The return of the local democracy to the military training areas raises a number of complex challenges even under the conditions of a democratic state. In the municipalities that were established in the Czech Republic on 1 January 2016 by a separation from the territory of the military training areas, a nondemocratic paternalist system has dominated for many decades at the local level, which in some cases was deepened by a presence of the foreign Soviet army. While other municipalities in the post-communist period after 1989 have undergone a complex development and have gradually responded to new challenges (e.g., the use of subsidy titles, intermunicipal cooperation), and, in the case of the settlements in the territory of the military training area districts, nondemocratic local paternalism was preserved until the end of 2015. In the first phase of their term, the elected representatives of the local government primarily focused on securing the basic functions of the municipality (issues of housing and basic amenities of the village—school facilities, shops), saving local sights as remnants of historical memory, and developing cooperation within different networks of actors on a general level (e.g., issues of tourism development, environmental protection).

The transformation process from an authoritarian/totalitarian system entails many institutional changes, however, the individual citizen is often being overlooked in this chaotic, fast-paced process and his or her “transformation” into a democrat is taken for granted. The changing socio-political system and its exigencies may lead to nostalgia and social frustrations, which in turn cause democratic backsliding. In order to cultivate a democratic society and avoid future backsliding, the post-communist states quickly set out to reform their educational systems, both in form and substance. By reviewing the reform process of the Czech educational system and discussing the prevailing legacies left by the communist regime, the article will show that through the “destruction” of the former system and its de-monopolization, decentralization and de-ideologization, the state deliberately lost significant means and power to transform Czechs from “ homo sovieticus ” to “ homo democraticus ” and is now left with a dependence on the highly autonomous schools and their propensity to foster democratic generations that will uphold the democratic state in the future. This paradox is reminiscent of the so-called Böockenföorde dilemma, claiming that the liberal democratic state “lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself”.

In the Czech lands (included in Czechoslovakia until the end of 1992), rock music has evolved through three phases. In the first phase, lasting until 1968, rock musicians had no ambition to offer social or political commentaries. This began as the era of rock ‘n’ roll, which is to say music being performed for dancing. The second phase began after the Soviet bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, lasting until the end of the communist era in 1989. In this phase, rock musicians (no longer playing rock ‘n’ roll were closely monitored by the authorities and were expected to sing happy songs, submitting their song texts to the authorities for approval in advance of performing them. In spite of this control, some rock groups purposefully sang political texts in the 1970s and 1980s, mocking or criticizing the communists, albeit often cryptically. Finally, in the third phase — since 1989 — having lost their ideological foe, Czech rock groups have for the most part become politically disengaged.

This article deals with the factors influencing the degree of trust in political institutions at three levels of government in the Czech Republic (national, regional and local) in two dissimilar regions in the time of economic crisis in 2009, the year when citizens of the Czech Republic experienced the negative impacts of growing unemployment and a substantial decline in real GDP. Two competitive theories - the cultural and the performance explanation - were used as a theoretical framework. The results show that there are significant differences among particular levels of government as well as regions. The influence of both institutional performance, including factors related to economic crisis, and cultural background were found. The influence of contextual factors was also confirmed.

This article traces developments in the Czech political elite’s thinking about structural changes that the region and the country have experienced during the last several years. It is argued that two parallel, external structural constraints have significantly shaped decisions of the Czech political elite as the country has, once again, proven to be an ostensibly “reactive state”. These structural constraints have been the ongoing U.S. recalibration of its grand strategy as well as the financial crisis with a systemic challenge to the European political project in which fiscal and monetary issues have largely replaced previous criticism of the Constitutional Treaty and then the Reform Treaty. It is argued that these developments have posed a notable problem for two predominant ideological convictions present in the Czech political thinking – Atlantism and Europeanism, as neither of them has offered readily answers to deal with such a challenge. As will be shown, this mutually reinforcing dual challenge has further exacerbated previously existing Czech government’s lack of political vision, and resorted to a political mentality which has contained elements of denial, rationalization, and political resignation.

