The Life of Vaclav Havel: Saint from the End of History

“...no one of my generation will ever forget those powerful scenes from Wenceslas Square two decades ago. Havel led the Czech people out of tyranny. And he helped bring freedom and democracy to our entire continent.”
David Cameron 2011

 “There is no real evidence that Western democracy, that is, democracy of the traditional parliamentary type, can offer solutions that are any more profound. It may even be said that the more room there is in the Western democracies (compared to our world) for the genuine aims of life, the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply do they become immersed in it.”
Vaclav Havel 1978

“...you [Foucault] were the first to teach us a fundamental lesson… the indignity of speaking for others”
Deleuze on Foucault

The recently departed Vaclav Havel is arguably one of the most important Europeans of the last hundred years.

Such an accolade is not advanced because of his participation in 'Charter 77', the 'Velvet Revolution' of 1989 nor his ascendancy to the Czech presidency a few years later, but rather is made, more born of empirical observation then obliging encomium, because Havel performed a particular role within the collective European imagination from 1968 until his recent death this week – this including the tumultuous events of 1977.

His role, particularly after 1989, can not be understated. The key moments of his own life were also the key moments writ large for post-war Europe. As his compatriot and fellow writer Milan Kundera wrote of him,

“...Havel's is the rare life that resembles a work of art and gives the impression of a perfect compositional unity."

Havel's life was quite a journey. As Zizek wrote of such 'compositional unity' over a decade ago,  

"...rarely has one individual played so many different parts. The cocky young student in the early Fifties, member of a closed circle which holds passionate political discussions and somehow survives the worst years of the Stalinist terror. The Modernist playwright and critical essayist struggling to assert himself in the mild thaw of the late Fifties and Sixties. The first encounter with History – in the Prague Spring – which is also Havel’s first big disappointment. The long ordeal of the Seventies and most of the Eighties, when he is transformed from a critical playwright into a key political figure. The miracle of the Velvet Revolution, with Havel emerging as a skilful politician negotiating the transfer of power and ending up as President.”

This is the 'composition' that we hear of in the eulogies of Western leaders and commentators mourning the loss of of the statesman, 'Europe's Mandela [1]' Havel. Zizek however chooses to add one final 'movement' of which we hear very little in the panegyrics of the great man's passing among the usual, obsequious suspects,

“...finally, there is Havel in the Nineties, the man who presided over the disintegration of Czechoslovakia and who is now the proponent of the full integration of the Czech Republic into Western economic and military structures."

This final and rather contentious point is of course missing in the eulogies Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy. Havel was after all a noble 'defender of freedom' - a latter day saint. Indeed Havel is perhaps one of the last saints Europe could conceivably produce, he is after all the an icon of 1989 and the years thereafter. He is the Saint Wenceslaus of the demise of the Warsaw Pact, who eventually became a king like that other Czech saint and his namesake. [2] Vaclav Havel was the patron saint of the end of history and if Francis Fukuyama was its chronicler, Saint Matthew, Havel was its Saint Peter.

The Journey: 1968-1977, 1989-2011

The story of Havel, and the 'perfection' of his life as composition, is to an extent the story of 1968 and 1989 and the relationship between those two intense and momentous years. One might be inclined to believe that Havel as microcosm represented the 'shift' from the first date to the second and that Havel was a personification of the INEVITABLE trajectory from 1968 to 1989.

This is of course entirely untrue.

Put simply, 1968 sought liberation from the everyday, an excess of life, emancipation of the self and the social body in the fullest sense. 1989 desired, rightly, an end to state socialism, and wrongly, appealed to liberal democratic frameworks of civil and rights based 'politics' as the only appropriate solution. The desires of '68 – individual liberty, emanicipation, free expression were by 1989 recognised as the good life, but only as commodified preferences within a market. The idea of a radical subjectivity of 'making oneself' had by then been reduced to full participation in the market, the commodification of everything with universal suffrage and equality under the law bolted onto the side – no matter if the orthodoxy of liberal capitalism itself inevitably meant new forms of a one-party state.

Havel was entirely on board with such a project. Yet it was not always thus.

In 'Power of the Powerless' (written in 1978) just as he was critical of state socialism and the Warsaw Pact, he was also critical of arrangements as he understood them within the 'free' West,

“...there is no real evidence that Western democracy, that is, democracy of the traditional parliamentary type, can offer solutions that are any more profound. It may even be said that the more room there is in the Western democracies (compared to our world) for the genuine aims of life, the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply do they become immersed in it.”

Here was an intellect that was uninterested in being hostage to an orthodoxy that still clearly limited the fullest flourishing of humanity. A noble sentiment. As a writer Havel seemed to persist with an aesthetic notion of the good while holding a position, bordering on that of Negri or Spinoza, that intelligence should never be an instrument of dominatory power (potestas). Namely politics.

How then, as Zizek writes, do we get from,

"...the lone, fragile dissident with a crumpled jacket and uncompromising ethics, who opposes the all-mighty totalitarian power, to the President who...reminds us that human rights are conferred on us by the Creator, and is applauded in the US Congress for his defence of Western values? (who) ...indulges in New Age ruminations that aim to legitimise Nato military interventions."

