Though at times uncertain of the motives and reliability of the Dubček coalition, the Czechoslovak public overwhelmingly supported the changes introduced in the first half of 1968. Around 60 per cent of citizens were content with the pledges of the Action Programme, while another 21 per cent favoured a more radical approach; about 17 per cent would have preferred a more restrained reform or none at all. Given such levels of support, how can we explain public acquiescence to the rollback of reforms, and then quiescence for two decades under the authoritarian regime of Gustáv Husák? Put differently, how was normalization accomplished in a society that would clearly have preferred to proceed instead to full democratization?

The meanings of normalization

The term ‘normalization’ should first be explained. The word was coined in the 1860s to mean the action of making something normal, be it a situation or a thing; originally it was applied to orthographical and metallurgical standardization. In the 1920s it was adopted by psychologists to describe subconscious devices for altering images or patterns to resemble more familiar forms. In the late 1930s it came to mean the advent or renewal of stable relations between two once-hostile states, in particular a local hegemon and a weaker power. After 1955 it was frequently used to describe Soviet–Yugoslav dealings, and appeared in West Germany's Ostpolitik. In Russian normalizatsiia has two meanings: the process of ‘making normal’; and the adaptation of an object to conform to a norm.