POLITICAL DISSENT:
OPPOSITION AND
R E SI S TA NC E I N
2 0 TH C E N T U R Y
E U R O P E
I N T E R N AT IO N A L C O N F E R E N C E
PÁZMÁNY PÉTER CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
2 9 - 3 0
N O V E M B E R
M
Mos Maiorum
Kutatócsoport
M
Mos M aiorum
Research Group
2 0 1 3
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
2
Mos Maiorum Research Group
The conference was supported by the project of the
Pázmány Péter Catholic University TÁMOP 4.2.1. B-11/2/KMR-2011-0002
POLITICAL DISSENT:
OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE
IN 20 TH CENTURY EUROPE
Executive Summary
P
political order itself. Depending on
historical context and social circumstances, on regime type and political
power relations, both legal and illegal,
legitimate and illegitimate forms of opposition have appeared on the scene of
European politics.
We do not, however, wish to suggest
a comprehensive idea or classification
of all forms and types of opposition
and resistance in the 20th century. We
only seek to provide inputs and contributions to the theory and practice of
political dissent and legitimacy, a topic
which has become relevant and timely
in the wake of the financial and economic crisis since 2008. From the Occupy movement to the protest of the
hopeless youth in Southern European
countries, the question of political legitimacy and opposition seems to be
an acute problem once again. We try
to shed light on both conventional and
non-conventional forms of political
dissent; while always paying special
attention to the historically embedded
forms of political opposition as well.
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
olitical dissent and opposition
are present not only in dictatorial
and authoritarian regimes, but also in
democracies. Querying the legitimacy of political authorities or even the
political system as a whole belongs to
the very nature of politics. Different
forms and intensity levels of political
dissent, however, lead to different tactical considerations about how incumbent political governments might best
be defeated. Anti-system resistance
through dissent within a totalitarian
party or a peaceful struggle to change
the government within an existing
democratic system presuppose different motivations and tactics. From
Ireland to Finland, from the Netherlands to Belgium, from the Czech
Republic to Romania, different forms
of delegitimizing strategies have determined politics in the 20th century.
Anti-totalitarian and anti-democratic,
anti-system and anti-government opposition, soft disagreement and insurmountable cleavages between political
actors have characterized resentment
with the prevailing authorities or the
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PROGRAM SCHEDULE
Friday, November 29, 2013
15:00-15:15 Conference opening: Máté Botos, Dean of the Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences
15:15-16:15
Session 1: Opposition and Resistance: Historical Roots
15.15-15:30
Tamás Nyirkos (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest)
Resistance: The Origins and Transformations of a Concept 15:45-16:15
Tomasz Wieciech ( Jagiellonian University, Kraków)
Constitutional Ideas of the British Radical Opposition
in the Early 19th Century
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
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16:15-16:30 Coffee break
16:30-17:30
Session 2: Political Dissent in Western Europe
16:30-17:00
Marnix Beyen (University of Antwerp) Dissent in a (de-)centered
Context: The Contestation Movement in Belgium and the
Netherlands during the 1960s and 1970s
17:00-17:30
Bill Kissane (London School of Economics)
Moronic Inferno or Imminent Democracy? Calls for a
New Republic During the Current Crisis in Ireland
18:30
Dinner
Saturday, November 30, 2013
9:30-11:00
Session 3: Opposition and Resistance During the Communist Era I.
9:30-10:00
Geoffrey Swain (University of Glasgow)
Resistance from Within: Trotsky, Tito and Khrushchev versus
the Communist Apparatus
10:00-10:30
István Ötvös (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest)
From the Resistance Movement to the Show Trials: The Pálffy Case
10:30-11:00
Virgiliu Tarau (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca)
Resistance and Dissidence in Romania: The Role of the Secret
Police (Securitate) in the “Administration” of Political Enemies
Coffee break
11:30-13:00
Session 4: Opposition and Resistance During the Communist Era II.
