Political transformations in the Czech Republic after the “Velvet revolution”: a retrospective approach

Abstract

Using a retrospective approach, the author explores the changes that took place in Czechoslovakia after the 1989 «velvet revolution». The article emphasizes that the «velvet revolution» later grew into a national revolution and led to the emergence of two new nation-states; into a political revolution that destroyed the authoritarian regime and contributed to the emergence of new democratic political institutions; in the economic revolution, during which the mechanisms of a market economy were created in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The country made a simultaneous transition from dictatorship to democracy, from a command economy to a free market and to a nation state. Despite such a difficult situation and a large number of tasks, Czechoslovakia was able to eliminate the totalitarian legacy, solved the transformational tasks and problems of the division of Czechoslovakia into two sovereign states. In the Czech Republic, the classical political mechanisms of a democratic civil society had already been established in the 1990s and first, a multiparty political system. New democratic election laws laid the groundwork for a competitive multi-party system and political pluralism. The 1993 Constitution of the Czech Republic legislated a new political system for a democratic society, which was to be based on the voluntary creation and competition of political parties, who respect fundamental democratic principles and deny violence as a means to an end. The «velvet revolution» caused a sharp rise in civic activity. On the eve of the first parliamentary elections in 1992, more than 140 political parties and right-wing and left-wing social movements were registered in the CSFM. This was the peak of the quantitative growth of the number of political parties at the stage of building civil society.