the rise and fall of czech post-dissident liberalism after 1989

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2011 25: 244East European Politics and SocietiesMichal Kopecek

The Rise and Fall of Czech Post-Dissident Liberalism after 1989

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244

East European Politics and Societies

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The Rise and Fall of Czech Post-Dissident Liberalism after 1989Michal KopečekInstitute of Contemporary History, Prague

The article describes the rise and fall of the Civic Movement during the early 1990s, the most distinct post-dissident political group in Czech politics after 1989. Basically it follows two lines of enquiry. The first describes the post–Charter 77 community of people during the first years after the 1989 Czechoslovak democratic revolution, when strong personalities of the Czech culture and civic activism from its midst strove to cultivate a vision of “November 1989” in the nascent Czech democratic political cul-ture and to promote the Velvet Revolution’s ethos as its base, first in the Civic Forum and later through one of the successor organisations, Civic Movement. analysing the main reasons why these efforts were rather unsuccessful, the article turns to the “the politics of history” of the early Czechoslovak and Czech democracy. The “politics towards the past,” namely, turned out to be a soft spot of the post-dissident political elite and actually one of the main conflict points among the various cultural-political streams stemming from the former anticommunist opposition. The second line of enquiry focuses on this community’s half-hearted, if not even forced attempt at a political-ideological delineation heading towards socially conceived liberalism. The article describes how this attempt at recasting the “legacy” of former dissidence into a civic or social liberal political form also failed relatively soon due to the structural development of the Czech political system as well as internal ideological and political diversity of the Civic Movement.

Keywords: legacy of dissidence; politics of history; liberalism; antipolitics; democratic transition; anticommunism; Czechia

This study follows two main explanatory axes. The first wants to describe the post–Charter 77 or post-dissident community of the first years after the Czechoslovak

democratic revolution, when strong personalities of the Czech culture and civic activ-ism from its midst often strove to cultivate a vision of “November 1989” in the nascent Czech democratic political culture and to promote the Velvet Revolution’s and Občanské fórum’s (Civic Forum; OF) ethos as its base. This effort was not very suc-cessful. Paradoxically, “the politics of history” turned out to be the post-dissident political elite’s soft spot, emerging as one of the main conflict points among the various cultural-political streams stemming from the former dissidence. The second explana-tory axis focuses on this community’s half-hearted, if not even forced attempt at a



Kopeček / Rise and Fall of Czech Post-Dissident Liberalism after 1989 245

political-ideological delineation heading towards socially conceived liberalism, which, from the viewpoint of political theory as well as a certain natural sense of balance, seemed to be a logical and necessary option for the Czechoslovak/Czech political life of the first transformation years. However, this attempt at recasting the “legacy” of former democratic opposition into a liberal political form also failed relatively soon. The following pages are an attempt to answer why.

I. Dissidents in Politics: Year One

From the outset, the formation of a post-dissident political party as a viable political formation in the Czech environment was burdened by a strong tradition of the so-called antipolitical politics and the Charter 77’s consensualist strategy, rooted in the years of struggle of a handful of Czech and Slovak dissidents with the social-ist dictatorship. November 1989 swept the former society’s outsiders from dissi-dence to the forefront of the democratisation movement. This tradition became the core of the dynamic and often chaotic formation of OF: it was conceived as a broad non-party community of engaged citizens, the main role of which was to guarantee the non-violent transfer of power from the hands of communists and to create condi-tions for the first free elections in Czechoslovakia since 1946. Václav Havel played a key role in OF’s initial days as the generally recognised leader of the November Revolution. Not only at the time of his OF leadership but also later, from the heights of the Prague Castle and his presidential office, he defended the concept of OF as a deliberately vague, not very sharply defined—and so politically undetermined—movement, whose central role was to establish the bases of liberal democratic order rather than to represent specific politics. Subsequent OF leaders adopted and main-tained this mission as well: first, the political scientist and journalist with legal educa-tion Petr Pithart, soon to be appointed Czech prime minister; and later the journalist and former dissident Jan Urban, who led OF to the June 1990 elections.1

The first months of 1990 already proved this concept of broad civic movement based on permanent mobilisation and ad hoc improvisation rather problematic. Partly inevitably, partly due to the adherence to this concept, OF got into several fundamen-tal external as well as internal conflicts, which it was unable to resolve. On the one hand, OF’s identity was based on politics of consensus and the effort to establish the bases of liberal democracy with support from the non-communist majority of popula-tion. Simultaneously, utterly specific reform policy needs soon emerged in all areas of public life that were not and could not be apolitical. The question of the nature and intensity of the economic reform may serve as an example: it soon became the object of contention between the experts of the Czech national and federal cabinets, repre-sented on the one hand by the Czech Deputy Prime Minister František Vlasák and on the other by the federal Minister of Finance Václav Klaus.2 Few disputed the eco-nomic reform itself as a way out of the state centralised system’s crisis, even among



246 east european Politics and Societies

the communists. However, the specific manner of its implementation represented a naturally political question, but the OF and most of its representatives in state posi-tions understood and presented it to the public as a more or less technical, apolitical problem that just requires the optimum solution.

The non-party politics (nestranická politika) concept naturally had its critics within the OF as well. Often, they were the same people who criticised the lack of programmatic political discussion in dissidence already under late state socialism, such as emanuel Mandler or Václav Benda. They found support among other politi-cal party representatives within OF and unsuccessfully strove to strengthen their influ-ence within the Forum and their representation at its election tickets. The OF’s Conceptual, later Political Committee, uniting political party representatives, promoted the concept of OF as a coalition of different political streams. This hit resistance not only with the OF Coordination Centre Council, but also with President Havel, as it went against the spirit of a politically undefined, broad-as-possible movement. These initiatives found little understanding also with district and local OF leaders, for whom small parties and political movements, usually emerging and concentrated in Prague, were unknown and not trustworthy.

However, the idea of politics of consensus as a result of a kind of mass acclamation was very problematic also due to the OF’s internal structure and communication. The movement was based on charismatic legitimacy that soon began to crumble as Václav Havel and many former dissidents close to him left for the Office of the President, state, or parliamentary positions. The non-existent vertical relations and unclear com-munication rules, particularly between the Prague Coordination Centre and the regional or district forums, produced a power vacuum inside the movement, which resulted inter alia in a considerable democratic deficit. The Prague Centre gradually took on a great burden of responsibility, but its decision-making was not controlled by the OF Congress or anything else. Therefore, it quickly lost support or at least the clear approval of the regions and districts. “OF representatives never stopped speaking about democratisation, while the power logic forced them to maintain the previous revolutionary practice that had inhibited democratisation. This represented one of the period paradoxes, probably without a solution.”3 The emphasis on the “generally ben-eficial” character of the Prague Centre politics concealed the de facto hegemony of the narrow circle of Prague intellectuals—former dissidents, which naturally aroused aversion and bitterness in many active participants of the political process.

This was accompanied by another aspect. The basic paradox of the 1989 and 1990 dissident and post-dissident politics—in Czechoslovakia and east Central europe—was its effort to create democratic community consensus based on the clear rejection of communism, while striving for political and pragmatic agreement with the communists at roundtables in the name of peaceful societal change. This created a basic disharmony between the legitimization practices of the newly emerging order, which declaratorily denounced communism as a “totalitarian order,” that is, the embodiment of historical evil and a dead end of modern society development;




and the pragmatics and needs of the political process, that is, the practical level, characterised by the politics of “historical compromise” and broad co-operation across the entire societal spectrum including the communists.4

Roundtable politics became the fundamental model of regime change negotia-tions for a short but key period. The OF leadership inevitably felt bound by it and could hardly push for the sharp anticommunist course that many in and outside the former dissidence called for. This soon became the object of criticism by certain more distinct political streams and memorial organisations, such as the Club of Committed Non-party Members or the Confederation of Political Prisoners.5 even more importantly, the Prague Centre’s temperate anticommunism soon became unacceptable for a considerable number of district OF organisations, for whom the relations with local Communist Party officials and structures had become the central problem of their practical political activities.6

OF did win the June 1990 elections in the Czech lands, but the victory simultane-ously brought it to the edge of its dissolution. It became the most important political entity in the country, while at the same time it lacked any political or programmatic vision that it could begin to fulfil. In the elections, “the concept of civic politics tri-umphed, while losing momentum at the same time. Transformation politics could no longer be the politics of consensus and compromise.”7 The idea of OF representing a certain broad, ideologically undefined political centre based on citizens’ active par-ticipation according to their interests and needs contradicted the growing transfor-mation process dynamics, which, in contrast, required strong political responses and ideological anchoring. The logic of this development was best understood by the then-reappointed federal Minister of Finance Václav Klaus. In summer 1990, he began to tour regional and district OFs, endeavouring to secure political support for his vision of radical economic transformation based on privatisation and the fast intro-duction of market economy. He skilfully used the exacerbated anticommunism in the districts, stemming from the power and economic struggles between local OFs and “communist mafias,” but also from the growing natural need for more centralisation and hierarchy within the organisation to provide local OF representatives with the necessary authority and agility. Klaus was hailed by the OF activists unhappy about the Prague Centre’s practices and the excessively yielding policy calling for a clear framework; he offered them a vision of OF transformation into a right-wing party with a clear economic transformation and de-communisation program. He was then very quickly—in October 1990—elected OF chairman, and soon ODS (Občanská demokratická strana; Civic Democratic Party) was established using considerable parts of OF organisational structures as well as its activists’ human potential.8