11:30-12:00
George Cipăianu (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca)
The Catholic Church at the Beginning of the Communist Regime
in Romania: Persecution and Resistance
12:00-12:30
Tamás Lönhart (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca)
“Minority Report 46/56/89”: Forms and Means of Resistance
Against the Communist Regime in Romania of Ethnic
Hungarian Cultural Elites
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
11:00-11:30
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12:30-13.00
Zoltán Kántor (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest)
Opposition and Resistance of National Minorities in
Communism and Postcommunism
13:00-14:30Lunch
14:30-16:30
Session 5: Political Dissent: Recent Phenomena
14:30-15:00
Emilia Palonen (University of Jyväskylä) Populism as Dissent
15:00-15:30
Michal Kubát (Charles University, Prague)
The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia:
The Unexampled Success of an Anti-System Nostalgic
Opposition in East-Central Europe
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
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15:30-16:00
Kálmán Pócza (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest)
Op posing the System: A Long-standing Hungarian Tradition
16:00-16:30
Péter Smuk (Széchenyi István University, Győr)
The Opposition’s Access to Media: Standards and Challenges
16:30-17:00 General discussion
17:00 Closing of the conference
VENUE: Pázmány Péter Catholic University
Faculty of Theology
1053 Budapest, Veres Pálné u. 24, Room: 227
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Dr. Tamás Nyirkos (Department of Political Science, PPCU)
Dr. István Ötvös (Department of Political Science, PPCU)
Dr. Kálmán Pócza (Department of Political Science, PPCU)
CONTACT:
Dr. Tamás Nyirkos (PPCU): nyirkos.tamas@btk.ppke.hu
Dr. István Ötvös (PPCU): otvos.istvan@btk.ppke.hu
Dr. Kálmán Pócza (PPCU): pocza.kalman@btk.ppke.hu
INSTITUTIONAL ORGANIZERS:
Department of Political Science, PPCE
Mos Maiorum Research Group
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
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ABSTRACTS AND SPEAKERS
1. Marnix Beyen
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
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Dissent in a (de-)centered Context: The
Contestation Movement in Belgium and the
Netherlands during the 1960s and 1970s
Whereas
political
and
social
contestation in the Netherlands during
the late 1960s and early 1970s took on
the form of a broad movement with
international visibility, in Belgium it
maintained a relatively low profile.
Moreover, if the Dutch movement had
its center in the capital city Amsterdam,
in Belgium its epicenter lay in the
small University town Leuven. In my
presentation, I will interpret this striking
difference in the light of the political
traditions of both countries. Even if
both countries could be characterized
as parliamentary democracies with a
liberal basis, they had evolved from
nearly opposite starting points. The
Belgian political system had grown out
of opposition against the state, which
meant that political power itself was
distributed over many players, several of
which had an oppositional origin (trade
unions, political parties). The Dutch
political system, on the contrary, had
evolved from the eagerness to maintain
the existing State in spite of the Belgian
secession. Hence, good governance
was much more central to its political
traditions than ideological opposition.
Precisely because it had a more univocal
center of power to resist against, the
contestation movement of the 1960s
could develop more energetically than
in the politically de-centered Belgium.
Marnix Beyen is a Senior Lecturer at the
History Department of the University
of Antwerp. Apart from directing the
educational board for the history program,
he teaches several courses on modern
and contemporary political history, and
on the theory and methods of historywriting. He is also a member of Power in
History, the Research Centre for Political
History at the University of Antwerp.
His own research deals primarily with
the cultural and political representation
of nations in Western Europe during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His
main book-length publications include
“Held voor alle werk: De vele gedaanten
van Tijl Uilenspiegel” (1998), “Oorlog en
Verleden: Nationale Geschiedenis in België
en Nederland, 1938-1947” (2002), “Un
autre pays: Nouvelle histoire de la Belgique
contemporaine, 1970-2000” (2009, with
Philippe Destatte), and “Nationhood from
Below: Europe in the Long Nineteenth
Century” (2012, with Maarten Van
Ginderachter, eds.).
