The article deals with the idea of Central Europe and aims to identify common developmental tendencies of the region in the medieval period and early modern age. The author emphasizes the advantages of the comparative approach primarily in the case of the medieval and early modern Polish, Czech and Hungarian states. Alongside common developmental tendencies the author emphasizes also important differences which cast doubt on the very idea of Central Europe.
The article deals with the narratives on the First Czechoslovak Republic in the Czech communist and post-communist public discourse. It is argued that the attitude to the First Republic played an important role in the political history of the Czech society in the second half of the twentieth century. The article shows that the negative narratives on this period were of key importance for the legitimisation of the communist regime whilst the positive narratives were an essential component in the discourse of anti-communists, supporters of the democratic reforms and the dissident movement in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1989 revolution was interpreted both as the return to the success of the First Republic democracy and economic system, and as the imagined return from the East to the West.
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