National Communism as intellectual tradition and political program in Czechoslovakia

Descrizione del progetto

Studiare la relazione fra ideologia comunista e nazionalismo

Qual è la relazione fra ideologia comunista e nazionalismo? In che modo il nazionalismo comunista ha plasmato lo sviluppo politico, intellettuale e culturale in Cecoslovacchia dal 1918 fino alla seconda metà del 1990? Il progetto NATCOM, finanziato dall’UE, risponderà a tali domande, studiando in particolare come le complicate relazioni fra comunismo e nazionalismo hanno dato forma allo sviluppo della dittatura socialista cecoslovacca e come l’agenda nazionale comunista rimodellata dopo il 1989 ha influenzato la transizione post-comunista. NATCOM analizzerà la natura degli appelli comunisti alla legittimità nazionale e le continuità fra comunismo nazionale e «populismo nazionale». Il progetto si concentrerà sulla parte slovacca della Repubblica Cecoslovacca e sulle sue interazioni con l’ambiente ceco e ungherese.

Obiettivo

The project National Communism (NATCOM) addresses the ambivalent and dynamic relations between communist ideology and nationalism. The project goal is to investigate how national communism, in its various stages, shaped the political, intellectual, and cultural development in Czechoslovakia during the “short 20th century”, from 1918 until the second half of the 1990s. National communism, as understood in this project, is a specific variety of communist thinking deeply rooted in the Eastern Central European (ECE) intellectual tradition. It is a crucial phenomenon that both predates and outlives the existence of the socialist dictatorships in the region. The investigation addresses the central question of how the complicated, ever-changing relations between communism and nationalism formed the development of the Czechoslovak socialist dictatorship and how the remodeled national communist agenda after 1989 influenced the post-communist transition. The main objects of the analysis are the nature of communist appeals to national legitimacy and the continuities between national communism and the “national populism” in the 1990s Eastern Central Europe. The research of national communism will look for continuities that survived the implementation of the new rules, the cases of adaptation, and evolution according to specific traditions. The main question is how the intellectual substance of national communism adapted to and also formed the changing reality. National communism will be analyzed with a specific focus on the Slovak part of the Czechoslovak Republic, in its interactions with the Czech and Hungarian environment. However, Slovak development is not understood as unique. NATCOM uses it as a case study identifying and providing distinct developmental traits typical for other former socialist dictatorships in ECE.