2.George Cipăianu
The Catholic Church at the Beginning
of the Communist Regime in Romania:
Persecution and Resistance
After March 6th, 1945, the gradual
transition to a communist regime turned
into a new phase: government, controlled
George Cipăianu is Professor Emeritus of
Contemporary History and International
Relations at the Faculty of History and
Philosophy at Babeş-Bolyai University,
Cluj-Napoca (Romania). Between 19942005, he was also an invited lecturer in
France at Université de Limoges, Université
Paris XII, and Université de Marne-laVallée, where he delivered courses primarily
on the history of Romania. In France, he also
researched some of the main archives on 20th
century history: the Archives Historiques
de l’Armée de Terre la Vincennes, and the
Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères
in Paris. His research interest includes the
history of international relations, the history
of communism, and ecclesiastical history.
3. Zoltán Kántor
Opposition and Resistance of National
Minorities in Communism and
Postcommunism
The first part of the lecture discusses
the resistance of national minorities
during the communist era, while
the second part does the same under
democratic conditions after the regime
change. Since both cases are similar
in their vindication of basic rights, the
main difference to be made should rely
on the different frameworks of political
systems surrounding them. The issues
at hand are primarily theoretical
in nature, but can be illustrated by
practical examples as well.
Zoltán Kántor holds a PhD in Political
Science. He studied in Timeshare,
Budapest, and Edinburgh. His research
interests are kin-state politics, theories
of nationalism, national minorities,
ethnic parties, Hungarians in Romania,
questions of citizenship and out-of-country
vote. He is an editor of several books on
nationalism, national minorities, and kinstate politics. His articles were published
in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Spain,
Japan, Germany, and Slovenia. At
present he is a lecturer at the Department
of Political Science at Pázmány Péter
Catholic University, Hungary.
4. Bill Kissane
Moronic Inferno or Imminent
Democracy? Calls for a New Republic
during the Current Crisis in Ireland
Ireland is unusual among those
countries in crisis in seeing an IMF
bailout and succession of austerity
budgets introduced without major
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
by the Communist Party of Romania with full support of the Soviet Head of
the Inter-Allied Control Commission and
the massive presence of the Soviet Army
in Romania - introduced new policies
towards the churches, which, as major
factors in organizing and motivating
society, were to be controlled by all means.
In conformity with the Communist
rulers’ plans, the outcome of these policies
was to be a major setback in the influence
of churches in society, the cutting of all
ties with extra-Romanian centers and
international partner institutions, as well
as influencing the inner structure and
the agenda of the churches. Resistant
churches which failed to meet these
requirements were to be institutionally
blocked or even disintegrated. In this
paradigm, the fate of Roman Catholic
and Greek Catholic Church leaders was
determined by their options to resist the
totalitarian agenda of the State, and by
the increasing persecution that set the
scene for almost a half century later on.
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protests from below. Many lament
the fatalism of the population.
Nonetheless, there are calls for political
reform and the current government
is responsive. What is noticeable is
that all these calls and the rhetoric of
the political parties themselves, call
for “a New Republic”. Is this mere
rhetoric, a style of communication, or
a form of populism, different to many
contemporary examples in its stress
on the need for purely constitutional
reform but similar in the degree to
which it reflects historical patterns of
nationalist opposition and dissent. The
paper will consider what such rhetoric
tells us about the nature of the Irish
state.
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
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Bill Kissane is Associate Professor of
Politics at the London School of Economics.
He is the author of three books including
“New Beginnings: Constitutionalism and
Democracy in Modern Ireland” ( 2013)
and will publish “Beyond Internal War:
Reconstruction, National Identity and
Armed Conflict in Europe, 1918-2011”
in 2014.
