Certainly as presidential speeches go, these are extraordinary. Extraordinary in the range of subjects they address, from Maastricht to the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, from European security to the legacy of the Czechoslovak security police, from Kafka to the need for a higher something that Havel cannot quite bring himself to call God. Extraordinary in their literary quality. Extraordinary in their frank and vivid insights based, like his earlier work, on a kind of wry agonizing about his own existential dilemmas. Since his present dilemma—or, at least, one of them—is that of the intellectual in politics, there is much on that in his speeches. And sometimes in unlikely places.
Nearly two years ago, a mutual friend brought me, with the president’s greetings, the typescript of a speech delivered in the Asahi Hall in Tokyo in April 1992 and now reproduced in this volume. The speech is devoted to the place of the intellectual in politics. Having described the peculiar postcommunist situation in which “poets, philosophers, singers became members of Parliament, government ministers or even presidents,” he proceeds to take issue with “a British friend of mine” who “has said that one of the biggest problems of the postcommunist states lies in the inability of their leaders to make up their minds about who they are. Are they independent intellectuals or practising politicians?”
Having explained that he understands only too well what I have in mind, he goes on to ask if this may actually be “not a dilemma, but a historic challenge? What if in fact it challenged them to introduce a new tone, a new element, a new dimension into politics?” Based on their specific experience under totalitarianism, might they not inject “a new wind, [a] new spirit, a new spirituality…into the established stereotypes of present-day politics?” Faced with the huge challenges of overpopulation, poverty, pollution, ethnic and social unrest, what is needed is a change “in the sphere of the spirit, of human consciousness and self-knowledge.”
Politics is increasingly becoming the domain of specialists, but it should be the domain of people
with a heightened sense of responsibility and heightened understanding for the mysterious complexity of Being. If intellectuals claim to be such people, they would virtually be denying the truth of that claim if they refused to take upon themselves the burden of public offices on the grounds that it would mean dirtying their hands. Those who say that politics is disreputable in fact help make it so.
He does not know, he says in conclusion, who will be proved right, but he regards it as “a challenge to take a great risk and launch a great adventure. It is up to those of us whom fate has put in this position to demonstrate whether my British friend has shown foresight, or has simply been too influenced by the banal idea that everyone should stick to his own trade.”
Heaven only knows what the Japanese audience made of the president from Prague conducting a long-range discussion with someone in Oxford from a platform in Tokyo. But the result is certainly one of the clearest and fullest statements of his position. Elsewhere, he restates and elaborates on various parts of it. Right at the outset, in his 1990 New Year’s address, he expresses the hope that the new Czechoslovakia can “permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas,” with a new version of the founding president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s concept of politics based on morality. (“Jesus, not Caesar,” as Masaryk famously wrote.)
“If the hope of the world lies in human consciousness,” Havel tells a joint session of the U.S. Congress in February 1990, “then it is obvious that intellectuals cannot go on forever avoiding their share of responsibility for the world and hiding their distaste for politics under an alleged need to be independent.” And he says there what he repeated in opening the PEN congress nearly five years later: that if everyone remained independent then in the end nobody would be independent.
Perhaps his most remarkable treatment of the subject, however, is a speech he delivered in Copenhagen in May 1991. Here he confronts head-on what he calls the “diabolical” temptations of power. He now finds himself, he writes,
in the world of privileges, exceptions, perks, in the world of VIPs who gradually lose track of how much a streetcar ticket or butter costs, how to make a cup of coffee, how to drive a car, and how to place a telephone call. In other words, I find myself on the threshold of the very world of the communist fat cats whom I have criticized all my life. And worst of all, everything has its own unassailable logic.
“Someone who forgets how to drive a car, do the shopping, make himself coffee, and place a telephone call is not the same person who had known how to do those things all his life.” The politician becomes “a captive of his position, his perks, his office. That which apparently confirms his identity and thus his existence in fact subtly takes that identity and existence away from him.” This is vintage Havel, probing through a combination of ironical observation and agonized introspection to a larger truth, as he did in “The Power of the Powerless.” It hints at a great essay to come: on the powerlessness of the powerful.
Yet the conclusion of this speech is surprising. It does not follow, he says, “that it is not proper to devote oneself to politics because politics is in principle immoral.” What follows is that politics requires people of higher responsibility, taste, tact, and moral sensitivity. “Those who claim that politics is a dirty business are lying to us. Politics is work of a kind that requires especially pure people, because it is especially easy to become morally tainted.”7
He returns to the theme in a speech at New York University in October 1991, comparing himself to a literary critic well known for his sharp judgments who is suddenly called upon to write a novel. First he quotes his own refutation of the charge that politics is “an essentially disreputable business”:
Of course, in politics, as anywhere else in life, it is impossible and pointless to say everything, all at once, to just anyone. But that does not mean having to lie. All you need is tact, the proper instincts, and good taste. One surprising experience from “high politics” is this: I have discovered that good taste is more useful here than a degree in political science.
