Across the “curtain” and within the “bloc” – political opinion of Maoist parties and organizations in Central and East Europe from the perspective of international politics

Abstract

This thesis explores the political opinion of Maoist parties and organizations in Central and East Europe. As an important topic in the field of Cold War studies, considerable amounts of research on the global Maoism and Maoist movement are concentrated on the developed world of the West and the vast developing world of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet for the Central and East Europe at the frontier of the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, Maoist movement of this region has been little studied comparatively. The recent years witnessed the gradual growth of related studies about the Maoist movement in Central and East Europe, but most of the limited literature mainly tried to outline the major historical timeline of the Maoist movement or to give overview about the lives of specific leaders of the CEE Maoist group but lacks deeper analysis of their organizational documents concerning their political programme and opinion as organized group. The thesis tries to focus on Maoist political parties and organizations emerged within the Eastern Bloc and make a detailed analysis of their crucial document defining the core proposition of their organizations with special attention to the substance of their theoretical principle and claiming proposal in the replenishment of factual outline from existing literature. By examining the global and regional geopolitical environments, combined with a closer look from international and domestic level at the selected key documents of the CEE Maoist organizations with common theme defining their political identity and proposition, it is an attempt trying to contribute a little bit in pushing from “Was it (Maoism) there?” towards deeper and closer inspection at “Why and What were they (Maoist) struggling (for) there?”