5. Michal Kubát
The Communist Party of Bohemia and
Moravia: The Unexampled Success of an
Anti-System Nostalgic Opposition in
East-Central Europe
The paper discusses the Communist
Party of Bohemia and Moravia.
Although it is a significant agent in
Czech and Central European politics,
Czech and Central European research
on the Communist Party of Bohemia
and Moravia suffers from a degree of
ambivalence. While it seems that the
Communist Party of Bohemia and
Moravia is very well described, even
down to details, its analysis in terms of a
determination of its nature is not entirely
sufficient. Therefore, it is appropriate to
attempt a short analysis of the Communist
Party of Bohemia and Moravia in relation
to the classical theory of the anti-system
party/opposition developed by Giovanni
Sartori, which is, in my opinion, not
obsolete. I will address the issue whether
the Communist Party of Bohemia and
Moravia is an anti-system party as Sartori
defined it; although many authors argue
against it, criticizing the term itself, I will
present arguments why the Party not only
fits Sartori’s criteria, but also why I find
the term useful.
Michal Kubát is an associate professor
and Head of the Department of Russian
and East-European Studies at Charles
University in Prague, Faculty of Social
Sciences, and also a Lecturer at New York
University in Prague. He received both his
B.A. and M.A. in political science from the
Department of Political Studies at Charles
University. He successfully completed his
doctoral thesis at Charles University’s Institute
of International Studies in 2005. Appointed
associate professor of political science by the
Faculty of Social Sciences at University of
Brno, Czech Republic in 2009.His interests
focus on politics and government in Central
Europe. He has published numerous titles
on the politics of transition in Central and
Eastern Europe in Czech, Polish and
English.
6. Tamás Lönhart
“Minority Report 46/56/89”: Forms and
Means of Resistance Against the Communist
Regime in Romania of Ethnic Hungarian
Cultural Elites
Tamás Lönhart is Head of the
Department of Contemporary History
and International Studies at the Institute
of History in the Hungarian Language of
the Faculty of History and Philosophy at
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
(Romania). His research includes the
history of East-Central Europe; the
history of communism; nations, states
and ethnic minorities in East-Central
Europe; as well as contemporary theories
of international relations and the process
of European integration. Since 2010 he
also teaches as an invited lecturer at the
Pázmány Péter Catholic University,
Hungary, where he delivers courses on
the politics of memory and parties/party
systems in the 20th century.
7. Tamás Nyirkos
Resistance: The Origins and
Transformations of a Concept
It remains a relatively lesser-known
fact outside medievalist circles that the
first detailed theoretical justifications
of resistance go back to the Middle
Ages. These justifications of resistance
are all the more interesting as they
avoid many of the theoretical pitfalls
of later revolutionary theoreticizing,
while maintain a reasonably critical
attitude towards political regimes.
The paper raises the question why this
attitude almost completely vanished
from religious conservatism in the
nineteenth century, and why the
twentieth (twenty-first?) century sees
the comeback of religious radicalism
once again, without paying enough
attention to the middle way represented
by the original formulations of
legitimacy, resistance, and revolt.
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
The aims and means of the process of
establishing a Communist regime in
Romania involved in very different
ways the representative members of
the Hungarian ethnic minority. As
early as 1946, this fact caused inner
scissions and debates, as well as different
manifestations of resistance against the
“new rulers”, organized and carried out
by certain groups of elites of the ethnic
community. After the turning point
represented by the year 1947, there was
also a dramatic change in the policies
of the Communists in power regarding
the ethnic Hungarian community, that
lead to show trials and disillusion for
those who projected the future of granted
collective rights for the ethnic minorities
in the paradigm of the new political
realities. 1956 also had a very important
impact on how and by which means
the different parts of cultural elites of
the ethnic group reshaped their strategy
of relating to the totalitarian regime.
