Suchergebnisse

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.

Much has been written about human rights language as a keystone of democratic dissent in Eastern Europe as well as about its damaging impact on the communist dictatorships—the so called "Helsinki effect." This article analyzes the less familiar criticism of the core of the socialist theory of human rights and discusses whether this criticism proved to be particularly damaging for the socialist regimes' legitimacy, self-esteem, and international standing, leading to their defensive stance in this sphere. Simultaneously, it will question, to some extent, the prevailing and rather one-sided "liberal" reading of dissident human rights theory itself. With this aim in mind, the article begins with the specific "developmental" socialist conception of human rights elaborated in the 1950s and the 1960s by prominent legal scholars and philosophers such as I. Szabó and I. Kovács, and outlines how this theory served as a tool of self-confident state socialist human rights politics in the first decades of the Cold War. Second, it will follow the diverging paths of this socialist human rights theory during the period of consolidation and the authoritarian turn in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Third, the article turns to some of the 1970s–80s dissident criticism of human rights abuses in communist countries. It will focus not on the best-known cases, which serve to emphasize encroachments upon civil and political rights and freedoms, but rather on critical approaches (like those of J. Tesař, J. Šabata, O. Solt, M. Duray, or the Solidarity's Charter of Workers Rights) directed at the heart of the socialist theory of human rights, that is the abuses and unfulfilled promises in the area of social, economic, and—prominently in the Hungarian case—cultural rights.

Dealing with the communist past was one of the constitutive elements of the new or reborn democracies of East Central Europe after 1989. 'Coming to terms with the communist past' was especially important as a means of securing the legitimacy of new democratic regimes. This article provides an overview of how this process was shaped in the Czech Republic and touches upon the most significant events and actors since 1989.

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.

"The book intends to be the first collective monograph of the post-1989 history of political and social thought of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The project emerges from a deep conviction that the period of political transitions in the region, whether accomplished, aborted or abhorred, can and needs to be treated as a chapter in the intellectual history of political thought. Adopting the perspective of intellectual history, but inviting multidisciplinary expertise, the book aims to contribute to a more complex reflection on the post-socialist 'transition period' in East Central Europe and its historicization. While necessarily lacking comprehensiveness, it has a remarkable exploratory value for the future challenges in the field. The volume raises some of the most pressing problems of intellectual history of the period as addressed by the current scholarship, clustered into several major themes"--Provided by publisher

"Czechoslovakism" was a foundational concept of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic and it remained an important ideological, political and cultural phenomenon throughout the twentieth century. As such, it is one of the most controversial terms in Czech, Slovak and Central European history. While Czechoslovakism was perceived by some as an effort to assert Czech domination in Slovakia, for others it represented a symbol of the struggle for the Republic's survival during the interwar and Second World War periods. The authors take care to analyze Czechoslovakism's various emotional connotations, however their primary objective is to consider Czechoslovakism as an important historical concept and follow its changes through the various cultural-political contexts spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993"--