| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
PRAGUE - Viewing the Occupy Wall Street movement from post-Communist Europe, I can't stop thinking of October 1917.
This date, when the Bolsheviks seized power from the Russian Provisional Government and set in place a Communist dictatorship that would last for more than seven decades, was brought to mind by the recent comments of the great Polish dissident and newspaper editor Adam Michnik. Speaking on a panel at Forum 2000, the annual conference put on here by his friend, the former Czech president Vaclav Havel, Michnik heard a familiar message in the rhetoric of the protesters in New York. The topic at hand was "Europe's Future: Constitutional or Populist Democracy?" Fortunately, revolution (whether from the left or the right) is unthinkable in the United States, the world's oldest constitutional democracy. But it is not so unthinkable in Europe, destroyed by a world war just seventy years ago, where Spain and Portugal only emerged from fascist rule in the 1970s, and where one half of the continent freed itself from Communist domination not long after that.
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