“National Narratives of Czech Identity From the 19th Century to the Present”, in Anton Pelinka et.al., Geschichtsbuch Mitteleuropa. Vom Fin de Siècle bis zur Gegenwart, Vienna, New Academic Press, 2016, p. 161-189.
Muriel Blaive, Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR)1
National Narratives of Czech identity from the 19th Century to the Present
Der Beitrag zeichnet das dominante tschechische nationale Narrativ und die ihm eingeschriebene Ambivalenz auf sehr diferenzierte Weise nach. Das tschechische nationale Narrativ ist seit seiner Entstehung im 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart vom Ideal der Demokratie und der zivilisatorischen Werte geprägt. Es nahm im Gefolge der gescheiterten Revolution von 1848 Formen an und war von Anfang an explizit als Antithese zum Deutsch-Österreichischen gedacht. Statt militärischer Stärke sollten – einzigartig in Ostmitteleuropa – in Tschechien (intellektuelle) Kultur und demokratischer Geist als nationale Kerneigenschaten und Quelle nationaler Identität gelten. Ganz im Sinne dieses Selbstverständnisses konnte sich in Tschechien, anders als in fast allen anderen Ländern der Region, in der Zwischenkriegszeit keine nationalistisch-autoritäre Bewegung etablieren und es kam während der deutschen Besatzung zu einer Exilregierung. Tatsächlich stand das demokratische Argument seit dem Zerfall der Doppelmonarchie im Zentrum der tschechischen nationalen Narration, sowohl während der Ersten Tschechischen Republik, dem kommunistischen tschechoslowakischen Regime und der postkommunistischen Tschechischen Republik als auch in den dazwischen liegenden Transformationsphasen. So legitimierten während der Transformationsphasen auch die jeweiligen politischen Gruppen ihre Machtaspirationen wesentlich mit dem Verfechten der „wahr(er)en“, „besseren“ Demokratie: sowohl die Kommunisten nach 1945 als auch die DissidentInnen der Bewegung Charta 77, die sich scharf von ersteren abgrenzten. Die Ambivalenz dieser Narration zeigt sich dort, wo es um den Umgang mit dem Anderen, speziell mit Minderheiten geht, wobei im Beitrag allerdings in diesem Zusammenhang die relativ große Minderheit der Roma in Tschechien keine
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Many thanks to Shawn Clybor, Michal Pullmann and Libora Oates-Indruchová for their critical remarks and comments on this text. his article is published in the frame of the research project “Rulers and Ruled …”, supported by the Grant Academy of the Czech Republic (GAČR) number 16-26104S.
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Erwähnung indet. Wenn das Tschechische idealtypisch für Demokratie und zivilisatorische Werte steht, so wird alles nicht Tschechische tendenziell als undemokratisch und zivilisatorisch mangelhat abgewertet. Mithin erweist sich das Stereotyp der demokratischen tschechischen Nation als Ausdruck von Nationalismus und läut Gefahr, instrumentalisiert zu werden. Der tschechische Beitritt zu EU und NATO werden in der Darstellung lediglich indirekt als Teil der „Westorientierung“ in und nach der Transformationsphase mit eingeschlossen. Die Samtene Revolution stand im Zeichen der „Rückkehr nach Europa“. Das Verständnis, dass es sich dabei um eine „Rückkehr“ handle, lässt in erster Linie darauf schließen, dass Demokratie und zivilisatorische Werte in der (Post)Transformationsphase im tschechischen Diskurs zunehmend idealtypisch mit Westeuropa verbunden wurden/werden. Um eine Rückkehr im eigentlichen Sinn kann es sich nicht handeln, da das Projekt der Europäischen Union erst in der Nachkriegszeit entstanden ist. In the Czech context like in many other Central European countries where the existence of their nation-state is recent, conlictual, and until very recently luctuating, intellectuals have played a central role in deining the national identity. During their long history of forced integration into the Austrian Empire, Czech politics and identity have centered on intellectual discourse and mostly discarded violent means of action. Historians, sociologists, philosophers, writers, artists, journalists, commentators on current issues – rather than the military or any form of popular armed rebellion –, have been the main contributors to the narratives on Czech history and Czech identity. he prestige of intellectuals shows at the country’s political top: the irst Czechoslovak president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1918–1935), and the irst post-communist president, Václav Havel (1989–2003), were both keen observers and analysts of Czech society. Both their successors, Eduard Beneš (1935–1938 and 1945–1948) and Václav Klaus (2003 to present) are more distinctly professional politicians, but they betray many intellectual characteristics, too, if only because they philosophized on the intellectual debates of their time. he only periods where the head of state was not fullly an intellectual are the Second World War (1939– 1945), when Bohemia-Moravia was occupied by Nazi Germany, and the communist period (1948–1989) – despite homerous eforts by the early Communist presidents to posit themselves as intellectuals –, which is no doubt one of the main reasons why both periods are mostly regarded as historically illegitimate by today’s intellectuals – the post-1989 period being correspondingly viewed as a “return to Europe.” In this intellectualized environment, the Czech elite discourse has tradition-
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ally deined the history of the Czech nation by its “cultural identity” (Holý 1996, 12), which comprises a near unanimous self-deinition as democratic and cultivated (“civilized” and “European”). his self-conception stood in opposition to the German-speaking oppressor and alter ego: the Austrian empire and the German-speaking community in Bohemia and Moravia, who became a rather hostile minority ater the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 – and indeed massively embraced Nazism in the second half of the 1930s, which consequently brought Czechoslovakia to a collapse. When Czechoslovakia was reconstituted in 1945, the Czechoslovak Germans were forced to leave the country. his expulsion, irst spontaneous and then carried out by the state, was an ambiguous turning point for the modern Czech nation because it was both, the achievement of Czech national purity and a betrayal of sorts of Czech non-violent (i. e. democratic in the Czech understanding) identity. he intellectual ight against what was henceforth a German ghost has nevertheless continued. It has faultlessly succeeded to mobilize the Czech population’s national and patriotic feelings under communism. he regime also (ab)used the image of the “West German revanchist” or “fascist threat” to discredit and maintain distance from the “cursed” West – including in order to justify the continued presence of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia ater the 1968 invasion (Heimann 2009, 270). In this sense the Communist period is, as opposed to what many Czech intellectuals claim, fully integrated in Czech history. Ater 1989, a recent microhistorical study at the border between the Czech Republic and Austria has shown not only that this anti-German sentiment and discourse still exists today, but that the local population has so identiied with it that it still informs their self-deinition as Czechs and their image of Germans/Austrians (Blaive/Molden 2009). his article is conceived as a chronicle of the democratic argument as the deinition of Czech identity by the Czech political and intellectual elite in the 19th and 20th centuries in the background of historical occurrences and developments that have crucially impacted the region. Czechoslovakia as a country was shared with the Slovaks until its dissolution in 1993. As Dušan Kováč deals with Slovak identity narratives in a separate article, I will mostly not include Slovakia in the present analysis, although it is of course impossible to ignore the Slovak issue altogether, insofar as the Czechs have also deined their identity in the mirror of their Slovak “brothers.” I will present and analyze the most crucial and well-known national narratives in Czech history from the 19th century to the present, produced by inluential intellectual and/or political authorities: František Palacký, Tomáš Masaryk, Ferdinand Peroutka, Emanuel Chalupný, Jan Masaryk, Edvard Beneš, Hubert Ripka, Eduard Táborský, Ivo Ducháček, Jiří Pelikán, Karel Kaplan, Václav
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Havel, Milan Kundera, and Václav Klaus. I will proceed chronologically, from the second half of the 19th century to the First World War; to the interwar period and Second World War; the 1945–1947 expulsion of the Sudeten Germans; the postwar and communist period; and the post-1989 period. In this dominant discourse, democracy was established as one of the main components of Czech identity, but also as the expression of Czech national culture – culture and democracy becoming in this sense virtually synonymous. Of course, a concept as broad as “national identity” is not intangible, but rather represents evolving social and cultural conigurations. Moreover, it is necessarily subject to conlicting interpretations. Nevertheless and notwithstanding Rogers Brubaker’s objections about the “tendency to take bounded groups as fundamental units of analysis (and basic constituents of the social world” (Brubaker 2004, 2), I shall attempt to trace the outline of a constant and dominant model in Czech political and intellectual life consensus around the fundamentally “democratic” identity of the nation, shared by major political and social actors beyond the usual political divides.
