Civilizationally Incompetent? The Culture of Czech Society in the 1990s in the Memory of Western Expatriates

The so-called Velvet Revolution started a new "transformation" period of Czech history. There seemed to be a general agreement that the main goal was the "return to Europe", assimilation to the West after more than 40 years of different historical development. That was not only a political and economic, but also a cultural and civilizational process. Theories about postsocialist societies with distorted values tried to explain why the westernizing process was taking longer than expected. This article confronts the theory of Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka with oral history interviews conducted with Western expatriates who came to Czechoslovakia in early 1990s. Although daily interaction with Czech society brought them many disenchantments, the narrators generally perceived those simply as cultural differences, not as signs of civilizational incompetence. Some of the differences even led them to settle down in the Czech Republic. The most prominent social phenomena which the narrators classify altogether negatively are xenophobia and racism which in their view still prevail in Czech society, albeit less pronounced.