15 - Czechia

Summary

In the early 1990s, Czechia was, with some justification, seen by many observers of the post-communist democratization stakes as “most likely to succeed” (see, e.g., Gati, 1990; Wightman, 1993, p. 52). Although its image had been tarnished somewhat by the end of the decade in comparison with countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia, its prospects remain, on balance, among the brightest in the region. Unlike almost all other post-communist countries, Czechia possessed both an industrialized capitalist economy and a flourishing liberal democracy before the communist era, more successful at that time than many West European states. This deeper historical democratic legacy and relatively high level of economic development, proximity to the West, ethnic homogeneity, and mode of extrication from communism combine in a set of truly advantageous circumstances when it comes to the prospects for both the consolidation of constitutional democracy and effective economic reform.

Czechia has perhaps the most positive historical legacies of all the countries in this study. Czechoslovakia was created at the end of the First World War by the Treaty of Versailles out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The interwar republic was an industrialized liberal democracy influenced strongly by the political philosophy of its first president, Tomáš G. Masaryk (president until 1935). Liberal democracy in Czechoslovakia survived even as its neighbors succumbed to fascism and authoritarianism, until the state was dismembered by the appeasers and Nazis meeting at Munich in 1938.