(This may be less surprising to anyone who has studied political science.)
Then he notes that in the few weeks since he wrote those words, “fate played a joke on me. It punished me for my self-assurance by exposing me to an immensely difficult dilemma. A democratically elected parliament passed a bill I considered to be morally flawed, yet which our constitution required me to sign.” This was the so-called lustration bill, which, as Havel explains, banned from public service whole categories of people who had been implicated in the communist regime, with inadequate rights of individual appeal. He describes his decision: to sign the bill and then propose an amendment to parliament.
He does not know, he concludes, whether his decision was the right one, whether this part of the “novel” he is writing would meet the standards he set earlier as a critic. “History can probably be the only judge of that.” He still does not think that politics requires one to behave immorally. “My latest experience, however, makes me want to underline five times a sentence that, until a few weeks ago, I thought unnecessary to underline even once: that the way of a truly moral politics is neither simple nor easy”
Six months later comes the Tokyo long-range argument with me, which is, so far as I can judge, his last major stab at this issue before his resignation as the president of a now clearly dissolving Czechoslovakia in July 1992. (The English edition rather glosses over this discontinuity, but what is described as his “abdication speech” can be found in the relevant Czech volume.)8 Since he came back to the Castle as president of the Czech Republic in January 1993, courtesy of the votes of Václav Klaus’s party and with much reduced powers, he has returned to the theme on various occasions, most recently in his welcome speech to the PEN congress, but without, so far as I can see, adding significant new elements to his argument.
I have quoted what Havel has to say on this subject at some length because his reflections are always i
nteresting but also because only through extensive quotation does a problem become apparent. The problem is that what he has to say is often vague and confused, and this analytical confusion reflects a deeper confusion about his own role.
In his PEN speech, for example, he confuses the intellectual’s engagement in politics in the broader sense (that is, without being directly involved in the pursuit of power or office) and in the narrower sense (the anecdote about urging his writer friend to take office). But, as I argued against Klaus, the distinction is very important.
The argument in the Copenhagen speech is also confused. Is he saying that politics is or is not a dirty business? If it isn’t a dirty business, then why should it require exceptionally “pure” people to get involved without being corrupted? Anyway, why should we imagine that intellectuals are any better equipped to resist the temptations of power, to remain decent, upright, and uncorrupted, than ordinary mortals? One might well argue, with Ivan Klíma, quite the contrary: the record of intellectuals in power in the twentieth century suggests that they are among the least likely to resist the insidious poison, precisely because they are most able to rationalize, intellectualize, or philosophically justify their own submission or corruption by referring to higher goals or values. Orwell’s faith in “ordinary men” may also be misplaced, but the history of Europe in the twentieth century gives us no grounds for believing that intellectuals will do any better.
The argument about the irresponsibility of not taking political responsibility is also a highly questionable projection from the very particular situation of postcommunist Central Europe, and specifically of V. Havel, to the general one. Of course, in the unique situation of 1989, in countries where the only alternative to the nomenklatura was a new political elite drawn largely from the ranks of more or less independent intellectuals, it would have been shirking responsibility not to take office. “Someone had to” is, for 1990, an entirely valid observation. But even then it could be the polite and, as it were, p.c. (or, rather, m.c.—morally correct) guise for personal ambition. Lech Wałȩsa’s “Nie chcȩ, ale muszȩ” (“I don’t want to, but I must”) has become proverbial in Poland. In any case, this is the particular problem of a particular historical moment. As a new class of professional politicians emerges, there is no reason at all why those intellectuals who do not feel comfortable in professional politics—with its different rules of play, its different way with words—should not return to their desks, laboratories, or studios.
Then there is Havel’s powerful argument about the need to change consciousness. But why need intellectuals be in politics in order to change the consciousness of their own societies or a wider world? To be sure, it is good to have politicians with larger visions. In conversation, Havel mentions the examples of de Gaulle, Adenauer, and Churchill. But, if the point is to change consciousness, then the classics of the samizdat reading list—Orwell, Hayek, Popper, and, of course, Havel—have done as much or more. You don’t have to be a president or a prime minister to change consciousness. In fact, you may stand a rather better chance if you’re not.
There remains the general claim about introducing a new moral, intellectual, and spiritual dimension into our routinized, specialized, unimaginative party politics—a “new wind,” to recall Havel’s own metaphor. At this point, at the latest, one has to turn from the writing to the man. For Havel now differs fundamentally from most writers or philosophers, in that the test case of the truth of the propositions he is advancing is himself. As he constantly points out, the test of what Václav Havel argues in these speeches is what Václav Havel does as president—which is, of course, now mainly to give speeches.
