CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Dolezal, Krystof |
|---|---|
| Title | Christian Democratic Option: On the Logic of Ideological Persistence |
| Summary | Recent scholarship in comparative politics suggests that the stability of the center-right and its ability to counter hard-right challenges are crucial for the survival of European liberal democracy. The Christian Democratic Option contributes to this debate by offering an Eastern European perspective, focusing on a region from which many issues for the contemporary right originate. Despite its significance, the diverse conservative legacies of Eastern Europe remain underexplored. My study fills this gap by examining the Christian democratic tradition through a longitudinal case study of Czechoslovakia and its successor states, the regionally most successful Christian democratic projects. This dissertation proposes a new approach to understanding Christian democracy, exploring how this ideology persisted despite profound historical disruptions. It uncovers the untold story of how Christian democracy served as the central proxy through which liberal and anti-liberal scripts traveled to Czechoslovakia. By examining the language used by Christian democrats to confront post-fascist, communist, and post-communist regimes, I provide a much-needed comprehensive account of the mainstream right in Czechoslovakia. I approached this task through punctual history and institutionally embedded hermeneutical analysis to reconstruct the nearly forgotten Christian democratic canon, zooming in on key moments of ideological relaunches, canon articulations, and local adaptations. I argue that Christian democracy should be re-evaluated as the major right-wing ideology in Czechoslovakia in the latter half of the twentieth century. I demonstrate its alignment with Western counterparts and its role in articulating liberal ideas within Czechoslovak discourse. Finally, I propose to use “Christian democracy” as a broad analytical concept for studying the interactions between Christian political theologies, liberal democracy, nationalism, and socialism across various contexts to address biases in existing revisionist scholarship on Christian democracy. |
| Supervisor | Enyedi, Zsolt |
| Department | International Relations PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/dolezal_krystof.pdf |
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