Krystof Dolezal

Recent scholarship in comparative politics suggests that the stability of the center-right and its ability to counter hard-right challenges are crucial for the survival of European liberal democracy. The Christian Democratic Option contributes to this debate by offering an Eastern European perspective, focusing on a region from which many issues for the contemporary right originate. Despite their significance, the diverse conservative legacies of Eastern Europe remain underexplored. Krystof Dolezal’s study fills this gap by examining the Christian democratic tradition through a longitudinal case study of Czechoslovakia and its successor states, the most successful Christian democratic projects in the region. This dissertation proposes a new approach to understanding Christian democracy, exploring how this ideology persisted despite profound historical disruptions. It uncovers the untold story of how Christian democracy served as the central proxy through which liberal and anti-liberal scripts traveled to Czechoslovakia. By examining the language used by Christian democrats to confront post-fascist, communist, and post-communist regimes, Dolezal provides a much-needed comprehensive account of the mainstream right in Czechoslovakia. The author approached this task through punctual history and institutionally embedded hermeneutical analysis to reconstruct the nearly forgotten Christian democratic canon, zooming in on key moments of ideological relaunches, canon articulations, and local adaptations. He argues that Christian democracy should be re-evaluated as the major right-wing ideology in Czechoslovakia in the latter half of the 20th century. Dolezal demonstrates its alignment with Western counterparts and its role in articulating liberal ideas within Czechoslovak discourse. Finally, he proposes to use “Christian democracy” as a broad analytical concept for studying the interactions between Christian political theologies, liberal democracy, nationalism, and socialism across various contexts to address biases in existing revisionist scholarship on Christian democracy.

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.