and
thus, they know them better (paradigmatically in Havel’s speech to
180 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
the US Congress in 1990). Sometimes, some elements of the West,
such as feminism, were criticized as alienating people from the ‘real
West’ or as simply being crazy. But these were only adjuncts to
a general identification with the West or, sometimes, a form of compensation for the subordinated position.
After full integration into NATO and the European Union,
the goal of ‘return’ had been achieved, but it came with the slow
realization of two facts: (1) the country’s semi-peripherical position
within it and (2) the deep problems and weaker relative position of
the West itself. The stereotypical positive image of the West as
a role model was in some parts of the society replaced during that
time by a stereotypical negative image of the West – migrant crimes
in the streets, crazy Western universities, almost failed states within
the EU. An acceleration of this process came with the refugee crisis: The Western part of the EU could be described then not only
as the land of failing cities, with no-go zones full of street crime
and political Islam, but also as an oppressor which, by enforcing
refugee quotas, was forcing Czechs to repeat its mistake. It was
also the exact moment that differences with the West – whether
the absence of a colonial past, which exculpates Czechs from special obligations to poor countries in this context (as declared by
ČSSD MP Lubomír Zaorálek – cf. Kalmar 2018, Sayyid 2018), or
the country’s relative ethnic homogeneity – were underlined and
re-evaluated.
Second, strong Euroscepticism came relatively quickly, led by
Klaus especially as regards the debate about the European Constitution (already in 2005) and then the Treaty of Lisbon (2007–9).
As we have seen before, the Czechs are, according to some polls,
the most Eurosceptic nation in the EU. While this position was not
very strongly articulated because of fragmentation among Eurosceptic political forces, it had its voice in President Klaus and some
movements supporting him.
Long before the refugee crisis, it changed from a debate mostly
about political power (nation state or EU) into a culture war of
some form, with the European Union being criticized for articulating a mixture of ‘human-rightism, ecologism, feminism,
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 181
multiculturalism’, which was recognized as a new version of leftwing politics by Klaus. It was exactly this refusal of the EU and
especially the Treaty of Lisbon which unified a relatively weak
conservative Czech civil society (Akce Dost, Euportál) and led to
the integration of some far-right figures such as Adam B. Bartoš. This
alliance organized street demonstrations supporting Václav Klaus in
his decision not to sign the treaty (until he changed his opinion and
signed it). They also became the epicentre of one culture war when
one important member of this initiative Ladislav Bátora became in
2011 an important official at the Ministry of Education, Youth and
Sports. The media, Jewish organizations, anti-government initiatives
but also liberal parts of the government coalition demanded his resignation because of his far-right connections. President Klaus then
identified the situation as a ‘dictatorship of political correctness’
and publicly defended Bátora. He was unsuccessful; Bátora had to
resign.
For a long time, Klaus’s position framed the union and many liberal topics as a new ‘left menace’ and based his position on the negation of communism. Thus, he labeled the EU as ‘socialist Brussels’
and so on. But, at the end of the 2010s, he declared that communism
also had some good aspects – its isolation from the West (which he
had criticized very harshly before) defended Czechs against feminism and some other Western evils.3
Anti-gender Mobilization without Feminism?
During the 2010s, some important public controversies connected
with gender took place in the Czech Republic. While they never
became central political issues, they attracted some attention and
polarized views; thus, they can definitely be considered culture wars
or perhaps ‘low-intensity’ culture wars. What follows is a brief summary of some of these:
3 Polák, M., ‘Komunismus nás paradoxně ochránil před genderismem a feminismem, prohlásil Klaus’, Aktuálně, September 11, 2019, https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/komunismus-nas-paradoxne-ochranil-pred-gende‑
rismem-a-feminis/r~550cc428d48811e982ef0cc47ab5f122/ (accessed June 26, 2021).
