ON THE POLITICAL DIFFERENTIATION OF CZECH SOCIETY AT THE TURN OF THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES. ESTABLISHMENT AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE CZECHOSLAVONIC TRADER'S PARTY IN MORAVIA

Abstract

The 1990s represent one of the historical turning points in the character of Czech political partisanship. It brought an end to the existence of honorary political parties as a loose grouping of a narrow class of elites and triggered the beginning of well-organized communities with a solid, mass membership-based internal structure and expansion of their electoral potential by establishing interest affiliate organizations offering benefits to supporting voters. At the same time, the change in the parties’ character was accompanied by processes of political differentiation in Czech society as an expression of its modernization and desire to complete national emancipation and the creation of its statehood. The result was the creation of several new political parties and, at the same time, the creation of political camps, which became the foundation of the emergence of the Czech society pillar political structure. With a certain time lag, the processes of political differentiation in Czech society in the first decade of the 20th century were completed by efforts to form Czech professional political parties, comprised of the so-called old urban middle classes, i.e. tradesmen, craftsmen, and merchants. In the initial phase, their founders believed that they could promote their economic interests on the political scene through established civic and socialist political parties. However, quite quickly, the elites of small entrepreneurs abandoned this vision and began to seek to establish a professional trader’s political party. In Bohemia, three professional political parties were established in the short period between 1903 and 1909: the Trader’s Progressive and Independent Party in Bohemia, the Trader’s Party in Bohemia in the Czech Kingdom, and the Czechoslavonic Trader’s Party. These were honorary-type organizations or pre-party units that just started searching for their party identity. The failures of the traders’ parties in the elections to the Reich Council and the Landtag revealed a weakness in the cooperation tactics. They contributed to the transformation or the disappearance of said parties. The situation in the trader’s movement in Moravia was different. The Trader’s Party was formed here compared to Bohemia with a slight time lag, but its founders immediately began to form it as a mass political party. The Czechoslavonic Trader’s Party in Moravia, founded in 1908 in Prostějov, even though in the short period before the outbreak of World War I, it went through a building phase, is the first successful attempt to create a standard, classical political party in the Bohemian territory. This study reflects its efforts for internal consolidation and integration into the Bohemian party-political system of pre-war Moravia.