In examining the social context for the revolutions in 1989, many observers highlight the role of the churches and religion as explanatory factors. Certainly Poland is the obvious example, but often the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is also cited as one case in which the Evangelical Lutheran Church played a key role. But in the case of Czechoslovakia, the Catholic Church is seldom cited as instrumental to the Velvet Revolution. In this solidly researched volume, however, David Doellinger breaks with this accepted wisdom. First, by disassembling the Czechoslovak system, he looks at the separate case of strongly Catholic Slovakia. And second, he chooses not to focus on the statechurch leadership relationship, but rather “two distinct grassroots movements whose sustained challenges to state power successfully expanded spaces for action independent of state control” (p. 1).
The author’s main interest is how churches provide a free space in an otherwise authoritarian social system, permitting the possibility of organizing an embryonic civil society. In the Slovak case, Doellinger finds after 1948 a “secret church which created a community of believers that by taking precautions and acknowledging limits could worship freely and grow spiritually” (p. 47). In the less repressive GDR case, by contrast, groups focused on peace, environmentalism, and reconciliation could enjoy the legal protection of the church, based on “the give and take relationship which the state never had with the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia” (p. 30). Despite these differences in the churches’ standing, Doellinger discerns similar patterns: Both provided a fertile basis for independent communication networks which broke the state’s monopoly; and in both cases, triggers such as pilgrimages and commemorations (Slovakia) or European security tensions and declining ecological quality (GDR) led to a widening of the social space of the grassroots groups.
But Doellinger’s analysis also underscores differences between the two cases. The goals of the GDR groups focused on social issues, to be sure subsumed under the religious motive of peace; religious freedom or human rights was not their primary agenda. By contrast, the Slovaks called primarily for religious freedom, using petitions and protests. In addition, he finds primarily personal networks (“a self-imposed atomized sphere of independent activity,” p. 192) in Slovakia, with very limited linkages with non-religious Czech dissent. In the GDR, by contrast, a robust group culture and eventual “archipelago of activists” provoked growing tensions with church officials as they sought more autonomy from the church in the late 1980s.
One of the key strengths of the book is its detailed treatment of activism in “the provinces.” Doellinger focuses not on Berlin, but on the varying strategies and dilemmas of activists in Leipzig, in the context of the celebrated Monday peace services. By the same token, the distinct character of the opposition movement in Slovakia from that in Prague is easily overlooked. Doellinger also nicely captures the ambivalence in the relationship of the church leaderships to the groups, more acute for the GDR churches with their investment in “church within socialism.” In my view, the crucial question in explaining the role of religion in the revolutions is whether the religious dissent was able to join forces with non-religious dissent. And in this respect, in this reviewer’s opinion, neither Slovakia, nor even the GDR, compares with the Polish case, in which such “solidarity” was developed and practiced openly by the mid-1970s.
This is a well-researched volume, relying on numerous interviews with key actors in the grassroots movement in both cases and well-grounded in the secondary literature. It is fluidly written, analytically sound, and cogently argued.
Ultimately in both cases, the churches did not make the revolutions, but they did prepare them by developing leadership skills and nascent civil society. In both cases the tempo of the revolutions brought greater autonomy to the churches, but less social significance. On this last dimension, even the “Polish exception” has now become regrettably quite comparable with the GDR and Slovakia.F
Robert Goeckel, professor of political science, State University of New York at Geneseo