182 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
• First of all, there were a few controversies framed by one side as
defending freedom of speech or artistic expression. The feminist opponents argued that this misunderstood this usage of
freedom of speech and artistic expression, as it results in an
incorrect definition of the role of educational institutions and
spreads sexist culture. (1) The first of these conflicts revolved
around the Miss Charles University pageant (2011–13), which
faced criticism from feminist student activists for sexism and
a commercial misuse of the university’s name. After strong criticism, the competition did not take place in 2014. (2) The other
dispute involved an exhibition of nude photographs in the library of the Academy of Sciences, which provoked a protest
by the professional Gender Expert Chamber and led to the exhibition’s premature end a few days later. Opponents of
the exhibition argued it dishonoured female scientists and there
was no connection to science; conversely, they were attacked for
being puritans or a ‘feminist Taliban’ (Professor of Psychology
Cyril Höschl). (3) Another conflict came when some feminists
criticized a poem of Jiří Žáček in the textbooks 7- and 8-yearold children, called ‘What Are Girls in the World for?’ (‘K čemu
jsou holky na světě?’).4
While the poet and his supporters
protested against the ‘censorship’ of ‘gender warriors’, his opponents discussed gender stereotypes in the education process.
• During the refugee crisis, one of the topics highlighted by the Islamophobic movement was gender. It was done in a twofold way:
The movement stressed the rights of women in Islamic countries
and, simultaneously, criticized the feminist agenda as an important element in Western civilizational ‘decadence’, a deviation
from the ‘natural order’ and vitality. Thus, this movement, with
the important component of women’s activism – one part of
the movement called itself the ‘Angry Mothers’ – targeted feminism as an integral part of their declinist diagnosis (cf. Slačálek and Svobodová 2018, Svatoňová 2020, Vochocová 2021).
4 The poem reads as follows: “What are girls in the world for? To become mothers and smile sweetly down
on someone who is small.”
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 183
• The ratification of the Istanbul Convention continued from
2010 until 2015 almost without media concern, and it was not
an important topic at the time. Only after 2018, when Prime
Minister Babiš announced his intention to finalize the ratification process, did the treaty become a significant matter
(Fellegi 2020). Activity against it was initiated by a letter
from Czech representatives of various Christian churches and
underlined by Petr Piťha’s apocalyptical sermon (see the next
section). But Catholic resistance found other followers, especially right-wing liberal but also left-wing conservative opponents of ‘gender ideology’. As of this writing in early 2021,
the treaty has still not been ratified in the Czech Republic.
While these controversies were present in the Czech public sphere,
a much stronger reaction was attracted by the images of Western
feminism. Special attention was caused by the Me Too campaign and
the transgender movement, and not by their relatively weak and muted
Czech forms but by their heated debate in the West. The conservative
perception of both was connected with the image of a decadent West
which had gone ‘too far’ and could lose its ‘basic’ and ‘natural’ institutions and intuitions (like ‘men are men and women are women’). While
Me Too was described as a de facto prohibition of almost any flirting,
a ‘67 sexes’ image became a meme present in the rhetoric of conservative
politicians defending the ‘normal world’. Thus, anti-feminist discourse
was part of the declinist discourse about the decadence of the West.
However, together with this general characterization of the situation, there is also another aspect which can be understood better
from a longer time comparison focused on the three post-communist
decades.
Medium-Term Trajectory: Post-socialist Feminism
Various authors have analysed the ambivalent legacy of the state socialist dictatorship. Some of them (Wagnerová 2017, Lišková 2018)
underline the important role of dictatorship in promoting women’s
emancipation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when some reforms
arrived sooner and more radically than in the West – starting in
184 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
the 1960s, a return to conservative ‘normal life’ and ‘normal family’ became the new preference and peaked under normalization.
Other authors highlight the low level of political participation
among women, the destruction of an independent feminist movement and the subordination of women’s emancipation as regards
the intentions of the regime (Nečasová 2011, Havelková and OatesIndruchová 2014). We can conclude that there was an important
level of emancipation but definitely not equality (considering both
the division of roles and women’s participation in political power);
however, we can also call it, in a paradoxical manner, repressive emancipation – conducted from above, in an authoritarian framework
which absolved women from many forms of actorship, especially of
possible feminist political actorship.
This paradoxical ambivalence was somehow mirrored by the
mostly male-dominated dissident movement. According to some reflections of participating women, they did not develop a feminist
critique of ‘their’ men so as not to undermine their position in
the context of the repressive regime (Bělohradský 2007, cf. Linková
and Straková 2017). But it was not only the difference between situations in the Eastern Bloc and the West; this difference translated into
political opinions. As Havel partially analyses and partially performs
in his Anatomy of Reticence (Havel 1986), dissidents felt a strong ambivalence towards Western feminist impulses, considering some of
them to be absurdly pathetic and inadequate, or as they called it,
dada (Havel 1986, cf. Ivancheva 2007).