1. Prologue: The Pre-1918 Period Nineteenth-century Czech history was marked by the emergence of a specific, “de-Austrianized” Czech national identity, at a time when Bohemia and Moravia belonged to the Habsburg monarchy. he so-called “national awakening” or “national revival” began in the 19th century and gained momentum ater the failed 1848 revolution (Hroch 1985, 44). he repression imposed hereater on the Czech national movement and on its protagonists reinforced anti-Austrian feelings and imagery; even today, some Czechs believe that the words “bacha!” (be careful!) and “bachař” (jail-keeper) might date from this epoch in reference to the feared Austrian Minister of the interior Alexander Bach. Faced with the Austrian centralized rule and traumatized both by their military defeat at the Battle of the White Mountain (1620), which resulted in three centuries of Habsburg rule, and by the failure of the 1848 revolution, the proponents of a historically deined “Czech nation” sought to distinguish themselves on an intellectual front rather than on the armed one, via their culture and values. hey decided to challenge the Austrian state by claiming cultural rights for the Czech nation and brandishing them against a German hegemony in the Austrian empire. By “culture,” I understand, like anthropologist Ladislav Holý, “a system of collectively held notions, beliefs, premises, ideas, dispositions, and understandings [which is not] locked in people’s heads but is embodied in
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shared symbols which are the main vehicles through which people communicate their worldview, value orientations, and ethos to one another” (Holý 1996, 2), i. e. a concept closer to a Foucauldian deinition of discourse than a reference to set practices. A “national tradition” was quite literally conjured up by these Austrian intellectuals of Bohemian descent who increasingly saw themselves as “Czechs” and who gradually switched from German to Czech as their main language of communication (Agnew 1994) – in a process similar to that of Hungarian intellectuals of Slovak descent, who made the conscious choice to “become” Slovaks and to speak Slovak (Maxwell 2009): “As language became central to the patriots’ concern, the process of ethnic separation began” (Agnew 1994, 253). Ater philologist Josef Dobrovský revived the Czech language and literature at the beginning of the 19th century (Agnew 1994), Czech theaters, newspapers, and publishing houses became the “irst element” of this nascent patriotic movement (Ducreux 1990; Agnew 1994). As Andrea Orzof remarked, Czech-speaking newspapers were crucial because they “created the emerging nation:” by “embodying it in print”, they “proclaimed its political demands” (Orzof 2011, 35). he Czech “national revival” in the period from the French Revolution to the First World War placed a special emphasis not only on using the Czech language, but also on creating a new culture, from and for the Czech people. he rapid and successful birth of a Czech science and literature in the second half of the nineteenth century was regarded as evidence of a kulturnost equal to that of the Germans (Holý 1996, 92). Music in general and the opera in particular (Antonín Dvořák, Bedřich Smetana) became a vector of expression for the Czech national aspirations (her 2008). But those were expressed in many other ways, too: the gymnastics movement Sokol, historical controversies, folk poetry, even cookbooks, etc., all having to do with aspirations and recruitment for the national cause (Hroch 1985). Historian and political activist František Palacký, who became known as the “Father of the nation,” played an especially prominent role in deining the new national identity. In his monumental, six-volume History of the Czech Nation, which he began publishing in German in 1837 and in Czech in 1848, Palacký claimed that the “core” and “most characteristic feature” of Czech history resided in the “conlict [spor] with the German presence,” that is to say, in the “acceptance or rejection of German customs and German culture by the Czechs.” By surviving this longue durée ordeal, the Czech nation had found its true vocation, i. e. building “a bridge between Germanity and Slavity, between the East and the West of Europe” (Palacký 1968, vol.1, 57, original publication 1848). Since, however, the Czechs “have been victorious in history only
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through the supremacy of our mind, not thanks to our military power,” what distinguished them from the Germans/Austrians was their “democratic spirit.” Palacký pointed particularly to Jan Hus, the iteenth-century religious reformist who was burned at the stake ater the Council of Constance in 14152, whom he vaunted as the symbol both of Czech nationhood and of the spiritual greatness of the Czech nation. he Hussite movement was sanctiied by František Palacký as a signiicant step in the journey of humanity from despotism to liberty and the “progress of the human soul” (Palacký 1968, 11). Impervious to the danger of anachronism, historian Palacký considered the existence of a “Czech nation” in the 15th century as a given. he Hussite historical episode underwent a wild exegesis. Renewed philological and doctrinal interpretations increasingly turned Hus into a symbol of pride and Czech independence of mind. In 1899, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the future president of the First Czechoslovak Republic and a prominent moral igure, lectured Czech students on Hussitism; Hus was introduced as a man who had “fought for a moral and religious awakening, for a new man,” and had “inaugurated a new historical phase” in search of the “ideals of humanity” (Masaryk 1899, 4–5). “Humanism” being a program of its own against the Germans (Masaryk 1905), the “abyss” between this “progressive, democratic, popular” Czech nation and a “violent, reactionary, dynastic” Austria had become unbridgeable. “Culture and the high consciousness level” of the Czechs warranted them their national freedom from the Habsburg rule (Masaryk 1918). By combining in his historical conception a strong moral imperative and the Czechoslovak ideal, Masaryk had created a new mythology. Despite or perhaps thanks to that, and on account of his contagious passion for justice, freedom, and democracy, he obtained from the Great Powers the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 ater a diplomatic tour de force, together with his sidekick and future successor Edvard Beneš (Heimann 2009). He was elected irst president of the newly-born country.
2
he Oxford Dictionary gives the following deinition of “Hussite:” “Ater John Huss’s execution the Hussites took up arms against the Holy Roman Empire and demanded a set of reforms that anticipated the Reformation. Most of the demands were granted (1436), and a Church was established that remained independent of the Roman Catholic Church until 1620.” See http://oxforddictionaries.com/deinition/Hussite#m_en_gb0392870.004 (accessed 19 July 2011).
