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Czechoslovakia External Threats to National Security
As of 1987, the party and government leaders of
Czechoslovakia continued to assert that West Germany, NATO, and
the United States represented the major external threats to their
country's security. Alleged West German revanche was periodically
denounced in the Czechoslovak press, and those German
organizations that called for Germany's 1937 borders to be
restored were especially singled out for criticism, as was the
Sudeten German Emigre Organization, an organization of those
Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II. Bonn and
ultimately Washington were seen by Prague to be exploiting German
revanchist sentiments for their own purposes. Dzur had stated in
1984 that NATO was seeking to "achieve military superiority . . .
over the Soviet Union and other countries of the Warsaw Pact, to
dictate [NATO's] will to independent states, to stop the
worldwide revolutionary process, and to dominate the world." A
rabid anti-American campaign reached its peak when the Soviet
Union failed to prevent the installation of Pershing II and
cruise missiles in Western Europe. The deployment of these
missiles during the early 1980s was portrayed as a threat to the
European military balance. The Czechoslovak leadership, however,
did not mention that the missiles had been installed in response
to the deployment of Soviet SS-20 missiles in the western Soviet
Union beginning in 1977. When the Soviet Union installed SS-21
and SS-23 missiles in Czechoslovakia starting in 1983, the
Czechoslovak public was noticeably unenthusiastic.
A different kind of threat was seen emanating from Poland at
the beginning of the 1980s. The development of the solidarity
trade union movement there obviously alarmed the communist
hierarchy in Czechoslovakia, which feared that the labor unrest
might spill over into their country. Czechoslovak spokesmen
warned the Poles that their toying with socialism could be
compared with the Czechoslovak heresy of 1968 and might result in
the same kind of disaster.
Data as of August 1987
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