Krystof Dolezal

During his fellowship, Krystof Dolezal will work on his book project, tentatively entitled Christian Democracy in Transition: Tracing Ideological Persistence in Czechoslovakia from Postwar to Post-Socialism. The book explains how the Christian democratic movement served as one of the central proxies through which liberal scripts traveled and were diffused in Czechoslovakia. The wager of Christian Democracy in Transition is to provide the reader with a much-needed comprehensive history of the Right and its entanglements with Catholicism and Protestantism in Czechoslovakia, chronicling its remarkable transformations in response to the challenges posed by political liberalism and the radical left and right. Situated at the intersection of comparative politics and conceptual history, the book employs punctual and nominalist analysis to rescue and construct the nearly forgotten Christian democratic canon, zooming in on key moments of ideological relaunches, re-canonizations, and local adaptations.

The intention of this project is to explain how religion is implicated in today's political conflict in Central Europe. Looking at contemporary Christian democratic political thought, Dolezal will explain how Christianity has been recalibrated into post-communist settings since 1989, and how inconsistent understandings of nationalism and internationalism, in particular, determine the Christian democratic phenomenon.