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2. The interwar period and the Second World War A. The First Czechoslovak Republic
As we have seen, Tomáš Masaryk, the president of the First Czechoslovak Republic, son of a German mother (Zeman 1976, 6) and a Slovak father (Masaryk 1943, 7), saw the Czech democratic spirit as the “ultimate national and historical program of the Czech people” (Masaryk 1895), a heritage anchored in the Reformation and the Enlightenment, in the message of Jan Hus and Comenius (Masaryk 1896; Masaryk 1901). Masaryk erected this “democratic identity” as the cornerstone of the new Czechoslovak state and as the guiding principle of his political activity. As soon as the industrial lagship of the Austrian empire, the Škoda factories in Plzeň, was handed “back to the Czech people” at the end of the First World War, the president exhorted the workers to work “for their country” and stated his irm belief that the nation would “fulill yet again its historic mission.” “he Czech man” would be known as “a model man, a model democrat!” (Masaryk 1933, speech held in 1919). What Andrea Orzof has coined the “myth of the First Czechoslovak Republic” largely rested on the “understanding that Czechoslovakia, alone in East-Central Europe, was a true democracy, whose leaders were devoted to democratic ideals and practice” (Orzof 2011, 57). he new Czechoslovak state culture indeed deined itself as “unique” in relation to its Central European neighbors and contributed to ixing Czech “democracy” as the wishful trademark of its national identity. he interwar period was not kind to democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and authoritarian regimes were progressively established everywhere else: in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, in the Baltic States, and of course in Germany and Austria. Even Slovakia eventually opted for its own fascist regime, breaking away to form an independent state in 1939. he political experience of the Czech First Republic, seen retrospectively but also at the time, was logically and, to a point, legitimately experienced as a source of pride – even as a virtually irrefutable evidence of Czech cultural superiority (Holý 1996, 129). To be a democrat in Central Europe was to be Czech; to be Czech meant to be highly mature and civilized, i. e. to be “Western.” What the Czech intellectual elites usually forgot to say was that although every citizen could participate in the regularly held elections, the “same ive Czech political parties would club together […] to keep the other nationalities out of government” (Heimann 2009, 50). Contemporary sociologists, strongly inluenced by Social Darwinism, pondered over Czech national existence in simplistic patterns that relected, if not
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scientiic brilliance, then at least a palpable obsession with Czech identity. Emanuel Chalupný, a professor at the University of Brno and vice president of the International Institute of Sociology, devoted himself to an emphatic study of the “Czech national character” (Chalupný 1932). On the basis of his study of the Czech language in comparison with nearly all other European languages, what he thought to be a “unique” Czech emphasis on the irst syllable of each word3 (a lawed assumption since he forgot to take Hungarian into account) was allegedly the proof of a national tendency to get to a good start on right principles, but of being collectively incapable of bringing these rightful principles to complete fruition. Among his examples he pointed to Hus, a model man who ended up burned at the stake, and the Czech Reform movement, which advocated democracy and humanism but was defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain. (ibid.). he Czech nation thus sufered from a peculiar cultural curse, that of being morally right but lacking the stamina to prove it to the rest of the world – or as Ferdinand Peroutka formulated it in his inimitable style, “Czechs are wonderful semi-inalists” (Peroutka 1934). he mythical or perhaps, more appropriately put, legitimizing dimension of this “Czech democratic argument” comes to the fore in any case. Not only did Masaryk attribute a dubious religious dimension to Palacký and the other “awakeners,” not only was the Hussite period artiicially recast as a model of democracy and humanism, not only was the Czech nation inappropriately antedated to the 15th century, but now the Czech state was anachronistically presented as having a centuries-long history, “temporarily suspended in the 17th century by its forcible incorporation into the Habsburg realm.” As Jan Masaryk, son of the president and Czechoslovak ambassador to Britain, brazenly formulated it, “his democracy has deep historical roots, and when Czechoslovakia once more [sic] became a free country [in 1918], it did not need to create any special system of statecrat, because this was something which it has already produced in the past” (Masaryk 1935, vii). Despite these (self-)assurances of the democratic Czech character, the young Czechoslovak Republic was confronted from the outset with a thorny problem: how to integrate a strong and hostile German minority that accounted for no less than one third of the Bohemian and Moravian population; and how to convince the second biggest minority, the Slovaks, that they belonged with the Czechs, as part of a common, unique, “Czechoslovak nation.” Again, democracy was identiied as the most appropriate answer to these issues. President 3
he Czech language stresses the irst syllable of every word, plus every syllable with a long vowel.
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Masaryk declared himself “optimistic,” “convinced that an absolute understanding was possible” and that “a peaceful political cooperation” would be attained in due time (Masaryk 1994, speech held in 1924). Masaryk’s successor President Beneš also assured: “Our philosophy and our political morality is democracy, which is our key to solving all problems since it sets respect for human personality and perfect civic equality as the standard for all political action” (Beneš 1936, 17). he discourse that Czechs addressed to their national minorities was beautifully crated but failed to address critical and concrete concerns. President Masaryk’s image of the Czech and Slovak respective cultural value, for instance, was hardly lattering for the latter: “Only the Czechs” held a “degree of culture comparable to that of the Western nations”, while the Slovaks “much less so” (ibid., 50). he Czechs were also the “only ones” among the Slavic nations “not to sufer from intellectual backwardness” and thus equipped to resist the “Teutonic aggression” (ibid., 58). In such a context, part of the Slovak political elite had by the mid-1930s become more concerned with demanding autonomy and deining their speciic Slovak identity than with defending an artiicial “Czechoslovak” nationality (Bystrický 2011, 159). he discourse on Czech democracy could hardly succeed in winning the minorities to the Czechoslovak (de facto Czech) state because the historical references it based itself upon could appeal to no one else but to the Czechs themselves. he Czechoslovak state spectacularly failed the “stress-test” of pre-war tensions: by the end of October 1938, the Czechoslovak Germans, backed up by Hitler, had gained suicient international support at the Munich conference to detach the so-called “Sudetenland” from Czechoslovakia; Hungary and Poland immediately seized their chance to recover the territories they had lost to Czechoslovakia in 1918. Slovakia achieved its autonomy that November and declared its full independence on 13 March 1939 (Bystrický 2011). Czech democracy had collapsed; President Beneš resigned immediately ater Munich and let the country shortly thereater. he Second Republic became, just like everywhere else in the region, an authoritarian regime, before surrendering completely to Hitler on 15 March 1939 ater the invasion by the German troops and the establishment of the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” B. The Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia
In 1940, ater the series of tragic events that had hit the country in the previous years, President Edvard Beneš, who went into exile in Britain, drew up an interim review of the German occupation in a speech held before the Press Club
