People Power and Political Change: Key Issues and Concepts by April Carter

Author:April Carter [Carter, April]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781136589669
Google: hOvGBQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17547643
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Combining Civic and Ethnic Nationalisms

Soviet occupation and consolidation of control after 1945 through direct rule (the Baltic states) or indirect political rule via highly organized communist parties (Eastern Europe) sought to override nationalist allegiances with a new communist class-based ideology. Resistance movements often drew on a highly developed sense of nationalism – though in many cases ethnic minorities with potentially conflicting aspirations and loyalties had resulted from the drawing of frontiers by the great powers in the first half of the twentieth century. On the other hand it would be very misleading to see these movements as exclusively nationalist. As argued in Chapter 3, the Central Eastern European states in particular were shedding over 40 years of communist party domination and ideology in favour of ‘European’ values and both political and economic liberalism. In the growth of dissent prior to fully fledged people power movements, issues of human rights, intellectual and artistic freedom, and, in several cases – notably in Lithuania and Bulgaria – growing concern over the dire environmental impact of communist party approaches to industrial growth were important issues (Miniotaite, 2002: 28; Randle, 1991: 36–7). (There was in Lithuania a nationalist element in concern for the local environment polluted by Soviet decisions, but these groups were also responding to the transnational green movement.) Environmental protesters added to the upsurge of popular resistance in Lithuania in 1988, and in Bulgaria acted as a catalyst. The Bulgarian Eco-glasnost group responded to a CSCE environmental conference in the capital, Sofia, in October–November 1989 to demand a voice at the conference and to organize a demonstration. Overreaction by the security forces, in the presence of many international observers, protests by other groups and the resignation of Bulgaria’s foreign minister created the political crisis that ousted the Bulgarian party leader.

The greatest emphasis on national history, culture and symbols occurred in the movements in the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which had been independent between the two world wars, suffered extremely brutal occupation first by Soviet and then by German troops during the Second World War, and been incorporated forcibly into the Soviet Union at the end of the war. As a result there had been substantial Russian settlement in all three states. After some initial attempts at armed resistance, many adjusted to the new political realities, but there were intermittent episodes of dissent. Religious and nationalist issues overlapped in the sustained struggle for greater religious freedom by the Lithuanian Catholic Church, which began in the late 1960s with open protests by priests against restrictions on the church, as well as underground training of seminarians. The arrest of two priests in 1971 sparked wider resistance (Reddaway, 1978: 137) The samizdat Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church was published in the period 1972–88, despite KGB attempts to suppress it and the arrests of priests and nuns who published it. There was also a remarkable degree of defiance from ordinary Catholics, with over 17,000 signing an open protest to the UN about religious

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