As with other national models, the Czech social policy model is an outcome of historical legacies, decisions made at different times by various actors, filtered by street-level implementation capacities and mirrored by public reflections of its operations and effects. Up to now, it has been able to resist the one-sided, hard-line reforms happening in some other post-communist countries. Its piecemeal development can be characterised by its functional adaptation to societal, political and economic changes, which preserved its core functions: universal access to basic social and health services, and preventing the most vulnerable people from falling into poverty. Even with the impact of the European Union (EU), domestic factors and actors have played a decisive role in this development.

The European social model versus the Czech model

The Czech-Slavic Social Democratic Party was founded as early as 1878. Since then, social democratic, radical socialist and later communist political movements have always been present in the political life of the country. The Czech Lands were significantly influenced by Bismarck's conservative corporatist social policy model even before the First World War. In the interwar period, Czechoslovak democracy put its stakes on the social dimension of individual and societal existence by advanced social legislation that became a pattern for Greece. The atrocious authoritarian behaviour of the communist regime after the Second World War was, in the eyes of many citizens, partially compensated for by the delivery of core social services to everybody – and by full (over-) employment as a chronic functional feature of the centrally planned economy. Pre-1989 Czechoslovakia was described by communist propaganda as a showcase example of a country with well-organised health and social services (even in the context of the Soviet bloc). The reason for the final collapse of communism was not so much the mediocre, technically outmoded quality and sometimes limited availability of social services as the sorry state of the economy.

Because the final stages of the country's preparations for EU entry and the first years of full membership coincided with the Czech Social Democratic Party emerging as the only, or the most influential, political force in government (July 1998-June 2006), the government's attitude towards the EU and its policies was quite favourable.