ABSTRACT
No Czech fascist ideologue, not even Radola Gajda, the leader of the Národní obec fašistická or NOF (the National Fascist Community), managed to produce an ideology or political programme as coherent as those created in Germany or Italy. The NOF did, however, operate within a particular ideological framework, and its ideologues, most notably Jan Scheinost, produced relatively complex plans for a future fascist corporatist state in Czechoslovakia. Scheinost wrote about corporatism as a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism and in doing so drew not only on the case of Italy but also on his previous inspiration from Catholic circles and especially on the country’s national history and the romantic notion of the organization of the medieval Kingdom of Bohemia into a “state of estates.” The culmination of Czech fascist thinking on corporatism came in 1933 with the trilogy “Stavovská demokracie národního státu” (Estates Democracy in the Nation State), officially written by Gajda. Although the past decade has seen a small boom in research into fascism in Central in Eastern Europe, this new wave of interest has largely ignored Czech fascism, which remains seriously under-researched. This chapter aims to fill a gap in comparative fascist studies and to make a long overdue exploration of one of the most important aspects of NOF ideology.