II. Post-Dissident Liberal Politics Formation in Czechia: Občanské hnutí

Similarly to ODS, Občanské hnutí (OH; Civic Movement) also emerged in conse-quence of the OF split.9 Unlike ODS, however, future OH members did not play an




active part in this process; they disliked OF disintegration that followed relatively soon after the victorious June 1990 elections and considered it premature. Therefore, the Movement presented itself from the outset as the main OF “heir,” not hesitating to emphasise its close links with the original Fórum in its party materials. Soon after the OF’s so-called Farewell Congress, on 24 February 1991, OH published the Občanské hnutí proclamation, defining itself as “a liberal, civic and social political movement,” which, in contrast to ODS, rejects the right-left division and—on the contrary—wants to play the role of the uniting liberal political centre. Five days later, the Movement adopted its first programme document We Are the Civic Movement, stating its ten main political goals and explicitly referring to OF and its first November 1989 dec-laration called What We Want. OH declared its lasting adherence to the OF manifesto, which had, allegedly, not been fulfilled. It was to be based on “realism, democratic and humanist traditions of our nations and the entire european culture that we con-sider rooted mainly in Christian ideas.” Immediately below, the declaration states that “we see the deep meaning of the current changes primarily in society’s moral renais-sance.” OH wanted to advocate fast economic transformation, market economy forma-tion, and private business support, and it explicitly rejected the 1968 reform communism ideas. at the same time, the economic sphere was not to be the only level of transfor-mation; the establishment of an active civil society and dialogical political culture was emphasised as well as the necessity to resolve environmental problems. Other motives that were to distinguish OH from ODS and other parties included the princi-ples of self-administration and decentralised decision-making; emphasis on the con-cept of the rule of law, but also the state’s social responsibility; social dialogue; and last but not least, the endeavour to preserve a functioning federation. One important element was also to “deal with the guilt of the communist regime representatives,” to determine specific accountability for the “moral, economic and environmental devas-tation of the country,” which, however, was not to lead to the application of the col-lective guilt principle in any way.10

The initial stage of OH formation culminated in the establishment Congress on 27 april 1991: Jiří Dienstbier was elected chairman, symbolising the Movement’s bond not only to OF but also to the pre-November dissidence.

The establishment of OH and its liberal democratic definition, however, did not as yet resolve the position of liberal post-dissident politics in the framework of the nascent Czechoslovak, or Czech political spectrum. The broad ideological base of former democratic oppositional groups all over east Central europe hindered any clear-cut political formation in times immediately following the fall of the dicta-torship. The exponential growth of the set of contentious political issues, inevita-bly brought about by the onset of the far-reaching societal transformation, required ever-clearer political delineation of individual political groupings. This speeded up the personally often painful political-ideological splitting of the former opposition, often leading to nostalgic pondering of the unity too quickly lost of the November Revolution civic camp. a more general question arose: how to reinterpret the ideo-logically broadly conceived “legacy of dissidence” in the new situation and how to




best use the indisputable authority and moral credit the democratic opposition in east Central europe had won in times of late socialism and its fall.

III. Postcommunist Liberalisms in East Central Europe

The 1989 events were accompanied by the hope that the fall of east european communism would not just mean the victory of capitalism but also the momentous victory of liberal democracy. global discussion then revolved around the contention whether they were “liberal revolutions” of their kind, which, in the end, introduced basic democratic rule-of-law principles into political life of most countries in the region, thus contributing to the irreversible “end of history” under this social-political order, as seen by Francis Fukuyama; or whether they were just short-lived victories of liberal principles to be soon overshadowed by one-sided neoliberal economic shock in some countries, or the onset of nationalism- and collectivism-oriented pop-ulism in others. In any case, liberalism as a political doctrine became an important reference point for a number of key political actors in the early stage of democratic transformation. It was a fairly natural development as liberalism represented an ideal antidoctrine to state socialism in postcommunist europe. In his influential 1992 book The Future of Liberal Revolution, Bruce ackerman attributed this to the fact that in many ways, liberalism appears as “Marxism reversed,” advocating capitalism instead of socialism but allowing for the same model of progressivist, linear thinking forecasting a certain end of history.11

Whether we accept this or not, it is certain that liberal political thinking experi-enced an admirable renaissance east and West after 1989 and that in certain coun-tries, such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, or estonia, liberalism became a strong political power. This fact needs to be immediately qualified in several respects. Liberalism, however we define it, seldom managed to appeal to the majority population and to gain mass support in this period. It always remained a matter of political and intellectual elites, who saw in it a system of thought and a political tool suitable for fundamental political, economic, and social transforma-tions of the postcommunist society. This also implies that we could hardly identify liberalism with a single political party or movement. We would search in vain for pure liberal politics in postcommunist europe; however, liberal principles and con-victions together with liberally formulated political proposals played and continue to play an important role in many political parties right and left of the imaginary centre. after the fall of communism, the new democracies saw a seemingly para-doxical phenomenon that older european and american democracies had experi-enced earlier. at the point when liberal democracy is established and the rule of law introduced, liberalism as political movement “dissolves” and often perishes, as it to an extent becomes a general starting point for most political movements and streams that recognise liberal democracy as the basic “playing field.” It is not and cannot be




property of this or that political representation; it stays despite the changing govern-ments and their party colours and defines the entire political environment rather than a certain political stream.12

This is also why the issue how to define today’s liberalism and whether we can speak of liberalism in the singular at all or whether we should distinguish among several different liberalisms remains one of the basic political theory questions. The latter opinion seems to have gained an increasing number of supporters over the past two decades, although political philosophers and intellectual historians differ sig-nificantly as to how and according to what they distinguish different liberalisms.13 Understandably, the subject of this study requires a historical rather than a philosoph-ical perspective. It is primarily not about determining the ideological or conceptual substance of liberal thinking to measure the level of “liberalness” of a certain political movement, but rather about a situational definition of liberalism, which is more interested in specific historical actors’ self-definition and their role in the given his-torical situation, in our case the post-1989 Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic.

authors who emphasise the problem’s historical perspective usually speak about two basic kinds of liberalism that played an important role after 1989 in east Central europe.14 The first one is usually referred to as ethical or political liberalism, or “civil society liberalism.” It is a broad stream of thought born in the democratic anticommunist opposition’s struggle for human and civil rights in the 1970s and the 1980s. Understandably, it carried significant features of its dissidence origin. It emphasises the concept of “civil society,” born in dissidence as a space of free action outside of state surveillance. It carries strong “communitarian” features, understands politics mostly as service to the public good, and emphasises civil society’s internal plurality and diversity. This gives rise to the emphasis on the “politics of consensus” as a fundamental base of political community, which allows it to stand up against dictatorship or to carry the weight of the democratisation process. This standpoint has usually defined itself as liberalism only after several months if not years from the fall of socialist dictatorship, and yet just hesitatingly. The term “liberal” in these various self-definitions relates to temperament or a life attitude rather than to a spe-cific political doctrine or an ideal image of the world. OH was the most significant representative of this type of liberalism in the Czech post-1989 politics.

The second type of liberalism tends to be characterised as economic (neo)liberal-ism; “market liberalism”; and sometimes also etatist liberalism, which is a somewhat misleading term, however. This type of liberalism emphasises philosophical indi-vidualism, the strict separation of private and public spheres. It is not primarily concerned with building a civil society but the establishment of the bases of “politics of freedom” that grow from the economic sphere, free market and ownership. That is also why this liberalism, despite its inborn mistrust of a strong state, prefers—in times of democratic transformation—the state, or the state executive power to be the central mover of liberal reforms. However, economic liberalism did not appear out of the blue after 1989; it also has roots in the last decades of state socialism, even if




much weaker that the ethical liberalism of human rights politics. Since the early 1980s, liberal thinkers of this tradition had emphasised ever more vocally the impor-tance of the economic sphere, which the democratic opposition’s ethical liberalism regularly failed to take into account. It, however, provided the ideological key to the early stage of democratic and economic transformation: the principle of ownership as the basis of the politics of freedom.15 Liberalism here is more than a mere life attitude; it usually represents a self-contained life philosophy and an image of good society, which is to form the basis and reference point of political actions. In the post-1989 context, this kind of liberalism—defining itself usually as conservative—was probably most successful in Czechia among all of east Central europe. It was represented not only by ODS, the most influential right-wing party, but also the less politically successful, but very influential, Občanská demokratická aliance (ODa; Civic Cemocratic alliance) with its strong dissidence roots, similar to those of OH.16

This study focuses on the first of the outlined types of liberalism, which was, given the significant political dominance of the second in the Czech context, neces-sarily circumscribed and eventually defeated by it.17

IV. Liberal Ideology or “Decent Politics”?

The new political entity enjoyed the seeming advantage of well-known person-alities of the first post-November political elite standing at its fore. at the time of its establishment, OH had the strongest cabinet representation at the federal as well as Czech Republic levels, and its proportional representation in the federal as well as Czech Republic parliament was also very high. Jiří Dienstbier and Pavel Rychetský, two federal deputy prime ministers, belonged to it, as well as Defence Minister Luboš Dobrovský. equally significant personalities included Czech Prime Minister Petr Pithart, Interior Minister Tomáš Sokol, Minister without Portfolio Jaroslav Šabata, and Chairwoman of the Czech National Council Dagmar Burešová. This fact of course became one of the important motives of the Movement’s self-promotion. It liked to present itself as a non-party political movement of citizens with a strong representation of political personalities. The bet on renowned faces, however, soon turned out to be concealing a trap. The clearly visible and often popular personali-ties in government and parliamentary positions usually had no time to develop structures and communication channels within the Movement. The generally shared aversion to this activity, demanding time and administrative effort and yet rarely providing visible satisfaction and recognition, strengthened their reluctance even further. Symptomatically, it was Dienstbier who became and remained chairman until the end, probably OH’s most popular figure. as foreign minister, he spent most




of his time in his cabinet office in the Černín Palace at Hradschin or travelling abroad, rather than in the OH central office at the Prague’s Square of the Republic.