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in London. Typically, his talk, entitled Nazi Barbarism in Czechoslovakia (Beneš 1940), centered on the intellectual horizon of the German-Czech clash rather than on the practical aspects of the occupation. he order in which he arranged his chapters leaves little doubt as to the respective importance of his sources of concern and as to what he deemed most endangered by Nazi occupation: ater the introduction came “he spiritual and moral destruction of the nation” (with the subtitles “he destruction of the legal system” and “he destruction of culture”), followed by “he destruction of economic life,” “Individual persecution,” and “Slovakia”, before wrapping up with “Germany’s real aim: the annihilation of the Czechoslovak [sic] nation.” Indeed, in a country where the “pride of the Czech nation that its culture, bound by numerous traditional ties with the culture of the West, was acknowledged by the whole civilized world” (ibid., 11), “all” that the hird Reich had “done in the Czech lands has been directed systematically and purposefully towards the destruction of the fundamental values of Czech national life” (ibid., 7–8). he imposition of a hitherto unknown level of (Nazi) violence and repression onto the Czech Lands and the disruption of the Czechoslovak political institutions led to an exarcerbation of the Czech moral attributes and national historical meaning in Beneš’s, and certainly most other democratic elites’, eyes. In this painful historical context, to stand up to Nazi barbarism meant to reairm the Czech national project. he democratic First Republic and the historical democratic myth in general acquired more than even a crucial, symbolical, importance, both at home under the Protectorate, and in exile. his sometimes led an exaggerated national view, conining to martyrology, which tended to discard any other sufering than the Czech one. As was occasionally the case before 1918 or under the First Republic, the Czech democratic myth is overshadowed here by a nationalist and patronizing attitude concerning everyone who was not Czech. Concerning Poland, for instance, Beneš writes that the destruction waged by the Nazi occupation troops in this country was essentially “material, physical, brutal;” whereas in Czechoslovakia what was at stake was the “systematic preparation of a spiritual murder and extermination, because the destruction of the spiritual resistance of the Czech masses seems more essential to the Germans” [sic] (ibid., 16). Slovakia’s importance did not come anywhere close to that of the Czech lands’ either. In a mere one and a half pages, the “little brother” was dealt with and unilaterally proclaimed as standing “in irm opposition to the treacherous Government and to the German invaders.” he “tragic experiences” of the Slovaks were showing, according to President Beneš, that Slovakia’s “free development” was “guaranteed only in collaboration with the Czechs and in the frame-
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work of the free Czechoslovak Republic” (ibid., 27). he fact that Beneš still spoke of a “Czechoslovak nation” shows that he had understood little if anything of the Slovak frustration with the First Republic and with its corresponding Czech patronizing attitude. And inally there was another “most shameful, dishonest and immoral piece of thet and public robbery” which would “remain in the history of Nazism as one of its most characteristic achievements:” not the expropriation of the Jews per se, as one might have expected, but the fact that the “Jewish question” had been “misused in Czechoslovakia by the Nazi intruders.” Indeed, the “so-called Aryanisation of the Jewish property in Czechoslovakia was realized in such a way that no single piece of coniscated or transferred Jewish property could be given to a citizen of Czech nationality” [sic] (ibid., 18–19). Even though Beneš rightfully claimed “with pride” that Czechoslovakia “knew no anti-Semitism” for its twenty years of existence and that the Germans had to impose the Nuremberg laws to a reluctant Czech protectorate government, this type of declaration, or the one which came a few lines further down: “What can be read in the British White Paper about the persecution of Jews in the concentration camps is a very mild version [sic] of what the Gestapo has perpetrated against Czech patriots since the occupation of Prague” (ibid., 24), could not but give the disastrous impression that Czech “culture” and pride in its own “civilization” was little more than thinly disguised Czech selishness of the worst nationalist kind. But this speech made perfectly clear that culture was seen by Edvard Beneš as fundamentally constitutive of Czech identity. he defeated President considered a battle led on the spiritual and cultural grounds as quintessential for the survival of the Czech nation. For him, a high level of culture – or what he held as such – was more than a luxury: it was an existential condition. By the same token, if democracy was taken away from the Czechs, the latter became helpless, which implicitly accounted for the lack of resistance (Beneš 2004, 55–56 original 1941) – an argument which was to be used again in the 1950s by the exile democrats to justify the apparent social passivity under communism. What the President considered a deadly attack on Czech culture warranted a strong reaction and retribution. Ater hesitating for a few months, he opted for getting rid of the Czechoslovak Germans once and for all and oicially started to demand their expulsion from the Czechoslovak territory in 1942–43. His public relations entreprise, which consisted in presenting the Czechs as unilateral “victims” – an endeavour which, just like in De Gaulle’s case concerning France, was by no means evident since he himself had resigned and a legal Czech collaborating government had taken over –, was inally successful when Great Britain repudiated the Munich Agreement. By mid-1943, Beneš had re-
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ceived the assurance that both the US and the Soviet Union would support the expulsion (Beneš 1972, original 1947).
3. The Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans A. A “German National Character?”
During the last, free, municipal elections of May-June 1938, the Sudeten Germans had cast 85% of their votes for an openly pro-Nazi party that advocated the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the annexation of the Sudetenland to Hitler’s Germany, a success that opened the path to the disastrous Munich Agreement.4 By doing so, the vast majority of the Czech Germans had shown that the democratic model they were supposed to be beneiting from did not, in their eyes, counterbalance the national oppression they were considering being subjected to. hey clearly conceived of their “struggle” in national and not political terms: to be liberated from the “Czech yoke” seemed to them more important that to choose between (Czech) democracy and (German) dictatorship (Zimmermann 2001). But for President Beneš as for most Czech political elites, the 1938 rupture was attributed to a German denial of the Czechs’ very identity: democracy. he “illusion” that the Germans would eventually “stop thinking German to start thinking Czechoslovak” (Chalupný 1947) gave way to the acute sense of an unforgivable political and national betrayal. At the irst meeting of the Czechoslovak Parliament in 1945, reinstituted President Beneš claimed that “Our […] Germans have placed themselves to a 80% to 90% majority at the service of barbarian Nazism to annihilate our state and undermine the strengths of our nation, as well as its moral and cultural values […] he bridges between us and them have been burned forever by their behavior” (Beneš 1946, 30). Again, “science” was put at the service of state ideology to document the evil character of the Germans. In his postwar book he Germans Are hreatening, sociologist Emanuel Chalupný proposed a long explanation of the “national character” which had turned the German nation into a “murderer of culture.” He found the explanation in the “useless tendency” of the German language to 4
Konrad Henlein’s Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP) polled in fact 91,4% of the votes in the “Sudeten” districts but the Communist Party, which presented itself as a trans-nationality party (competing in all districts), also polled a small percentage of German votes; this brings back the SdP representation among all Czechoslovak Germans to approximately 85%, which remains of course an overwhelming majority (Luža 1964, 110).
