In February 2025, Radka Šustrová spoke with Rosamund Johnston about the welfare states and social justice in 20th-century central Europe. Studying social justice reveals the promises that regimes—liberal or otherwise—make to their citizens, as well as how citizens interpret and respond to these promises. Yet, to what extent can we meaningfully use the term social justice to analyze societies that excluded entire groups—most notoriously Jews and Roma in territories occupied by the Nazis during World War II?

Focusing on this very period, and drawing on the example of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Radka Šustrová discusses not only how welfare institutions (alongside culture, literature, and media) historically reinforced nationalist projects, but also how deeply illiberal concepts of social justice have often been. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, she further reflects on how these wartime legacies shaped the postwar welfare states celebrated in Central Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Listen the 61 episode of the Transformative Podcast here.