The contrast between the popularity of individual personalities and the low OH election support in opinion polls was also caused by its long-term programmatic ambivalence. The all-too-wide breadth of opinion was obvious from the outset, lead-ing to uncertainty about what OH politics should represent apart from the continuity with OF, and what its relations to other Czech and Czechoslovak political actors were, particularly to ODS.

The diversity of opinion among the leaders is illustrated in the Manifesto of Czech Realism. Its author, Petr Pithart, OH’s vice chairman and Czech prime minister, pre-sented it to his unsuspecting colleagues in the absence of the chairman at the OH Presidium meeting on 4 July 1991.18 One of the most interesting Czech political thinkers of the last third of the twentieth century, Pithart followed upon many themes he had developed in samizdat journalism in response to the Prague Spring failure from the early 1970s on. He defended the concept of practical politics as pragmatic consensus, cultivation of tolerance, and patience in the spirit of British traditions. In this sense, the Manifesto emphasised the tradition of “Masarykian realism” that was to be the Movement’s fundamental political principle, creating conditions for OH’s centre-liberal position to embrace political consensus of a broad opinion spectrum in Czech politics. Pithart’s ideas on the need of perceptiveness to the conservative impulses from the right received much less approval. They expressed his long-term cautious search for liberal conservatism as a distinct opinion standpoint firmly rooted in Czech political traditions.19 The effort to strengthen the conservative element in OH was deemed counterproductive inside as well as outside the Movement, given the two existing strong Czech political parties defined in a distinctly conservative way.20

a large part of OH may have found Pithart’s as yet fairly general outline of his conservative motives strange, but it was certainly not opposed to another of his central motives: the mistrust to any dogmatism and ideologies in general. In his 1973 samizdat publication Defence of Politics, Pithart formulated a sharp opposition between ideology and politics in response to the ideologically propagandist activism of the early consolidation regime under Husák. Ideology for him was the opposite, or even a denial of politics as the discovery of specific solutions for specific life and social problems, as the mechanism of societal conflict resolution that simultaneously tolerates and initiates “life-enhancing social diversity.”21 In Pithart’s understanding, post-November liberalism was to be the opposite of ideology.

Liberalism is not and cannot be an ideology also because it requires pragmatic flexibil-ity, a realistic approach from its partisans: a liberal politician may be conservative in dealing with one problem, while in another instance, we catch him striving for a radical reform. . . . The freedom that forms the fundaments of liberal politics, while represent-ing its aim as well, is incompatible with the ideological view of the world.22




This aversion to any kind of ideologies was perceptibly present in the Czech political life of the first years after the fall of communism. Similarly to Marxism-Leninism, any ideology seemed to be leading to the same simplification and dema-gogical distortion of life’s complexities and dilemmas for the sake of political mobilisation. This aversion, strongly present in OF and later OH politics, found its practical expression in the refusal to recognise and accept the irreversible fact of the emerging right-left political spectrum. In this spirit, the relationship of OH to ODS, this “party of engineers to whom everything is obvious and for whom the entire world is just a nut to be cracked,” evolved as full of mistrust from the very start.23

Two large independent themes began to emerge in this period. OH strove to define itself against ODS through them, though hindered by the mutual proximity of their positions. The first theme was the constitutional issue stemming from the grow-ing Czech-Slovak disagreements. OH supported the preservation of the common state, which was, however, also ODS’s official position until the end of 1992. Disapproval of the lustration debate outcomes represented the second theme. OH supported lustrations in principle while it disagreed with the implemented “Jacobine version,” which contradicted international pacts on human rights, according to Dienstbier and others.

all these political motives, however, remained overshadowed by the, in its ori-gins, moralistic antipolitical idea of the existence of decent consensual politics made for people on the one hand and indecent, predatory, ideological politics primarily pursuing fractional interests on the other. In Dienstbier’s words, “Our task is to press the awareness in the public that the division line is not between the extremes but between the democratic, tolerant, decent, cooperation-desiring citizens be they in whichever party, and those who fall for the limiting ideologies of the right and left.” He thus invoked the idea that anything not affiliated with the political centre some-how automatically heads towards one or the other political extreme. “Today, just like after World War I, we are faced with the fundamental question whether the statist, authoritative extremes of the right and left prevail or the free-thinking liberal con-cept of the world.” OH was to represent politics following upon Charter 77’s activities and the 1988 Manifesto Democracy for all, politics “resulting from the implementa-tion of morality as the most effective political tool.”24 This idea was rooted in the belief that the democratic revolution had not been completed so far and that it should include the formation of a democratic state with the rule of law and the completion of fundamental economic, cultural, and social transformation in the society. all this was to be guaranteed by the majority civic consensus; OH representatives could hardly reconcile with the fact that precisely these issues were quickly coming to the core of a political, that is, ideological conflict.

The declared openness to “all decent people” that was to serve as a basis for the strategy of the strong centre had little correspondence to the actual turbulent devel-opment of political loyalties of the time. The fact that OH had little chance of com-ing to an agreement with the political streams self-defined as conservative was




demonstrated in the failed talks with Konzervativní strana—Svobodný blok (Conservative Party—Free Block) about possible cooperation at the turn of 1991 to 1992. The limits beginning to loom at the left were more serious for OH identity and its potential for electorate expansion. at the beginning of 1992, the non-registered but outstanding OH members and MPs Miloš Zeman and Zdeněk Jičínský left the party and successfully ran as social democrats in the following parliamentary elec-tions. In summer 1992, the OH Council called upon Jaroslav Šabata to leave OH due to deep opinion differences stemming from Šabata’s leftist orientation as well as his opinions and public statements on the issue of Czech-Slovak relationship. Šabata left the Movement immediately. another drain of significant personalities such as Květa Kořínková, Vlasta Štěpová, Lubomír Zaorálek, and later the former vice chairman of the OH Republic Council, Pavel Rychetský, in the same direction to social democ-racy, occurred after the electoral failure and Zeman’s appointment as ČSSD chair-man in February 1993. In retrospect, the departure of many left-oriented politicians obviously evidenced the limits of OH’s potential shift towards the left: to a great extent, they were formed by the Movement’s internal composition and its leader-ship’s prevailing political convictions. Ivan gabal, who authored the successful 1990 OF election campaign as well as the unsuccessful 1992 OH campaign, played an important role in this internal cultivation process. In an effort to create a clearer opinion stance for the Movement, he tried to dispose of strong leftist personalities and challenged their OH affiliation at the personal level.25 This strategy, however, turned out to be highly problematic. Whereas the situation at the left side of political spectrum was still relatively open for any non-communist party in 1992, the basic rules of the game at the right side were set by the ODS, seconded by ODa at that time. Other right-wing or centre-right bodies, including the indecisive OH, had no other option but to play along, which decreased their chances of threatening the posi-tion of the ascending right-wing hegemony of the Czech transformation.

The ever-present and sweeping assessment of OH as an undefined, programmati-cally slushy, and basically leftist political body—amply nourished by the right—forced the Movement’s leaders to formulate the political program more specifically. at that time, it was clear to many leading OH politicians, such as Petr Pithart, that the alternative to party politics in Czechoslovakia was not on the agenda for the day and that if OH were to feature as a distinguished partner to other parties in the elec-tions and if it were to have a chance to succeed, it needed to subscribe to the princi-ples of pluralist party politics unambiguously.26

The search for a programme climaxed in the second regular pre-election Congress on 14–15 March 1992, which confirmed Jiří Dienstbier as chairman and Petr Pithart as vice chairman of the OH Republic Council.

