Hala – APSA 2005
parties and extra-parliamentary organizations. This is what I shall argue in this essay,
highlighting causal mechanisms at work in the process, using the independent Czech
Republic and Slovakia as my cases.
I follow analysts of various other kinds of collective identities in their move away
from “substantialism” toward “relationalism” (for reviews see: Emirbayer 1996; Lamont
and Molnar 2002; Cerulo: 1997). I treat national identity as a categorical relation based
on claims of distinction between the nation and “others.” Drawing on daily event
catalogs of nationalist claims in the Czech Republic and Slovakia over their first decade
of independence, I specify changes in how the Czech and Slovak nations were defined.
Featured are both political actors who hoped to see their nations embrace
multiculturalism and fold into a New Europe and others – nationalists – who drew
boundaries between the nation and broader supranational collectives, other nations and
internal ethno-national minorities. Finally, I will identify two causal mechanisms
involved in the construction of nations: attribution of threat and external
certification/decertification.
Western Integration and Nationalist Backlash
Two decades ago Milan Kundera made a well-known plea on behalf of the
“kidnapped West,” urging Western intellectuals to speak out against the “Sovietization”
of East Central European culture. Today the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and
Slovakia are back where the exiled Czech writer insisted they belonged, back to the
putative “right” side of the civilizational boundary, having become members of NATO in
2002 and the European Union in 2004. But the road west was not as smooth as the term
“western integration” might suggest. Contrary to optimistic predictions of a decline in the
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Convention