>The New Right in the New Europe

My book on the Czech right-wing politics The New Right in the New Europe is published next week. The last leg in the whole authoring process, it seems, is an email exchange with the someone in the RoutledgeCurzon marketing depatment. It’s just over nine years since I first put pen to paper, or rather finger to keyboard, about a bizarre and exotic creature called ‘Czech Thatcherism’ and about four years since I decided to turn this particular academic interest into a book. Having become one of the UK’s biggest Czech politics junkies, it’s probably is time to move on. My wife routinely turns any books she finds about the house with Václav Klaus’s picture on face down. Even I found it mildly worrying when I had to explain to our six year old that the familiar face on the computer screeen was someone “a bit like a king who lives in Czechia in a Castle”.

RoutledgeCurzon prefer typographical (i.e. blank) book fronts, so there is no cover illustration, although in my mind’s eye I would probably put on a photo of the mega-hoarding of Klaus put up by ODS by Prague’s Letna during the 1998 local election campaign. A giant statue of Stalin stood in the 1950s and later in the Havel era a giant metronome. Apart from being a striking image in itself this bold but outrageous piece of electioneering sum up the appalling but impressive chutzpah of Klaus and his party. The accompanying slogan”We Think Differently” is also, at several levels, a rather neat encapsulation of the politics of the post-1989 Czech national-liberal right.

As it is the book comes in pictureless and with the standard academic hardback price tag £75.00 ($150) Review copies, it seems are being sent to Perspectives on Politics, Political Studies Review, Europe-Asia Studies, Slavic Review, East European Politics and Societies, West European Politics, Democratization, Czech Sociological Review, Slavonic and East European Review and Central European Political Science Review. So any suitably qualified academic readers who fancy some summer reading should free feel free to click through to their favourite book review editor.