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Dr Tůma hadn’t been feeling too well earlier in the day, apparently, but he quickly got into his stride and his presentation wasclear, well thought out and – as you would expect of a leading Czech historian – sprinkled with interesting and subtle interpretations. It was, I thought, however, a slightly safe view of the reform process, the answer to the question posed in the lecture title was that the Prague Spring was both a top-down communist attempt to revitalize one party rule with little (or limited) democratic content and a slow but gathering emancipation of Czech society trying to ease itself out from under the communist system – a ‘refolution’ with pressure from below and cautiously (mis-)engineered change from above, to borrow the phrase Timothy Garton Ash coined for 1989.
The 1968-89 parallel, Tůma suggested, was to be found in type of strategies employed by reform communist elites. He also noted that political change was – as seems typical for the Czech lands – framed in terms of ‘return’: reform communist wanted a return to 1948; socialists and radical communist reformers to the semi-pluralist managed People’s Democracy of 1945-8; and non-communist Czechs to an idealized chocolate box version of interwar Czechoslovak democracy. And on 1 January 1990 Václav Havel famously proclaimed ‘People, your government has returned to you’ and post-communist change was framed as a Return to Europe, or – if you like consuming the propaganda of the Czech right to the rich man’s club of the OECD. Like bored kids on a long car journey, Czechs are perhaps now entitled to ask ‘Have we got there yet?’ (I think the answer is yes).
The Q and A brought one important and well made criticism: a key omission in Tůma’s talk, the questioner noted, was the ubiquity of socialism. It had dominated the experience and perception of events at the time. There was little evidence that Czech society was consciously or distinctly looking back to a different point of reference, than reforming the regime. Socialism then still had significant support and legitimacy in the Czech working class. I lack the historical expertise to judge this one, but I suspect this point – basically a critique of views, which view 1968 in the hindsight of 1989 – is well observed. Czech thinking about 1968 seems to have a real blind spot here, perhaps because, at bottom, Czechs are still thinking through and coming to terms with their society’s relationship with communism and socialism. Much easier then to juxtapose an essentially non-communist society – expressing underlying national democratic tradition – with the reforming, but basically separate, communist regime and Communist Party.
When Czechs talk about 1968 they are always really thinking and talking about themselves and their society as it is and where it is going now. This rather contrasts with the profusion of flatulent retrospectives about the Western 1968‘. It occurred to me as my mind wandered a bit that if some people needed reminding that in 1968, socialism was (on) the agenda – at least in Czechoslovakia – others need reminding the left-libertarian agenda that burst forth then are either on the historical scrapheap or firmly entrenched in the mainstream. Why does there have to be endless series backward-looking intellectual nostalgiafests? I suppose because of the cultural power of a baby boomer generation of soon-to-retire academics and journalists, for whom 1968 was a never-to-be-forgotten golden moment Maybe in ten or fifteen years time, when the participants have finally moved on, 1968 will simply be studied as history. You know you’re getting middle aged when you start to agree with Timothy Garton Ash, but I can’t help thinking he was right to point out that 1968 and the May events was a merely historical hiccup compared with 1989 and that it was all, basically, a staging post to our current mainstream mix of social and economic liberalism.
Meanwhile back at the Czech Embassy, the Q and A at also revealed that Russian archives concerns the August 1968 invasion – bar a few carefully selected morsels – are largely still classified and inaccessible (a mixture of grinding post-Soviet bureaucracy and lack of political will) and that, while Czech and Slovak experiences of reform communism (and the communist regime generally) were rather different, Czech and Slovak historiography approaches 1968 in broadly similar ways. Vive la refolution!
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“Bulgaria President Proposes New Political Model
Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov presented Tuesday his proposal for the reform of the political model in Bulgaria, focusing on the three main points that could lead to real political results.
The three points included in the President’s proposal are: the necessity of legal and public guarantees for a national representation of the political parties, transparency regarding Party financing and regaining of voters’ trust through a reform of the election system.
Below is the proposals’ full text:
I. Legal and public guarantees for a national representation of the political parties:
II. Transparent Party financing:
III. Regaining the voters’ trust through a reform of the election system:
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The election was at lot closer than tends to be remembered now as views seem to be skewed with the hindsight that it led to 18 years of Conservative rule, ‘Thatcherism’, and the near collapse of the Labour Party. As the documentaries earlier in the evening had pointed out, Mrs T – although not exactly playing a blinder in the election campaign itself – managed to keep the radicalism of her beliefs safely under wraps. Conservative commentators in the studio like Peregrine Worsthorne are more fully bloodedly anti-state and anti-trade union, but somehow opponents around the table don’t seem to take what they say as a statement of serious intent. Most people interviewed on the street in vox pops backing the Tories just seem to want something different.
The old style psephology of the period with very limited computing power managed to pick up the basic pattern of the results and forecast the result impressively quickly and accurately, within the first dozen or so result coming in: the Tories were in with a comfortable majority driven by heavy swings in the South and Midlands, which got weaker the further North you went.
More interesting though were the undercurrents in British politics the election flagged, not apparent at the time: the relatively good performance of the Liberals (I was surprised the expression ‘tactical voting’ was used then), although having slip back from the 18-19% they had gained in 1974 and picked up only a few seats, it didn’t seem so at the time; the Ecology Party pick up a 1000 votes in Torbay, suggesting – very distantly – a potential for a viable Green Party; there is an emergent North-South and English-Scottish divide, but no one talks about these issues very much except to note the losses of the Scottish Nationalists to Labour. Another contemporary but not-so-contemporary echo is the presence of the (then declining) far right at the political margins.
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Perhaps worth remarking in passing the Flemish pensioners’ group Ageing with Dignity (WOW) was absorbed by the Antwerp branch of the sizeable radical right populist Flemish Bloc (now Flemish Interest). Indeed, many other pensioners parties in West Europe lean more to right than left.
The rest of Norfolk Unity the post is a long well informed discussion of the internal politics of the BNP (surely Britain’s most well researched, extensively reported and well blogged minor party), which – presumably in an attempt to add to it factional discord – is targeted at criticising its current leadership. All good work, but, as with many exposes of the far-right I have read over the years, I could help feeling that there was a slightly odd symbiosis between fascists and anti-fascists, almost as if the writers were themselves part of the BNP’s own little universe.