The Congress was above all dominated by a matter-of-fact debate over the elec-tion programme, which evidenced the growing need to define the Movement against the ODS. Considerable attention was devoted to the elaboration of individual pro-gramme components with the central position of the economic programme that was




to represent an alternative to ODS neoliberalism, and therefore emphasised social and environmental aspects of transformation. The main authors of OH’s economic policy were Jan Vrba, the Czech industry minister and head of the OH economic Committee; and Václav Humpal, chairman of the Federal Parliament’s agricultural Committee and head of the OH agricultural Committee. They were seconded by a number of other established experts such as Josef Fogl, Jan Mládek, Jan Taubner, František Vlasák, or consultants from international universities like Jan Vaňous and Jan Švejnar. OH continued to present itself as an undisputed supporter of economic reform with the key elements of privatisation, price, trade and foreign currency mar-ket liberalisation, and restrictive budgetary policy. However, according to OH eco-nomic experts, the overall liberalisation ever so emphatically advocated by Czech right-wing parties represented only one side of the matter. The other was to be a coherent state economic policy because the state treasury income had to be expected to diminish during the transformation, resulting in budget deficit. The state’s task, as it still owned most businesses and therefore bore responsibility for them, was an active demand-boosting policy. at this stage of transformation, the market was not to be fully and solely relied upon as it was not fully functional yet. Well-considered social policy was to remain an important part of state responsibilities, first because the social-liberal concept of democracy sees social justice as a guarantee of freedom and second because of the threat of significant decrease in societal support for the economic reform without considerate social policy.27 Criticism of the ODS and ODa concept of transformation became one of the stable and repeated motives of the Movement’s politics.

among the other motives of OH’s self-presentation belonged the anti-ideological argument and a preference to local politics, self-administration, and citizens’ activity over party politics. Many former dissidents and their supporters considered politics of consensus one of the most important elements of the dissidence and Charter 77 legacy.28 That, however, did not prevent the pre-election rhetoric from often taking a strongly ideological and provocative form despite all the declared realism, like in the case of Dienstbier’s crusade against the alleged threat of “right-wing bolshevism.” “If bolshevism denotes intolerance, the rule of violence, contempt for freedom and the opinions of people, the power’s effort to force its own world view as the only admissible on the majority, or even a minority, then we have to prevent the replace-ment of left-wing bolshevism by right-wing bolshevism.”29

To a great extent, Dienstbier’s diction responded to similar diction from the right, primarily the sharpened criticism in Český deník (The Czech Daily), a newspaper close to ODS, which, during spring 1992, referred to OH as an undefined political movement hiding under a right-wing cover and left-wing recipes. This was to be evidenced, for example, by the economic reform strategy advocated by the Czech Cabinet, which OH incorporated into its economic programme. OH leaders were also subject to sharp criticism: Pithart, who was to endanger the existence of the com-mon state with his alleged acquiescence to the Slovak pressure, and of course Dienstbier, whose allegedly utterly conceptless foreign policy was to represent the last




outpost of the so-called anti-political politics and to jeopardise inter alia the fast and radical economic reform in Czechoslovakia.30 also Václav Benda’s assault on his former dissidence fellow travellers was utterly ruthless. He was afraid of OH’s undue advantage at the expense of other parties not only due to the number of its leaders among media celebrities, but also thanks to President Havel’s unofficial but percepti-ble support for the Movement. Benda referred to OH as a “communist or cryptocom-munist [group of people] because it clearly follows upon the 1968 reform communism in its strongest representatives.”31

accusations of left-wing attitudes were unpleasant for many OH leaders, although its programme and the criticism of ODS economic neoliberalism did locate OH clearly towards the left-wing pole of liberal thought, referred to by some political theorists as social liberalism. However, Ivan gabal, OH’s electoral campaign manager, whom President Havel “lent” to the Movement from amongst his advisors for the pre-election period, stated clearly in spring 1992 that there is no danger of OH cooperating with the left, that is, social democrats, not to mention communists after the elections, mainly due to its interest in continuing the economic transformation. He emphasised OH’s readiness to cooperate with the right, claiming that if OH won the elections, it would again offer the Finance Minister office to Klaus.32 Retrospectively, this pre-election tactic was clearly mistaken because it de facto not only admitted to Klaus his status as the principal economic reformer, but it fully sanctioned it despite all the growing criticism. It also went against the logic of OH’s self-definition as the centre, deline-ated pragmatically rather than ideologically, and ready to cooperate on specific reform and daily policy tasks in a broad coalition. This represented yet another expression of the ambivalence of OH’s public presentation.

Petr Příhoda, a former dissident himself and Petr Pithart’s close friend, sharply criticised these shortcomings in one of his pre-election commentaries in the allied journal Přítomnost (Presence). In his view, the Movement generally lacked team spirit, “unless we want to mistake it for the now often frustrated self-importance of the numerous men and women of this movement who ‘did November, after all’ or ‘had been there’ in dissidence.” according to Příhoda, the only thing that truly united the diversity of opinion within the OH community was the aversion to ODS’ politi-cal style. This, however, was to represent “the consequence of the separation trauma rather than a rational stance” because OH representatives did not openly criticise the ways of ODS, they rather tried to prevent “these more dynamic former OF co-warriors from gaining new positions,” using occasional obstructions. aversion, however, is not a party-constitutive principle, noted Příhoda acrimoniously.33

V. Dealing with the Communist Past and the Rule of Law Principles

The attitude to the communist past belonged among the basic areas of contention from the onset of the OF internal split and significantly contributed to the ODS-OH




differentiation.34 It would be all too simple to claim that ODS uncritically adopted a radical anticommunist discourse whereas OH was against de-communisation. Rather, since early summer 1990, the unexpectedly strong impact of anticommunist rhetoric began to play in many respects a determining political role and influenced the entire OF. Whereas future ODS politicians at the central and local levels tried to take an active stance and to use the growing impact of anticommunism on the one hand, but to give it clear boundaries on the other, future OH political elites’ approach to radical anticommunism was considerably more critical and strove not to give into it. The fact is, however, that in one way or another anticommunism as a basic legitimization topos became a defining element of the emerging Czech political cul-ture. Whoever wanted to participate in political life outside the Communist Party could not escape it.

also in these waters then, OH had to try to sail between the rocks of “anti-communism with Bolshevik face”—adam Michnik’s characterisation of radical anticommunist activism in Poland of the time—and its own total disgrace and poten-tiality of being accused to be but a communist agency in a democratic regime. apart from that, many OH representatives had plenty of personal reasons to require at least a symbolical settlement of the socialist dictatorship’s injustice. However, in the poten-tial contention of de-communisation policy and consistent adherence to the rule of law, OH leaders tended to side with the second principle. The increasing difference between the growing right-wing de-communisation activism and OH’s position mani-fested most strongly during the debate on the so-called Screening or Lustration act.

according to a Federal assembly decision, ad hoc lustrations had been imple-mented since the beginning of 1991 at several levels, not only among MPs and cabi-net members, but, for example, also at governmental offices, ministries, or the Federal assembly office. In the process, it was increasingly obvious that the number of staff who had actively cooperated or worked for former communist secret police was far from negligible. The sense of potential threat to the nascent democracy, not neces-sarily through a conspiracy of the “old structures” but for instance in the form of the preservation of certain social networks and mental patterns, strengthened the need for a systematic settlement of the lustration issue. Pavel Rychetský, federal vice prime minister and OH member, submitted the intent of the Lustration act on 10 July 1991. Submitting the intent, he was aware of its trade-off nature and advocated its endeav-our to find the boundary between protecting democracy and constitutionality against potential turnover on the one hand and an accounts-settling tool on the other. at the same time, the penalties for unauthorised publication of screening process data were to be rather heavy—up to several years’ imprisonment. However, anticommunist radicals criticised the bill, accusing its authors of the unwillingness to rigorously deal with the past, and pushed the draft in a significantly more radical direction. In the following parliamentary debates that culminated in October 1991, ODS, ODa, KDS (Křesťansko-demokratická strana; Christian-Democratic Party), and other right-wing parties representatives stood against OH. Its MPs in turn were strongly




supported by then–Federal assembly Chairman alexander Dubček, for whom the approval of the act in existing form represented evidence of the onset of non-democratic forces.35 The connection with Dubček—in fact unsought for—failed to serve OH in its fight against the sharp lustration version as it gave the appearance of validity to the right-wing theory about the decisive impact of sixty-eighters’ (that is, reform communist) influence on OH politics.

Sharp arguments and political fights inside the government coalition were incited particularly by ODS amendments leading to a large-scale concept of lustration based on membership in certain state-socialist dictatorship organisations and applied to a considerably broader scope of current positions and offices of state-societal life. Several OH MPs led by Petr Uhl, as well as other OH leaders in cabinet positions such as Rychetský, became the main critics of the amendments, pointing out particularly the violation of the principles of individual legal accountability and pre-sumption of innocence, and the incompatibility with international human rights conventions.

after a heated vote that left the government coalition divided, with the act passing just by a few votes in both of the Federal assembly chambers, Rychetský warned against the consequences of the adopted act on the one hand and simultaneously chal-lenged its practical impact, pointing out that it would only cause troubles in the Council of europe. He regretted the abandonment of the government concept that insisted on an individual approach: the ban on the exercise of functions was not to be bound to the given citizen’s membership in a certain population group in the past, but to his participation, as a member of that group, in human rights violations. Rychetský warned that due to the shift that occurred in the parliament, the act could be criticised for applying the collective quilt principle. In certain aspects, he argued, the adopted norm transgressed generally recognised principles of the Czechoslovak legal order.36

OH leaders took a fairly radical official attitude to the adopted Lustration act. To them, it was in contradiction to the Constitutional Charter of Fundamental Rights and Basic Freedoms as well as to international human rights pacts because “it is based on the presumption of guilt, the collective guilt principle and does not grant the right of defence.” Mere membership in a certain organisation in itself was not to be a reason for persecution; the citizen concerned was to be proven to have violated human rights by specific acts, as stipulated in the original OH Lustration Bill. “an act that was to protect democratic institutions against the impact of the bearers of violence in the past, changed into an instrument of persecution of many innocent people. The recognition of the File Register as evidential material gave the former secret police (StB) another chance to influence people’s destinies again after the years.” In general, OH leaders saw the adopted Lustration act as an attempt to build a democratic state by non-democratic means, which contradicted the effort to inte-grate the country into the family of european democracies.37

although it was OH who expressed fundamental criticism of the shortcomings and dangers of the de-communisation policy pursued by the right, the overall tone




of its position on this question was again rather ambivalent. On the one hand, OH presented itself as the lustration initiator before the June 1992 elections, but its lead-ers such as Pithart, Rychetský, or Dienstbier simultaneously pointed out the Council of europe criticism and the inadmissibility of retroactive justice. The Movement declared the need to stipulate clear specific responsibilities for the moral, economic, and environmental devastation of the country; to deal with the guilt of the totalitarian regime representatives; and to sue offenders. Simultaneously, it resolutely stepped up against the collective guilt principle, that is, lustration as presented by the Czech right. OH then rejected both, overall de-communisation as well as the proverbial “thick line over the past.”38

The discussion about the potential publication of the official lists was closed on 4 July 1992 when the first part of the list of residents, loaned flat holders, and StB agents was published in Necenzurované noviny (Uncensored Newspaper) of the radical anticommunist Petr Cibulka. The so-called Cibulka lists were unverified and, apart from the true agent and co-operator names, they definitely listed also many innocent StB persecution victims. In his regular radio programme Talks from Lány, President Václav Havel referred to their publication as to one of the most successful deeds of the former StB. However, it was Havel himself whose de-communisation attitudes in the first years of democratic reconstruction took the share in the manner of coming to terms with the Czechoslovak and Czech past.39 His fundamental influ-ence also contributed to OH’s ambivalence, as it remained indivisibly linked to Havel as a November icon as well as its largest moral-political authority.

