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Czech Republic - People

The majority of the 10.3 million inhabitants of the Czech Republic are ethnically and linguistically Czech (94%). Other ethnic groups include Germans, Roma, Japanese, and Poles. Laws establishing religious freedom were passed shortly after the revolution of 1989, lifting oppressive regulations enacted by the former communist regime. Major denominations and their estimated percentage populations are Roman Catholic (39%) and Protestant (3%). A large percentage of the Czech population claim to be atheists (40%), and 16% describe themselves as uncertain. The Jewish community numbers a few thousand today; a synagogue in Prague memorializes the names of more than 80,000 Czechoslovak Jews who perished in World War II.

The Czech Republic is among the most "ethnically homogeneous" countries in Europe (some 95% of the population are ethnic Czechs or "Moravians"). Czechs themselves are usually able to recognize other people as "Czechs" or "non-Czechs", by their appearance and /or language. Ethnic identification plays a certain role in the workplace, especially where non-western "foreign workers" (mostly Ukrainians) or Roma (gypsies) are employed. In the latter two cases, the tendency to treat such workers in a way that could be viewed as "xenophobic", "racist" or "discriminatory" might be evident, though often such tendencies are more latent than outright. Visible minorities may often be seen as "exotic" and sometimes the target of derogatory or "racist" remarks and behavior, but very rarely with violence.

A glance at a map of Central Europe provides one key to understanding Czech culture: the Czech lands -- Bohemia and Moravia -- are surrounded by Germanic peoples on three sides. The fear of being engulfed by expansionist Germanic hordes remained a traditional and deep-seated one among the Czechs. The Germans prompted Czech concern for their cultural and political survival long before the Munich Agreement of 1938, when Czechoslovakia lost the Sudetenland, and World War II. Czech-German relations were the backdrop against which the controversies of the Hussite period were played out. The Hussite movement focused on German hegemony in university and ecclesiastical offices as much as theological doctrine. The linguistic border between Czechs and Germans in the mountains surrounding Bohemia tells something of the determination with which Czechs have resisted German expansion; since the ninth century, that boundary has remained fixed within fifty kilometers of its present location, irrespective of the political fortunes of the two groups.

The Czechs have been part of the major intellectual and artistic traditions of western Europe since the Middle Ages. Czech influence has been formative in movements as diverse as Renaissance music, the Protestant Reformation, structural linguistics, and twentieth-century European literature. A cultural tradition clearly rationalistic, secular, and anticlerical permeates Czech life; this is partly a consequence of the Hussite period and subsequent Austrian efforts to force Roman Catholicism on a reluctant populace. Part of Czech self-identity focuses on maintaining the unique blend of Slavic and Western elements that make up the Czech heritage.

Czechs seem to possess a predilection for political pluralism and a distinctly antiauthoritarian bent. Czechoslovakia was the one eastern European country to maintain a functioning democracy for the entire interwar period and the only one in which the communist party was never outlawed. In the party's analysis of the errors of the 1960s' "counterrevolution," party ideologues especially decried the prevalence of "social democraticism," which despite more than twenty years of socialist development remained deeply rooted in Czech society.

Czechs were overwhelmingly literate; in 1930 some 97 percent of the population over 10 years of age could read and write. There was a substantial middle class that was highly educated and well trained. Czechs had extensive experience in the Austrian bureaucracy and the legislative processes. Their wealth of experience in government contrasted starkly with that of the Slovaks, whom Czechs found backward. A certain degree of animosity has always persisted and continued to persist between the Czechs and Slovaks.

The Czech region was economically favored as well. The Treaty of Versailles gave the Czechs substantial arable land and two-thirds of the former empire's industry. In the late 1930s, after other powers had spent a decade of frenzied effort developing heavy industry for rearmament, the Czech lands still produced half of Central Europe's pig iron and steel. The Czech consumer goods industry was also well developed. However, Bohemia's economic advantages proved to be a two-edged sword. Much industry was owned by a substantial German minority of dubious loyalty, and this figured in Nazi Germany's designs on the republic. Nonetheless, the Czech lands emerged from World War II as virtually the only European region with a reasonably developed industrial structure unscathed by the conflict.

One characterization of the Czech national character is that it is Svejkian, a term based on the Czech protagonist in Jaroslav Hasek's famous (and still popular) World War I novel, The Good Soldier Svejk (also spelled Schweik or Schwejk). Svejk's adventures in the Great War begin with his arrest by the Austrian police in connection with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne. In the conflict between the staid Austrian bureaucracy and military establishment and the seemingly slow-witted, literal-minded, provincial Svejk, the Czech consistently gets the better.

In terms of Czech values and behavior, the term Svejkian suggests passive acquiescence to whatever regime holds power and recommends a sort of pervasive obtuseness as the safest strategy for political survival. The Svejkian means of dealing with those in power, whether Austrian bureaucrats, Czechoslovak communist officials, or Warsaw Pact forces, is the antithesis of armed resistance. In the midst of massive labor unrest in Poland in late 1980, the Soviets hesitated to use armed intervention. Polish workers indicated their readiness to resist in terms unmistakable to an East European: "We are not the Czechs." The Czechs are often criticized for their reluctance to go to the barricades, but the Svejkian strategy is less a matter of capitulation than a peculiarly Czech mix of resistance and survival. Hitler is reputed to have said that he never trusted the Czechs less than when they were making concessions.

The principal elements of the Czech ethos were played out in the Czech reaction to events of the Prague Spring of 1968. Both the Czechs' orientation to the West and their Svejkism were apparent, in different ways, during the Prague Spring and the Soviet intervention and its aftermath. The late-1960s reform movement had begun as an attempt to remedy the economy's rather dismal performance with as little change as possible but grew into a full-fledged effort to restructure Marxist socialism. The call to redress the wrongs of the Stalinist era led to a full-scale reevaluation of the appropriateness of that model in Czechoslovakia. Czechs called for some measure of political pluralism, for greater autonomy for the myriad associations and unions formerly central to Czech society and now under control of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunisticka strana Ceskoslovenska--KSC), and for genuine freedom of expression--"socialism with a human face."

It was clear that for a people with a pronounced egalitarian bent, Russian socialism was less than congenial. An anonymous Czech KSC official related an incident that illustrates the gulf between the Soviets and the Czechs. During the 1968 invasion, a Soviet military commander asked a Czech official to tell him who had ordered the road signs and street names removed (to slow the advance of the invading troops). The official explained that the people themselves had done it without instructions from anyone. It was an explanation the Soviet officer simply could not understand: independent action by the citizenry without orders from someone in authority was beyond his experience.

Czech reformers sought explicitly political changes: greater scope for democratic processes, freedom of expression, and more representative organizations. The Soviet response is, of course, a matter of history. Because 1968 was, after all, a Prague Spring, "normalization" took a greater toll among Czechs than Slovaks. KSC membership purges, changes in the managerial personnel of factories, and retributions against writers and artists all fell more heavily on the Czechs.