Spring Lessons
Regis d‘Edray has written a famous paragraph:
In which he talks about the difficulty of being contemporary with our present. Nowadays, in Europe, I would also add that we should be more contemporary with our past. The “Prague Spring”, culminated by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by forces of the Warsaw Pact is a good example to do so.
Today is the 50th anniversary of this event. To me, the failure of the czech experience can not only be explained, I repeat, not only, by the historic context of the cold war, or by the sowjet totalitarian interests and brutality represented by the so-called “Brezhnev-Doctrine”. I believe that a determinant factor is also the enormous difficulty if not impossibility, of reforming undemocratic systems without producing rupture moments carried out by civil society. Moments that allow the appearance of new social, but also political subjects, able to express the real plurality of societies. The attempts to reform czech socialism carried out by Dubcek and reformist wing of the single party, the CAS, not only failed, because of the violence not exerted by the USSR, but because it did not priorities a call for elections with the necessary democratic guarantees. I firmly believe that any process of reform/rupture is only viable if it is carried out by an articulated majority, both, socially and politically.
Mar Garcia is EGP Secretary General. She is from Barcelon, Spain.