Havel recognised certain criticism of the Lustration act, for instance. at the time of its approval, he responded particularly sensitively to an open letter by the Charter 77 co-founder Zdeněk Mlynář. Mlynář cautioned that Havel’s signature under the act threatened to discredit the Charter and the political authority associated with it because, according to Mlynář, the act fundamentally violated rather than protected basic legal principles. Havel did sign the act in the end about a month later, but promised, with reference to Mlynář’s recommendation, to submit a supplementary bill or amendment soon to modify the Lustration act’s illegal nature.40 The act was amended eventually in the end of 1991 by Constitutional Court ruling, which responded to MPs’ rather than presidential requests to review the act’s constitution-ality. The president did not suggest any further changes to the act. a similar situation repeated in summer 1993 during the adoption of the act on Lawlessness of the Communist Regime. President Havel, similarly to many left-wing as well as liberal politicians and intellectuals, had reservations to this act; however, he did confirm it with his signature in the end.

Václav Žák, a leading OH publicist and leadership member, pondered over the conflict around dealing with the recent past and the form the process took on in the Czech context in the liberal monthly Infórum in summer 1994. He identified Václav Havel’s ambiguous politics as the main cause of the current Czech version of the politics of history.41 Žák’s text did not represent the official party position, but it was




published as the main commentary in the periodical that served as the OH’s shop-window. It was an attempt to look critically at what its author understood as the dissipated legacy of Czechoslovak dissidence and the defeat of post-dissidence politics, but it was also probably the sharpest criticism of Havel that had ever been heard from this party.

according to Žák, the conflict about dealing with the past, which had divided OF, represented in reality a conflict about citizenship. It was about whether the exclu-sionary principle based on a certain group membership was to begin to apply again or whether it should be taken into account that dealing with the past must happen in the framework of the rule of law. according to Žák, most citizens had little inter-est in legal procedures; therefore, they understood the resistance against lustration as reluctance to crack down on communism. Thus, OF lost its social peace strategy and a threat of purges arose instead. The politics of consensus was replaced by a blatant power struggle, using the past as an easy instrument, based on the illusion that there was a way to deal with the sins of the previous regime. Political influence, however, demanded “waving the anti-communist card,” wrote Žák. The result was that not only not-so-long-ago active Socialist Union of Youth members but often also former Communist Party members begun to teach dissidents about how to fight against communism.

Only Václav Havel could have reversed this. Unfortunately, he did not succeed, namely because he understood politics as service in a very rousseaunian way. as he stated on 17 January 1990 in the Federal assembly, he wanted to “act in harmony with the will of the public, led by responsibility.” This idea is hardly compatible with the presidential role in a parliamentary democracy. It shows misunderstanding of the role of constitu-tional institutions. The public expected accounts to be settled. The President, instead of standing his ground with his vision of reconciliation, which he promoted at the begin-ning, speaks about a “second revolution” and “the dark veins of former nomenclature mafias” soon after the elections. This was the beginning of the path to the Lustration act and the act on the Lawlessness of the Communist Regime. The process of “settle-ment,” theoretically justified by the absurd idea by Roger Scruton, an exporter of the conservative moral revolution, that society’s moral renaissance is not possible without settling accounts with the communists, could no longer be stopped.42

VI. From the Highest Levels of Politics into Non-Parliamentary Opposition

Pre-election polls before the June 1992 ballot repeatedly predicted bad results for OH. The Movement’s leadership expected a lot from the alleged 40 percent unde-cided voters and strove to gain the largest possible proportion of this part of the electorate. This was one of the reasons why OH’s campaign focused on personali-ties. There were plenty in the Movement and, unlike the Movement as a whole, they




continuously ranked at the top of popularity opinion polls. The final stage of the campaign was virtually all focused on Jiří Dienstbier, who was to become a magnet for the yet undecided voters. The electoral gain of 4.7 percent for the Federal assembly and 4.4 percent for the Czech National Council prevented OH from featuring in either of the parliaments and was a huge disappointment. It represented a fundamen-tal turning point, making a former leading player of the highest league of Czech politics into a political outsider. apart from self-critical tones, the Movement leaders’ first responses also included fear for the country’s fate, a justified worry about the future destiny of the federation, and a reproach that “voters chose more intense and maybe more authoritarian style of country management.” However, OH was decided to continue in the trend introduced in the pre-election period, that is, building a “liberal party” and promoting “politics of consensus,” the time of which was yet to come sometime in the future.43

The second half of 1992 inevitably became a time of reflection and search for the causes of the fatal failure for OH. The process strongly manifested in discussions preceding the post-election OH Congress, but mainly in the long-term debate on the pages of the party journal called “Quo vadis Občanské hnutí?” Most contributions resonated with tones of optimism, despite the election defeat and the unfavourable development leading among others to the ever stronger polarisation in Czech politics as well as the final dissolution of the federal state, which OH had been consistently trying to prevent. OH supporters and members hoped, however, that right-wing politics as presented by the new government coalition would exhaust itself with time and the liberal centre would then again get a chance to stand at the forefront of reform politics. OH supporters and politicians drew their hope for liberal politics’ eventual success also from international supporters and political thinkers, who her-alded liberalism’s renaissance in the belief that after the fall of communism and the alleged crash of the social-democratic alternative in the West, an era of new liberal (or social-liberal) politics was coming.44

The discussions within the Movement often featured self-comforting opinions, seeing the main cause of defeat in the civically and politically immature voter, tricked by the right-wing dogmatism and promises of fast money, or even in the inability of many voters to bear the moral mirror held up to them by former dissi-dents and thus preferring to choose someone from their midst, namely Václav Klaus. Nevertheless, critical and self-critical considerations appeared as well. Milan Znoj, philosopher and long-term OH supporter, authored the most cogent analysis of the cause of OH’s political failure. In his view, it stemmed primarily from its loss of trustworthiness as a political formation. Znoj noted that OH repeated mistakes similar to OF’s and could not free itself from its fundamentally antipolitical spirit, “putting off those citizens, whose voice it wanted to become, i.e. those trusting the November Revolution, in a rather suicidal way.” In his view, it was right for OF and later OH representatives, such as Pithart, to step up against dangers brought about




by the revolution, that is, revolutionary or nationalist hysteria. The OF’s and later OH’s mistake was to let themselves become identified with this attitude, which gave them the hallmark of caution. Instead of vigorous and matter-of-fact dealing with the past, for example, in the form of statutory KSČ expropriation, OF and later OH got entangled in an ideological vicious circle in the name of the slogan “revolution is not over yet,” where they could hardly compete with the revolutionary radicals. The political scene then became dominated by Klaus’s “revolutionary conservatism,” uniting economic liberalism with radical revolutionary rhetoric, with which OH politics of “reasonable centre” could hardly compete; and OH lost its main social base of November Revolution supporters to ODS. according to Znoj, OH was justi-fied in drawing its legitimacy from the November Revolution and the “moral credit” many of its leaders had gained in dissidence. However, in the environment of demo-cratic life, it was necessary to abandon the “dissidence mentality”—a ghetto mental-ity, which establishes communities of internally kindred people bound by a moral ethos, but is useless at times of civil society building. To Znoj, OF as well as OH remained stuck in dissident illusions in the time of transition from moral community to civil community.45

One of the important outcomes of the self-reflection was the admission that OH’s reluctance to step into conflict with its former political allies, primarily ODS, aided the debacle considerably. Only the courage to formulate specific contents of liberal politics openly in a political clash and also to defend it was to rectify the impression of caution, insecurity, and ambivalence the Movement was radiating. Symbolically, OH adopted a new name, Svobodní demokraté (SD; Free Democrats) at its fourth Congress in October 1993. as a non-parliamentary party, not bound by governmen-tal or parliamentary responsibility, SD members and supporters could boldly embark on criticising governmental policies. They did so with relish as they were primarily an intellectual formation rather than a political party with the will for power from the very start anyway. On the pages of the daily press, cultural journals and of course the Infórum in 1993 and 1994, SD’s liberal publicists played the role of the main advocates of the civil society concept against—in their view—dogmatic libertarian criticism of Václav Klaus. His aversion and little respect for civil society contra-dicted the liberal as well as conservative perceptions of a functioning political order. according to them, Klaus rejected the concept of diverse, internally differentiated civil society in favour of his idea of the “society of free people” because he was afraid of the erosion of state power and consequently also of his own party’s influ-ence.46 economists close to SD, such as Vladimír Šíba, Jan Vrba, and others, strengthened their criticism of neoliberal economic transformation and above all of the voucher privatisation. In their view, it only seemed to include everyone and was inefficient from the transformation point of view. It failed to create a new stratum of responsible owners: about 60 percent of the privatised property belonged to privati-sation funds rather than private persons in 1994.47




Understandably, the SD also adopted a distinctly critical attitude to the govern-ment coalition’s foreign policy, as it started criticising certain aspects of european integration in the name of defending national interests, while also lacking sufficient conceptual ideas and self-consciousness for positive policy in the Czech-german reconciliation issue.48 In addition, SD defended trade unions’ and other social organ-isations’ rights for equal dialogue within the tripartite and continued to develop an environmental programme. This brought them into the camp criticising the one-sided emphasis on the completion of the Temelín nuclear power station. The SD standpoint in this respect was not very radical; they pointed out the need to face the excessive pressure of the energy lobby and to take into account the concerns and requirements of local citizens and anti-Temelín activists.