The late era of Communism being
also marked in Romania by a manifest
nationalistic agenda of the ruling elite,
political dissent meant building a parallel
paradigm for reshaping the strategy and
means of relating to that reality by the
new generation of ethnic Hungarian
cultural elites of Transylvania, including
dissent, samizdat, and also the reevaluation of relations with cultural
dissidence from neighboring Hungary.
The roots of post-1989 political options
and strategies date back to that era, as
the Hungarian minority’s cultural elite
had to assume a new role of building a
representative political structure and also
its leadership in post-communist times.
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Tamás Nyirkos is a senior lecturer at the
Political Science Department of Pázmány
Péter Catholic University, Hungary. His
research field includes religion and politics,
the religious justifications of revolutions
and counterrevolutions, the theory of just
war and holy war. He is currently working
on his book on the theological origins of
counterrevolutionary thought, started as a
visiting scholar at the University of Notre
Dame (USA) in 2013.
8. István Ötvös
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
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From the Resistance Movement to the Show
Trials: The Pálffy Case
The paper discusses György Pálffy’s way
from the resistance movement to the
communist show trials. A former officer
of the Royal Hungarian Army, he left
active service in 1939, and became a leader
of the Hungarian resistance movement
in 1944. After the Second World War,
he led the communist Military Police,
joined to the Soviet military intelligence
agency GRU. In 1949, however, he
himself was arrested by the Political
Police: he was involved in the Rajk trial,
and finally got executed as a “British spy”.
The lecture follows the most important
stages of his career, and tries to explore
the background of these events.
István Ötvös is Head of the Department
of Modern History at Pázmány Péter
Catholic University. He was research
fellow at the Historical Office (now
Historical Archives of the State Security
Offices) between 1998 and 2002, and
participated in the “East Looks West”
project of the School of Slavonic and East
European Studies (University College
London) in 2005. His research area covers
the history of military intelligence and
the communist show trials. He published
his book “Changes in Conception: The
Military Thread of the Rajk Trial” in
2012.
9. Emilia Palonen
Populism as Dissent
Politics is based on (dis)agreement and
frontier building. It is about the articulation
of an “us” in an agreement of a disagreement
with a different position. Populism,
characteristically, keeps the “us” vague and
thrives on the line of demarcation between
us and them. This paper, inspired primarily
on Ernesto Laclau’s work, investigates
populist movements as movements of
dissent. It also ponders on the possibilities of
such movements to grow from the fringe to
mainstream, and further, their relationship
to political goals. Is it possible to move
beyond dissent? If all political movements
are to some extent populist – in their abstract
articulation of an “us” and a frontier as the
basis of identification (otherwise we would
talk about institutional representation) –
what one needs to consider is the extent of
their populism, and the kind of populism
that is taking place, in the political context.
The paper makes an analytical distinction
between fringe, mainstream, and competing
populisms. It further makes a point about
the development of something one could
call cultural populism. Finally, the question
emerges: what is the relationship between
populism and democracy, especially
considering populism as dissent? The
discussion is mainly based on examples
from Finnish and Hungarian politics.
Emilia Palonen is a Senior Researcher in
an Academy of Finland funded project
“Populism as Movement and Rhetoric”
at the University of Jyväskylä. She has
previously worked as a Senior Lecturer
in Political Science at the University of
Helsinki and in Cultural Policy Research
at the University of Jyväskylä. During
and after finishing her PhD on political
polarisation in Hungary at Essex she has
been a research fellow at the Collegium
Budapest, IWM Vienna, and Humboldt
University in Berlin. She teaches regularly
interpretative methods in political science,
yet her first degree was in Contemporary
East European Studies at the University
of London. Besides populism and
democracy, her research has focused on
public commemoration and identities
– often, although not exclusively - in
Budapest.
10. Kálmán Pócza
Kálmán Pócza obtained his degree in History
and German literature at the Pázmány
Péter Catholic University, Hungary. He
studied at the University of Tübingen
(Germany) and University of Fribourg
(Switzerland). He holds a PhD in Political
Science from Andrássy University Budapest.
