Towards an Independent Society?

Abstract

The notion of an ‘independent’ or ‘parallel’ society caught the imagination of nonconformist circles in Central and Eastern Europe. It seemed to distil the essence of the independent activity undertaken within the framework of an otherwise totally controlled society and to demarcate it from the life of the official institutions. The ‘parallel’ structures which sometimes grew out of ‘individual civic initiatives’ represented ways of protesting against the marasmus of official society; substitutes for the inadequate or harmful performance of official structures (V. Benda); spheres where a different life — based on truth — could be lived (V. Havel); oases of values and intellectual orientations and of the life linked with them (Z. Mlynář); or elements of a revolutionary avant-garde (P. Uhl). These structures were capable of constant expansion into other spheres of life and offered a path toward a more developed independent society in future, even a model of it.¹