‘To Hell with Sovereignty!’: Poland and the Prague Spring

Abstract

This chapter shows how Polish society welcomed Alexander Dubček’s appointment as Czechoslovak Party Secretary in early 1968. University staff and students launched a nation-wide campaign for academic freedom and writers protested against state censorship. But the Polish party leader Władysław Gomułka, an acclaimed hero of ‘national communism’ in 1956, now saw the Prague Spring as challenging the maintenance of one-Party rule. He long advocated and then strongly supported the August invasion. Kemp-Welch shows how its subsequent justification, the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ of limited sovereignty, was eventually revoked by Gorbachev in 1989.