The emphasis on the self-administration level of politics—in contrast to ODS’s traditional Prague centrism—raised SD’s hopes for certain compensation of the parlia-mentary election debacle by success at the local level. Therefore, they devoted consid-erable attention to the 1994 local elections, which they campaigned for under the slogan “administer rather than rule.” The hope that the themes of self-administration and politics “from below” would attract local voters and help enliven SD, was, how-ever, somewhat disqualified by the lack of local SD activists. Therefore, SD focused on several areas only and produced an independent ticket and thus also programme just for Prague, Brno, Prostějov, and Liberec. In other districts, they ran in coalitions with other parties, for example, in Plzeň, they created a joint ticket with social demo-crats.49 This endeavour resulted in four elected SD mayors, a relative success, given the party’s possibilities, size, and above all its financial troubles. However, it failed to bring about the hope for the party’s fundamental revival.

VII. Last Attempt at Salvation: Social Liberals and National Socialists

In the summer of 1995, SD’s leadership began negotiating the approximation or potential merger of their party with the Liberální strana národně sociální (LSNS; Liberal National Social Party), the last incarnation of Czech National Socialists, a traditional Czech political party with a very long and complex history.50 It is a natural phenomenon for small political parties to look for allies to increase their chances at overcoming the 5 percent limit needed to enter the parliament. The Free Democrats were also forced into this move by their very bad economic situation that had lasted since their electoral defeat in summer 1992. The party was unable to repay its debt caused by the high election campaign expenditure that was not covered by the state contribution due to bad election results. LSNS was relatively well situated as to property and finance: it still owned, for example, Svobodné slovo (Free Word), one of the most renowned dailies, and the Melantrich Publishing House. From this viewpoint, LSNS was an interesting partner for SD. It was not




just about money, however. LSNS—previously Česká strana sociální (Czech Social Party), until May 1993—began to define itself ever more strongly as a lib-eral political entity, as the new name was to suggest. Thus, from the programme point of view, the SD-LSNS approximation seemed natural. The two parties for-mally united at the Unification Congress on 3 December 1995 in Hradec Králové. They followed the principle of equality, party bodies were renamed according to the SD custom, Vavřinec Bodenlos became the chairman for SD-LSNS, and Dienstbier became the election Chairman. The first SD’s unification loss was Pavel Rychetský, a strong leadership figure, who left for Zeman’s social democrats. Virtually immediately after the unification it became clear that the liberal political credo was a significant but by far not a sufficient unifier for the two parties. Their histories of origin, internal party cultures, membership compositions, political ambitions and finally, as it turned out, also the basic cultural-political values were completely different.51

Historical discourses that extend beyond the contours of party history itself and form an important part of every political party’s self-understanding and broader political-cultural identity featured considerable disparity from the very start. LSNS had a clear-cut national-social genealogy and a corresponding historical memory (however impossible it was to refer to a single historical memory in a party). Understandably, its historical imagination, its understanding of national history, and consequently of the so-called national interests (which had turned into a general mantra for Czech politicians in the meantime), was rather different from that of SD, which derived its origin from OF and the Czechoslovak dissidence. The initial dis-cussions about the maintenance or abandonment of the traditional National Socialist address “brother” and “sister” were symbolical. SD liberals must have perceived them like a nostalgic motive from an old black-and-white film, at the best.

Fairly naturally, it was Petr Pithart, more than sceptical to Czech national myths, who become the first target of criticism by National Socialist politicians, namely the prominent LSNS Vice Chairman Josef Lesák, living symbol of the National Socialist pre–February 1948 youth and prisoner of conscience of the Stalinist regime. Better symbols of the contrast between the traditions of the post-dissident liberal SD and the anticommunist national socialism of a good part of LSNS than Pithart and Lesák would be hard to find. On the one hand Pithart, an intellectual, former reform commu-nist, later dissident, one of the most fruitful critics of Czech national auto-stereotypes, and one of the strong post-1989 opponents of the apodictic de-communisation pol-icy; on the other hand Lesák, pre-February National assembly Member, one of the leaders of the February 1948 student protest march against the communist takeover, communist labour camp inmate, long-term promoter of Milada Horaková’s and edvard Beneš’s legacy, and one of the strong post-1989 representatives of former political prisoners’ historical memory.52 Lesák did not only disapprove of Pithart’s too open attitude to the Sudeten germans, but for example also of his critical attitude to the Temelín nuclear power station completion.53




at the crossroads, where the paths of Czech (post-dissident) liberal politics and Czech nationalism met yet again, Pithart returned to the theme of “civic homeland,” his domain from the end of the 1970s when Czechoslovak democratic opposition began to emerge.

a nation compatible with liberal values has nothing to do with nationalism. It can, however, have a lot in common with patriotism. a nationalist is oriented primarily towards his nation’s past, feels to be its guardian and patented interpreter. Unlike him, a patriot (pity that these two words have gone out of fashion, hopefully not for long) is also touched by the past, but as a critical and open person. He finds not only inspira-tion and models in his nation’s past, but also warnings—he is simply not bound com-pletely like an heir. For him, homeland is a common home not only to those who speak the same language and share the same faith or non-faith, but to all those who somehow contributed and contribute to the homeland, country, home.54

Pithart’s concept of “liberal patriotism” with its roots in the thought of Masaryk and Patočka might have been agreeable to some Free Democrats, but it could hardly attract traditional National Socialists, as its dichotomy of patriotism and nationalism implicitly criticised their understanding of national identity. The somewhat aca-demic project of liberal patriotism never came to be discussed, however, as it was not Pithart who stirred the nationalist stereotypes inside SD-LSNS. after the party unification, he completely withdrew from active internal party politics to run just a bit later as a non-party member in the Senate elections for the Christian Democratic Union. It was Dienstbier himself who started to use the term “ethnic cleansing” for the post-war transfer of germans from Czechoslovakia, which the media used in relation to the wars in former Yugoslavia at that time. This was of course utterly unacceptable for the nationalist thinking of the LSNS memberships as well as of a considerable part of its leadership.

This changed nothing about the fact that Jiří Dienstbier, still very popular in the opinion polls, again became the main crowd-puller for the SD-LSNS campaign for the June 1996 parliamentary elections, despite the obvious failure of this strategy in previous years. The election manifesto carried the spirit of the Free Democrats’ lib-eral centrist programme as well, with Czech national interests defined primarily as the eU and NaTO accession.

after the electoral failure in the parliamentary as well as the autumn Senate elec-tions, the crisis in the Free Democrats–National Socialists relations further deepened and was quickly heading to a direct confrontation. It broke out at the November 1996 Congress. The hitherto Chairman Jiří Dienstbier stated, among others, that “some members use . . . the national and social question . . . more and more often as a spell against modernisation”; and he cautioned against oversimplified understand-ing of the protection of the Czech market, invocations of the ghosts of the past in Czech-german relations, and the requirement for special exceptions in eU and NaTO accession. Vice Chairman Josef Lesák, who performed the role of the main




traditional National Socialist spokesperson already before Bodenlos’s resignation, stated that OH lost the 1992 elections “virtually with the same manifesto and same creators like this year.” He complained that the LSNS and SD unification brought into the party programme “certain elements of narrow-minded, orthodox liberalism” and, on the contrary, suppressed a lot of the traditional national and social features for the sake of, for example, environmental themes.55

an ever-clearer reluctance of both parties to make concessions could not be mended even by the conciliatory election of a new party chairman, Tomáš Sokol, who was seen by many National Socialists as the most open-minded member of the narrow SD leadership. The election of vice chairmen showed clearly that National Socialists outnumbered Free Democrats. The transformation of the Zítřek (Tomorrow) party periodical also confirmed the trend of reassertion of the relatively well-func-tioning LSNS party structures. In 1996, it was presented as a journal for liberal poli-tics and was in the hands of liberal authors from the former Infórum and leading SD politicians such as Milan Znoj, Lukáš Jelínek, Václav Žák, Tomáš Sokol, and of course Jiří Dienstbier. Since January 1997 not only the editorial board changed, and National Socialists Miroslav Tampír, Zdeněk Otruba, and Jiří Drtina got the main say, but Zítřek got a different layout and a large subheading “SD-LSNS Journal” explain-ing that it was turning from a liberal monthly into an internal party journal. Symbolically, the first issue of the new Zítřek was introduced by the reminder of the approaching hundredth anniversary of the National Socialist party foundation, which was celebrated on 4 april 1997 under the slogan “100 years in service to the nation.”