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create “unnecessary long words” such as Rauchfangkehrer (chimney sweeper), Regenbogenglanz (rainbow shine) or ruhmreich (famous). Who else but the Germans could fall to such “creative fantasy” and invent such an absurd insult as “Schweinehund” (swine dog)? (Chalupný 1947, 20). his language peculiarity did not only explain why English philosophy was clear and empirical (Locke, Hume, Stuart Mill) whereas the German one was “fantastically long-winded” (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel). It also allowed Chalupný to come to sweeping conclusions on recent German history: “‘Swine dog’ is a typical creation of the German national soul; […] it even igured in the national program in the most critical times of Germany’s modern history in 1932, when […] Hitler’s rival […] General Schleicher […] claimed […] that democratic thinking is ‘the inner swine dog.’” hat is why, according to Chalupný, Hitler and Göring, terribly “jealous” of this “lash of demagoguery,” had Schleicher murdered on 30 June 1934 during the Night of Long Knives. “here the political parallels to the German soul were made obvious”, concluded the expert (ibid., 21). his historical and sociological “analysis” continued in the same vein over another sixty pages and concluded that democracy had no future in postwar Germany (ibid., 80). What is undeniable is that ater the cataclysm of the Second World War, the desire to ind a radical solution to the “German problem” was overwhelming in Europe and does not characterize the Czechs alone. Twelve to fourteen million Germans were forcibly expelled or led from Central and Eastern Europe, the largest contingent of which (six million) was coming from Poland and another three from Czechoslovakia. What is peculiar to the Czech case, however, is that the Czech authorities insisted on justifying this expulsion in the name of democracy. B. The Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia
he expulsion of the Czechoslovak Germans (what the Czechs have insisted on calling the “transfer”, i. e. “odsun” rather than “vyhnání”) was criticized inside and outside Czechoslovakia all the more vividly because the Czechs had founded their state and national legitimacy precisely on democracy. he contrast between the discourse on cultural values and the practice of revenge revealed that democracy could serve as a legitimizing discourse while simultaneously negating practical democratic principles. Democratic self-identiication and respectful behavior are indeed two diferent things. he pre-1938 democratic discourse on the integration of national minorities gave way in 1945 to the conviction that the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia had imposed an unacceptable discontinuity to the democratic and humanist Czech “tradition.” Only
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expelling the Germans from the national territory could remedy this injustice (Holý 1996, 123). Seen from Czech eyes, it was Hitler who waged war on Czechoslovakia. he Sudeten Germans were instrumental in breaking down this country and their leaders took their orders directly from the “Führer.” Nearly half a million Sudeten Germans joined the Nazi Party, making the Sudetenland the most “pro-Nazi” region of the entire hird Reich (Zimmermann 2001). More than 120,000 Czech Jews, Czechs and Czech Romas were murdered by the German occupation forces and in the death camps (Skorpil 1994, 161–164). he Nazis also eradicated the (Sudeten) German Jewish community, the most efective mediator between Czechs and Germans in Czechoslovakia. Seven years of terror were implemented by a foreign power supported by the vast majority of Sudeten Germans, in a regime which considered Slavs as subhumans and had them next on its list of populations to be exterminated. hese are circumstances which could not but exert a major inluence on the Czech intent to get rid of their Germans ater the war. However, the democratic identity which Czech political and intellectual elites kept attributing to the nation came in rather stark contradiction to the reality of the expulsion: summary executions, torture, arbitrary detentions and abuses of all kinds, in addition to some 25,000 dead (Bazin 2007). Moreover, four presidential decrees (the “Beneš Decrees”) dating from 19 May, 19 June, 21 June and 25 August 1945 against “collaborators, traitors, Germans and Hungarians” stipulated that all their property was coniscated without compensation (Luža 1964, 269–271). he interesting point is that the discrepancy between the democratic ideals and the brutal practice was rarely pointed out or even noticed by contemporary Czech actors. On the contrary, members of the Provisional Assembly, which had been co-opted and had no direct mandate, amnestied with law 115/1946 the atrocities committed against the Germans at the end of the war by washing out acts committed by the Czechs in their “ight for freedom” in a time frame comprised between 30 September, 1938 and October 28, 1945 – a date which generously outlasted the end of the occupation period so as to include the spring and summer months when most crimes and mistreatments of the Germans had taken place (Frommer 2005, 113–115). Any crime, be it rape, murder or torture, committed against a German, Magyar or alleged collaborator retrospectively became legal. he expulsion of the Czechoslovak Germans thus shows that the self-representation of the Czechs as a “democratic” and cultural nation could be used to justify various forms of symbolic and physical brutality when their national
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identity appeared threatened and when they were in a position of force. he trail of violence that accompanied the so-called “return home” of the Sudeten Germans does not distinguish Czechoslovakia from other European nations, where the end of the occupation led to similarly brutal settlings of accounts. However, the contrast between the reality on the ground and the claimed intentions – it was told repeatedly that the expulsion was not a vengeance but a security requirement to secure the future of “democracy” (see for instance Ripka 1944, 12) – was perhaps greater. In the 1970s, dissidents debated the question and some deined the communist domination as a period of atonement ater the “original sin,” i. e. the expulsion of the Germans. he whole nation would have allegedly shared a sense of culpability concerning the very principle of the expulsion and the excesses committed during the period 1945–1947, a guilt which would partially explain the lack of resistance to the introduction of the Stalinist regime (Mlynárik 1978; Gluckstein 1953; Bruegel 1986, 18). Additionally, breaking the historical ties with the Sudeten German minority was argued to have put the Czechs in a position of dependency towards the USSR, the only regional power capable of protecting them against the “German danger” (Gluckstein 1953, 184; Pithart 1990, in a text published for the irst time in 1980).
4. The Path to Socialism and the Communist Regime (1945–1989) A. The Self-Sabotage of Democracy
he expulsion of the Germans indeed facilitated the postwar communist takeover, but thanks to the attitude of the Democrats themselves rather than as the consequence of a mystical collective feeling of culpability. he Czech population overwhelmingly approved of the expulsions; but what contributed to the destabilization of democratic institutions was, irst, the urge to suppress any debate on the expulsion, which led to a self-inlicted limitation of the political debate; second, a very bloody settling of accounts with “collaborators” whose exemplarity was aggravated by the radical aspect of the Sudeten German “solution;” and third, the political and socio-economic beneit reaped from the expulsion by the Czechoslovak Communist Party. he expulsion was massively approved by Czech society, but not unanimously, especially as time went by and the vindictive feelings which had marked the end of the occupation slightly abated. What is signiicant is that the opponents
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to the expulsion or to the brutal shape it had taken, although in minority, tended to be hushed or disregarded, when not self-censored (Drápala 2000; Hahnová 1996, 125–126; Frommer 2005, 61). hey spoke mainly ater 1948, when they had let the country. Since the expulsion was meanwhile extolled by all authorized political elites (right-wing parties had been banned for their real or alleged collaboration with the Protectorate), and since the Germans started to be driven to the border long before the irst postwar elections, the electorate was handed a fait accompli. he four Czech and two Slovak authorized political parties went so far as to adopt three principles before the 1946 elections: none of them was to criticize the government’s policy; none of them was to question its pro-Soviet inclination; all were to publicly claim they intended to continue pursuing the National Front policy inside the same cabinet ater the elections. he People’s Party daily, Lidová demokracie, dedicated only two paragraphs to the issue; under the title “he National Front government will stay in place ater the elections,” the article deemed the coalition agreement a “rule of courtesy and honor before the electoral struggle” (Lidová demokracie, 26 March 1946, 1). But what are elections for if all competing parties agree in advance not to criticize the government’s policy and accept to all participate in it again ater the elections? Historian Ben Frommer has undertaken a study of the extremely harsh postwar legal retributions in Czechoslovakia and details a series of unsettling elements for a state which claimed to be a democracy: the accused’s rights were tramped, people were detained for months before their crime was actually deined by law, they were judged more than once for the same crime, mitigating circumstances were not to be taken into account, the defendants could not appeal their verdicts, and the death penalty was to be carried out within two, at most three hours ater the verdict had been pronounced. In the author’s summarizing statement, “there is little doubt that the summary nature of the verdicts resulted in the execution of innocents” (Frommer 2005, 344). he Czechs hanged an astonishing 94.9% of the people they condemned to the death penalty (as opposed to a mere 11% in France or 8.2% in Belgium and even only 41.5% in Slovakia) (ibid., 90). “In addition to providing examples of Teutonic evil, thereby ideologically reinforcing the will to expel,” he concludes, “retribution helped to ensure that few voices would be raised against the Transfer and that few Czechs would sabotage its completion” (ibid., 239). In an implicit political, moral, and national contract, political and intellectual elites supported a democratic political platform strongly oriented to the let in exchange for the Communists’ and Soviet support for the expulsion of the Germans (Pithart 1990, 240). Like Trade Minister Hubert Ripka, they invoked