This setting produced its results during the 1990s: The ‘open society’ and reconstructed pluralist public space were not very open to
feminism. Many opportunities opened by the new regime were much
better used by men – it was mostly they who became the top politicians
and entrepreneurs as well as important and influential journalists.5
Feminism as an approach was considered not only to be ‘dada’ but
also ‘crazy’ (underlining and presenting some shocking aspects
5 Šimůnková, T., ‘Muži znovu získali svá stará loviště, říká spisovatelka a publicistka Alena Wagnerová’, Právo, October 11, 2017, https://www.novinky.cz/kultura/salon/clanek/muzi-znovu-ziskali-sva-stara-loviste-rikaspisovatelka-a-publicistka-alena-wagnerova-40047806 (accessed June 26, 2021).
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 185
of feminist activism from selected Western contexts) or even ‘totalitarian’, a new ideology similar to Marxism positing one group of
people against the other. Feminism was mocked in the media, with
the strong influence of emigrant writers Josef Škvorecký and Ota
Ulč, who testified to the declared absurdity of Western feminism
(Čmejrková 1998, Hašková et al. 2006). Even many defenders of
women’s rights distanced themselves from feminism in this context.
Feminist ideas and milieu were very weak both in terms of activists
and organizations and in terms of their position in the public sphere
and politics. ‘Groups defending women’s rights did not have access
to official institutions, and their agenda was not accepted as a part
of established political discourse […] neither institutional, nor discourse opportunities were open to them’ (Císař 2008: 99–100).
Starting in 1998, changes in the position of the feminist agenda
were brought about by a new social democratic government and,
above all, by processes of European integration. Gender conditionalities opened space for gender-related NGOs and their ‘transactional activism’ (Císař 2008); some gender-related topics were
mainstreamed in the media, and some elements of the feminist
agenda became important parts of the Europeanization package.
While sometimes feminism was still described as dada, it was already
too important to only be mocked.
Thus, we could consider the rise of the anti-feminist position
and its importance in the public sphere as well as in some political
discourses to be some form of backlash, a reaction to this alienating
and Europeanized ideology which did not have roots in the domestic society. However, this would probably be misleading as it would
lead us to forget about the most important aspect of the conflicts described above: These culture wars are ‘wars’ in so far as they have two
real sides. After all, the feminists were the winners of all three cases
described above as examples of the struggle for ‘freedom of speech’.
Gender experts and feminist activists as well as female and sometimes
male citizens identifying with their demands are present here. What
changed after a decade of mockery and exclusion in the 1990s and
another decade of Europeanization in the 2000s is the fact that, in
the 2010s, we can speak about the successful embedding of at least
186 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
some feminist approaches in at least some part of society (especially
the new generation), and its ability to use some institutional and discourse opportunities. While the anti-feminist imagination was fed, as
in previous cases of anti-feminist discourses, prevalently through images of Western feminism, it was made more acute by the fact that this
feminism had also found its Czech bearers. And vice versa, the presence of a strong anti-feminist discourse both in the form of aggressive
ideological criticism of ‘gender ideology’ and in the form of unpolitical reactions revealing primitive sexist prejudices broadly present in
Czech society, provoked into being and intensity both feminist activism and the mainstreaming of feminist positions.
Christianism without Christians?
With 34.5% of the population declaring ‘no religion’ and another
44.7% declaring ‘no stated religion’, the Czech Republic is considered one of the most atheist countries, sometimes even the most
atheist (competing with Latvia and the former German Democratic
Republic). Sometimes there is debate as to whether the lack of religious belief in the country is ‘real’ atheism or ‘something-ism’ (Koci
and Roubik 2015). While the Catholic Church is the largest church
in the Czech Republic, the number of Catholics in censuses show
a sharp decline: 82.0% in 1920, 78.5% in 1930, 76.3% in 1950, 39.0%
in 1991, 26.8% in 2001 and 10.4% in 2011.
