Work group
Human Rights
Dr. Michal Kopeček is a historian and Head of the Department of Knowledge, Culture, Expertise at the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, in Prague. His research interests include comparative modern intellectual history of East Central Europe, nationalism studies, history of communist dictatorship and post-socialism in Eastern Europe. Among his publications are co-authored Architects of Long-Systemic Change: Expert Roots of Post-Socialism in Czechoslovakia (in Czech, Prague 2019, forthcoming in English in 2026), Czechoslovakism (London 2022) or the multi-volume A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe (Oxford University Press 2016; 2018).
Research Project
National Self-Determination and the Struggle for Human Rights in Central European Dissent in the 1970s and 1980s: Nationalist Opposition between Universalism and Particularism
The project explores the role of nationalist and right-wing opposition in the human rights discourse of dissident movements in Poland and Hungary two decades before 1989. In contrast to the dominant liberal and anti-nationalist narrative of East-Central European dissent after 1989, it highlights how national-conservative (e.g. ROPCiO, Young Poland Movement) and national-populist (e.g. the so-called népi opposition in Hungary) actors engaged with human rights. While human rights were not central to their agendas, they were more than merely instrumental. These movements framed rights within the broader goals of national independence, cultural renewal, and moral responsibility to the national community. For them, the nation was the highest form of social organization, through which universal rights should be interpreted and realized. Their stance combined elements of anti-communism with scepticism toward liberal individualism, emphasizing national cohesion and spiritual continuity over abstract universality. These dissident milieus often presented the most explicit efforts to reconcile universal human rights with cultural particularism. The study also shows how some of these groups, with longstanding illiberal tendencies, later became vocal critics of post-1989 liberal transformations, perceiving them as dominated by Western cosmopolitan elites. Thus, the project reconsiders the complex legacy of nationalist dissent in the human rights history of the region.