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a “socializing democracy” (Beuer 1947, 41) – while the Communists spoke of an apparently innocuous “democratic socialism.” Ferdinand Peroutka claimed in his adeptly entitled volume his or hat Way that the question was not whether Czechoslovakia would adopt socialism, but rather what kind of socialism it would choose (Peroutka 1947). Jan Masaryk, the Foreign Minister of President Beneš, also famously stated: “We may be a socialising State, but a State of free men. A State of impartial justice and genuine democracy. Neither a curtain nor a bridge, but a link in a democratic chain which spans the world and keeps this globe together. he small, blessed country, rendered great and famous by its traditions of prevaling truth” (Masaryk 1947, 51–52). Democrats assumed they were the natural and thus exclusive holders of the (democratic) political legitimacy of the country. heir fatal mistake was to underestimate the consequences of the ideological, political, economic and social concessions they granted to their communist political opponents. Only reluctantly and too late were they able to inally appreciate that the Communists were perfectly able to interpret at their own convenience the concepts of “socializing democracy,” of “impartial justice,” of “true democracy”, of “link in the chain that spans the democratic world” and of “prevailing truth.” In short, Moscow’s men demonstrated their ability to capture and use to their advantage the democratic national consciousness. he Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ), which reemerged in 1945 was not a newcomer to Czech politics. Not only was it legal and powerful already in the interwar period, but he had fully integrated the most important components of national identity. he Hussite and Taborite heritage claimed by the Democrats had been integrated into the cultural background of the Czech labor movement already since the turn of the 20th century; hadn’t the workers been then anointed as the “worthy descendants of the invincible Taborites?” Czech Socialists (many of whom became communists ater 1921) painted the Czech Hussite movement as a model of social revolt and saw it as the “beginning of the socialist and collectivization movement in Bohemia.” Ater 1921, the Communist Party considered the “holy warriors” as its direct ancestors, and even took part in the Hussite celebrations under the motto “Hus and the First Communists in Bohemia” (Rak 1994). he KSČ’s “national turn” was thus as old as the history of the Czechoslovak Republic itself. Intellectual Zdeněk Nejedlý, Tomáš Masaryk’s pupil and a primary instigator of Czech Communist propaganda into the 1950s, issued in his volume Jan Hus and Our Epoch his own exegesis of the Hussite program: to establish the “law of collectivization,” to lead the “reform of ownership,” and to ensure the “equality of the people” especially, of course, in the socio-economic realm. In other
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words, the Taborites were “communists” and the principles of their “revolution” (which were found “today in the USSR”) had been the “corner stone in the construction of socialism” (Nejedlý 1946a, irst edition 1919). Ater the Liberation, the Communist Party efortlessly revived this intellectual tradition. he party’s general secretary, Rudolf Slánský, was sure that his supporters did not want anything else for their country, a land “once Hussite and Taborite,” than to be “back to the forefront with those who ight for progress, for a most substantial democracy, for a radiant life for humanity” (Slánský 1945, 23). he KSČ was not only heir to these distant Hussite tradition but as well to the Czech progressive intellectuals, the 19th century “awakeners of the nation,” Kollár, Šafařík, Jungmann, Havlíček, Palacký, Jirásek, Němcová, Smetana, and all the others, who were now presented as Communists’ precursors. he humanist heritage of the irst president was not forgotten: in order to achieve the “victory of humanity” dear to President Masaryk, the Communists were to “follow the path he had paved” (Nejedlý 1946b). Communist propaganda’s main feat was to appropriate the traditional discourse by gradually replacing political legitimacy (democracy) by a new national and social legitimacy: the so-called “national and democratic revolution” – which neatly it into the national intellectual tradition of democracy, humanism and socialism as personiied by Tomáš Masaryk. his ideological line allowed the KSČ to appropriate, to embody, and even to arouse, Czech nationalism on three counts: Pan-Slavism, the transformation of the “national treason” of the political elites who had taken power ater Munich into an “ideological and social treason,” and the gloriication of the Soviet Union as the sole protector against the German peril (Blaive 2005, 141–156). By the same token, Nejedlý denied Western Europe’s cultural legitimacy at the time when the European construction was starting; he saw it as a “dollar-driven American project” (Reijnen 2008, 111–112). Ater the Second World War, Czech society was largely ripe for the advent of communism. As historian Carlos Reijnen explains, the perception of Europe and the West was deeply entangled with the need to reformulate the “national” question; “rethinking the future was also rethinking the past”, especially concerning the relation to Germany and the Soviet Union (ibid., 112). he “East” represented not only geopolitical security but socialism, a societal project which suited a Czech political and social practice imbued with egalitarianism. he KSČ polled 38% of the votes in the free 1946 elections and became the irst party of the country; its leader Klement Gottwald became President Beneš’ Prime Minister. When the democratic ministers of the government resigned in February 1948, in the hope of provoking early elections, the democratic camp
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collapsed without a ight. President Beneš did nothing to stop or help them, Jan Masaryk took the Communists’ side on petty considerations of wounded pride (Kosatík/Kolář 1998, 301–304), the students who took to the streets against the Communists found themselves alone, and the nation watched passively – or joined the communist demonstrations. he Communists took over. By the end of the year 1948, the KSČ counted 2.5 million members, i. e. one Czechoslovak adult out of three or nearly half of the Czech active population (Maňák 1995, 57). he Czechoslovak party had twice as many members per capita as in Hungary (Lazitch 1956, 88) and almost four times more than in Poland (ibid., 95). he anti-European and pro-Russian mindset of Czech communist propaganda did more than match Stalinist standards: it took up its “self-evident place in the intellectual history” of Czechoslovakia, while addressing the widely shared concern among the Czech population that Nazism and fascism were “inherently linked to a deep crisis of Europe itself ” (Reijnen 2008, 111, 115). The Stalinist Years
During the dark years of Stalinism and while the communist leaders were busy chasing “saboteurs” and “spies,” the discourse on Czech democracy was mainly taken over by Democrats-in-exile, who used it to justify and minimize the apparent passivity of the Czechoslovak population in the face of communist domination. Despite its alleged democratic identity, this population nevertheless ofered little visible resistance to a regime held as fundamentally anti-cultural. his became particularly evident in 1956 when the Czechs and Slovaks abstained from taking part in the radical protest movement that afected theirs most immediate neighbors, the Poles and the Hungarians. Did the “democratic traditions” of the Czechoslovak people inhibit the expression of popular discontent? Ivo Ducháček, a former Democratic MP between 1945 and 1948 who had led to the United States ater February 1948, cited the “sophisticated sobriety of the opposition, rooted in the traditions of democracy and of its non-violent methods of action” as an important explanatory factor of this 1956 passivity (Ducháček 1958, 115). he only democracy in interwar Central Europe was supposedly paralyzed by its high cultural level and inability to use weapons other than electoral ballots – of which it was now deprived. Ducháček was nevertheless convinced of strong anti-communist sentiments. He described the political climate of the Czechoslovak as one of “revolutionary evolution.” It was a “bloodless but permanent civil war, oten more than discreet” that was the “order of the day in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in Central Europe” (ibid., 119–120). In fact, this article documents only its author’s wishful thinking. hat the people aspired to freedom is doubtless but this desire