At the same time, the Catholic Church changed its position in
the 2010s. Whereas in the first two decades of post-communism it
was represented mainly by defensive and often even liberal voices,
it is now very visible in cultural conflicts, summarized illustratively
below through four examples:
• Since 1999, there has been a Czech public holiday commemorating St. Wenceslas, the tenth-century Czech duke considered
the ‘patron saint’ of the Czech lands. Over the last decade,
the holiday has been celebrated with a procession used by
the Catholic Church to declare its ambition to play an important
role in the nation. In 2017, for example, Archbishop Dominik
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 187
Duka stated that he placed his hope in the ‘silent majority’ which
would speak up during the election because it was now ‘governed and manipulated by the caprices of certain minorities’.
• In 2018, both Christians and the Far Right protested against
a Brno production of Oliver Frlić’s drama Our Violence and
Your Violence in which Jesus was depicted as raping a Muslim
woman. Some far-right activists organized a demonstration
against the production (and some of them even interrupted
the performance). Archbishop Duka thanked the demonstrators, tried to use legal instruments against the production
and declared in this context that ‘certain minorities are creating a totality’ which is ‘worse than Nazism and communism’.
• In 2018, Archbishop Duka published (together with the representatives of six smaller churches) an open letter against the Istanbul Convention criticizing it for being based on an image of
antagonism between men and women analogous to class struggle, for promoting ‘artificial categories’ and the ‘relativization
of the shared values of European culture’.6
On St. Wenceslas’
Day, the notable Czech Catholic intellectual doyen and former
minister of education (in the first half of the 1990s) Petr Piťha
gave a sermon in St. Vitus Cathedral. The text of the sermon
was apocalyptic and warned against the LGBT movement and
the Istanbul Convention, talking of ‘perfectly perverted laws
[…] against the traditional family’. He warned that ‘your families will be divided […]. For any expression of disagreement,
you will be put into correctional labour camps of an exterminatory character […]. Homosexuals will be declared the new
superior ruling class.’ Piťha created a media scandal and was
broadly criticized, but both the former conservative president
Klaus and the current populist president Zeman defended
him, as did Archbishop Duka. Piťha’s rhetoric was downplayed
as being a ‘prophetic speech’ warning with exaggerations
against real threats. When the liberal priest and Templeton
6 „Církve ke schvalování tzv. Istanbulské úmluvy v ČR“, June 25, 2016, http://www.istanbulskaumluva.cz/
assets/vyzva_cirkvi_politikum.pdf (accessed June 26, 2021).
188 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
Prize bearer Tomáš Halík criticized both Piťha and Duka, he
was given an official written warning by the latter.
• Marches against abortions have been organized in Prague since
2001, but prior to the 2010s, they had counted participants
in the hundreds or low thousands. In the 2010s, the marches
were massively supported by the Archbishop of Prague, who
personally participated in them alongside other members of
the clergy, politicians and several thousand demonstrators.
The marches were framed as ‘national pro-life marches’ or ‘national marches for life and for family’. In 2017, Duka declared,
as a participant in the march, ‘Let us recognize how many lives
are lost, the various ways in which we must look for workers because they are not born here.’ The question of Catholic morality
was connected in this way with the subject of immigration, on
which Duka has commented many times (cf. Beláňová 2020).
• As a candidate of the Catholic bishops, the young, neoliberal
economist Hana Lipovská was elected to the Czech Television
Council in 2020. Lipovská is publicly connected with Václav
Klaus and the nationalist political leader Jana Bobošíková,
who has a long history of attacks on the independence of public television. As Lipovská had herself publicly spoken about
the uselessness of public television (as its services can be provided by private providers), her nomination was understood as
a challenge and an attack on the independence of Czech Television. When Lipovská was elected to the council and started
to organize a coalition against the management of Czech Television, even liberal Catholic politicians asked the bishops to
call upon her to resign, but Dominik Duka refused.
Thus, we see that key Catholic priests, including the Prague archbishop and cardinal, Dominik Duka, have become vocal and important conservative voices in public discourse, and, to some extent,
they play the role of allies of the conservative, populist and xenophobic milieu. Their agenda, at the same time, has become important for
these allies. Even politicians who are atheist or agnostic (or formally
Hussites) are becoming much more open to the Catholic Church,
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 189
and the defence of the special position of Christians is becoming
important to the conservative/nationalist/populist politicians.
How can this alliance be explained? Can it be a productive strategy in re-establishing the Church’s position in the Czech nation?
What does it look like over the long-term historical trajectory of
the relationship between the Catholic Church and Czech society?
