„Exilové internacionály“ ve studené válce jako nástroj boje proti komunismu
‘Exile Internationals’ in the Fight against Communism during the Cold War

Summary/Abstract: The article is concerned with the formation and development of the supranational organizations in the West which were composed of political exiles from the countries behind the Iron Curtain, mainly during the fi rst phase of the Cold War. The article sets out chiefl y to provide a basic factual overview and to outline a possible comparison of the types, activities, and aims of the anti-Communist exile organizations. Regardless of whether they were political parties, national committees, or ideological and professional organizations working in exile, the task and status of these subjects depended entirely, the author argues, on changes in the international situation and the degree of support from Western governments, chiefl y the United States of America. That is demonstrated by their being established one after the other in the late 1940s and early 1950s, their comparatively short period of real activity in the fi rst half of the 1950s, and, later, their gradual, though irreversible, decline over the next decades. The author then focuses in detail on the fi ve most important ‘exile internationals’: the International Peasant Union, the Socialist Union of Central and Eastern Europe, the Liberal Democratic Union of Central and Eastern Europe, the Christian Democratic Union of Central Europe, and the International Centre of Free Trade Unions in Exile. Although these groups achieved some importance, and although a number of Czechs worked in their organizations, Czech historians have yet to pay systematic attention to them, let alone to the chapter of Cold War exiles as a whole.

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