The article is an analysis of the five most distinctive public mobilisations in the Czech Republic in the past 20 years. The analysis builds on two key debates regarding post-communist civil society (civil vs. uncivil society and transactional vs. participatory activism) and also on an analysis of Czech nationalism by the anthropologist Ladislav Holý. In the empirical part, it looks at the image of the nation and civil society in the cases of the movement against the opposition agreement (Thank You, Now Go, and Czech Television -A Public Affair), the movement against the American radar base, the anti-austerity protest movement, the anti-Roma protests and the islamophobic movement. The self-conception of the movements is complemented by an analysis of the images of them that were held by their opponents. The article points to the vague and indefinite nature of Czech national identity, and the fact that in the past two decades, it has been markedly connected with the image of the West and a relatively low significance of class. It also shows that "NGO-ised" transactional activism has become the subject of hostile rhetoric which may rely on the legitimacy deficit that this type of activism has. However, it concludes that to a certain extent, it shares this type of deficit with another type of civic activism; in the case of participatory activism, it identifies a dilemma between the polarisation of society and political ineffectiveness.

Slačálek and Svobodová's paper focuses on the ideology of the Czech Islamophobic movement as seen during the 2015-16 migration crisis. In their analysis of interviews with demonstrators and speeches by leaders of the movement, they discuss first how the movement imagined its enemies, and then describe its vision of positive core values. They conclude that the movement's key ideological features are: an emphasis on social and civilizational decline (declinism); a return to an assumed naturalness in economic and gender relationships (naturalization); and the open evocation of violence and severity (brutalization). In terms of Rogers Brubacker's distinction between xenophobic ethno-nationalism in Eastern Europe, and the xenophobic defence of liberal values in the West, Slačálek and Svobodová find that the Czech case fits the allegedly western pattern better than the eastern one, which may cast doubt on the whole essentialization of distinctions between 'western' and 'eastern' populisms. KEYWORDS brutalization, Czech Republic, declinism, Islamophobia, naturalization, populism, social movements 1 Centrum pro výzkum veřejného mínění (CVVM), 'Postoj české veřejnosti k přijímání uprchlíků a kvótám na jejich přerozdělování-říjen 2017', press release, October

The paper is based on an analysis of Czech anti‑communism. It starts with a brief definition of anti‑communism. Then it presents six possible typologies of anti‑communism based on various questions: type of political mission, political background, actual political function, proposed cure, and spatial scope. There then follows a presentation of various phenomena that are framed in an anti‑communist way: the Communist Party, Social Democrats, liberals, the young generation, but also the contemporary West with its “progressivist” tendencies. In the two final sections the paper focuses on comparison in the Central European context. It shows that in the Czech context the transfer of German experience was (in)adequate for different reasons than in the Polish and Hungarian cases, namely because of the dynamics connected with the different trajectories of post‑communist political subjects.

Based on a study of anti-Roma mobilizations in the Czech Republic, this chapter examines how the image of the Roma as a folk devil exhibits not only stigmatizing characteristics but also complicated relationships in terms of tension and expectations between the ‘decent and productive majority’ and the ‘inadaptable minority’. Through this, the article states that given that decency means complying with norms defined by the behaviour of the majority, the minority is at the very least an object of suspicion from the start.

The article reconstructs the ambivalence of the relationship of Czech society to the Habsburg monarchy and its legacy. While this period can be retrospectively contrasted with the twentieth century as a time of relative stability, it is also recognized in Czech collective memory as a time of national subalternity and inequality. Sometimes the imperial legacy is also blamed for the absence of civic virtues in Czech political culture. The study traces the roots of these Czech approaches in the thought of Czech historian and national leader František Palacký (who proposed federalist reform of the empire) and the ideas of the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš G. Masaryk (who declared “de-Austrianization” to be a doctrine of the new state as well as a basis for new civic virtues). The essay also touches on popular culture images in Hašek΄s Schweik and the phenomenon of Jára da Cimrman, which contribute to an ambivalent and infantilizing image of the times of empire.