I will try to answer these questions in three steps: First, I will
present two possible explanations, one very localized and one very
general – (1) the situation whereby the Church is held hostage as
a result of receiving financial compensation for property expropriated by the Communists, as explained, and (2) Rogers Brubaker’s
(2017) conception of Christianity as a cultural condition of the contemporary identitarian crisis of the West and as a demand of the secularist populists. I then present the historical context and prospects
of the Catholic Church in the role of culture warrior. According
to Vaňáč (2017), the return of property, which was meant to bring
freedom to the church, paradoxically made it a hostage to political
power. It now needs to be on good terms with leading politicians
to finish these unpopular property transfers. Brubaker (2017) coins
the term Christianism as culturalized and political Christianity, an
identitarian totem, not a religious belief; demand for it is provoked
by Muslim migration, with the Christianist reference to Christianity
answering the question of ‘who we are’.
Together with these answers, we can see another level of analysis:
Central Europe. Since 2015, the Bishop’s Conference of Central and
Eastern Europe has organized regular meetings annually, with topics like family, ‘culture of life’ and European identity.7
While similar
meetings took place before, after 2015 they became regular, annual
and more focused on the politics of morality and identity. Archbishop Duka in some interviews explicitly mentioned the influence
of other Central European churches and also shared some elements
of their rhetorical repertoires (‘worse than Nazism and communism’), arguments and topics.
7 Tetiva, T., ‘V Bratislavě se sešli biskupové střední a východní Evropy’, Cirkev.cz, September 9, 2018, https://www.
cirkev.cz/cs/aktuality/180907v-bratislave-se-sesli-biskupove-stredni-a-vychodni-evropy (accessed June 26, 2021).
190 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
Catholicism and National Identity:
Losing Ground
Unlike the Polish, Croat and, to some extent, Slovak context,
the Catholic Church did not become a national church in the Czech
Republic (cf. Rupnik 2018, Balík et al. 2015, Nešpor 2011, Pabian
2013). The dominant stream of Czech nationalism had strong antiCatholic undertones, as the suppressed memory of Czech Protestantism (together with the Hussite tradition) was reconstructed
by key national historians and ideologists (Palacký, Masaryk) and
occupied a central position in their narratives regarding the ‘nature’ and the ‘meaning’ of Czech history. But there was a paradox
since the successful re-Catholization in the seventeenth century and
the effective ideological monopoly of the Catholic Church (albeit
partially muted in 1781 by the Patent of Toleration of Joseph II)
meant that the great majority of the Czech nation was Catholic, and
Catholics (including priests) were also an important part of the national revival movement.
The anti-Catholic accent grew stronger when the Czech nationalists became progressivist and anti-Habsburg, portraying the Catholic Church as loyalist and caught in the ‘alliance of the throne and
altar’, as ‘medieval’ and ‘obscurantist’. As the Czech nation constructed itself to some extent as a ‘nation in opposition’ to empire,
the majority of political parties included some form of opposition to
the Catholic Church, which was on good terms with the empire (cf.
Pabian 2013: 97).
Czech nationalist politics and culture in the nineteenth century
was deeply influenced by its relationship with German nationalism,
especially by the Protestant nationalism of northern Germany (with
its Kulturkampf and Los vor Rom!). At the same time, it was strongly
anti-German, which in practical terms meant defining itself in opposition to the Austrian German-speaking monarchy and its strong
south German Catholicism.
Tension in the Czech national movement and its paradox – an at
least implicitly anti-Catholic ideology in a mostly Catholic nation –
was partially visible after 1918. Czechoslovakia’s first president,
Tomáš G. Masaryk, founded the new state on ideas of the secularist
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 191
reinterpretation of Protestantism and the humanist interpretation
of enlightenment and progressivism. Nominally, the great majority
of Czechs were Catholic. But the progressive intelligentsia (both
liberal and left-wing) was more influential in the new state. Also,
to some extent, the Protestants were important, although Protestantism never became the ‘national religion’, of which the traditional
Evangelical Czech Brethren – Lutherans and Calvinists united as
one church in 1918 – and the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, created by the Czech Catholic priests who left the Catholic Church in
1920, dreamt. Many Catholics (maybe even the majority) became
matrikoví katolíci (registry office Catholics) who were not active
churchgoers and did not even have a strong Catholic identity but
were considered Catholics in the census because they did not leave
the church. A large part of the clergy and Catholic intellectuals identified as a misrepresented minority with a strong resentment towards
‘liberalist’ and, sometimes, even a ‘freemasonic’ or ‘Jewish’ Czechoslovak Republic.
