“National Liberals” Devoid of Liberalism? Nationalist Conceptions and Rhetoric—Continuities and Change

Closely examining the nationalist conceptions and rhetoric of the three political parties, the fifth chapter asks whether the type of nationalism that they embraced may still be treated as a liberal one. As such it directly tackles the intertwinement of liberalism and nationalism among the national liberal heirs and the dynamic between the two ideological currents that had comprised the two main aspects or “faces” of the national liberal ideology. It demonstrates that a major continuity of old, pre-WWI nationality policies was present in all the three cases under scrutiny despite the introduction of new ideologies of national integration (Czechoslovakism, Yugoslavism) or partial transformation of the old ones (Greater-German nationalism). However, in the new political frameworks of states that understood themselves as nation states, what had previously acted as “national defense” easily transformed into nationalist oppression of minorities. In line with the pre-WWI developmental patterns the parties of national liberal heirs also more or less continued moving along the trajectories leading toward radicalization of the nationalist component at the expense of the liberal one. A partly novel feature thereby was adoption of racialist categories and discourses, to differing degrees distinctive for all the three cases.