Building Détente from Below

Visegrad Lecture Series

Building Détente from Below: Underground Philosophy Seminars and East–West Co-Operation from Oxford to Prague, 1979–1993

by Dr Bethan Winter, Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

Cold War détente was not only a project driven only by statesmen and diplomats, but a lived form of cooperation created people-to-people contacts across the Iron Curtain. Focusing on the underground philosophy seminars of late-socialist Czechoslovakia, this project argues that dissidence and détente were not opposites but mutually reinforcing processes: détente opened channels of travel, contact, and rights-based language, while so-called "dissidents" turned those openings into on-going exchanges, utilizing the language of "rights" that Helsinki had turned into law.

What began in Prague living rooms as banned private teaching developed into a transnational network linking Czechoslovak dissidents with scholars in Oxford, Cambridge, and beyond. Through visiting lectures, smuggled books, samizdat, translation, and clandestine examinations, these seminars created an alternative educational infrastructure under conditions of surveillance, harassment, arrest, and exile. They enacted a form of "détente from below," realizing Helsinki’s "expansion of contacts" through academic practice.

The presentation may be followed online on Zoom:

https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/91299097034?pwd=GuYK1oqUT8ZZRLA3amgQNQQ1KLmeE9.1

Meeting ID: 912 9909 7034 Passcode: 315067