Introduction For almost a half of the 20th century, Europe had been divided into two distinctive blocks. They were distinctive in ideology, political regime, economy, and other characteristics. While the ‘West’ was known for its democratic values, the ‘East’ was known for its totalitarian regime. Sweden was in the former, Czechoslovakia in the latter block of states. And yet phenomena with similar aims have emerged in both of the countries. The phenomena being the normalization process in Czechoslovakia after the ‘Prague Spring’ and the politics of racial and social eugenics in Sweden. Both were created with a single predominant aim – to form societies to a specific desirable image, based on ideology. In Czechoslovakia it was the image of a conformable and obedient society, securing the rule of the Communist party. In Sweden it was an image of a society which would be improved so that the productivity and the well-being of the society would advance. Why have these developments taken place? How did they evolve and what influenced them? These will be the central questions of this paper and possible answers will be debated in two main subchapters. In each of these, relevant aspects of both cases will …show more content…
They gave up upon the Marxist Socialist ideals and rather focused on the functioning in the industrial capitalist system which was based upon the increase of productivity and progress based on the best interests of the society as a group (Spektorowski and Mizrachi, 2004). Exactly this is the reason why it has been aimed at individuals, as they comprise the weakest links of society. These goals were set in order to, as mentioned above, increase the well-being of the society, to improve the qualities of the nation, and to save money on the ‘unfit’