The Rise and Fall of Czech Post-Dissident Liberalism after 1989
The Rise and Fall of Czech Post-Dissident Liberalism after 1989

Summary/Abstract: 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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