The idea of Slavic reciprocity in Czech nationalist thinking in the 1860s and early 1870s (a case study of the Sokol movement)

The author uses the case of the Sokol (Czech for a “falcon”) movement in the 1860s - early 1870s to examine the ideas of the Slavic origin of the Czech nation and its kind of “kinship” with the other Slavs as an important component of Czech nationalist thinking. The first Sokol was founded at the turn of 1862 in Prague and followed the model of the German “Turnvereins”, combining nationalism with physical exercises. Analysing the print media that played a vital role in Czech nationalist culture, the author shows that Czech nationalists constantly sought to emphasize their belonging to the Slavs through verbal, visual, and musical representaions. Among the main principles of Czech nationalist thinking was totalism, which meant conceiving the nation as the highest value. Putting Czech national interests over everything else led Czech nationalists to take the idea of Slavic reciprocity as their subsidiary identity used as an instrument to define and achieve their goals. One of the manifestations of this approach was the Czech commitment to the concept of Austro-Slavism - the cooperation of Slavic nations to make the policy of the Habsburg monarchy serve their joint interests. This concept can be associated with the stable interest in the issues of Galician Poles, Slovenes, and Croats. The attention of Czech nationalists to the rest of the Slavs had a wave-like character. During the period under study, such waves were caused by one of the regular Montenegrin-Turkish military conflicts in 1862 (the popularity of the so-called Junak or heroic discourse), the January Uprising in 1863 (PoLonophiLia and Russophobia) and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which made Czech nationalists seek the external support (Russophilia). These trends have influenced the formation of the Sokol culture and the activities of the Sokol societies.

Keywords

Authors

References