Once upon a time, in the bleak year of 1985, when Konstantin Chernenko died just thirteen months after Yuri Andropov, and a certain Mikhail Gorbachev became the head of the USSR, which was then still a country that was supposed to last forever, Jiří Dienstbier, one of the most inspiring Charter 77 dissidents in the phenomenally grey Gustáv Husák’s Czechoslovakia, wrote a charming, highly utopian essay called Snění o Evropě (“Dreaming of Europe”). 

The essence of his utopia was a vision of a continent without two power blocs, no Warsaw Pact, no NATO, where all citizens would enjoy peaceful life in a “common European house”: the Czechoslovaks, the Balts, the Yugoslavs hand in hand with the Germans (united, of course!), the Norwegians, the British; believe it or not, at that time he even dreamed of the Russians joining the great European family.

In a magical turn of events, it took less than five years for Jiří Dienstbier to become the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia after the 1989 revolution, which was called “gentle” or “velvet” because of its peaceful and civil nature. 

One of the most common slogans to be seen on the do-it-yourself banners that adorned Czechoslovak squares in those innocently naïve November days was quite oxymoronic in nature, for it read “Return to Europe” or “Back to Europe”, which seems to make no sense in a country that is geographically described as Central European.  

But there it was, declaring the ambition to fulfil the utopia of …