As soon as upon a time, within the bleak 12 months of 1985, when Konstantin Chernenko died simply 13 months after Yuri Andropov, and a sure Mikhail Gorbachev grew to become the pinnacle of the USSR, which was then nonetheless a rustic that was purported to final without end, Jiří Dienstbier, some of the inspiring Constitution 77 dissidents within the phenomenally gray Gustáv Husák’s Czechoslovakia, wrote an enthralling, extremely utopian essay referred to as Snění o Evropě (“Dreaming of Europe”).
The essence of his utopia was a imaginative and prescient of a continent with out two energy blocs, no Warsaw Pact, no NATO, the place all residents would get pleasure from peaceable life in a “frequent European home”: the Czechoslovaks, the Balts, the Yugoslavs hand in hand with the Germans (united, in fact!), the Norwegians, the British; imagine it or not, at the moment he even dreamed of the Russians becoming a member of the good European household.
In a magical flip of occasions, it took lower than 5 years for Jiří Dienstbier to turn out to be the international minister of Czechoslovakia after the 1989 revolution, which was referred to as “mild” or “velvet” due to its peaceable and civil nature.
One of the frequent slogans to be seen on the do-it-yourself banners that adorned Czechoslovak squares in these innocently naïve November days was fairly oxymoronic in nature, for it learn “Return to Europe” or “Again to Europe”, which appears to make no sense in a rustic that’s geographically described as Central European.
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However there it was, declaring the ambition to fulfil the utopia of …
