Restitution Identity in the Rudé Právo and Restitution of the Rudé Právo Identity in Year Zero (1990)
Abstract
This dissertation analyses the mass media (the Czech communist press "Rudé právo") discourse of property restitutions one year after the revolution of 1989. The author is inspired by the approaches and procedures of Critical Discourse Analysis in investigating the discursive and extra-discursive practices of the communist/left wing newspaper Rudé Právo.
From the perspective of symbolic power as control, she analyzes the newspaper text as well as the social context in which the text was produced. She reconstructs the institutional and organizational transformation of the Rudé Právo daily, whose social position and identity changed radically during 1990, from a Communist Party affiliated propagandist to a private left-wing newspaper.
The author links a discursive, narrative, and recursive frame analysis of the Czech communist press with the Boltanski and Thévenot theory of justice and the theory of retrospective/transitional justice. The dissertation describes the establishment of the restitution agenda and successive crystallization of the restitution discourse during "year zero" after November 1989.
The author also observes the discursive area on a more general scale, i.e., in the economic reform and transformation discourse. In 1990, the privatization ideology represented the core of the transformation mythology.
There was remarkable convergence between the constructions of the winning Klausian neoliberal privatization ideology and reform argumentation aimed at undermining the legitimacy of restitutions, on one hand, and the left-wing or communist privatization ideology which was represented by the Rudé Právo, on the other hand.