The Politics of Rights in East Central Europe, 1970s–2010s
The book project explores the political thought and social practices of the dissident anti-communist opposition in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland in the 1970s–80s and its fundamental contributions to local post-communist political cultures. The so-called dissidence remains one the most attractive topics in the region's recent history and the global history of human rights. Yet, its legacy after 1989 is highly contested. By redefining and analyzing the historical roots of the omnipresent rule-of-law doctrine and the politics of liberal constitutionalism after 1989, this project facilitates a contextualized and historically informed understanding of both the ›liberal consensus‹ era in the 1990s and the current powerful illiberal ›backlash‹ The project adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws on literature in the fields of global and intellectual history, memory studies and comparative constitutionalism.
Michal Kopeček is a historian, head of the Department of Ideas and Concepts at the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, former Co-Director of Imre Kertész Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, and was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge in 2021-22. His research interests include the comparative modern intellectual history of East Central Europe, nationalism, the history of communism, and the democratic and liberal transformation after 1989. Among his recent publications are co-authored Czechoslovakism (Routledge 2022), Architects of Long-Systemic Change: Expert Roots of Post-Socialism in Czechoslovakia (in Czech, Prague 2019) and the multi-volume A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe (Oxford University Press 2016; 2018).
»Post-Dissident Politics and the »Liberal Consensus« in East-Central Europe after 1989«, in: East European Politics & Societies, 2024.
»Dissident Legalism. Human Rights, Socialist Legality, and the Birth of Legal Resistance in the 1970s Democratic Opposition in Czechoslovakia and Poland«, in: C. Donert, A. Kladnik, M. Sabrow (eds.), Making Sense of Dictatorship. Domination and Everyday Life in East Central Europe after 1945, Budapest: CEU Press 2022, p. 241–269.
»From Narrating Dissidence to Post-Dissident Narratives of Democracy. Anti-totalitarianism, Politics of Memory and Culture Wars in East-Central Europe 1970s–2000s«, in: P. Barša, Z. Hesová, O. Slačálek, (eds.), Central European Culture Wars. Beyond Post-Communism and Populism, Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University 2021, p. 28–83. (open access: https://dspace.cuni.cz/handle/20.500.11956/170756)
»Was there a socialist Rechtsstaat in late communist East Central Europe? The Czechoslovak Case in a Regional Context«, in: Journal of Modern European History, vol. 18 (3) 2020, p. 281–296. (https://doi.org/10.1177/1611894420924960)
»The Socialist Conception of Human Rights and Its Dissident Critique: Hungary and Czechoslovakia, 1960s–1980s«, in: East Central Europe, vol. 46 (2–3) 2019, p. 261–289. (doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/18763308-04602006)
Human rights as the political Grundbegriff of today's world are open to all possible political interpretations. The peaceful revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe have been perceived, for good reason, as revolutions of human rights, which strengthened the legitimacy of Western-type liberal democracy and global neoliberal capitalism. The lecture challenges these assumptions.