Images of Enemies: Memory, Economy and Crime

The thesis deals with two images of the key "Others" in the Czech Republic in the second decade of its existence: communists and Romanies. It shows the characteristics that have been attributed to them, points out the attributes that were constructed as a threat, and informs about power relations into which they have been placed against the rest of society. The aim of the thesis is to show on what values society is constructed in discourses which create various forms of exclusion of these "Others". The introductory chapter summarizes the Czech relationship to the "Others": Germans, Russians, and Slovaks in the form of interpretative looks into key authors (especially Palacký, Kundera, and Pithart) Next chapter focuses on methodology and introduces the starting points of the analysis in the critical discourse analysis (especially Van Dijk, Wodak and Jäger) and in the foucaultian discourse analysis (especially Hansen). These starting points are combined with the concept of moral panic which is introduced in the third chapter which also discusses its problematic places. Analytical chapters are devoted to the election of president Václav Klaus and they also discuss the role of communists (February - June 2003) and society's reactions to ethnically contextualized violence in Šluknov Hook. They..