Czechoslovakism

0546659 - ÚSD 2023 RIV GB eng M - Část monografie knihy
Ducháček, Milan
Czechoslovakism in the First Half of the Czechoslovak Republic. State-Building Concept or Hackneyed Old Phrase?
Czechoslovakism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022 - (Hudek, A.; Kopeček, M.; Mervart, J.), s. 172-208. Routledge History of Central and Eastern Europe. ISBN 978-1-032-07072-8
Grant CEP: GA ČR(CZ) GA19-03474S
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378114
Klíčová slova: Czechoslovakism * nationalism * history of ideas * historiography of science
Obor OECD: History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

This chapter turns to one of the central concerns of the field, i.e. the transmutation of the primarily cultural idea of Czechoslovak reciprocity into a state-building political idea. The analysis does not replicate the traditional disputes surrounding constitutional documents and statistical praxis. It instead studies how the newly launched „Czechoslovak sciences” dealt with public and state requests for scientific justifications of Czechoslovakism to help fortify the national consciousness. Using concrete examples from the social sciences, including legal studies, historiography, geography, linguistics, ethnography and literary studies—represented in this text by well-known exponents of Czechoslovakism, such as Viktor Dvorský, Václav Chaloupecký, Albert Pražák, František Trávníček or Emanuel Chalupný—the chapter attempts to determine to what extent their various efforts to scientifically legitimize Czechoslovakism were either semantically or argumentatively dependent on older, pre-war polemics and stereotypes, or to what extent new argumentative strategies emerged with the creation of the common state. Despite the undeniable thriving of Czech and Slovak social sciences, the overwhelming majority of approaches merely replicated antecedent concepts, as was evident in official „apologetic” publications from the period when Nazism was already an ever-growing threat. Ultimately, when confronted with social reality, these scientific pursuits of legitimacy failed. Over the course of the 1920s, Czechoslovakism became nothing more than a hackneyed old phrase, rolled out for official state festivities but nowhere to be found in the lived experiences of Czechs or Slovaks.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0330683