Ondřej Holub: “Unified in a Cause: On Connected Histories of Czech and Slovenian National Socialism”

Zgodovina na Špici / History on the Edge

You are kindly invited to the new event of the History on the Edge series, which will take place on Wednesday, 22 January 2025 at 13:00, at the INZ premises or at the ZOOM link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86949706378

The lecture will be given by Ondřej Holub, and the title of the lecture is “Unified in a Cause: On Connected Histories of Czech and Slovenian National Socialism”. The lecture will be held in English.

Unified in a Cause: On Connected Histories of Czech and Slovenian National Socialism.

Czech National Socialism took the shape of the political movement at the very dawn of the 20th century as a political current that represented a new kind of a semi-bourgeois radicalism. Gaining strength from a radicalizing wave of modern mass and emancipatory politics, it soon evolved into a most significant national branch of a global political culture of progressive populism that atracted predominantly a significant mass of a lower middle class voters.

Despite its roots in a modern stream of nationalism, Czech national socialists nevertheless aspired to reached beyond national and cultural borders of former Bohemia. Thus, while fueled  by a powerful idea of Slavic unity, leaders of the Czech National Socialist Party actively participated in organizing the first national socialist political and trade unionist groups in former Slovene Lands, namely in a region of Trieste. The postwar establishment of a Slovene National Socialist Party in 1919 was only a consequence of a long transnational partnership of both Slovene and Czech national socialist movements

Based on the conceptual history of ideas and politics, the presented paper aim to provide an insight into Czech National Socialism as a current of political thought, as well as a particular form of political culture, especially in conjunction with Slovene national socialism.  As I perceive such kind of political thought as a sort of progressive populism, it’s my intention to present and discuss the possible theoretical basis for the connected or entangled Histories of Czech and Slovene National Socialisms as interconnected branches of a common political culture.