The article looks first into the nature of the relations between Germany and the CEE countries a decade since the accession of the CEE countries to the EU. The relations are characterized as normalised and intensive with diverse levels of closeness and cooperation reflecting of the conceptual and ideological compatibility/differences. Next, the article focuses on the German attitude to the euro zone crisis. Germany has become a hegemon in the rescue effort aimed at stabilisation and economic invigoration of the euro zone. However, German hegemony has developed by default, not by design: her leading position is linked with considerable political and financial costs. Germany moved central stage and took the position of a reluctant hegemon. However, German role is contested internationally (it has not the support of the French government in key areas) as well as internally (particularly by the Federal Constitutional Court and the Bundesbank). The article argues that the new situation makes the German–CEE relations increasingly relevant for both sides. The German leadership of the EU increasing split along the north–south divide requires backing by the Northern group countries to which the CEE in general belongs. Given a number of reasons the CEE countries implement three distinctive strategies of co-operation with Germany in European politics. Also military co-operation, which remained rather limited so far, may receive new impulses, given the financial austerity.

The presented article tries to make sense of Václav Havel, a man of many qualities and professions yet not a professional in the conventional sense of the word. The aim is to offer deeper insight into diverse cognitive elements which formed Havel’s political reasoning and attitudes. The idea is to provide an alternative interpretation and get beyond the customary explanations expressed through traditional IR language seeing Havel as a dissident idealist who was pushed by some realist impulses to clearly define real political and later also geopolitical stands. In doing so, the article is divided into three parts. The first part discusses conceptual frameworks (rather than a single framework) within which Have saw and understood the political world. The middle part examines Havel’s political agenda, namely the issues of the return to Europe, the German question, and relationships with Russia, the United States and toward multilateral institutions. The final part that utilizes primary data obtained through personal interviews with many Havel’s close collaborators presents two faces of Václav Havel: the dramatist and the ideologue.

Theory of parliamentary regimes presumes that parliament can express vote of no confidence in government. On the other hand executive power (government or head of state) is endowed with right to dissolve the parliament. However, these “doomsday devices” are not in balance in many parliamentary regimes, including the Czech Republic. On the basis of a comparative analysis of dissolution provisions in the constitutions of European states the article argues that the government in the Czech Republic should be given the right to dissolve the lower chamber at least in case that the latter expresses vote of no confidence in the former.

This article describes the extreme right in the Czech Republic, where, in contrast to several other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, this part of the political spectrum has been unsuccessful for the past ten years. The aim of this article is to analyse the position of the extreme right in the Czech party system and the internal ideological and strategic cleavages within the extreme right. The conclusion of this article is that organized party-political extremism is after two decades of modern political development only a marginal part of the Czech political spectrum, with many internal problems and without real chances of significant success in the near future.

This article represents a contribution to the debate over the attitudes of political parties to the European integration-one of the hot topics in contemporary political science. It explores the dynamics of attitudes of political parties in the Czech Republic to the EU and analyzes them in the context of parties primary ideologies. On the basis of the results of an expert survey the author interpretes the changes in the major features of “European” debate in the Czech Republic and offers a new classification schema of attitudes of political parties towards the EU, according to the preferences of economic and/or political dimension of European integration.

This article examines the relationship between social justice norms and the perceived legitimacy of the social stratification system in the Czech Republic. Despite the fact that meritocratic values have remained the dominant part of ideology in the Czech Republic throughout the transformation process, those values have played only a very minor role in fostering evaluations of system legitimacy, such as perceptions of system closure and widespread inequality. This article argues that perceived corruption is the key factor that negatively mediates the relationship between norms of distributive justice and beliefs about social legitimacy, and ultimately plays a major role in reducing the legitimacy of the social stratification system. The main analysis uses a structural equation model based on Czech data from the ISSP Role of Government Survey in 2006. The evidence lends support to the path dependency view of the social transformation process, according to which rampant corruption, which was a core legacy of the market transformation process, continues to shape system legitimacy even in the face of relative economic prosperity of the mid 2000s.

The goal of this paper is to analyse the impact the EU has had on Czech women’s groups since the1990s. Drawing on both Europeanization and social movement theories, the first section defines the theoretical framework of the paper. The second section is focused on the impact of changes in the funding of women’s groups which, since the end of the1990s, have relied more than before on European funding. The third section analyses the shift in the political context and the domestic political opportunity structure in the Czech Republic that has occurred in connection with the accession process. The fourth section analyzes transnational cooperation for which new opportunities have appeared with the EU’s eastward expansion. The paper concludes by summarizing its main findings.

