Christian Democracy under Autocracy: How Catholics Reinvented Anti-totalitarianism and Human Rights in Late Cold War Czechoslovakia

This article examines the conditions of the emergence of Christian democracy in late Cold War Czechoslovakia. Rather than treating Christian democracy as a postwar party-political project exhausted by its accommodation with liberal democracy in Western Europe, it is approached as an intellectual and political strategy for contesting socialist autocracy from within. Through the intellectual labor of four counter-elite activists, the article demonstrates how Czech and Slovak Catholics at home and in exile remade Christian democracy by reworking its antitotalitarian and personalist pillars through nonconformist ecclesiology, Christology, communitarianism, and performative human rights. The Czechoslovak case reveals how, under extreme historical conditions, a push for political liberalization could emerge from within a non-liberal political tradition, leaving a lasting, if ambivalent, imprint on democratic transition and the post-socialist political order in Eastern Europe.