1968-1977: Genesis of a Dissent

1968 was a momentous year for Havel both personally and politically. It is in 1968 that he first finds himself as a writer of international repute when his play 'The Memorandum' is shown at the Public Theatre in New York. That same year, with the suppression of the Prague Spring, Havel found his work banned inside his native Czechoslovakia. It was this mix of foreign acclaim and domestic censorship that, as is so often the case, was sufficient to render him a key political figure after 1968. Consequently he found himself becoming more active in an explicitly political sense and came to resemble the 'dissident' – a leitmotif favoured by media of the powerful across the world - as much as a playwright over the following years. After '68 his ouevre never failed to to engage with politics and dissent.

These years after 1968 should then be understood as the making of both Havel as political figure and the formative years of the Velvet Revolution as historical event. Both in chrysallis for two decades thereafter.

In 1977, almost equidistant between those two dates Havel along with other dissidents, most notably, Ludvik Vaculik and Pavel Landovsky co-authored Charter 77. This was to prove a seminal document in criticizing the regime for failing to implement the human rights provisions of a number of documents it had signed. These included the 1960 Constitution of Czechoslovakia, the Final Act of the 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and various other United Nations covenants on political, civil, economic, and cultural rights to which Czechoslovakia was a signatory.

Charter '77 defined its signatories as a "...loose, informal, and open association of people . . . united by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect of human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world." The emphasis the charter placed on civil rights ultimately triumphed in post-1989 Czechoslovakia as Havel, on a liberal democratic platform, ascended to power and unanimously won election to the post of president of a democratic Czechoslovakia that was no longer beholden to the Warsaw Pact. It was for his participation with Charter '77 that Havel was to find himself incarcerated for intermittent periods of time, the longest of which was for five years between 1979 and 1984. These are of course actions and consequences for which one can have nothing but the utmost respect.  It is these three key dates in Havel's life 1968, 1977 and 1989 that are perhaps the three most important years in European history until the current crisis and the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008. For Franco Berardi, it is 1977, the year of the 'German Autumn', Autonomia's crushing by a highly militarized Italian state and the birth of a Britsh punk genre whose cry is 'there's no future, in England's dreaming', that the hopes of '68 find themselves contorted into failed political movements, cultural angst and murder.

However 1977 for Havel and Czech dissidents was something rather different. The year initiated a process whereby they and their countrymen were central within the events of 1989 - a truly momentous occasion, liberation from the Warsaw Pact and the ordained 'end of history'. While we see the death of the dreams of 1968 in the events of Germany and Italy in 1977 we also see the embryo of the 'demands' for that next wave of upheavals in the Eastern Bloc in 1989. 1968-1977-1989 no wonder Kundera compares the symmetry in Havel's life to historical events for Europe more generally as instructive of a 'perfect composition'.

 The Bearable Heaviness of Governing: Saint Vaclav - an Ingenious King

Perhaps surprisingly for a dissident turned international political figure Havel remained something of an idealist on entering the diplomatic stage. Years in prison and dealing with a repressive Czechoslovak state had not endowed him with the steely realpolitik of others of his generation. On greeting Chancellor Kohl Havel in early 1990 he reportedly said, ‘...why don’t we work together to dissolve all political parties? Why don’t we set up just one big party, the Party of Europe?’ This motif, of compromise, the end of history and with it ideology, embodies the politics of Havel in particular and 1989 more generally. Here is, after all, a man who having insisted on the neccesity of autonomous intitatives beyond the state in creating social change was happy to house an integral part of a global nuclear capability on Czech soil when he was later in office.
Furthermore, the charismatic 'post-political' figure of Havel in which we see the elapse of politics as antagonism is neatly contrasted by Havel's biographer, John Keane, with that other great Vaclav of post-1989 Czech politics, Václav Klaus, his Prime Minister, the cold technocratic advocate of market fundamentalism who 'dismisses any talk of solidarity and community.' If Havel was the velvet glove of the velvet revolution, Klaus was its iron fist. No guesses for whose politics drove Czech economic and social policy thereafter.

Such an aversion to ideology goes deep and is even explicit within Havel's writing. As he wrote in 1977,

“...ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo...The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe. . . .”.

He had also previously recognized the failings of the ideology of 'western' liberal democracy when writing, “..there is no real evidence that Western democracy, that is, democracy of the traditional parliamentary type, can offer solutions that are any more profound.”

From such remarks one concludes that his aversion to ideology was one that criticized both East and West before 1989. Havel seemingly recognized that both market and state could have differing forms of totalitarianism founded upon them.

One can only presume that in 1989 Havel was only content to participate so centrally as he viewed the entire beast of ideology as itself coming apart. Why else would a man, willing to be incarcerated for years at a time, take part in such events? It can only be that he believed that the liberal democratic model and the Velvet Revolution did indeed permit such an escape from that 'specious way of looking at the world'. 1989 represented an escape from ideology and in a way politics, hence his remark to Kohl a few months later. He thought like Francis Fukuyama and eed Hegel in 1808, that it was the end of history.