This article represents a contribution to the debate over the Europeanization of political parties, one of the hot topics in contemporary political science. It explores the extent of Europeanization in political parties represented in the lower chamber of the Parliament of the Czech Republic by means of an analysis of party election manifestoes. The extent of Europeanization in these documents is analyzed using a bi-dimensional conceptualization. The first we call the quantitative dimension , assesses the space taken by the topic of European integration in each manifesto. The second one we call the qualitative dimension . This, using the analysis of content, measures the degree to which the European integration issue is elaborated in the programs. Using this conceptualization, we analyze the election manifestoes of five Czech political parties in the period 1996–2006.

The Czech Republic’s Temelín nuclear power plant provoked the worst relations between it and Austria. This article identifies novel, unexpected roles that the EU played in that dispute: mediator, framework-setting; absenteeism; foil; and belated enforcer. The EU ultimately altered the nature of the dispute and can be seen to have inadvertently defended a non-member state’s interests against those of an existing member.

Hungary outpaced the Czech Republic in reforms of the telecom sector during the first decade of transition. In the Czech Republic, prices remained low, competition limited and the state maintained ownership of the incumbent operator. Hungary, in contrast, experienced extensive privatization, liberalization of prices and some deregulation. This outcome challenges the assumption that institutional veto points (frameworks that constrain or enable political agents) manipulated by conservative bureaucrats hindered the initiatives of reform minded politicians in Hungary, while allowing reforms to occur in the also reforming Czech Republic. It is shown that the Czech telecom administration had only a few possibilities to block policy decisions through veto points. The slow reform process was rather a result of a conscious political strategy of maintaining control and accommodating a conservative constituency in context of a relatively sound economic environment. In Hungary, bureaucrats acting as agents of change pushed though the reforms despite opposition from politicians. This insight challenges the traditional picture of civil servants in post-communist systems as inherently conservative and anti-reform.

After the 1998 general elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic, the largest party, the Social Democrats, formed a minority government. The formation of this government was puzzling for at least four reasons. First, according to the so-called Opposition Pact, the minority government was supported from the outside by the conservative Civic Democratic Party, the principal opponent of the Social Democrats in the party system. Second, the grand legislative coalition was not followed by the sharing of executive portfolios between the two largest parties. Third, the two parties entered into this agreement only weeks after they had explicitly stated their unwillingness to govern together. Fourth, neither theories of coalition formation nor those of minority government formation provide an accurate prediction for this outcome. This article provides a solution for these puzzles based on a game theoretic analysis.

The communist parties’ adaptation to democracy is one of the more remarkable developments of post-1989 politics in East Central Europe. Ironically, unresponsive and incompetent ruling communist parties have in some cases spawned successors that have been able to respond to democratic electoral cleavages and convince large portions of the electorate of their ability to govern democratically and competently. This paper argues that the main factor underlying this ability has been organizational transformation of the communist parties: specifically, the extent to which these parties centralized and streamlined their organizations, while breaking with a discrediting past. This transformation is itself a function of elite skills developed under communism.

Following the assumption that the middle class is important in the transition from communism to a democratic market society as its leading actor and guarantor of social integration, this paper presents evidence of the benefits it has gained from economic and social reforms. As these have turned out to be rather modest, it is likely that the middle class will be more reserved in its political support for a rigorous transformation. Special attention is given to the distribution and redistribution of income in which the middle seems to have been neglected, in comparison to the lowest and upper strata which have become better off. Evidence based on official statistics is complemented by a survey of attitudes which document both the still strong endorsement of the middle class with regard to the implemented changes and a certain split between the ‘old’ and ‘new' component of this important social category.

The rapid privatization of the Czech economy has contributed to its first rank in the economic performance of the post-communist countries. The claim that 75 per cent of its GDP originates in the private sector may, however, be only formally true. Many of the voucher-privatized former state-owned enterprises and financial institutions are still influenced through core stakes in their share capital by the Fund of National Property and by their mutual interdependence. This article concludes that full privatization will likely be attained through a hybrid of German and American corporate governance systems.