Velvet President

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

Matt Welch from the May 2003 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

The one Czech politician who consistently challenged Klaus to get economic reform rolling again was none other than Vaclav Havel, the same guy suspected in the early '90s of being a Third Way quasi-socialist without the "stomach" for market policies. For those more interested in facts than in stereotypes, Havel's remarkable December 9, 1997, speech to the Czech Parliament took Klaus to the woodshed for dragging his feet on reforms and advocated specific measures far toothier than the shock therapy slogans Klaus had been mouthing since 1990. According to Havel, reforms had resulted in the appearance of a market rather than the real thing.

"I do not share the view held by some of you that the entire transformation started from the wrong foundations, was wrongly devised and wrongly directed," Havel said. "I would rather say that our problem lies in the very opposite: the transformation process stopped halfway, which is possibly the worst thing that could have happened to it.

"Many businesses have been formally priva--tized, but how many have concrete visible owners who seek increasing effectiveness and who care about the long-term prospects of their companies?...[T]hose who represent the owners see their role not as a task, mission or commitment but simply as an opportunity to transfer the entrusted money somewhere else and get out....A rather strange role, to my mind, is often played by our banks: they indirectly own companies that are operating at a loss, and the more the companies lose the more money the banks lend them....The legal framework of privatization, as well as of the capital market, is being perfected only now. Is it not rather late?"

In a region where power has almost always corrupted, Klaus has had more of it, and for longer, than any of his transition peers. (Even when he lost the 1998 elections, he entered a controversial power-sharing agreement with the ruling Socialists.) Havel's hectoring surely served as a restraint on Klaus' ambitions. It is hardly surprising that, after Havel stepped down, Klaus succeeded by the narrowest of margins in replacing his long-time rival at the Castle.

Rumpled Prophet

Havel is a short and rumpled man, even in a sharp presidential suit. He's a disaster at press conferences, wiggling his tube-socked feet under the table and making chewing sounds into the microphone before each response. He nearly died three times in the last eight years from various illnesses, and he reportedly headed to Portugal for a long cure soon after stepping down as president. He describes himself as perpetually nervous, afraid someone's going to wake him from the dream and put him back in jail, where he probably belongs. He may have been the life of the party a time or two, but overall the impression he gives is that of an unspectacular man who probably would rather be drunk.

This is one of his true gifts to the rest of us, and once again recalls Orwell's legacy. As in Orwell's case, Havel's talents seem far more the result of hard work and discipline than any once-in-a-generation gift of talent. If this normal-looking character could shake off the hangover long enough to give an eloquent finger to The Man, well, what were you doing with your time?

Once in office, Havel took pains to remain himself. On his first New Year's speech, in 1990, he started by saying "I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you," and from that point on tried to give his fellow citizens the feeling that one of them was up in the Castle. The same impact can be seen on many of his foreign admirers; when I ask my American or British friends who lived in Prague to tell me their favorite story about Havel, it usually involves them bumming a smoke off the guy, or sharing a urinal, or seeing him with a hot blonde at a rock show. Though he quickly grew out of the blue jeans phase, and was careful about the ceremonial dignities of office, he was forever injecting informality into the serious work of public life. He was trying to practice democracy with a human face.

When Clinton or Boris Yeltsin or Pink Floyd came to town, Havel would take them out to a typical Czech pub. "As for heads of state," he once told the Czech newspaper Mlada fronta Dnes, "I haven't met anyone yet whose eyes didn't shine with delight when I suggested that after the official reception we should go get a beer somewhere really quick." For years, he lived in an accessible apartment along the river, and most Praguers can still tell you his favorite pubs.

Three successive United States presidents have fallen under Havel's spell, and he in turn has used his access to cajole them into taking military action against Slobodan Milosevic, expanding NATO, and minding the lessons of Munich. Clinton and George W. Bush in particular seem tongue-tied and awe-struck in the presence of someone who actually fought communism and lived to tell about it; Havel returns the favor by flattering America's role in taking down the Evil Empire. His open, though qualified, flattery of the U.S. is one reason Noam Chomsky considers him "morally repugnant" and on an "intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks."

Chomsky's insults aside, Havel has enabled Czechs to punch above their weight in international affairs for 13 years; this will likely end as the extraordinary geopolitical circumstances that created him fade and are replaced by more provincial Czech political concerns. Havel himself sees his career as a massive historical accident, even a joke. But as he walks off the global stage, Czechs and the rest of the world can be thankful that someone like him was essentially in the wrong place at the right time. He remains a figure from whom not just insight but inspiration can be drawn.

"The most important thing," Havel said in his final New Year's address as president, "is that new generations are maturing, generations of people who grew up free and are not deformed by life under Communist rule. These are the first Czechs of our times who inherently consider freedom normal and natural. It would be great if the breaking through of these people into various parts of public life leads to our society more factually, thoroughly and impartially examining its past, without whose reflection we cannot be ourselves. I also hope it will lead to our successfully parting with many ill consequences of the work of destruction the Communist regime wreaked upon our souls."