4 - National traditions and the imagining of the nation

Summary

Whether people behave in accordance with their traditions may be questionable, but in the Czech view the existence of the traditions themselves is beyond doubt. Individual Czechs or even most Czechs may be autocratic and intolerant of the opinions of others, but Czechs as a nation are inherently democratic; many Czechs may have no more than the compulsory education and not even a modicum of manners, but the Czech nation is well educated and highly cultured. National traditions make it possible to find the behaviour of most members of the nation wanting at specific times without such behaviour's adversely affecting the positive image of the nation as a whole. Thus, for example, the collaboration of a considerable number of Czechs with the German occupation during World War II and the compliance of most Czechs with the communist system have not shattered the democratic tradition of the Czech nation.

All this seems to suggest that a nation can be a nation only when it has traditions. This is something that has probably always been intuitively felt. The contemporary Czech philosopher Jaroslava Pešková expressed this feeling when she said that ‘a nation without a tradition loses the meaning of its existence’ (1988: 118).

Anderson argues that a nation ‘is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’ (1983: 6) and that it was the emergence of press capitalism that made this imagination possible.