“We bring order, discipline, Western European democracy, and culture to this land of former oriental chaos and disorder.”

Colonial Exceptionalism: Post-colonial Scholarship and Race in Czech and Slovak Historiography

“…: 203-204). In other words, the idea of 'democratic colonialism' , which was interconnected with the supposedly innate 'democratic' nature of Czechs (or Czechoslovaks) and the trope of Czechoslovakia being an imaginary 'island of democracy' in Europe (Koeltzsch, Konrád, 2016), enabled the generation of a specific colonial discourse aimed not only at potential territorial colonies located overseas, but also at 'internal colonies': peripheralised parts of the historical Czech lands, Slovakia and above all Subcarpathian Ruthenia as a prominent laboratory of modernity, respectively a playground for the Czechoslovak 'civilising mission' (Holubec, 2014;Shmidt, 2018;Baloun, 2018).…”

“…Venturing both outside the classic 'oriental' settings in the Near East, Northern Africa, and the 'exotic' overseas, individual researchers have also identified orientalist representations produced by Czech and/or Slovak authors in the Balkans (Šístek, 2007;Malečková, 2018) another zone of 'otherness' , associated with orientalism's cognate: 'Balkanism' (Todorova, 1997). Finally, individual scholars have also described orientalising representations of interwar Subcarpathian Ruthenia and Ruthenes (Holubec, 2014;Shmidt, 2018), or even identified Czech orientalisation of Slovaks and other presumably younger Slav nations as part of the late-19 th -century folklore movement (Ducháček, 2019), or in the professional Slavic studies that developed in the interwar period (Glanc, 2009).…”