3
So how far has Havel achieved the very high goal that he set himself five years ago? Particularly in his first two years as president of Czechoslovakia, the achievement was immense. Through his words and deeds, he both preached and practiced a resolute and morally sensitive moderation, civility, tolerance, and decency that contributed a huge amount to the peaceful, civilized nature of the transition from communism in Czechoslovakia. There was nothing inevitable about this. Were it not for him, it could have been much messier, dirtier, even bloody. Beyond that, he has been an extraordinary and much-needed voice in Europe and beyond. While the response of West European leaders to what happened five years ago was woefully inadequate, while they fiddled as Yugoslavia began to burn, he has constantly and eloquently reminded us of the larger historical dimensions of what has happened in Europe, and—if one can say this without too much pathos—of our duty.
Of course he did not become Plato’s philosopher-king, or even, to take the obvious comparison, a second Masaryk. At times, he does seem to hold the peculiar Masarykian belief which Ernest Gellner ironically sums up as “No State Formation without Philosophic Justification.” But he is not a systematic philosopher, and 1989 was not 1918. Yet measured by any but the vertiginous standards he has set himself, the first two years of the playwright-king would be accounted a remarkable success.
Since then, however, and especially since his abdication in 1992 and his return as Czech president in 1993, it has been, to say the least, a more mixed picture. There are many reasons for this, but the one most relevant here is his refusal to choose between the roles of intellectual and politician.
If, when the Civic Forum broke up on the initiative of Václav Klaus in 1991, Havel had allowed himself to be identified clearly with the remaining movement or some new political movement or even—perish the thought—a political party, he would certainly have stretched the terms of his office, but he might also have had a real political power base as well as his own charisma and popularity. As it was, he refused to engage in those normal, partisan (and often dirty) politics. His power slipped away. Up came Václav II, on whose reluctant sufferance he was, in a quite humiliating way, elected Czech president in 1993, with very limited powers. Havel himself recalls with anger how members of the Czech parliament openly ignored him, reading newspapers or chatting while he addressed them. Wryly, but with more than a touch of bitterness, he mutters, in English, the word clown.
Yet at the same time, his image and voice as an intellectual have become blurred. It’s not just the suits and ties (in which he says he still feels uncomfortable), the ceremonial duties, and the compromises, such as that on the “lustration” law. It’s not just the privileged isolation from ordinary life—the life in a velvet cage that he describes so vividly in his Copenhagen speech but that has nonetheless alienated many former close associates and friends. All that apart, there is simply the plain fact that a president’s speeches are not a writer’s essays. Text and context interact in a different and much less favorable way. Life contradicts art.
Even the outward form of Toward a Civil Society somehow speaks to us of the blurring of the voice that comes from the confusion of roles. The copyright page tells us this book is published with financial assistance from the Czech foreign ministry. Does a book by Havel really need a subsidy to be published? It comes with jacket endorsements from Zbigniew Brzezinski, Eduard Shevardnadze, and one Thomas Klestil, who, readers may like to know, is the president of Austria. Does Havel really need to be puffed by a Klestil? The cover photograph shows a man in a pinstriped suit and tie speaking in front of the yellow-stars-on-blue-background of the Council of Europe and the EU. In other words, this book looks just like a professional politician’s piece of government-subsidized vanity publishing—which, of course, it definitely is not. But it looks like it.
“The strongest poison ever known / Came from Caesar’s laurel crown,” wrote William Blake. I do not believe that Václav Havel has been poisoned by power in any normal sense. If mildly infected at all, it is in the rather unusual form of being, so to speak, aesthetically enamored of the theater of high politics—which, as he is the first to point out, is even more the theater of the absurd than the most absurdist of his own plays.
Earlier this year, I heard him give a brilliantly funny description of the stage management
of President Clinton’s visit to Prague and, in particular, of his visit with Clinton to a typical Prague pub with a typical gathering of typical locals—all carefully identified by the American embassy beforehand. (The typical locals included the writer Bohumil Hrabal.) It was a wonderful foretaste of the book he might write when he ceases to be president. But I must admit that for a moment I did find myself uneasily wondering what the dissident writer Václav Havel would have made of such a stage-managed scene, what subtle lessons he would have drawn about the alienation of the powerful.
Probably the shortest and best retort ever made to Plato’s vision of the philosopher-king is Kant’s remark that for philosophers to become kings is neither desirable nor possible, because “the possession of power unavoidably spoils the free use of reason.” Havel’s case is an interesting variation on this eternal truth, because it seems to me that the greater threat to his free use of reason may actually be the relative loss of power he has experienced since 1992—a loss that Václav Klaus misses no occasion to rub in. Havel is now fighting to regain some of the lost power, staking out his own political agenda in a series of speeches stressing the importance of education, local government, civic engagement, and so on. He now even seems prepared, at least on some issues, to be a focus for opposition to Klaus—an opposition that is to be found not least within the prime minister’s own governing coalition. But to use his “spoken essays” in this instrumental way would seem to be a departure from the standards he has set himself—and simply a sad comedown from his position five years ago.
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