In contrast to most existing literature, the author claims that there were palpable ‘rudiments’ of authoritarian socialist Rechtsstaat in some communist countries of East Central Europe in the late ...1980s. The first part of the article examines the existing terminology with regard to the functioning of law in communist dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in general. By using the example of communist countries such as Poland and in particular Czechoslovakia, the author strives to show not only how rule by law was an increasingly important ruling instrument in state socialism but also how that gradually changed the nature of the dictatorial regimes. He argues that the late communist leaderships in these countries haphazardly set out towards an authoritarian socialist Rechtsstaat in an effort to safe their grip on power by strengthening the socialist normative state. They never arrived at the envisioned optimal stage in this respect, yet they opened a fateful path inside the dictatorships towards the legalist and negotiated revolutions of 1989.
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One of the major challenges facing historians of contemporary East Central Europe in the era of Brexit is the need to rethink the construction of the post-socialist political order and pay closer ...attention to its evolving political languages. These languages use the same terms as liberal democracies elsewhere but often mean something quite different due to their particular evolution in this region. One of the most significant aspects here is the role of constitutionalism.
Thinking through Transition is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be ...understood as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy (as well as the older political traditions), and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.
This article, focusing on the East Central European democratic opposition during the 1970s and 1980s, explores the connections between human rights politics and efforts to reshape collective ...identities based on critically reconsidered national historical canons. The first part discusses examples of civic patriotism, the attempts to build a "new compromise" among various forces within the opposition and within society more broadly. The second part explores the contradictions in the political languages of the opposition during the 1980s and explains those contradictions as a result of a continuing and sharpening struggle against the party-state as well as of evolving political differentiation within the opposition.
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Historical revisionism, far from being restricted to small groups of ‘negationists,’ has galvanized debates in the realm of recent history. The studies in this book range from general accounts of the ...background of recent historical revisionism to focused analyses of particular debates or social-cultural phenomena in individual Central European countries, from Germany to Ukraine and Estonia.
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 culture 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.
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10.
Making Sense of Dictatorship Celia Donert, Ana Kladnik, Martin Sabrow / Celia Donert, Ana Kladnik, Martin Sabrow
2022, 20220322, 2022-03-22
eBook
How did political power function in the communist regimes of
East Central Europe after 1945? Making Sense of
Dictatorship addresses this question with a particular focus
on the acquiescent behavior ...of the majority of the population
until, at the end of the 1980s, their rejection of state socialism
and its authoritarian world.
The authors refer to the concept of Sinnwelt, the way in which
groups and individuals made sense of the world around them. The
essays focus on the dynamics of everyday life and the extent to
which the relationship between citizens and the state was
collaborative or antagonistic. Each chapter addresses a different
aspect of life in this period, including modernization, consumption
and leisure, and the everyday experiences of "ordinary people,"
single mothers, or those adopting alternative lifestyles.
Empirically rich and conceptually original, the essays in this
volume suggest new ways to understand how people make sense of
everyday life under dictatorial regimes.
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