IB History Route 2 - Topic 4 - Post-1945 nationalist and independence
movements in Central and Eastern Europe.
This section of the website is
an extension of our chapter in the IB 20th Century World History
Course Companion. It examines Topic 4 from the IB History Guide,
"Post-1945 nationalist and independence movements in Central and
Eastern Europe", and concentrates on two of the countries
identified as 'material for detailed study' Poland and
Czechoslovakia. In addition, as required by the History Guide,
particular attention is invested in the leadership of Lech
Wałęsa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia.
From outside it is tempting to
see the Soviet sphere of influence as a monolithic bloc of
nations, each conforming to the demands of the Moscow
leadership. Poland and Czechoslovakia certainly share a lot in
common; the people of both nations are predominantly Slavs,
sharing similar languages and cultural traditions. Nationalist
aspirations of sustained independence in both countries would
continue to be limited by their geographical position between
powerful neighbours. However, this chapter also highlights the
ways in which these close neighbours differed in their
experience of war, Soviet control, revolution and
post-communism.
Topic 4 requires the student to explore 'the origins and growth
of movements challenging Soviet or centralized control'. 'The
role and importance of leaders, organizations and institutions'
should be also considered along with 'the methods of achieving
independence'. These syllabus themes should be kept in mind as
you work your way through the first part of this section.
Solidarity in Poland and
Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia would become the organisations
most associated with the challenges to Soviet control in 1989,
but both organisations had deep roots in their respective
societies. You will also need to evaluate how significant these
organisations and their leaders were, relative to the external
factors which also contributed to the end of the Cold War.
Finally, when considering the methods used in achieving
independence, the relatively peaceful events of
1989 in Poland and Czechoslovakia need to
be contrasted with the earlier street fighting of 1956 and
1968 and the brutal civil war in
Yugoslavia.
As required by the History
Guide, this chapter brings the story of Central and Eastern
Europe into the new millennium. (pages 25-33) Students are
expected to consider how new states were established and how
they dealt with new political, economic, social and cultural
challenges of becoming democratic states. Some states, including
Czechoslovakia failed to survive the transition; others like
Poland survived despite massive upheaval. Yugoslavia
disintegrated in the bloodiest way imaginable.
When the authors of this
section of the website were finishing their secondary schooling,
nothing seemed more permanent than the division of Eastern and
Western Europe behind Mr Churchill's iron curtain. Now, twenty
years after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, our IB Diploma
students in the former socialist republic of Czechoslovakia, are
amongst the first of a generation born after the Velvet
Revolution of 1989. They inhabit a city in which the capitalist
symbols of MacDonalds and Ikea seem as natural and inevitable as
the Berlin Wall once did to us. Now, communism is ancient
history; more than that it has become part of the heritage
industry, a curiosity to entertain. Now you can visit a
museum
to communism in Prague or a
park of
communist statues in Budapest. In all of this, communism
appears to have been an aberration, a detour whose ending tends
to be explained as almost inevitable. The French Philosopher
Henri Bergson once described this as the illusion of 'retrospective
determinism'. You can always find more than sufficient
causes for every great event - after the event. In the final
section of this chapter, the problem of inevitability is
examined and an attempt made to explain not why the communist
regimes collapsed but, rather, why they lasted as long as they
did.
