SOU OBÉ ĚJINY - Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV - Akademie věd ČR

Summaries Anotace 521
political movement, and they eventually became the catalyst of the pronounced
division within the Civic Forum. But these calls never turned into a decisive political
strategy and they managed to hold a dominant place only in the programmes of the
less important parties and organizations like the Club of Engage Non-Party Members
(Klub angažovaných nestraníků – KAN) and the Confederation of Political Prisoners
(Konfederace politických vězňů). After the break-up of Civic Forum in late 1990 and
early 1991, radical anti-Communism ran out steam, and the right-of-centre political
parties that emerged from the erstwhile Civic Forum – primarily the Civic Democratic
Party, the Civic Democratic Alliance, and the Christian Democratic Party – adapted
the originally radical demands to a realistic policy of compromise based on the fact
that the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, with the support of more than
ten per cent of the electorate, remained a part of the democratic political system. The
largely ignored sense of frustration with morals, stemming from the fundamental
contradiction between the ideal (that is, comprehensive) possibilities of a policy of
settling scores and the real (that is, limited) possibilities, was put off for later years,
and remains a public problem to this day.
A Rather Traditional Break with the Past: The Presence of the Past
in the Ideology and Political Rhetoric of the Civic Democratic Party
Adéla Gjuričová
The Civic Democratic Party (Občanská demokratická strana) was founded in early
1991 with no historical predecessor. According to its founders it was founded ‘in spite
of’ the tradition of Czech political thought, with reference only to Anglo-American
political models. This article investigates whether these historical factors were truly
absent, and, among other things, points to the veiled use of widely shared historical
stereotypes in the popularization of the chosen variant of economic transformation.
From the political crises of 1997 and 1998, when the right-of-centre governing
coalition fell apart and the Social Democrats took power, Civic Democratic Party
rhetoric linked up far more explicitly with Czech tradition and history. This trend
came to a peak between 2000 and 2002, when the party no longer saw Czech
national traditions and interests as being in conflict with the allegedly provincial
thinking of the Czechs’ post-Communist neighbours, but rather in conflict with the
structure and orientation of the European Union and the interests of Germany.
In the second part of the article the author discusses how in the Civic Democratic
Party the interpretation of ‘coming to terms with the Communist past’ was changed.
She supports the view that this was not merely a matter of a short-term political
instrumentalization of changes in mood in society or reactions to pressures from
regional organizations and political opponents. Rather, she argues, it was a matter
of a relatively consistent conception of the Communist past as an alien element in
Czech history, which needed, as part of the idea of ‘breaking with the past’, to be
driven out of its own tradition. This sort of conception leaves no room, however, for