Luisa Tousova (Charles University)
Solidarity played a decisive role in the birth and success of Czechoslovak and Polish dissident movements within the Eastern Bloc. In both, anti-soviet-resistance is attributed to individual personalities– Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa. Havel’s Charter 77 and Civic Forum was predicated on solidarity amongst artists and dissidents. A direct result of the Soviet unforgiving politicisation and criminalisation of the underground art-scene. Wałęsa, like Havel, successfully led a political opposition movement– Solidarność. The two movements’ ethos hinged on solidarity, spurring collaboration between them. The following work focuses on the two contemporaries as symbols of resistance and solidarity, with some comparison to József Antall Jr., the final member of the Visegrad four. The research will explore the wave of international solidarity movements, primarily, the Western European “Solidarity with Solidarność”. Additionally, the research surveys how the leaders’ emergence as symbols of liberation and democratisation contributes to national memory. The methodology includes case study tracing of exaltation during remembrance celebrations, honorific titling of public spaces, and invocation by current parties. The paper also hypothesises that remembrance of democratic figures transpasses national boundaries by employing a case study of Liu Xiaobo, whose Nobel Prize-winning Charter 08 cites Havel’s Charter 77 as the point of inspiration. Research concludes with an analysis of how the legacy of resistance and solidarity movements is memorialised at national and transnational levels.