Kmen s mnoha planými výhonky
A Trunk with Many Dead Branches

Mapping the Czech Radical Right Over the Last Century

Summary/Abstract: The book by historian Jan Rataj and political scientists Miloš Dlouhý and Antonín Háka entitled "Proti systému! Český radikální konzervativismus, fašismus a nacionální socialismus 20. a 21. století" [Against the System! Czech Radical Conservatism, Fascism and National Socialism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries] comprehensively discusses the multifaceted phenomenon of the extreme political right in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic from 1918 to the present. In the first part, the authors cover the period of the First and Second Czechoslovak Republics, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the wartime Slovak Republic. The period of the renewed Czechoslovak and Czech democracy, since the early1990s, is examined in the second part with an emphasis on the developments in the twenty-first century. Despite some differences in the method of treatment and the temporal discontinuity of the two parts, the book, according to the reviewer, is a successful summary of the issues. It analyses the attitudes these ideological trends and political movements maintain towards the liberal-democratic establishment, and it outlines their (common or different) features and continuities. The reviewer agrees with the assessment that, with the exception of the years from 1938 to 1945, the Czech radical-right scene was fragmented and marginal, but she also draws attention to the danger that in other historical constellations the same anti-systemic forces could have gained much greater influence and that they can still draw on the defects of today’s democracy.

• Details
• Contents