Did Havel fall for the myth of capitalist realism – an orthodoxy that poses itself beyond ideology and instead posits itself as reality? Within the understanding of capitalist realism, 'reality' and 'the real' should be understood as distinct - and any system that posits itself as 'reality', as Zupancic points out, should invite suspicion,

“..the reality principle is not some kind of natural way associated with how things are ... The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact (or biological, economic ...) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as non-ideological). It is precisely here that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology.”

Thus while Havel believed that the liberal democratic system demanded in Charter '77 and which ultimately 'won' in 1989 meant an end to the danger, as he identifies it in 'Power of the Powerless', of ideology, he failed to recognize the latent ideology within the 'reality' of the Velvet Revolution and post-1989 Europe. Namely the ideology of late capitalism and market fundamentalism.

As Zizek writes,

“...if the concept of ideology is the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge then today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way ...to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.”

Havel's postion on Atlantic-looking, liberal-interventionist foreign policy seems at odds with any meaningful comparison to Mandela or Martin Luther King. Indeed given his allegiance to the US as the world's exclusive military hyper-power such comparisons seem downright bizarre and the definition of ideology. As Zizek wrote in 1999 in the London Review of Books,  

"Havel praised the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia as the first case of a military intervention in a country with full sovereign power, undertaken not out of any specific economico-strategic interest but because that country was violating the elementary human rights of an ethnic group. To understand the falseness of this, compare the new moralism with the great emancipatory movements inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. These were movements directed not against a specific group of people, but against concrete (racist, colonialist) institutionalised practices; they involved a positive, all-inclusive stance that, far from excluding the ‘enemy’ (whites, English colonisers), made an appeal to its moral sense and asked it to do something that would restore its own moral dignity."  

There was no greater evangelist of the end of history and western interventionism then Havel. He displayed a proclivity, as evidenced in his exchange with Kohl, for forms of 'post-political' compromise where 'we have no parties' or ideology – where only 'pragmatism' reigns.

Such pragmatism can mean, it turns out, bombing those we disagree with.

Unlike some of his more noble thoughts in 1977, Havel after 1989, did not seek to situate, in the Aristotlian sense, an ethics of the 'good life' within his politics. This is integral to capitalist realism as an ideology. As Guy Aitchison writes of the centrality of antagonism to politics,

"....a politics of emancipation is, and always will be, about the formation of collective identities around points of conflict and antagonism. There is nothing unseemly about this. Failure to realise it reinforces a diluted, centrist politics trapped by the demobilising logic of the lowest common denominator. Naturally, the idea that we live in a post-political age, in which earlier political orientations and conflicts are irrelevant, suits the powers that be quite nicely. Indeed, a central dynamic of neoliberalism is the removal of ever more spheres of social life from political control. Public services are privatised, whilst economic policy decisions are handed to technocratic bodies insulated from popular pressures. In the writings of Austrian economist F.A Hayek, and those of his followers on the New Right in the 1970s and 80s, the elimination of political disagreement and conflict is fundamental since it permits the substitution of democracy for the market. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “End of History”, social democratic parties in Europe and the US gave up on providing an alternative to neoliberalism seeking merely to moderate its excesses."

It is little wonder that Havel was so feted by the likes of Bush, Chirac, Sarkozy, Blair and Obama – Havel did after all champion “the idea that we live in a post-political age, in which earlier political orientations and conflicts are irrelevant”. As Aitchison points out – such a rationale serves only the powerful who have the opportunity to conflate advancing their own interests with 'modernization' or 'pragmatism'. As Blair would frequently say, “get real” which inevitably meant “agree with me because I am right”.  In thinking of Havel's achievements and how posterity may remember both him and the 'Velvet Revolution' it is best to depart with a few questions. What can we make of a man compared to a saint when he was so at ease with helping home an integral part of a global US nuclear capability in his native Czech Republic? And could such a man seriously conceive of himself in opposition to all ideology?

Consequently, in light of the Great Recession of 2008, the 'return of history' and with it the inexorable end of the 'Pax Europea' and 'Pax Americana' how do we think of the 'revolutionaries' of 1989 more generally, and, are those saints from the period a subject ripe for revision?

It is beyond doubt that Havel, by serving years in prison was a martyr for freedom, but were ECB, the Council of Ministers and the European Commission to impose a government on the Czechs as they have already with the Italians and Greeks the question would have to be asked - was it really worth it? Was not 1989 an exchange of allegiance from one imperium to another, of one ideology, one orthodoxy for another?  Havel's own comments to Kohl reveal much about himself and the zeitgeist between 1989 and 2008. We wish away the ghost of political antagonism amid the belief the economy will grow into perpetuity - scarcity and conflict have been at long last overcome. Amid such conditions good men like Havel presume they are permitting political 'compromise' and pragmatism when in fact it is the powerful who are bestowed with everything. A lesson then. Beware those saints that merit the acclaim of earthly kings.