Page:East European Quarterly, vol15, no1.pdf/34

 liberalism was two-fold: it derived from the Enlightenment, and from a perception of problems peculiar to Austria and the Czechs. In 1848 the Enlightenment tradition led all central European liberals to oppose absolutism as contrary to Natural Law. Accordingly, they stressed the need for a constitution to limit the authority of the ruling dynasty. Reason became the preeminent guide to truth and, if applied properly, would guarantee human progress. Owing, though, to Austria’s slow industrial growth (compared to western Europe’s) and to her ethnic diversity, central European liberalism developed at least two features not found in its west European counterpart. It was not strongly laissez-faire in its approach to economics. And, among non-Germans at least, it sought guarantees of “nationality” as necessary complements to political freedoms, whether corporate or for the individual citizen.

Both Palacký and Havlicek blended freely the liberals’ demand for political liberty with the narrower requirements of nationality. For Palacký, the key agent in all of history was the nation.” More than the individual, it nurtured the great ideas that gave purpose to life. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one such idea had been religious liberty, the primacy of conscience over ecclesiastical authority. And the Czechs had been the first to proclaim it, a century before [[AuLuther, in the Hussite movement. In the seventeenth century, the Czechs had waged a fierce, though unsuccessful, struggle for the preservation of their autonomy against the inroads of feudal Habsburg power. And in the nineteenth, together with other nationalities, they opposed the centralizing and Germanizing reforms initiated by Joseph II.

In each chronological period, Palacký detected elements of a Slav-German conflict which, he believed, gave Czech history a distinctive quality. The nation did not achieve its end unopposed. Rather, it engaged in a dialectic, faintly Hegelian to some scholars, where Germanic ideals confronted its own and where success was matched by frequent failures. The process was a painful one, but it alone measured a nation’s progress, just as it alone made progress possible.

Palacký saw the great nineteenth century contest as one between governments seeking to centralize power and nationalities striving to preserve their individuality. Political centralization was but a modern, secular counterpart to the pre-Reformation ideal of religious universality. And it was stronger than its antithesis, for it enjoyed the advantages of science and technology. Nationalities, by contrast, had limited resources and had been roused only recently to a sense of their worth, by Herder and other Romantics. Though they might strive for independence or for unification with kinsmen in other states, nationalities had