Authoritarian nostalgia, regional-populist sovereignism, and anti-Western attitude: Czech case

The Central European discourse in the Czech intellectual and political environment has always differed significantly from that of Poland and Hungary, in which regional hegemonic aspirations played an important role. In this respect, the Czech national revival, as a defensive response to German geopolitical and geocultural ambitions, was primarily focused on the idea of the survival of small Central European nations. František Palacký and Josef Kaizl, who perceived Austria-Hungary as a supra-ethnic concept protecting small nations from Germanisation or Hungarization, can be included in this tradition, as can Tomáš G. Masaryk and his concept of the ‘Europe in-between’ from Finland to Greece. The nostalgia for the Habsburg monarchy and the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938) was then specifically fused in the reflections of important political thinkers, when the conceptualization of Central Europe became the strongest antithesis and compensatory theme to the concept of a unified Eastern, ‘Slavonic’ Europe under Russian domination. After the democratic transition in 1989, Czech politicians and political philosophers also emphasized the continuity of this perception, which was summarized in the short slogan ‘Back to Europe’. This ‘return’ was to be confirmed by membership of the Council of Europe, NATO and, above all, the EU. However, also in Czechia, we have observed a specific turn in the last two decades, which has turned the pro-Western character of Central European reflections into their counterpoint, i.e. a reflection of Central Europe as other, or ‘non-Western’. The basic axiom of these approaches is the assumption that Western Europe is in decline, which Central Europe, as the new core and protector of European traditions, is supposed to resist. The West is presented as dystopian, and Central Europe is offered as a positive alternative based on ‘Christian tradition’ (which very often conceals racism, including its cultural variant) and national sovereignty. A prominent feature of this Central European ‘neo-nostalgia’ is a regional populism based on the cooperation of sovereigntists. Representatives of this movement specifically use and simultaneously transform older Central European concepts, including populist or anti-colonial positions towards Germany, which is presented as the leader of the EU and the proponent of dystopian concepts (gender, Green Deal, mass migration), while at the same time adding new elements – for example, the symbolism of Saint Adalbert as a ‘Central European’ or the perception of the Great Moravian Empire as a Central European actor whose ‘anti-Western’ legacy can be revived. The aim of my study is to use the method of critical discursive analysis to reflect on nostalgic legacies in contemporary Czech discourse on Central Europe and to confront them with new or altered narratives of regional-populist sovereigntists. I focus on a relatively large group of epistemic communities linked by the idea of ‘Central European sovereignty’ – let us mention the Svatopluk Society or the Patrimonium Sancti Adalbertias examples. In addition to the operation of these and other regional-populist sovereigntist actors in the national discourse, I focus specifically on their spillover into the transnational environment and the building of transnational networks.