Velvet President

Why Vaclav Havel is our era's George Orwell and more.

Matt Welch from the May 2003 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

The Plastic People trial spurred Havel and his friends to form Charter 77, a human rights organization built around a petition that asked, simply, that the Czechoslovak government adhere to the Final Act of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement -- specifically its covenants on civil, political, and economic rights -- to which it had recently become a signatory. Living up to Helsinki would have meant allowing free expression, "freedom from fear," freedom of religious practice, and other rights then quashed by the Communists. This narrow, legalistic tactic, which has since been emulated the world over, allowed the dissidents to claim that they were not, after all, agitating against the regime, but rather asking it to follow its own acknowledged legislation.

The wind now at the anti-Communists' sails, Havel uncorked his most famous and influential essay of all, "The Power of the Powerless." It starts by dissecting exactly why a greengrocer would put a sign in his window saying "Workers of the world, unite," and how this "dictatorship of the ritual" is used as a knowingly false brand of ideological glue to keep the Party in charge.

If shopkeepers and others suddenly stopped observing the rituals, and instead spoke and acted freely, he predicted (with unnerving accuracy), "The entire pyramid of totalitarian power, deprived of the element that binds it together, would collapse in upon itself, as it were, in a kind of material implosion." The essay, which was addressed to 20 prominent dissidents from around the East Bloc, also served as a micro-analysis of the new "dissent." Just 40 months after delivering his bolt out of the blue to Gustav Husak, Havel was now breaking down the finer points of a movement that his own open letter forced into the world. As a direct result, he spent most of the next five years in jail.

After being released, with his health now diminished, Havel could not resist the temptation to bite the hands even of those who would reach out to him, should they be deserving. Perhaps the most remarkable essay in this genre was 1985's "Anatomy of a Reticence," where Havel described the dissidents' suspicion of the "Western peace movement" then lobbying for an end to the nuclear arms race. It foreshadowed his later impatience with reflexive anti-Americanism. Here's a stirring passage on ideology and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan:

"How much trust or even admiration for the Western peace movement can we expect from a simple yet sensitive citizen of Eastern Europe when he has noticed that this movement has never, at any of its congresses or at demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of participants, got around to protesting the fact that five years ago, one important European country attacked a small neutral neighbor and since that time has been conducting on its territory a war of extermination which has already claimed a million dead and three million refugees? Seriously, what are we to think of a peace movement, a European peace movement, which is virtually unaware of the only war being conducted today by a European state? As for the argument that the victims of aggression and their defenders enjoy the sympathies of Western establishments and so are not worthy of support from the left, such incredible ideological opportunism can provoke only one reaction -- utter disgust and a sense of limitless hopelessness."

The Culture of Markets

The same instincts and habits that made Havel the foremost observer of modern-day Stalinism got him into unexpected trouble not long after he helped engineer one of the most inspiring and bloodless revolutions in history. It is one thing to shoot your mouth off, tell your audience the opposite of what they want to hear, and hang around with beer-swilling "underground" characters. It's quite another to deftly juggle the nuances of presidential behavior in a newly emergent democracy.

In July 1990 Washington Post legend Benjamin Bradlee detected "early warnings of threats to the new Czech freedom" after Havel complained to him that the local press "forgets...that the freedom is only one side of the coin, where the other side is represented by responsibility." Free traders grimaced at Havel's repeated railings against the "ideology of the market," especially when compared to then-Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus and his blunt adulation of Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, and "a market economy without adjectives." Staunch Czech anti-Communists, particularly the generation that fled the country after 1968, begrudged their samizdat hero for using his new power to seek reconciliation with, not justice against, the hundreds of thousands of collaborators who made the police state logistically possible.

Political realists had their doubts about Havel as well. In 1990 he emptied Czechoslovakia's prisons and shuttered its national arms factories, acts that smacked of rash hippie idealism -- a diagnosis consistent with his disturbingly fuzzy talk of "nonpolitical politics." Klaus, meanwhile, was busying himself with the urgent task of herding anti-totalitarians into a professional political party that promptly trounced all comers. Even Havel's admiring former advisers, such as Boston University's Chandler Rosenberger, warned at the time that the utopian Castle longhairs "became prone to fantastic delusions" of "transforming the politics of the planet."

With dissident contemporaries such as Lech Walesa, Adam Michnik, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn dropping out of post-communist politics and into self-parody, it was hardly a stretch to imagine Havel as destined for a position more suited to his talents: editing a Czech literary magazine, say, or running an Open Society think tank funded by George Soros. When Czechoslovakia's June 1992 elections placed Klaus and Slovak nationalist Vladimir Meciar firmly in charge of the increasingly incompatible Czech and Slovak republics, Havel resigned rather than preside over the "Velvet Divorce" he felt was a "fatal error." It seemed logical that the unglamorous, nuts-and-bolts business of "transition" would now be managed by the more technocratically adept Klaus.

But the smart money was wrong. Havel was the only real choice considered when the new Czech Republic needed a president in January 1993. And Havel's entire career and philosophy, like Orwell's, were dedicated to navigating ideological minefields under the extreme duress of personal participation and suffering. This skill, it turns out, had some relevance in the post-Gorbachev world too. Like Orwell's, Havel's words and zesty one-liners can be (and have been) quoted selectively to make him sound conservative, liberal, and otherwise, and his bedrock belief in the transformative power of "calling things by their proper names" virtually ensured that some of his freewheeling opinions would set off alarm bells among those who see the shadow of socialism in such phrases as "civil society" and "new politics."

"I once said that I considered myself a socialist," Havel wrote in Summer Meditations. "I merely wanted to suggest that my heart was, as they say, slightly left of center." The words could have come directly out of Orwell's mouth: "In sentiment I am definitely 'left,'" he wrote in 1940, "but I believe that a writer can only remain honest if he keeps free of party labels."

Havel went on to discuss the futility of those who would pin an ideological tag to his lapel. "All my adult life, I was branded by officials as 'an exponent of the right' who wanted to bring capitalism back to our country," he wrote. "Today -- at a ripe old age -- I am suspected by some of being left-wing, if not of harboring out-and-out socialist tendencies. What, then, is my real position? First and foremost, I have never espoused any ideology, dogma, or doctrine -- left-wing, right-wing, or any other closed, ready-made system of presuppositions about the world. On the contrary, I have tried to think independently, using my own powers of reason, and I have always vigorously resisted attempts to pigeonhole me."

No one tried to pigeonhole Havel more than his revolutionary comrade turned rival Vaclav Klaus, and many of the president's comments that were perceived initially to be illiberal were, in fact, thinly veiled rebukes to Klaus, whom Havel suspected of placing his own political ambitions above genuine concern for the country. In a society seeking moral footing after 50 years of totalitarian rot, Havel found Klaus' public manners personally appalling and potentially combustible.

Passing early judgments on Central European politics can be a loser's game, but Havel's warnings about Klaus -- and on the dangers of immorality in post-revolution politics -- turned out to be prescient. Despite his still-glowing reputation among American conservatives, Klaus has been nobody's Thatcherite since at least 1993, and probably earlier. Reforms that the Hungarian Socialist Party was ramming through in 1995 -- freeing rent and utility prices, cleaning up and selling off banks, introduc-
ing greater capital markets transparency -- Klaus never bothered with at all. This despite having a clear mandate from 1989 to late 1997, when a collapsing economy and various corruption scandals forced him to resign. As Thomas Hazlett wrote in the March 1998 issue of reason, Klaus had "all but shelved further efforts at economic liberalization and declared the transformation complete."