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was not necessarily inconsistent with a partial satisfaction of their socio-economic needs by the Communist regime, nor is it automatically synonymous with a willingness to open resistance. Other authors, such as Eduard Táborský, President Beneš’s personal secretary during his London exile, or Jiří Pelikán, young Stalinist apparachik in the 1950s and one of the reformist communist leaders of the Prague Spring in 1968, then exiled, similarly detected the resurgence of a democratic spirit among the KSČ members in 1956 ater Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. hey saw signs of a new and “surprisingly vigorous internal democracy within the KSČ,” which had reappeared so fast that it proved the existence of a “continuous liberal movement” within Czech society (Táborský 1961, 77), a movement which “overwhelmed” and “threatened” the Central Committee (Pelikán 1975, 112). In reality, only 0.5% of the KSČ’s grass roots organizations demanded an extraordinary Party congress, a marginal movement which didn’t put the Central Committee in any danger at all. Táborský, Pelikán, Ducháček, and many others – from former Democrats to reform Communists (both during and ater 1968), to Western scholars, to Czechoslovak exiles of all backgrounds including former State Security policemen and judges – founded their analysis not on (already available) actual information but on their preexisting belief in the “democratic spirit” of Czech society (and possibly of the Czechoslovak Communist Party). What is interesting is that authors with such a completely divergent political background invoked the same democratic nature of Czech society, thus illustrating the prevailing intellectual consensus on this issue beyond all political or ideological divisions. The 1968 Prague Spring
One of the irst signs of the impending Stalinist thaw was the reappearance within ruling communist intellectuals of a concern with the nation’s degree of civilization. Historian Karel Kaplan published in 1963 an English-speaking propaganda volume covering the history of the period 1945–1948, whose title was suggestive: A victory for Democracy. He noted in the introduction that “he country’s high cultural level was well known throughout the civilized world” (Kaplan 1963, 7). In a sign that the Prague Spring was in the pipeline, he announced a historic rehabilitation of the “democratic socialism” of the pre-Stalinist era as representative of the great Czechoslovak tradition of democracy and humanism. Eduard Goldstücker had been sentenced to life imprisonment in May 1953 in the wake of the Slánský show-trial before being released in 1955. his anti-Sta-
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linist intellectual vividly recalled the objectives of the oicial party line before 1948. Czechoslovakia was supposed to achieve socialism in its own way and according to its own rhythm: “We knew that, compared to us, Russia was a backward country,” he says, “and we imagined that our road to socialism would be diferent, because we had a head start [in the economic and cultural ield]!” (personal interview, 1996). In 1968, as president of the Writers’ Union and prominent reform communist intellectual, he invoked the traditional democratic values of the Czech people as the natural foundation of “socialism with a human face.” In a speech addressed to Prague Spring critics in other socialist countries, he stated: “We have to admit, outside of any nationalism or exaggerated parochialism, that Czechoslovakia has entered the socialist phase of its historical evolution as the socialist camp’s most advanced country from the industrial and political point of view. […] I take into account the historical fact that the nations of our country have the longest and strongest democratic traditions, with irst-hand experience with democracy, even if with bourgeois democracy. What is happening today in this country, my friends, is nothing but the adapting of socialism […] to the demands of the life, traditions and possibilities open to our nations” (Goldstücker 1968, 10). he reform communist resort to the “democratic traditions” ensured a spectacular growth of the Communist Party’s popular legitimacy during the 1968 Prague Spring. But in such a self-proclaimed culturally democratic society, the Stalinist phase of the Party’s rule was rather embarrassing to account for, so it was conveniently blamed on Stalin and the Soviets. What was also potentially embarrassing was the level of popular passivity all throughout the period, and especially in 1956, when allegedly less democratic Poland and Hungary challenged the communist rule in a radical and impressive way. he igures of Stalinist repression were instrumentalized to provide an explanation for this passivity. Oicial historians engaged in a comparison with the other countries of the communist bloc and focused on the idea of a speciic repressive violence in Czechoslovakia. Karel Kaplan in particular wrote a famous article entitled “Relections on Political Trials,” which had a great impact on the historiography of the communist period in Czechoslovakia, both at home and abroad. According to him, the great show-trials started in 1950 in Czechoslovakia “at a time when they were already over elsewhere,” but “the irst judicial sentences resulted in almost as many dead as the trials in all the other popular democracies put together in 1949” (Kaplan 1968, 915). In fact, it is the general concept of a communist repression more violent in Czechoslovakia than in all the other popular democracies put together that acquired a mythical dimension; it became the universal explanation for Democrats and Communists alike for the
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1950s in Czechoslovakia (Blaive 2005, 93–102). he Stalinism of the 1950s supposedly was the “most ruthless” in Czechoslovakia because it was, in a way, “proportional to the democratic traditions it had to destroy” (Skilling 1976, 824). Despite its appeal, this argument was refuted by the archives opening in 1989. Without denying in any way the compassion to which Czechoslovak victims of communism are entitled, the regime never was “particularly ruthless. ”Moreover, the Hungarian and Polish examples (not to mention Bulgaria or Romania) demonstrate that the level of repression in a communist state is not linked to the depth of its democratic traditions (Blaive 2005, 100–102). Democratic identity, Czech nationalism’s traditional basis, was instrumentalized by the (reform) Communists so as to rehabilitate democratic socialism and ultimately to legitimize “socialism with a human face.” But just like with President Beneš in 1938, just like with the Democrats between 1945 and 1948, the democratic component of Czech identity, for all its merits, could be preached to no one else but to the choir. Even though the discourse on democracy as adopted and adapted by reform Communists did have a highly positive, practical impact and gave the Czechs and Slovaks their irst taste of democracy and freedom in several decades – while arousing a genuine enthusiasm for this original “hird Way” experiment with Western intellectuals –, it nevertheless failed again to be a source of geopolitical power. Dissent as New Support for the Democratic Identity (1975–1989)
Ater the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops in August, 1968, the political legitimacy stemming from the “democratic tradition” changed hands again. he communist ideology as such was seriously undermined by the events of August 1968, not only by the violent intervention which proved yet again that socialism rhymed with a thankless Realpolitik rather than with a bright future, but also by the attitude of the reform Communists themselves, many of whom stayed in power around Alexander Dubček ater August and undid themselves the popular reforms which the Prague Spring had been famous for. he Communist regime aroused a strong sense of injustice by purging the Party ranks in the so-called “normalization” process (Otáhal 1994) and settled like in Poland and Hungary on a mellow compromise (“Gulash communism”), “exchanging” consumerism, social peace, and a guaranteed standard of living against political passivity and the absence of challenge brought to the Communist rule – of course at the cost of “frequent compliance and occasional collaboration” (Bren 2010, 202). Emerging dissent, which was not limited to inner-Party criticism anymore,