He was granted research scholarships of
the Katholische Akademische AusländerDienst (KAAD) and the Hanns Seidel
Stiftung. He has been a visiting scholar at the
University of Notre Dame (USA). Currently
he is a Research Fellow at the Institute for
Political Science of the Hungarian Academy
of Sciences. He is member of the Editorial
Board of the Journal Századvég. His main
field of research is political representation,
constitutionalism, and historiography. His
recent books include “Parlamentarismus
und politische Repräsentation” (2013)
and Verfassunggebung in konsolidierten
Demokratien (edited with Ellen Bos, 2013).
11. Péter Smuk
The Opposition’s Access to Media: Standards
and Challenges
The role of the opposition in modern democratic
political systems is protected and promoted. Its
functions (critics, control, offering alternatives)
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
Opposing the System: A Long-standing
Hungarian Tradition.
The starting point is a special
phenomenon of Hungarian politics
after the 1989/1990 transition, which
consists in the fundamental denial of
the existing political system, a so-called
“system opposition”. Although the
initial institutional arrangement of the
Hungarian democracy from 1989 would
have pushed the political actors towards
a consensus-oriented political culture,
Hungarian politics has never internalized
this aspiration of the founding fathers
and the democratic constitution. Thus,
Hungarian politics in the last twenty years
has been characterized by a discrepancy
between consensus-oriented political
institutions and a deeply confrontative
attitude of political actors. In the last
twenty years, opposing a government has
almost always meant opposing the system.
Political actors have mostly been active in
the grey zone between legal and illegal
political actions; the mentality of “system
opposition” gave rise to various strategies of
delegitimization. The core elements of these
delegitimization strategies were accusations
of betrayal of the idea of democracy
on the one hand, and the betrayal of
the nation on the other. This mentality
certainly had its historical antecedents:
the enduring tradition of ius resistendi up
until the early twentieth century, when
strategies of opposing a government and
opposing a political system became clearly
distinguished in Western Europe.
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may generally be recognised, but also detailed
guarantees shall be laid down in normativelegal instruments. The contribution gives
an overview on one of the most important
aspects: how can oppositional parties and
opinions reach the public via media surfaces.
Special media regulations pertain to procedures
of political discourse during parliamentary
debates and political election campaigns. The
contribution introduces and evaluates the
modern democratic standards in this field and
the legal regulations in Central-European
countries: recommendations of the Council of
Europe, parliamentary rules of procedures and
rules of national electoral laws.
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
14
Péter Smuk is Associate Professor at the
Széchenyi István University (Győr, Hungary);
Head of the Department of Constitutional
Law and Political Sciences, and Vice Dean for
Education of the Faculty of Law. He is member
of the advisory committee of the Association
of Hungarian Constitutional Lawyers,
and former Rector of the St. Ignatius Jesuit
College in Budapest (2011-12). Main fields
of research: parliamentary government, rights
of opposition, constitutional values, freedom of
expression, constitutional guarantees of political
discourse.
12. Geoffrey Swain
Resistance from Within: Trotsky, Tito
and Khrushchev versus the Communist
Apparatus
At the height of the clash between Stalin
and Trotsky in the 1920s, Trotsky called
the growing party apparatus a “faction”
in its own right, while Stalin insisted the
apparatus was nothing more than the party’s
neutral civil service. This paper will compare
the leadership roles of three dissident
communist leaders – Trotsky, Tito and
Khrushchev – and show how their leadership
styles led them to question the concept of
the Party apparatus. During the Russian
Civil War, Trotsky consulted widely with
“military specialists” and clashed bitterly
with Stalin when he tried to introduce
similar methods to the Politburo. At the
lowest point in Tito’s partisan war, in spring
1942, the Party’s apparatus really did have to
work with the masses, as it did later in 1948.
