Protecting Health in State Socialist Central Europe: Common Aims, National Constitutions and Varieties of Socialist Development

The protection of health was a shared ideological objective of Central European state socialist regimes. The objective was incorporated into the constitutions adopted by these regimes, which were essential instruments for communicating their political promises and programmes of transformation. However, health protection, which was recognised as a right of citizens and a state task, was not treated the same way in the different constitutional documents. The constitutional texts reveal local variation in how this supposedly common objective of socialism was to be achieved. They also show that the local conditions of socialist transformation had an impact on the realisation of the objective.