Not like us. The social marginalization and integration of minorities in the Czech borderlands while "building the new order" (1945-1960)

This work considers the changing attitudes of Czech society and its political élite towards minorities in the restored nation-state of Czechoslovakia after the Second World War and in the period of the coming to power of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the stabilization of its dictatorship. To this end, it examines three very heterogeneous minority groups: the ethnic Germans remaining after the expulsions, the Gypsies (Roma), and the Volhynian Czechs. The Czech borderlands (former Sudetenland) were a distinctive space; the processes that took place there are analysed in detail in this work. The discourses and the strategies of legitimation, as well as conflicts and negotiations at the local level, are considered in particular. The aim of the work is to reveal the ideological starting points that the key political actors turned into concrete political aims and the influence that they had on specific events in the border areas, and also the influence that the thinking and notions of local actors had on the transformation of policy and even ideology. Consequently, the work presents a vivid picture of the often ambiguous attitudes amongst the individual components of the Party and State apparat (the senior leadership of the Communist Party, the individual ministries, and the regional and local..