Abstract
This article reviews the political history of Czechoslovakia as a vital part of the Soviet-dominated “Communist bloc” and its repercussions for the journalist associations based in the country. Following an eventful history since 1918, Czechoslovakia changed in 1948 from a liberal democracy into a Communist regime. This had significant consequences for journalists and their national union and also for the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ), which had just established its headquarters in Prague. The second historical event to shake the political system was the “Prague Spring” of 1968 and its aftermath among journalists and their unions. The third landmark was the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989, which played a significant part in the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and led to the closing of the old Union of Journalists in 1990, followed by the founding of a new Syndicate which refused to serve as the host of the IOJ. This led to a gradual disintegration and the closing down of what in the 1980s was the world’s largest non-governmental organization in the media field.
Highlights
The starting point of this article is a story about the rise and fall of the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ)—an international non-governmental organization of journalists based in Czechoslovakia, which had become an icon of the changing political landscape of the world since 1946
The same story has been told in an anthology of the history of the international movement of journalists (Nordernstreng, Björk, Beyersdorf, Høyer, & Lauk, 2016) and in a monograph on the IOJ (Nordenstreng, in press), but this was done without covering the broader context of the political history of Czechoslovakia
The present review aims to fill the gap by first describing the key political turns in the history of Czechoslovakia since World War I (Emmert, 2012)
Summary
The starting point of this article is a story about the rise and fall of the IOJ—an international non-governmental organization of journalists based in Czechoslovakia, which had become an icon of the changing political landscape of the world since 1946. The same story has been told in an anthology of the history of the international movement of journalists (Nordernstreng, Björk, Beyersdorf, Høyer, & Lauk, 2016) and in a monograph on the IOJ (Nordenstreng, in press), but this was done without covering the broader context of the political history of Czechoslovakia. The present review aims to fill the gap by first describing the key political turns in the history of Czechoslovakia since World War I (Emmert, 2012)
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