Cooperative Movement and Politics in the First Czechoslovak Republic
The interdisciplinary project focuses on cooperatives and the cooperative movement in the gravitational field of political parties. The instrumentalization of cooperatives as a part of the doctrines of mass-based political parties started in the second half of the 19th century and culminated in the interwar period. It was focused on binding the clientele to a particular political party. The cooperative movement thus became an important, systemic factor of politics. The means of this instrumentalization, its characteristics and mutual impacts (on the cooperative movement and on political parties), are in the Czech literature unreflected subjects of the proposed project.