The situation was different from Slovakia. The Protestant minority became an important bearer of Czechoslovakism, but the Catholic Church was representative of the majority of Slovaks, and thus, it
became the national church (see Chapter 6).
In the Czech case, the Catholic Church gained hegemony only
for a short period of time between Munich (September 1938) and
the occupation (March 1939). During that period, it articulated
strong resentment towards the secularist First Republic, as well as
displaying antisemitic and authoritarian tendencies (Rataj 1997). It
thus discredited political and, to some extent, even cultural Catholicism for a long time.
Catholicism and Communist Rule:
Effective De-Catholicization and Renewal of Legitimacy
The Communists included the Hussite narrative and anticlerical
progressivism in their reconstruction of the Czech national identity
(Kopeček 2019, Randák 2015). They made heavy use of the struggle
against ‘clero-fascism’ and ‘collaboration’, as well as against ‘clerical
obscurantism’.
192 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
At the end of the 1940s and in the 1950s, the Catholic Church
was subjected to harsh repression. Its property was expropriated,
monasteries were violently closed, and many priests, intellectuals
and politicians were imprisoned, some even murdered. At the same
time, the Communists drastically and, to a degree, successfully
modernized the countryside – the traditional base of the Church.
This modernization was very often connected with effective deCatholization.
During the 1970s and 1980s, some Catholics were part of the dissent, and some organized independent criticism and protests (Augustin Navrátil and his petitions for religious freedom). The underground church meanwhile brought together secret bishops, monks
and priests (Fiala and Hanuš 1999).
At the same time, the Catholic Church was legal and tried to
influence the nation. A ‘decade of spiritual renewal’ was declared
by Cardinal Tomášek in 1987 but initiated by underground church
activists Tomáš Halík and Petr Piťha. In the streets, the Catholics
publicly protested – Cardinal Tomášek spoke on television and
Czech and Slovak petitions were signed by thousands – against
the full legalization of abortion (in 1986; abortions had been legal
since the end of the 1950s but were, in effect, limited by humiliating
abortion committees).
The Long Nineties: A Subordinate and Unsatisfied
Part of Liberal Hegemony
Catholics visibly participated in the Velvet Revolution and entered
the new regime with moral capital brought by their opposition to
the communist regime, the popularity of John Paul II and the image
of tradition and stability in a time of change. However, the position
of the Catholic Church was, in fact, highly ambivalent at this time.
The historical mood was based on ‘destroying myths’ of nationalism and communism (which sometimes implicitly led to Habsburg
nostalgia), and the Catholic Church profited from it, especially from
revision of the negative view held of the Baroque era. But the church
went too far the canonization of Jan Sarkander in 1995 (a provocation of the Czech historical memory of the counter-reformation).
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 193
Much more important were non-local problems, especially
the general mood of post-modern liberalism, liberation from traditional moral values and relativism. In this context the Catholic
Church proposed outdated and problematic positions, especially in
the case of family and sexual morality. These are in fact impracticable even for the majority of its members.
Thus, the Czech Catholic Church lost the majority of its legitimacy and moral capital – through its moralism, the conflict between
liberals and conservatives in its ranks and, above all, through
the struggle for restitution of church property.
The Catholic Church, much weaker than it had been forty years
prior, pretended to become an important part of the public debate
and to play, in fact, the role awaited by ‘Christianists’: a moral compass, a source of tradition and identity. During the 1990s, both political and intellectual elites (historian Dušan Třeštík, writer Gustav
Mahler) reacted by and large negatively to this proposal. In reaction
to the demand for a special role in society, the neoliberal prime minister Klaus declared that the churches should have the same role as
the associations of gardeners.8
The church adapted to these conditions. When the Czech Catholic
Church was led by Archbishop Miroslav Vlk (1992–2010), it took on
a relatively defensive and defeatist approach and accepted the liberal
hegemony. Its most prominent spokesperson was the liberal priest
Tomáš Halík, close to President Václav Havel and the liberal camp
in Czech society.
