Liberalism After the Habsburg Monarchy, 1918-1935: National Liberal Heirs in the Czech Lands, Austria, and Slovenia

This book explores what it meant to be ’liberal’ in interwar Czech, Austrian, and Slovenian politics. Up until 1918, these countries shared the common political framework of Cisleithania (the Austrian part of the Habsburg Monarchy). Within this framework was the predominantly pejorative function of the label ’liberal, ’ and as a result after 1918, no major political party employed it to describe its own political orientation. Despite making considerable efforts to dissociate themselves from liberalism, many parties continued to be referred to as ’liberal’ by the contemporary public. This association with liberalism, the book argues, was primarily due to the parties’ historical background rather than any ideological commitment to liberalism, and for that reason, the author refers to them as ’national liberal heirs.’ Examining the (dis)continuities of liberal party traditions, the book presents three representative cases of national liberal heirs: the Czechoslovak National Democracy; the Greater German People’s Party; and the Slovenian sections of the Yugoslav Democratic Party, the Independent Democratic Party, and the Yugoslav National Party. Forming a distinctive part of early twentieth-century party landscapes in Central Europe, the national liberal heirs had inherited organisational structures, parts of electorate, as well as rootedness in specific cultural and social milieus from their liberal predecessors. Following the political trajectories of the national liberal heirs, the author seeks to answer in which spheres, in which manners, and to what extent liberalism survived or even continued to develop in the interwar Czech lands, Austria, and Slovenia.

Oskar Mulej is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Vienna. His primary field of scholarly interest is the political and intellectual history of Central Europe since the late nineteenth century. In 2020 he independently designed and taught an MA-level course entitled ’Liberalism: Introduction into the History of a Political Concept’ at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.