Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Prague Spring: “In the mid-1950s, Czechoslovakian society and
broad swathes of the Communist Party began to suspect the truth
about the crimes committed. That, together with the growing domestic
difficulties facing the regime, as well as a crisis of morality
and values, indirectly led people to remember the ideas and values
of Czech and Czechoslovakian social democracy under the first
and third republics. Analyses of the situation printed in an anthology
that the leaders of our party-in-exile published in London in
1958, predicted that a major internal social disruption of the
Stalinist regime in Prague would soon become inevitable.”
While social democrats refused any compromise with the fascist
dictators, they have been accused of not doing enough to challenge
communism. It is even said that by entering into dialogue with
official communist parties, social democrats prolonged the regimes.
Europeans in general were accused by the Americans and communist
opponents of being too soft and for that reason, in dissident
circles, NATO was more popular than the European
Communities. This also explains the success of the myth that Reagan’s
confrontational policies towards the USSR lead to its downfall.
In reality it collapsed under its own dead weight, or as Norman
Davies said “I usually liken it to a dinosaur that had a heart attack
and died on its feet.” With hindsight one has to admit, nevertheless,
that dialogue did not deliver concrete results. On the other hand, we
do not know what the situation would have been if these contacts
had not existed.
Leading western social democrats believed that they could promote
change from within and they were not the only ones. They based
their model of cooperation and convergence on this assumption,
convinced that a process of confrontation was dangerous for the
whole continent and would have especially dire consequences for
the two Germanys. This implicated a certain acceptation of the status
quo but who in those years could have imagined what happened
after 1989? In the 1980s, Western Europe was in the grip
of a threatening regional nuclear arms race and those who opposed
new missile deployments tried to find allies on the other side of the
Iron Curtain. The Helsinki Agreements, concluded in the 1970s,
were the embodiment of the contradictions of pan-European politics.
For the Russians they symbolised the acceptance of the status
quo; the Americans emphasised the human rights dimension.
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