The last drop in the cup of Free Democrats’ patience was the Charter of National Interests, which originated during the anniversary celebrations and for many liberals represented clear evidence of the ultimate return of nationalist clichés into LSNS politics. These were ideologically unacceptable to the Free Democrats and, mainly, were in contradiction to the european direction of liberal politics in their own under-standing. after another internal party scandal related to separate negotiations of the National Socialist party leadership without the awareness of the chairman, Tomáš Sokol decided for a form of passive resistance: he did not resign but did not call leadership meetings either. The departure of a large part of Free Democrats from the party did not take long to come. It also meant the final dissolution of the most sig-nificant form of post-dissident liberal politics in Czechia.

VIII. Conclusion

Post-dissident civic or social liberalism failed to assert itself as an independent political stream in Czech post-1989 conditions. The causes were many. Political liberalism of the dissident origin had to deal with specific problems in the envi-ronment of postcommunist democracy. On the one hand, it presented itself as the main motor of democratic revolution and the bearer of basic changes such as the




introduction of the democratic political system, a market economy, and the rule of law in the first years. On the other hand, the successful implementation of these basic principles of liberal democracy took the strength away from this kind of lib-eralism and forced it to leave the position of the centre, which it naturally took at the time of democratic revolution, and to take sides in the framework of the polar-ising political spectrum. The concepts of right and left must be understood rela-tively in every historical period. after the fall of the socialist dictatorship, it was probably natural for liberals to often feel more on the right. given the vigorous assertion of the economically neoliberal, conservative in value orientation, and strategically anticommunist right, many liberals with a dissident past necessarily, despite their personal aversion, found themselves more at the centre-left side of the political spectrum.

The dilemma of political self-assertion and self-definition that post-dissident politics all over east Central europe was dealing with, fails to explain its failure in the Czech case, however. Hungary can serve as an example, a mirror to the Czech development: a country comparable as to size, political differentiation, and—with a certain degree of tolerance—the overall economic-social situation after the fall of communism. The relative success of the Hungarian Union of Free Democrats (SzDSz), a grouping very similar to OH in its intellectual nature, its dissident past, as well as the prevalent social support in the capital, contrasts with OH’s failure. The long-term presence of SzDSz at the Hungarian political scene, whose influence arguably diminished after 1998, lets us suspect that the potential for left-liberal politics and the utilisation of the dissident legacy—equally significant as in the Hungarian case—was bigger in Czechia as well.

Unlike Hungary, the concept of the so-called “antipolitical politics” was a more relevant part of the Czech dissident heritage, which, it seems, undermined the pos-sibility of forming a SzDSz-style (social) liberal political party in many respects. The political dispute over the OF-style antipolitical politics or politics of consensus formed part of the fight over the form of the nascent political spectrum at the begin-ning of the 1990s, when the anticommunist democratisation movement was dis-integrating. at the time of the OF establishment, the threat of disintegration of the fragile unity was the dissident leaders’ nightmare. Therefore, the effort to maintain a broad societal consensus in the interest of the electoral defeat of Czechoslovak communists and of keeping democratisation in motion played a central role in the politics of the OF leadership as well as President Havel. However, the disintegration of the OF consensus, due to different understandings of the approach to communists and the ever more expressed conflicts around economic transformation, was threat-ening virtually from the very start. Only the strong political hegemony of the Charter 77 people and Havel’s charismatic authority within OF enabled the action unity to be maintained at least until the June 1990 elections. However, precisely this—in a way arbitrary—maintenance of the democratisation movement’s unity against the communist threat—at the price of a significant loss of democratic trustworthiness—may




have been one of the causes of the low support that the former Chartists received in later in Občanské hnutí.

The failed attempts to overcome “antipolitical politics” in the programmatic and strategic development of OH, later SD, in the first several years of Czech democracy testify its the great power and velocity—subliminal rather than explicitly advocated. OH’s response to the fast-developing polarisation and differentiation of the political system in Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic and to the shock of the take-over of a great part of OF’s active potential by Václav Klaus’s right-wing ODS was not the effort to create their own specific political positions, but the fundamental insist-ence on the legitimacy of the hitherto consensual politics or “politics of the center.” as the declared main heir of OF politics, OH refused to ideologically differentiate. Instead, it kept presenting the project of society-wide transformation as a question of constitutional consensus, that is, an actually “apolitical theme,” not subject to political struggle but majority societal consensus. In a situation of significant political polarisa-tion, post-dissident liberal politics not only lost the short-term exclusive political posi-tion due to this attitude, but was also unable to formulate a positive programme that would turn political liberalism into an autonomous political stream critical to the gov-erning liberal conservatism with a neoliberal economic programme. OH’s relatively intense criticism of the Czech right wing’s de-communisation policy and its “politics of history,” born in the autumn 1991 dispute over the Lustration act, failed to help either. The opposition against the political style of ODS and its government coalition was not a strong enough motive to unite the internally differentiated OH community. and as Petr Příhoda stated in his spring 1992 commentary, aversion itself can hardly be a sufficient party-constitutive principle.

Notes

1. For more on OF’s situation between November 1989 and elections in June 1990, see Jiří Suk, Labyrintem revoluce. Aktéři, zápletky a křižovatky jedné politické krize (od listopadu 1989 do června 1990) (Praha: Prostor, 2003). On the dynamic of the Velvet Revolution and its ethical contents, see James Krapfl: Revolúcia s ľudskou tvárou: politika, kultúra a spoločenstvo v Československu po 17. novembri 1989 (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2009).

2. Zdislav Šulc, Stručné dějiny ekonomických reforem v Československu (České republice) 1945-1995 (Brno: Doplněk, 1998), 71–77; and Lubomír Mlčoch, Zastřená vize ekonomické transformace (Praha: Karolinum, 1997).

3. Suk, Labyrintem revoluce, 305. 4. Cf., e.g., Marcin Król, Nieco z boku. Autobiografia niepolityczna (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka,

2008), 136–38; more generally Jiří Přibáň, Dissidents of Law: On the 1989 Revolutions, Legitimations, Fictions of Legality and Contemporary Version of the Social Contract (aldershot: ashgate, 2002).

5. Both organizations originated during the 1968 Prague Spring as non-communist political organi-zations. Suppressed after the Warsaw Pact invasion, they became once again active after 1989, belonging to the most outspoken, especially in the case of the Confederation, political forces of anti-communism.

6. See Jiří Suk, “Politické hry s „nedokončenou revolucí.” Účtování s komunismem v čase Občanského fóra a po jeho rozpadu (1989–1992),” Soudobé dějiny 14:2–3(2009): 276–312.




7. Suk, Labyrintem revoluce, 458. 8. See Václav Klaus, O tvář zítřka. Rok devadesátý (Praha: Pražská imaginace, 1991). Cf. also

Magdalena Hadjiisky, “Vznik Občanské demokratické strany: Pokus o sociologickou analýzu,” in adéla gjuričová and Michal Kopeček, eds., Kapitoly z dějin české demokracie po roce 1989 (Praha—Litomyšl: Paseka, 2008), 70–90.

9. For OH general development in brief, see, e.g., Pavel Pšeja—Miroslav Mareš, “Malé strany liberální orientace,” in Jiří Malíř and Pavel Marek, eds., Politické strany. Vývoj politických stran a hnutí v českých zemích a na Slovensku, 1861-2004 (Brno: Doplněk, 2005), vol. II, 1667–79.

10. Jsme Občanské hnutí. In OH, Občanské hnutí (Praha: Republikové koordinační centrum OH, 1991), 6–10.

11. Francis Fukuyma, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin Books, 1992); Bruce ackerman, The Future of Liberal Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 34–35.

12. Cf., e.g., a classic history of european liberalism, guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (Boston: Beacon, 1955); or John gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

13. See, e.g., José g. Merquior, “a Panoramic View on the Renaissance of Liberalisms,” in ernest gellner and César Cansino, eds., Liberalism in Modern Times (Budapest: CeU Press, 1996), 7–20.

14. Jerzy Szacki, Liberalism After Communism (Budapest: CeU Press, 1995); and ervin Csizmadia, Két liberalizmus Magyarországon (Budapest: Századvég Kiadó, 1999).

15. We encounter this type of liberalism as an important, even if minority stream of political thought only in Poland. See Szacki, Liberalism after Communism; also andrzej Walicki, Polskie zmagania z wolnością (Kraków: Universitas, 2000); Mirosław Dzielski, Bóg, wolność, właśność (Kraków: Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej, 2007); and Bronisław Łagowski, Co jest lepsze od prawdy: Wybór artykułów (Kraków: Wydaw. Literackie, 1986). Political aspects of economic problems had not been thought out by Czech liberal economists before 1989; cf. adam grešl, Ekonomické myšlení V. Klause (Praha: Karolinum, 2006).

16. Cf. Sean Hanley, The New Right in the New Europe. Czech Transformation and Right-Wing Politics 1989-2006 (London: Routledge, 2008).

17. The history of Czech post-1989 liberalism is by far not limited to the two main OF successors. at the time of democratic revolution and later throughout the 1990s, many other—usually marginal—political groupings (e.g., Liberálně demokratická strana [Liberal Democratic Party], ODa, Unie svobody [Union of Freedom], Cesta změny [Path of Change], Liberální reformní strana [Liberal Reform Party], Strana svobodného občana [Party of a Free Citizen], etc.; and think-tanks and educational centres [Liberální institut [Liberal Institute], Občanský institut [Civic Institute], Centrum pro studium demokra-cie a kultury [Centre for the Study of Democracy and Culture], Centrum pro ekonomiku a politiku [Centre for economics and Politics], CeVRO, Institut Karla Havlíčka Borovského [Karel Havlíček Borovský Institute], and others) claimed their affiliation to liberal traditions of various kinds.

