Publication Details

Abstract

The present political process in Czechoslovakia may be characterized as an institutional revolution whose aim is to create a new institutional structure o£ the Czechoslovak socialistic society. The change of the structure of the system of power, which accompanies the transition from the deformed dictatorship of proletariate to the all-people’s socialistic state and to the collective self-government, is a very important part of this process. The communist party voluntarily returns in it the usurped political power to the people; from now on, it will share the power only indirectly, through the mediation of the democratic institutional structure, all components of the latter being renewed as political subjects of full rights. The basic moments of this process of „handing over the power“ are as follows: (a) a consequential separation of the party from the state, (b) redemocratization of the whole institutional structure existing up to now; in this process, the original democratic functions are being restored of such components of the structure as government, representative committees, the National Front, the democratic mechanisms; (c) the parallel process of the creation of a new institutional structure, which ought to give rise to a specific Czechoslovak model of socialistic democracy. The basis factors of this process include (1) consequential introduction of a new economic system, which will destroy the basis proper of the governing system existing up to now: the directive and centralistic form directing the national economy; (2) reduction of the influence and role of the state in socialism; here, the mistake must be removed which follows from the fact that collective property used to be identified with state property; (3) creation of an effective system of control and guaranties, which would admit no misuse of political power and its concentration in the hands of individuals or cliques; (4) federalization, whose aim is to change the present asymmetric model of the arrangement of the relations between the two nations of Czechoslovakia into a symmetrical one, at the same time fully respecting their national sovereignties.