Why is it that most Czechs and Slovaks accommodated themselves to the post-1968 neo-Stalinist "normalization" under Gustáv Husák so readily? In the Czech lands, internal regime change is always brought about by external political developments. Czechs and Slovaks often bear the brunt of international developments, but they rarely have the chance to influence them. And many Czechs and Slovaks were caught by surprise by the sudden collapse of communism in 1989 which, again, came as a result of external events.

What is now clear is that it is the 1968 Prague Spring --- and not November 1989 --- that remains the most formative landmark in contemporary Czech history.

In the 1960s, Czechoslovak society embarked on an exciting journey towards liberalization. It was a time of extraordinary cultural foment, which quickly turned political. But the destruction of the reform movement in the wake of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion coincided with a generational shift.

A new, much harsher era began, and the people --- most of whom had known only communism in their lifetimes --- were willing to accommodate themselves to the hypocritical terms of Husák's occupation regime, to be pretend communists at a time when no one believed in communism any longer.

It was these people who willingly participated in the destruction of the original and enlightened political and cultural legacy of the previous decades. The 1970s and 1980s turned Czechoslovakia into a veritable cultural and political graveyard, emasculating the nation and hurling it back into a state of childlike helplessness. When the Soviet Bloc was beginning to collapse in the late 1980s, Czechoslovaks, who had been almost totally isolated from the outside world, were unprepared. Luckily for the country, a small handful of dissidents --- whom the nation later came to despise --- temporarily stepped in and possibly prevented bloodshed.

Once communism fell, the nation had high hopes. It believed that it would quickly become truly free, democratic and affluent, but it seemed to forget that democracy, as well as affluence, is the result of painstaking hard work --- that democracy must be cultivated by open, critical discussion and that it can only thrive if it has good, enforceable laws. Instead, the normalization of the Husák era and its value system based on the principle of absolute, individual selfishness blossomed, transmogrified under the new "market conditions" of unregulated capitalism. It was a kind of communism in reverse. Anyone who was critical of what was going on in the first carpet-bagging years after 1989 was labeled a communist and thus conveniently discredited.

The deplorable legacy of the lingering Husák era did not exhaust itself until the end of the 1990s, when the transitory post-normalization regimes headed by Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar finally collapsed. It is only after this traumatic interregnum that the Czech Republic and Slovakia have finally been able to embark on the slow journey towards mature democracy within the community of European nations. Let us hope the journey will now accelerate.

Originally published in Czech Business Weekly HERE