18. Petr Pithart, “Manifest českého realismu,” Přítomnost 2:6(1991): 4; and Petr Pithart, “Český realismus,” in ibid., 1–2.

19. Cf. particularly his early 1970s text called “Defence of Politics”, or Obrana politiky (Praha: Panorama, 1990). Its motives also appear in Pithart’s later journalism.

20. Cf. Petr Janyška, “Dvojznačný premiér. Realistický klub P. Pitharta,” Respekt, 10 June 1991, p. 2.21. Pithart, Obrana politiky, 7–19.22. Petr Pithart, “Hráz proti pokušením moci,” in Jeden plus 24 rozhovorů s českými politiky od B do Z,

p. 9, archive of the Institute of Contemporary History of the academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (a ÚSD aV ČR) Collection PV 92, file 90.

23. Jana Klusáková, a Petr Pithart rozmlouvají Nadoraz (Praha: Primus, 1992), 43.24. Speech by Občanské hnutí Chairman Jiří Dienstbier, in Svobodná a demokratická budoucnost,

pp. 4 and 10–11.




25. Cf. Miloš Zeman, Jak jsem se mýlil v politice (Praha: Ottovo nakl, 2005), 119.26. Cf., e.g., interview with Pithart from March 1992, Jiří Leschtina, “Petr Pithart: Politik vyladěných

kompromisů,” MF Dnes 3:71(24 Mar. 1992): 7; cf. also Klusáková, a Petr Pithart rozmlouvají Nadoraz.27. Jak dál k prosperitě. Hospodářská politika Občanského hnutí. OH 1992, Na cestě k sociálně a

ekologicky orientované tržní ekonomice. ekonomický program. OH 1992, Prosperita & Bezpečnost. Kompexní národní program čtyř dalších let boje s kriminalitou, OH 1992. For all materials, see a ÚSD aV ČR, Collection PV 92, file 89.

28. Cf. Jan Štern, “Konsensus,” Listy 22:4(1992): 19.29. Jiří Dienstbier, “Proti bolševismům,” Jeden plus 24 rozhovorů s českými politiky od B do Z, p. 9. Cf.

also later criticism of ODS policies from a similar position, seeing the 1992 Czech right’s victory as a success of “populist mobilisation politics.” Václav Žák, Rizika mobilizační politiky (Praha: Český spisovatel, 1997).

30. See, e.g., Martin Weiss, “OH objevuje Reagana,” Český deník 2:83(7 apr. 1992): 3; Jan Proczyk: “Snění o bolševismu,” Český deník 2:91(16 apr. 1992): 3; and Josef Mlejnek Jr., “Zahraniční nepolitika,” Český deník 2:95(22 apr. 1992): 3. In relation to the right-wing criticism of Jiří Dienstbier’s and also president Václav Havel’s foreign policy, the term “national interest” began to emerge more often in this period. after the elections, it became a central category of the foreign-policy shift under Václav Klaus’s right-wing coalition and his Foreign Minister Josef Zielenec.

31. See Nebezpečí zvané OH. Jakub Císař’s interview with Václav Benda. Telegraf, 8 Jan. 1992, p. 6. It needs to be added that Benda mentioned Pavel Rychetský, Zdeněk Jičínský, and Petr Kučera as “the most significant representatives” rather than Dienstbier or Pithart.

32. S levicí do vlády nepůjdeme. Rozhovor s Ivanem gabalem. Vladimír Mlynář, “Jan Macháček,” Respekt 15 (13–16 apr. 1992): 8–9.

33. Petr Příhoda, “Na předvolebním skřipci,” Přítomnost 3:2(1992): 7–8.34. generally on former dissidents’ relation to the communist past and the “pitfalls of dissident

memory,” see Françoise Mayer, Češi a jejich komunismus. Paměť a politická identita (Praha: argo, 2009), esp. 135–65. For French original, see Françoise Mayer, Les Tchèques et leur communisme. Mémoire et identités politiques (Paris: editions de l‘ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2004).

35. See “Byla či nebyla porušena lidská práva?” Rudé právo, 10 Oct. 1991, pp. 1–2.36. “Lustrační zákon přijat,” Rudé právo, 5 Oct. 1991, pp. 1–2.37. Občanské hnutí on Lustration act. In Infórum 30 (1991): 1–2. Cf. also Petr Pospíchal, “Kdo je

vinen?” Infórum 36 (1992): 10–11.38. See a ÚSD aV ČR, Collection PV 92, file 95. Cf. also, e.g., Václav Boštík—Václav Žák, “O

vyrovnání s obdobím totality,” Listy 22:2(1992): 14–17.39. Cf. the difference between adam Michnik, one of the main campaigners against what he con-

ceived of as blatant anticommunism since the early 1990s, and Václav Havel, who repeatedly spoke about an “incomplete revolution” in the same period. See, e.g., “Naše podivná epocha. Rozhovor adama Michnika s Václavem Havlem,” Listy 22:3(1992): 37–52; “Pravda je podstatnější než úspěch. Z rozhovoru adama Michnika z Václavem Havlem,” Listy 23:5(1993): 17–24.

40. Cf. “Otevřený dopis Z. Mlynáře prezidentu Havlovi,” in Zdeněk Mlynář, Proti srsti. Politické komentáře 1990-1995 (Praha: Periskop, 1996), 155–157.

41. Václav Žák, “Kudy z jeskyně,” Infórum 7 (1994): 3–5.42. Ibid., 4.43. Statement of the OH Republic Council on Parliamentary election Results 1992, a ÚSD aV ČR

Collection PV 92, file 91.44. Ralf Dahrendorf was the most influential herald of liberalism’s promising prospect at this time,

not only in Czechoslovakia but all over east Central europe. See Úvahy o revoluci v Evropě v dopise, který měl být zaslán jistému pánovi ve Varšavě (Praha: Nakl. evropského kulturního klubu, 1991), esp. 41–70. Cf. also, e.g., Paul Starr, “Výzva pro liberalismus,” Infórum 37 (1992): 6–7; and 1 (1993): 11–12.

45. Milan Znoj, “Poznámky k volebnímu neúspěchu OH,” Infórum 31 (1992): 6–8.




46. See, e.g., Petr Pithart, “ani „Rozum“ ani „Hegel” (Když už tak Karel Poláček),” Infórum 3 (1994): 4–5, published also in Lidové Noviny, 25 Mar. 94; and Václav Žák, “Přízrak občanské společnosti,” Infórum 6 (1994): 6.

47. Vladimír Šíba, “Česká transformace z globálního pohledu,” Infórum 3 (1994): 5–7; and Vladimír Šíba, “Trh a demokracie,” Infórum 4 (1994): 7–8.

48. See, e.g., Jiří Dienstbier, “Budoucnost evropy, ale jaké?” Infórum 2 (1994): 4–5; and Václav Žák, “Schází nám sebevědomí? Polemika na téma sudetoněmecké otázky,” Infórum 5 (1994): 5.

49. a ÚSD aV ČR Collection KV 94, file II/123.50. It was founded in 1897 as a socialist branch of the National Liberal Party. Next to social democ-

racy, it was the most important non-communist socialist party up until 1948 to later become a part of the so-called National Front system during communist rule. The party reestablished itself after 1989 without, however, any significant political success.

51. Cf. Jaroslav Skopal, Konec jedné velké strany? Vzpomínky a analýza 1967-2006 (Krásná Lípa: Marek Belza, 2007), esp. 88–112.

52. Cf. Josef Lesák, Čas oponou trhnul . . . Ve spolupráci s Miroslavem Ivanovem (Praha: Fortuna, 2000).53. Jaroslav Skopal, Konec jedné velké strany? 93.54. Petr Pithart, “Vlastenectví liberálů?” Zítřek 6–7 (1996): 15. Cf. Petr Pithart, “Pokus o vlast,” in

Petr Pithart, Dějiny a politika. Eseje a úvahy z let 1977-1989 (Praha: Prostor, 1990), 327–43. See also Michal Kopeček, “Citizen and Patriot in the Post-Totalitarian era: Czech Dissidence in Search of the Nation and its Democratic Future,” in Tr@nsit online, thematic volume, The “Brave New World” after Communism. 1989: Expectations in Comparison (December 2009), http://www.iwm.at/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=168&Itemid=231.

55. See Zítřek 12 (1996): 4–5. Cf. also the report by SD-LSNS political secretary Jiří Müller, “Kritériem politické práce strany je zájem veřejnosti,” in ibid., 8–11.

Michal Kopeček, PhD, is head of the Democratic Transition History Department, Institute of Contemporary History in Prague, and an associate fellow of the Centre for advanced Studies, Sofia. His main fields of academic interest are modern intellectual history and nationalism in east Central europe, commu-nism and transition studies, history, and theory of historiography. In 2009 he published a monograph titled Quest for the Revolution’s Lost Meaning. Origins of the Marxist Revisionism in Central Europe 1953-1960 (in the Czech language). He is one of the editors of the five-volume series Bolshevism, Communism and Radical Socialism in Czechoslovakia (in Czech; Prague) and the four-volume Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945): Text and Commentaries (in english; Budapest and New York).



the rise and fall of czech post-dissident liberalism after 1989

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