RTG Contradiction Studies

„Sascha, ich würde Dir gern glauben, aber versteh auch Du mich …“. Breschnew, Dubček und die Frage von Kadern und Vertrauen im Konflikt um den Prager Frühling 1968

Contribution

Susanne Schattenberg

2013

This article focuses on the question, which kind of diplomacy we have to deal with within the Warsaw pact states. Taking the invasion in Czechoslovakia in 1968 as an example, three theses are discussed: (1) Brezhnev transferred his inner-party concept of „trust in cadres“ and his „scenario of power“ based on trust to foreign politics and treated Dubček as a client whom he addressed in a patrimonial and familiar way. (2) He lost faith in Dubček when the latter established a new democratic discourse denying the central power of the party. (3) The diplomatic language within the Warsaw pact states referred more to socialist common values and party discipline than to the language and setting of international meetings with third party states.

Historische Anthropologie 21(2): 227–250.

DOI: 10.7788/ha.2013.21.2.227

Back to overview
every day

“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”

Gisela Febel
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
idea of democratic critique

“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

Martin Nonhoff
relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart