UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Saturday 18 February 10:00 – 11:30: Panel H3: Post-Communist Politics

James Krapfl (University of California, Berkeley): ‘Excluding the People, Excluding Themselves: 1989 and the Czech Dissident Myth’

It is often claimed that the non-violent and self-limiting character of the “Velvet” Revolution in Czechoslovakia can be attributed directly to the nonpolitical politics of prominent dissidents under Communism, one author going so far as to claim that the Revolution was a play directed by Václav Havel, following a script that the dissidents had written. Given the social isolation of the dissidents and popular unfamiliarity with their political thought prior to the revolution, however, this notion of “deterministic dissidence” is problematic. How did dissident ideas diffuse rapidly enough and in such a way that the revolutionary actions of a sufficient number of actors could have been influenced by these ideas? To date, no account has tackled this question in any but a cursory fashion. This paper, therefore, sets out to test the deterministic dissidence thesis by analyzing evidence of diffusion contained in the flyers and bulletins of the revolution between its start on November 17, 1989 and Havel’s election as president on December 29 of that year.

My concern is therefore not with high politics—where it can clearly be demonstrated that dissidents and their ideas played a crucial role—but with the politics of the street. The debate on the relevance of dissident political theory to this politics began in the revolution itself between proponents of what might be called “preparation” and “spontaneity” theses. The preparation thesis that dissidents had made the revolution possible. The spontaneity thesis, on the other hand, maintained that dissidents had done no more than anticipate the revolution, which was a spontaneous awakening of the entire nation (or nations). Both theses, not coincidentally, had their roots in an earlier debate within Charter 77 between proponents of Václav Benda’s “parallel polis” and Jan Patočka’s “solidarity of the shaken.”

I argue that both interpretations of the dissidents’ role are fundamentally myths structured around sacrifice. The type of structure differs, however, and is significant. The Bendian notion of a parallel polis, while it need not necessarily imply perception of difference between self and other, generally tends to do so. It is very easy from the Bendian perspective to see those inside the parallel polis as innocent victims sacrificed by culpable members of outside society, thus re-introducing radical difference between self and other. For Patočka, every individual in modern society is a potential sacrificial victim, and the solidarity of the shaken results directly from the victims’ dawning awareness of this fact. Solidarity is based on seeing the self in the other, which makes the transcendence of sacrificial forms of social organization theoretically possible. Thus Benda’s perspective merely inverts the sacrificial system, while Patočka’s suggests the possibility of transcending it. In short, by emphasizing their pre-revolutionary sacrifices and their special role in “preparing” the revolution, many dissidents actually sanctioned their renewed marginalization, and missed an opportunity to give their most radical ideas genuine popular currency.