Nations Apart

Radka %Sustrová is a lecturer in Social History at Charles University in Prague. She studied history and political science in Prague and Berlin. Her research focuses on the history of the welfare state, social justice, social and labour rights, women's activism, and nationalism in 20th-century central Europe. From 2020 to 2022, she was a British Academy Newton International Fellow and supervisor in history at the University of Cambridge. In 2022, she was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Vienna. Her further publications include three books, several edited volumes, and articles in English, German, and Czech.

This important work makes a major contribution to the history of the development of social welfare in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Through its careful analysis of the successive stages of Czech national, Nazi, and Communist welfare structures, it demonstrates the significant continuities of policies and of institutions that transcended the multiple changes of political regime in the Czech lands through the 1930s and 1940s. By doing so, %Sustrová's study demonstrates that the expansion of welfare systems of Europe, east and west, after 1945 was not the simple consequences of changes in political power. Instead, it was the product of the mid-century confluence of state ambitions, expert-led policies, and ideologies of social solidarity and of a national community.

• List of IllustrationsList of TablesNote on the Text and TransliterationAbbreviationsMapsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1: Social Security during State-Building2: The 'Autumn Revolution' and the Reconstruction of the State and Society3: Community-Building through Authoritarian Welfare4: Towards Workfare Communities5: Health Care in Warfare6: Family Policies for Segregated NationsConclusionBibliographyIndex