ABSTRACT
Early analyses of ‘Thatcherism Czech-style’ (Rutland 1992-3) viewed it as a set of policy prescriptions or strategies whose underlying beliefs could be straightforwardly understood as a form of East European liberalism or neo-liberalism. Such analyses usually argued that the Klaus governments’ pragmatic pulling of economic punches, combined with relatively high living standards and macroeconomic stability, legitimized the Czech right for much of the 1990s (Orenstein 1994; Dangerfield 1997). However, such approaches are of limited usefulness for understanding the political appeal of the new Czech right. They do not explain, for example, why Czechs’ support for Klaus and his party was high in 1991, when the post-1989 transformational recession was deepest and living standards in the Czech lands fell most sharply (Myant 1993b: 182-205; Vecerník 1996: 80), nor why this support was sustained at relatively high levels for more than decade, much of it spent in ineffective opposition, despite the gradual unravelling of the Czech ‘economic miracle’. As subsequent crossnational research has confirmed, trajectories of political support and economic reform strategies in post-communist states are hard to explain fully in terms of economic welfare, the relative strengths of domestic interest groups (Appel 2000, 2004) or even the wider geo-political balance between states (Abdelal 2001).
