Living in dystopian times: Dissident thinking on moral foreign policies before 1989 and its applicability to foreign policy after.

Visegrad Lecture Series

Living in dystopian times: Dissident thinking on moral foreign policies before 1989 and its applicability to foreign policy after

by Rick Fawn (Professor of International Relations, University of St Andrews)

Czechoslovak/Czech dissident Václav Havel stated in office as President in 1990 that the morality of the pre-1989 period mattered more after. This project asks to what extent and how pre-1989 dissident thinking on morality impacted foreign affairs after 1989.

The hypothesis is two-fold: the first is methodological, contending (at this stage) that this has been overlooked because of the intensive but nevertheless narrow focus on domestic politics. The oversights also help to explain what became jarring issues of explaining how leading former dissidents like Poland’s Adam Michnik and Havel could support the use of military force, such as in 1999 and 2003. Analysis of their “domestic” political views were certainly legalistic and nonviolent. Thinking on international affairs could be and was significantly different, including in warring of the naivety and counterproductively of Western pacifist and anti-nuclear movements in the 1980s.

The second hypothesis is that distinctive and coherent thinking on foreign policy and on European security could be drawn from debates and that a programme of action was developed from that for policy after 1989. Visegrad was expressly formulated both by ex-dissidents and with repeated and calculated references to shared political values and political solidarity before 1989.