Rozděleni minulostí - Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV

382and at the same time the creation of usable political and culturaltraditions as an indispensable bond of the individual politicalbodies as well as national political community itself. This book,however, attempts to show that this search for traditions andimages of past was in no way arbitrary or accidental. In someinstances the “usable past” was determined by the long termdevelopment of the given political community or personalbiography of a politician, in other cases it was more a matter ofpragmatic political struggle and the inevitable politicaldifferentiation. Each of the political movements or nascentpolitical parties discussed in the individual chapters representsan advanced phase of personal biographies, social networks,friendships, mental horizons and social “structures”. In the early1990s, people often used the catch phrase “old structures” to referto someone closely associated with the ancient régime. In the logicof this study, all the political subjects in this book and theirleading politicians could legitimately be called “old structures”as “new structures” were nowhere to be found.The first chapter “Political Games with the ‘UnfinishedRevolution’: Settling Accounts with Communism during andafter the Civic Forum” deals with the dynamics of the politics ofhistory among the revolutionary elite focusing on the shift fromthe immediate post-revolutionary spirit of “national understanding”to the pronounced anti-communist campaigns and policies. Thesecond chapter “Dissent as the Past, Liberalism as the Future:Civic Movement and Free Democrats in Czech post-Novemberpolitics” asks about the fate of the liberal and secular stream ofthe dissent movement in the rather hostile political environmentof the early 1990s. The third chapter called “A Rather TraditionalBreak with the Past: The Presence of the Past in the Ideologyand Political Rhetoric of the Civic Democratic Party” discussesthe politics of history of the largest right-wing party and the mainsuccessor of the revolutionary Civic Forum. Its way of relating tothe past is as much politics of memory as it is politics of amnesia. The382