During the Crisis of Liberalism
Between 2008 and 2013, three things changed: (1) Some former liberals such as Klaus and later even the left-wing Zeman started to use
Christianist and value-laden conservative language; Klaus even publicly encouraged Catholics to be more vocal in defence of conservative
values. (2) During Klaus’s period in office, Vlk was replaced as primate of the Czech Catholic Church by the more conservative and vocal Dominik Duka. (3) The question of property restitution was solved
8 Later, he said he was not talking about gardeners’ associations, but ramblers’ associations (Vaňáč 2017).
194 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
by the liberal right-wing government – together with some real estate,
the Catholic Church received financial compensation equal to almost
fifty billion Czech crowns to be paid over the next thirty years. This is
also a condition for the final separation of the church from the state.
During the same period, the church started to cooperate with
some conservative and populist politicians and began to wage culture wars against abortion, same-sex marriage, the Istanbul Convention and so on. Criticism from within the church existed but it was
not very strong. When in 2018 a group of liberal and left-wing Catholics published a petition demanding Pope Francis relieve Duka of
his archbishop office upon attaining the age of 75, both former President Klaus and President Zeman published statements supporting
Duka. The supportive petition was followed by many more signatories (around 3,000) than the original petition (of around 700).
The restitution of church property and financial compensation
also took place for Protestant churches and Jewish communities;
they received even more than they lost under communist rule. It
is probable that Duka wanted to employ this kind of ecumenism
(with a leading role played by the Catholic Church) as he is now
promoting a joint committee of historians which would deal with
re-Catholization as an extremely painful time in the Czech memory
and overcome it.
Concluding Debate
Both Vaňáč and Brubaker are right, there is both influence of local
politicians and of general demand for Christianism. But maybe we
can say more. Given the historical memory and the state of society,
the Catholic Church cannot become a ‘national church’ in the Czech
context. But with its resources, it (or an important faction led by
key bishops) can work effectively as some form of social movement
organization which can cooperate in alliance with conservative and
populist politicians. It is hard for them, as the ‘silent majority’
evoked by Duka is also one which often hates Catholics and criticizes the restitution of church property.
It is also unrealistic to expect that it can revert the existing level of
moral freedom in cases such as abortion rights or tolerance for LGBT+
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 195
peoples. But, in alliance with other conservative forces, it may be
rather effective in blocking new liberalizing changes, such as the Istanbul Convention or same-sex marriage, and contribute to the articulation of a feeling that liberal freedom has gone ‘too far’. In this role as
the moral lobby, its unrealistic demands also make complete sense: They
move the goalposts of political debate and make the stakes higher.
We could go back to the end of the 1980s and the 1990s and show
that the supply of Christianism existed on the side of the Catholic
Church much sooner than the demand for it within (at least one important faction of) secularized society. What failed in the Czech society at the beginning of the 1990s (when the Czech nation did not
accept its consecration to the Virgin Mary) and in Europe most visibly in debates about the European constitution, which ended with
the refusal to accept the centrality of the Christian legacy, returns
in a much more politicized way: as an identitarian source for antiimmigration xenophobia and against new liberal rights from within
liberal societies. This demand could even bring about some religious
impacts (conversions), but not enough to change the key problem
of the Czech Catholic Church. As there is antisemitism (almost)
without Jews in some Central European countries and Islamophobia
(almost) without Muslims in the Czech Republic, even if Christianism were to be successful in the Czech Republic, it would be Christianism mostly without Christians.
The Czech case shows us one paradox of Christianism: It tries to
promote Christianity as the cultural basis for the whole society (or
‘civilization’), but by promoting this idea, it must lose its political
independence and neutrality and side intensively with one political camp
in that society. In the end, it casts the church’s demand to be the spiritual and cultural representative of the society much more in doubt.
Instead of a Conclusion:
Conservative Anxieties without Conservativism?
As we can see, the most important issues in the Czech culture wars
are issues of identity. They have various versions, but mostly they
are connected with the self-conception of the Czech Republic as
196 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
a Western country and with the question of migration. In this chapter, it is discussed under the label of Westernism. At the same time,
while the debate about the quality of democracy does not have to be
understood as an identity issue (since it does not have to be understood as a culture war at all), we will argue that, in this context, it is
sometimes transformed into a culture war, as the special concept of
liberal democracy becomes an attribute of (Western) identity.