By the 1960s Khrushchev, a creation of the
apparatus, increasingly involved non-party
experts in decision-making as he found the
nomenklatura turning against him. Yet,
despite their frustrations, none of these
communist leaders could bring themselves to
push their argument to its logical conclusion
and attack the apparatus as something
inherent in the Leninist concept of the party.
Geoffrey Swain holds the Alec Nove Chair
in Russian and East European Studies at
the University of Glasgow. He has published
extensively on the history of Russia and Eastern
Europe, specialising in such areas as the Russian
Civil War, Latvia during and after the Second
World War, and the Yugoslav Communist
experiment. Among his many publications are
biographies of Trotsky (“Trotsky: Profiles in
Power” 2006 ) and Tito (“Tito: a Biography”
2011); he is currently writing a short biography
of Khrushchev.
13. Virgiliu Tarau
Resistance and Dissidence in Romania: The
Role of the Secret Police (Securitate) in the
“Administration” of Political Enemies
Until the 1960s, a lot of groups in the
mountains of Romania tried to resist the
communization process of the country. These
groups were systematically destroyed by the
Securitate, who deployed a large number of
agents across the country in order to prevent
their actions. During the late 1940s and
early 1950s, there existed an engineered
plan in Romania to demolish any form of
organized opposition. It is a significant fact
that all resistance groups where situated in
isolated places, in forests and mountains,
having few contacts with the people of the
country. On the other side, from 1947 to
1952, the secret police organized a large
scale repression against all potential enemies
of the Romanian Communist Party. In my
presentation I will first try to explore the
objectives and the results of those actions,
discussing the fate of political prisoners who
were detained with or without reason by
communist authorities as well. The second
part deals with the bureaucratic era of
repression from the late 1950s, orchestrated
by the Securitate; discussing a few cases
which might explain why dissidence was
apparently so weak during the last decades
of communism.
14. Tomasz Wieciech
Constitutional Ideas of the British Radical
Opposition in the Early 19th Century
British radical opposition was a unique
phenomenon in Europe in the age of
democratic revolutions. For once it was not
a revolutionary movement, even though
it was mostly extra-parliamentary and
clearly anti-establishment. Its aims were
limited. It did not wish to overthrow the
government by a revolutionary action but
to reform the constitution by constitutional
Tomasz Wieciech received Ph.D. from
Jagiellonian University in 2007. Since
2011 he is Adjunct Professor at Jagiellonian
University, at the Department
of
Constitutionalism and Governmental
Systems. His teaching and research focuses
on both contemporary and historical aspects
of British and American constitutionalism,
comparative federalism and early American
political thought. He authored three books and
a number of journal articles. He was a visiting
Professor at the University of Bucharest and
a visiting researcher at Fribourg University,
University Of Virginia, Oxford University,
and University of Edinburgh.
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
Virgiliu Leon Tarau is Professor at the
Department of International Studies and
Contemporary History at Babeș-Bolyai
University, Cluj-Napoca (Romania), and VicePresident of the Board at the National Council
for the Study of the Securitate Archives. His
field of expertise include postwar history, secret
services, and the history of the communist regimes
in Romania and Eastern Europe.
means, that is through Parliament. The
radicals demanded parliamentary reform,
specifically: universal manhood suffrage,
annual parliaments, equal representation,
payments for members of Parliament and
term limits. Only the most extreme of
them tried to resurrect the ideas of Thomas
Paine, calling for a national convention
that would establish a written constitution.
The paper presents constitutional ideas of
the British radical opposition through the
lens of the writings of the major figures
involved in the reform movement. Special
attention will be paid to major John
Cartwright who was not only one of the
most devoted activist but also probably
the most sophisticated and advanced
constitutional thinker among the early
19th century radicals.
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POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
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INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
PÁZMÁNY PÉTER CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
29-30 NOVEMBER 2013
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE
IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE
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POLITICAL DISSENT: OPPOSITION AND RESISTANCE IN 20TH CENTURY EUROPE