Czechoslovak Political Culture: Pluralism in an International Context

Abstract

It has been argued by certain Western specialists that pluralism has been a prominent and enduring feature of the political culture of Czechs and Slovaks. Archie Brown and Gordon Wightman, for instance, have observed ‘A belief in the virtues of political pluralism has almost certainly been a dominant one throughout the existence of the Czechoslovak Republic’.¹ David Paul, who broadened his purview to cover a longer historical period, has written of political pluralism as a ‘recurrent tendency’ and ‘a pattern well-known’ in Czechoslovak history, has discerned ‘a thin thread’ of continuity linking manifestations of this tendency under capitalism and under socialism and has described ‘the re-emergence of deeply rooted patterns’ in the 1960s.² The present author, on the other hand, while referring to pluralism as a ‘deeply rooted national tradition,’ has placed greater emphasis on the heterogeneity, and the discontinuity of Czech and Slovak traditions. He has noted certain defects or weaknesses in the pluralist tradition, and the presence of a contradictory tendency toward authoritarianism which has markedly influenced the behaviour and the thinking of the two nations.³