The politics of memory had higher impact during the first and
second post-communist decades. They were present both in the form
of debate about the communist past and debates about the memory
of World War II, especially in the context of the Sudeten Germans.
In the third post-communist decade, these topics were present but
mostly in new contexts and subordinated positions: Anti-communism is used against the oligarch Babiš for his Communist Party
membership and collaboration with the secret police in the 1980s,
as well as for his government’s collaboration with the Communist
Party after 2017. Sometimes, anti-communism is also used to frame
Russia and China. However, in these contexts, the Western identity is a more important dimension of the conflict than memory.
The presence of Sudeten Germans also becomes important in some
episodes, but their importance is much less than in the 1990s and
2000s; meanwhile new, alien dangers – Muslims – were exchanged
for them. But this menace to Western identity did not come from
the national past but from the imagined future.
The politics of morality have become much stronger now, both
in terms of public prominence, mobilization of actors (public visibility and the conservative stance of the Catholic Church) and
results (same-sex marriage, the Istanbul Convention). To some
extent, we can attribute this rise in the politics of morality to
the changed social climate, the rise of various actors’ conservative
intuition and the transformation of the Catholic Church. It can also
be understood as a reaction to liberal political actors as well as relatively successful or courageous feminists and LGBT+ activists and
the Europeanization of part of their agenda. And yet, at the same
time, we see that the politics of morality has become relatively
strong at precisely the same moment where they can be connected
czech republic: populism without culture wars? 197
with the politics of identity (the criticism of feminism for destroying ‘the old, good West’ as we have known it and the framing of
anti-abortion protests via criticism of migration by Archbishop
Duka).
Until now, conservative declinism has not succeeded as a separate
political force. Its political formations combined mostly neoliberal/
right-wing libertarian Euroscepticism with conservative declinism
and failed electorally (Svobodní, Realisté, Trikolóra)
But this indicator, of course, can work only partially. As we
have seen, many political parties as well as public intellectuals have
adopted the logic of culture wars. To some extent, the logic of declinism does not need to be promoted by a new political formation
with a specific programme, as it has been brought into the mainstream by a plethora of actors.
The really open question is the shape of the opposite, ‘liberal’
camp. Various discourse coalitions were able to ridicule the Islamophobes and mobilize mass protests to defend ‘liberal democracy’
against ‘oligarchical usurpation’ or smaller protests against ‘fascists’
(members of conservative civil society) in media regulatory councils.
But they are also not able to target the declinist diagnosis and face it
at full scale, partly because they have their own variant of declinism:
The story about the loss of Havel’s liberal paradise in the first two
transformation decades.
Thus, can we speak about populism without culture wars, or at
least culture war with very muted importance? There are some arguments for this thesis: Above all the character of Czech populism, in
its main form, is technocratic not national conservative. Its leader
Andrej Babiš is very skilful at manoeuvring between various sides of
the culture wars, and he includes some elements of the declinist imagination in a very subordinate role to his general picture, which is
optimistic, based on hard work and the prospects of a bright future.
His embrace of national conservatism in the culture wars currently seems like tactical opportunism, the same kind of opportunism which has previously cast him as a ‘third party’ nestled between
the liberals and conservatives. But this view can be slightly changed
if we take into serious consideration that conflicts about the quality
198 central european culture wars: beyond post-communism and populism
of democracy or the perception of the West and the European Union can be and often are perceived by its participants as a culture
war. The struggle against ‘populists’ or ‘elites’ can work as a substitution for ethical and moral conflict – be the topic the ‘struggle against corruption’ or the ‘defence of democracy’, they share
the absence of a possibility for compromise and an absence of space
that is the nature of culture wars. When two anti-corruption movements clash with each other (the Pirates and ANO), culture war can
become a good strategy to differentiate and mobilize around. But
Czech politics do not provide only for this kind of struggle. Strong
Euroscepticism (stronger even than in the case of Poland and Hungary) also works here, and it intervenes into actual debates about
the decline of the West. Other elements like ethnic nationalism,
sexism, homophobia and conservative Catholicism are very muted
but present. They result in posing important limits on the sphere
of possibility for many liberal/progressive forces, both domestic
and/or of the EU, whether help for refugees, the Istanbul Convention or same-sex marriage.