Czech nationalism differs in one important respect from its Polish and Hungarian counterparts: the Czech nation did not have a “national” aristocracy. As a result, so the conventional wisdom goes, when the modern Czech nationalist movement emerged, even its leading elites were only a few generations removed from the countryside, giving it a supposedly more egalitarian and bourgeois coloring. This affected its ideology and political program, and by extension, helped account for the relative stability of the interwar Czechoslovak democracy, the most successful of the “successor states.”