From Democrats to Liberals
From Democrats to Liberals

The Ambiguous Origins of Liberals and Civil Society in Slovakia after 1989

Summary/Abstract: This paper critically examines the process of politicization of the Slovak democratic protagonists gathered in and around the civic movement Public Against Violence (Verejnosť proti násiliu, VPN), from the 1989 democratic revolution to the 1992 elections. By politicization I mean the process through which the examined subjects underwent a transformation from a democratic movement to a liberal-democratic political party. I focus on particular protagonists within VPN as well as on their interactions with other political subjects. For this purpose, I employ two methodological approaches. The first is borrowed from Robert Brier’s reading of Skinnerian intellectual history, as applied to Adam Michnik’s use of the term “totalitarianism”. The second is informed by Daniel Hirschman and Isaac Ariail Reed’s understanding of “formation stories”. This allows me to focus on a subject-driven analysis of key concepts, practices and political ideas that shaped the nascent pluralist environment in early post-socialist Slovakia. Liberalism, as represented by VPN, seemed to appear as a pragmatic choice to counter the Communist regime’s wrongdoings and misconceptions. Yet at the same time, to understand liberal democratic politics and policies in Slovakia, one has to acknowledge the gradual dissent from approaching democracy as participatory to imagining democracy as a conservative liberal-democratic institutionalized order.

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