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even if former Communists constituted a third of its ranks, progressively took over and appropriated the democratic discourse. his transfer, albeit hardly noticed by the wider public in Czechoslovakia at the time since it was almost completely unaware of these dissident activities, became crucially important in and ater 1989, and even earlier abroad, where dissidents enjoyed much admiration and support despite their striking numerical weakness. Retrospectively seen, we might even venture that this legitimacy transfer in the use of the national democratic argument marked the beginning of the end for the communist regime. he inaugural manifesto Charter 77 began with a reference to the 1975 Helsinki Agreement, while reminding that freedom and the rule of law were “important civilizational values” (Prečan 1990, 9). he most prominent dissident and co-founder of Charter 77, Václav Havel, pointed out that dissent was primarily an “ethical initiative”, in which “individual conscience” played the most important part (Havel 1989, 45–52). He deined his program as “living in truth” and instinctively appealed to the heritage of the greatest Czech intellectuals, from Jan Hus to Tomáš Masaryk. In fact, one can analyze his “moral ideal of tolerance and virtue in public life,” apparently devoid of any “dogmatism, sectarianism, and nationalism,” as a legacy of the said Masaryk (Ducreux 1990, 124); Havel indeed spontaneously endorsed the traditional justiication of Czech statehood by invoking the notions of democracy and humanism (Holý 1996, 119). Until 1989, the Czechoslovak population treated this revival of the discourse on democracy with skepticism at best, and more commonly complete indiference. “Living in truth,” ighting the regime with the discourse on democracy, appeared doomed and useless. Moreover, as Havel himself was acutely aware of, and as he analyzed at length, notably in his essays Letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák (1975) and he Power of the Powerless (1978), people did accept to a large extent the social contract of political passivity proposed by the regime against a relative economic prosperity and comfort (Havel 1989, 82–86 under the title “When Dictatorship Meets Consumer Society”). If this compromise/compromising is not a trademark of the so-called Czech national character, we might nevertheless wonder how long it would have held had the communist regimes not irst started to disintegrate in the USSR, Poland, Hungary and East Germany. In any event, the dissenters suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves bearers of a high degree of legitimacy in November 1989 because they were the only ones, at a time when the Communists lost all credibility, to convey an alternative discourse, one which was already familiar to all Czechs. heir reunion with the people of Prague was strengthened by the memory of a “collective
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identity based on the appropriation of ethical values” transmitted down in history, such as “truth, tolerance, goodness, love, humanity and, ultimately, democracy” (Ducreux 1990, 109). hese slogans were reaching every individual in “what they confusedly felt as the most profoundly ‘Czech’ in their hearts” (ibid., 109). According to Havel, the Czechoslovak human and democratic tradition was “somewhere dormant in the consciousness of our nations and had been quietly passed on from generation to generation to reappear in each and everyone of us at the right time” (Havel 1990, 28). he inscription reproduced on the countless posters proposing Havel as candidate to the presidency in December 1989, Love and Truth Must Prevail Over Lies and Hate, exempliied this “national tradition” almost to the point of caricature. How not to see in it a direct legacy with Masaryk’s call for love and humanity? In his candidacy speech on television, the direct descendant of the irst philosopher-president synthesized all the national ideology: “It is culture which, for decades, even centuries, has transmitted our national identity through the dark periods in our history. It is thanks to the cultural front that we have been able to renew with our best traditions, based on the ideal of peace and represented by the names of George of Poděbrady, Comenius, Havlíček, Štúr, Masaryk, Štefánik, Patočka” (Havel 1990, 18), i.e. the “full gallery of the spiritual ancestors of the nation” (Holý 1996, 126). Ladislav Holý impudently concludes that by becoming a hero worthy of representing the national traditions, Václav Havel “relieve[d] others from the necessity to live up to their ideals and ma[de] it possible to maintain the credibility of an ideal which would otherwise be challenged by the historical experience of the masses. It is ultimately through venerating its heroes that the autocratic, intolerant, begrudging, and not exceptionally cultured or educated little Czech can still consider himself to belong to a democratic, cultural, and well-educated nation” (ibid., 167).
5. Postscript: 1989 and the “Return to Europe” he Cold War had seemingly solved the question of the relative position of Czechoslovakia in Europe: in the East. However, Czech intellectuals and dissidents were unhappy with this forceful geopolitical solution. hey tried during the Prague Spring and later on to rehabilitate Central Europe as a territory between East and West, as a way of asserting the Czech moral superiority over the occupying Russian forces. Milan Kundera published his famous article, “he Tragedy of Central Europe,” to redeine Central Europe as “culturally in the West, geographically in the centre, and politically in the East” (Kundera 1983).
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he democratic value of Czech culture rhymed with civilization, and civilization with (Western) Europe. Correspondingly, the Velvet Revolution was placed under the sign of the “Return to Europe.” But ater the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the issue of dealing with the communist past on the political, economic, and social level rapidly took precedence over “Europe” as a philosophical concept. Only the “democratic argument” remained. While President Havel celebrated humanist values in the “traditional” Czech way, Prime Minister Klaus, even though he rejected Havel’s ethical package (human rights, civic society, humanism, environmentalism, etc.), endorsed the equally long tradition of considering the Czech nation as superior, “more civilized,” than the rest of Central Europe. Ever since the 1990s, he has claimed that his country has been more successful than its neighbours and would for instance be the irst to join the European Union (Blaive/Maslowski 2011). He has also fully adhered to the classical anti-German suspicion in Czech politics, iercely defending the Beneš Decrees against Sudeten German attacks – and being elected president in 2003 with the support of the Communists only ater his main opponent, former dissident Jan Sokol, was suspected of being in favor of abrogating the said Decrees (ibid.). In short, although he could not derive any intellectual legitimacy from his dissident past, Klaus reshaped classical populist and nationalist values into the Czech cultural frame and dressed them in the traditional Czech discourse on democracy. he relativity of this discourse on democracy, on all sides, could not be better documented than by the detailed study of the Velvet Revolution led by Gil Eyal. he latter shows that, fearful of the interference of the reform Communists during the 1989 revolution, (Czech) dissidents sought “to maintain their monopoly over symbolic political capital [and] developed a discursive strategy involving a complete rejection of the Communist past such that anybody associated with it, even as a reformer or a critic, was immediately suspect” (Eyal 2005, 159). Former Communists such as Dubček were moved aside as much as possible to make way for a new political elite, while economic experts from the “grey zone,” such as Klaus, were co-opted: “he zealous protection of their status as ‘opposition’ during the round-table negotiations guaranteed that the dissidents would enter the new post-communist period as holders of the symbolic power to represent ‘society’ as its delegates. his power was immediately converted into a dominant position in the new post-communist political ield” (ibid., 160). he new political elite kept to this uncompromising anti-Communist discourse, which led to a corresponding, exceptionally high, level of “lustration” and anti-Communist cleansing in the Czech Republic. In other words, it is not a particularly strong democratic spirit that led to the toughest decom-
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munization policy of Central Europe, but the urge for the former dissidents to establish their own power and not to share it. On the other hand, since there were many more former Communists within the Slovak intellectual elites before 1989 than within the Czech ones, the Slovaks were more or less excluded from the revolutionary process; this rapidly led to enormous political dissension and Czechoslovakia’s ultimate dissolution, while Slovakia adopted a much more lenient attitude concerning the Communist past (ibid., xx-xxi, 159).
Conclusion Ever since it emerged in the 19th century, the Czech nation has derived its sense of identity and political legitimacy from the concept of democracy. Ater the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the Czechs have sought to deine their own identity on a political basis. Although they did claim their inalienable right to live their national existence within their own state, the Czechs were proud to be spared the narrow-minded nationalism which characterized their immediate neighbors in Central Europe; be it in 1918, in 1945, or in 1989, they presented to the world the democratic component of their culture as the most representative element of their identity. In reality, the stereotype of the democratic nation has been the very expression of Czech nationalism. 19th and 20th history has shown that it was repeatedly used for purposes that had nothing in common with the original democratic ideal. herefore, it should be handled with care by the political and intellectual elites of the country. his pleasant enough, but oten self-satisied democratic conviction did not prevent the German minority from striving to achieve Czechoslovakia’s dissolution in 1938; it did not prevent the Communists from gaining a genuine popular support ater the Second World War and from conquering their political legitimacy from the Democrats; it did not stop the Soviets from destroying the historical enterprise of merging democracy and socialism in 1968. “Every nation that doesn’t know its own past is doomed to repeat it,” claims the opening statement of the law that created the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in 2007; such an institute could relect on the fact that democracy, as appealing as it may be, is not only an absolute value but also a concept prone to being instrumentalized.
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Report "“National Narratives of Czech Identity From the 19th Century to the Present”, in Anton Pelinka et.al., Geschichtsbuch Mitteleuropa. Vom Fin de Siècle bis zur Gegenwart, Vienna, New Academic Press, 2016, p. 161-189. "