Nation and State in the Context of Czech Culture
Raelene Angle
The 2 most NB trends that have emerged in the West: ecological and feminist movements
1. The Ecological discourse
 The Czech’s embraced the traditional Western perception of people’s relationship
with the environment.
 They felt that nature has an instrumental value in that it provides resources which
people use, and they have the right to use nature for their benefit but also have
duties toward it. They must respect it as Gods creation and are responsible to God
for it.
 The main argument for the protection of environment is people’s health and the
health of their children and future generations.
 Ecological protest became the most important form of expression of disagreement
with the communist system.
 The ecological movement reflected anxieties resulting from living in a society
which was perceived to be in a crisis.
 Awareness of this crisis was most driven home by the fact that Czech’s had a
lower standard of living, a higher infant mortality, and a lower life expectancy
rate than Capitalist countries.
 People believe that the overall transformation of society will bring about
improvement in the environment as well.
2. The Gender Discourse
 The communist ideology emphasizes the value of the working woman.
 The socialist state made the full incorporation of women into the work process
possible by providing not only generous maternity leave, but also nurseries and
kindergartens in local communities and workplaces.
 Czech women feel that neither men nor women enjoy any advantages or
disadvantages in law, social security, the family, and education.
 Socialism exploited women by making it impossible to live off of a single
income.
 Women enjoy three less leisure hours per day than men.
 The average woman’s pay was 30% less than man because more women were
employed in low-paid unskilled and semiskilled jobs.
 Men felt degraded by not being able to fulfill their traditional role of
breadwinners, women felt degraded by not being able to fulfill their role as
homemakers.
 Women emphasize their unique experience of gestation and childbearing which
men can never share.
 The division between us and them didn’t refer to men and women, but to the state
and the people who felt manipulated by it.
 The Czechs see gender differences as embedded in nature and as resulting directly
from the biological differences between them.
 They are naturally predisposed to different tasks.
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Because of their biological differences, men and women have different natures
and different psychological dispositions and think differently.
Feminists emphasize the emancipation of women in the public sphere, and the
importance of increased participation by men in the domestic sphere.
An improvement in the supply of goods was one of the most important ways to
better the position of women in society.
The main woman’s issue is the insufficient representation of women in politics.
Two main arguments are put forward for the desirability of greater representation
of women in the main political institutions. 1. Women are seen as better qualified
to propose legislation on education, child benefits, childcare, maternity benefits.
2. The greater participation of women would soften and clean up the political
game and thus improve the overall political culture of the country.
However, feminist movements have not met with much interest among Czech
women.
Many reject feminism and describe it as a movement of hysterical women who
hate housework or who demand to be paid for it.
Czechs also reject feminism because of its conviction that gender differences and
the traditional roles of men and women are not biologically determined but
learned and can thus be altered.
The cultural construction of the natural and the artificial.
 Things are perceived as either having emerged naturally or as the result of
deliberate human design.
 What is seen as naturally constituted includes constructs that are the result of the
evolution of human society and of its historical development.
 Specific institutions (family) is itself seen as natural in the sense that these
institutions cannot be conscious or deliberate creations.
 For example, the market economy is seen as natural because nobody created it.
 And the course of history is natural.
 The dichotomy between the consciously created and the naturally constituted can
be formulated as a dichotomy between will and nature.
 A higher cultural value is ascribed to what is seen as natural than to what is seen
as the result of conscious human effort, design or will.
Czech’s Root Metaphor
 The root metaphor of Czech culture is of the centre.
1. Czech is seen neither as part of eastern or western or central Europe. Their
country lies on the boundary between east and west.
 Czech has often seen the solution to its political problems by thinking of
itself as a bridge between these two divisions.
 The metaphor of the bridge lends to Czech identity the role of mediator
between the two distinct cultures and value systems, and as the creator of
their eventual synthesis.
2. Another core symbol of the desirable mediation between the naturally given
and the consciously created is reason.
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The Czech language makes a distinction between feelings and emotions.
Feelings are value-free, whereas emotions always have negative
connotations.
 The Czech-Slovak conflict is occasionally seen as a conflict of reason and
emotions.
Balance is achieved by constituting the metaphor of the centre.
The achievement of balance is recognized as the ideal.
So you could look at it as a balance between the east and the west, the balance of
feelings and emotions, or the balance of the naturally given, and the artificially
created.
The nation is a naturally constituted entity, so it disturbs the culturally valued
balance.
The perpetual striving for balance between the naturally constituted and the
consciously created doesn’t mean the excess of either is always negatively valued.
The cultural construction of nation, state and homeland.
1. The nation is a naturally constituted community.
 Membership of the nation is determined by one’s birth, which is seen as a natural
process.
 To belong to the Czech nation is as naturally given as gender or physical
characteristics, something that cannot be changed by a conscious decision.
 The nation is not something that can be built.
 The nation is defined by common language and culture and remains a nation
whether its members inhabit a particular territory or not.
2. The state is a deliberate human construction.
 Identification with the state is also denied a positive value. Czechs had little
reason to identify with the state whose citizens they were but which did not serve
their interests.
 There was no pride in the institutions of the state, whether the parliament, the civil
service, the army, or the police.
3. The homeland is the socio-cultural space in which they understand what others do
and others understand what they do.
 The image of the homeland includes family, friends, language, customs, way of
life, mentality, culture, history, and traditions.
 People often express the meaning of homeland by saying that it was their country,
their home, or a country in which they had the right to live.
 Slovakia was part of the state in which they lived, but it wasn’t their homeland.
 Language is often seen as the reason why Slovakia is not part of a Czech’s
homeland.
 Language, customs, traditions, and culture are attributes, which make a homeland
of a country. They are attributes which make a nation of a collectively.
 If one’s homeland is a country in which people speak the same language, and
have the same traditions and customs as on does, one’s homeland is the country in
which one’s nation lives.
 Although they hated the communist state, they loved their homeland too much to
leave it.
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 States come and go, but the homeland remains.
 The homeland can be seen as the balance between the nation and the state.
The Czech state and Czechoslovakia: the natural and the artificial.
 Slovak politicians emphasized that they weren’t seeking full Slovak independence
but aiming only at achieving Slovak sovereignty as a precondition for a treaty with
the Czechs.
 The roots of the prolonged political crisis had been widely perceived as lying in the
Slovak’s pursuit of national sovereignty.
 The inevitability of the separation was accepted by both sides.
 The Czech republic and the Slovak republic came into being as two fully
independent states on January 1, 1993.
 The Czech’s had always treated Czechoslovakia as their state even though most of
them considered only the Czech lands to be their homeland.
The metaphor of the center
 The Czech cultural notion ascribing a positive value neither to the naturally
constituted nor to the deliberately created, but to the harmony and balance between
the two.
 The ascription of high values neither to the nation (the naturally constituted) nor to
the state (the artificially created) but to the homeland, a construct which mediates
between these two terms.
 The bridge between the east and the west.
The national principle of the Czech State
 Positive value ascribed to the nation as a naturally constituted entity, and the
negative value ascribed to the state as a deliberate creation.
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