Sacralizing people's health in interwar Czechoslovakia: In search of new drivers for mobilizing the nationals

By ceasing to be peripheral nationalism struggling for emancipation, after the First World War, Czech nationalism started to serve the task of practicing social order in the newly established state. According to the approach for understanding the transformation of nationalism by Michael Hechter, this transformation of Czech nationalism from an ideology of those who were oppressed to a source of legitimacy for the state's power and surveillance started to call for revising the ideological grounds for solving internal issues. By paraphrasing Benedict Anderson, we could say that the dichotomy “Czech vs. German,” which worked as ideological criticism of the Habsburg Monarchy, could advance neither economic interests nor the political intentions of the new Czechoslovak authorities as they tried to shape themselves as a highly effective state. But being the by-product of endemic imperial collapse, the Czechoslovak state can be seen as a result of the multiple fragmentation of several territories rather than the output of pure secession. This nature of the state's establishment should also have decreased popular support for the nationalist movement and prioritized the role of the contest among political elites seeking national unity. The main successor of the prewar nationalist movement, the ruling coalition of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Československá sociálně demokratická strana dělnická) and the Republican Party of Farmers and Peasants (Republikánská strana zemědělského a malorolnického lidu), remained in opposition to the Czechoslovak People's Party (Československá strana lidová), representing other influential political elite with respect to secularization and other significant democratic ideals.