The long road to democracy

The historians György Dalos, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk and Jean-Yves Potel have examined the impact of the four great revolutionary moments of the labour movement in Central and Eastern Europe on the development of democracy across Europe: 1953 GDR, 1956 Hungary , 1968 Czechoslovakia and 1980 Poland. To this day, they are signposts for the difficult process of democratization, which is characterized by considerable setbacks - even in countries that now belong to the EU.

Despite the Soviet tanks that put an end to them, the workers' and people's uprisings had an effect: workers' councils were founded in Hungary, and in the Czechoslovakia the hope was »socialism with a human face«. The majority of the population was on the side of the reformers and insurgents. Solidarność is a remarkable anomaly – it seems like a portent for the end of Soviet dominance and the beginning of a new Europe. Today Poland is once again confronted with nationalist ideologies, illiberality and the weakening of the rule of law. To counter this, it helps to look at the people who resisted totalitarianism in Berlin, Budapest, Prague and Gdansk.

The theses of the book were presented by the authors at a side event of the FES at the ETUC Congress in Berlin on May 22, 2023 and discussed with the participants. You can find the book here.