Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

The year 2008 serves as an important anniversary of the many crucial events that have shaped Czech history—the ninetieth birthday of the founding of the first Czechoslovak Republic in 1918; the seventieth commemoration of the 1938 Munich Agreement which gave the Sudetenland to Germany and de facto control of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, thereby dismembering the country and putting an end to democracy in Czechoslovakia; and the pivotal Communist coup in 1948 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Now, as the Czech Republic is poised to assume the presidency of the European Union during the first half of 2009, we find ourselves in a position to contemplate these historical anniversaries marked in the year 2008 and the changes that have led us to where we are today. The events that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1968 were a milestone in Czech, Slovak, European, and transatlantic history. As they had in 1938, the Czechoslovak people felt again in 1968 that the West was not prepared to fight for a strange country, and instead it let us down. I was six years old in 1968 when the tanks rolled into the country. As a young boy, I was excited to see the tanks in the streets and didn’t understand why my mom was crying and why my dad was angry. After that, I began to understand the true meaning of those tanks.

Two lessons arose from the Warsaw Pact intervention of 1968. First, intellectuals in the East and West came to realize that building socialism with a human face is not feasible. The second lesson of 1968 for the United States and the West is that the Czech Republic must not be abandoned again. This second lesson helped us gain entry into NATO in 1999 and has led to an alliance between the United States, the Czech Republic, and Central Europe that is stronger than ever before.

I thank the University of New Orleans, Center Austria, and all those involved for organizing the “Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968” conference. I am grateful to have the opportunity to mark these defining milestones in Czech history with you.

The day of 20 August 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the invasion of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Č SSR). The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on War Consequences in Graz, Austria, organized an international network of Cold War scholars to produce a collective new scholarly analysis on the Prague Spring within the context of the international crisis year 1968. Some eighty scholars and eyewitnesses of these signal events in 1968 produced essays for the massive scholarly volume Prager Frühling: Das Internationale Krisenjahr 1968 . 1A selection of these papers are reproduced in this volume in English as an offspring of the conference “The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968” organized by CenterAustria of the University of New Orleans in April 2008. The essays by Mark Kramer, Mark Carson, and Alessandro Brogi were delivered in New Orleans for the first time and are new and original contributions to this collection. Together this multinational collective research collaborative produced a vigorous scholarly reassessment of this turning point in the Cold War. This reassessment is particularly timely and up-to-date since the essays are based on numerous new and unknown documents from Moscow archives and an additional three dozen archives from around the world. The key documents collected for this project have been published in both the original Russian language (and in some cases English) and a parallel German translation in a second documentary volume, complementing the essays. 2Taken together, this collective history amounting to almost three thousand pages in these two volumes constitutes a major contribution to Cold War history and is made available here in an abbreviated English version.

The “global disruption” of 1968 challenged the authority of many governments in both the East and West and sparked the quickening of the nascent policy of détente to reconstruct international order from the top down. 3The bloody war in Vietnam fueled much of the energy of the global protest movement. 4The heady reforms of the Czechoslovak Communist Party during the “Prague Spring” of 1968 and the invasion by the Warsaw Pact stopping the liberalization and democratization of this Soviet puppet state were key moments during this momentous year of crises in 1968. 5The Warsaw Pact invasion ended President Lyndon B. Johnson’s policy of “bridge-building” with Eastern Europe. 6It arrested Johnson’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union for the time being, but did not end this process of easing tensions with Moscow. 7The invasion of Czechoslovakia “doomed the summit and arms control negotiations,” concludes a major new history of U.S. foreign relations. 8During the hot summer of 1968, Johnson was hoping to arrange a summit meeting with the Soviets to produce results on strategic arms control as a principal foreign policy legacy of his presidency. The invasion of Czechoslovakia stopped all those efforts in their tracks. Had Johnson been able to negotiate the freeze on nuclear weapons he was looking for in 1968, it might have saved both superpowers billions of dollars in arms expenditures and avoided many of the averse political consequences of the 1970s and 1980s. 9Ironically, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia stabilized the region where the Cold War had begun and provided a solid basis for détente. After 1968, neither side seriously contemplated going to war in Europe, let alone nuclear war. During the Czechoslovak crisis, both sides “showed a prudent disposition to underestimate their own strength and overestimate the strength of the adversary,” concludes one scholar. 10Johnson’s inaction and marked aloofness during the Prague Spring and in response to the Warsaw Pact invasion also spelled the beginning of the end of U.S. hegemony in the global arena. 11Literature on Johnson’s foreign policies, the international crises of 1968, and the Czechoslovak crisis of 1968 has grown by leaps and bounds, 12including solid documentary collections from Soviet and former Warsaw Pact countries’ archives. 13

The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia were a turning point in the Cold War. 14These events spawned the “Brezhnev Doctrine” and Soviet claims for the right of intervention in its own sphere of influence if its “sovereignty” was threatened. The Soviet Union and its allies would guarantee the survival of socialism in their own sphere of influence. 15It alienated the Communist parties of Italy, France, and Spain. 16It launched negotiations for the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), including the Canadians and reluctant Americans, culminating in the Helsinki meeting of 1975, generally regarded as the high point of détente. It unleashed West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik , improving relations with the Soviet Union and the Soviet satellites, including the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It spawned the development of the Soviet SS-20 medium range rockets to improve Soviet nuclear defenses by uncoupling militarily inferior Western Europe from U.S. nuclear deterrence. This produced NATO’s “double track” decision and unleashed a new arms race in the 1980s (including Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative”) that was economically more harmful to Moscow than Washington. The Soviet Bloc’s increasing technological and economic backwardness and lagging behind the West were crucial factors in bringing down the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. Moreover, Prague’s 1968 “socialism with a human face” model of reforming communism may also have influenced Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the later 1980s that ultimately brought down communism by way of their spillover effects into the Soviet sphere, exactly as Moscow and its satellites feared in 1968. Neither should the factor of the Czechoslovak dissident movement of “Charta 77” on other dissidents movements in the Communist world and their impact on the end of the Cold War be underestimated. 17