Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mideur-l
Date:         Tue, 29 Sep 1992 22:12:54 EDT
From:         Hugh Agnew <AGNEWHL@GWUVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Havel interview

I hope this isn't stale news for everyone; but I picked up an issue of
Lidove noviny in Prague during a recent visit with a lengthy interview
Vaclav Havel gave to Gazeta Wyborcza on his visit to Poland in early
September.  The questions were put by his friends from dissident days,
Adam Michnik and Andrzej Jagodzinski, and transcribed for Lidove noviny
by Roman Krasnicky and Eva Martinkova.  The interview was published in LN
on September 11.  Mr. Havel appeared on Antonin Pridal's TV interview
program "Oci do oci", from the Brno studios of Czech TV, a couple of weeks
later, and said much the same thing.

                 "What Actually Happened? -- V. Havel
                    Tries to Explain to the Poles"

     "A year ago, when we last talked, you still believed in the survival
of a common state of Czechs and Slovaks.  The fate of the federation appears
now, however, to have run its course.  What actually happened?

     The decisive moment was the last parliamentary elections, in which the
party known as HZDS led by Mr. Meciar, an energetic and substantial Slovak
politician, won decisively on a program of the maximum emancipation for
Slovakia.  It is an expression of a certain long-range trend, but it was
this moment that was decisive for bringing about this momentous change.

     "You have declared yourself to be a great federalist.  Could you
characterize your present position towards federation?

     I continue to be a friend of federalist thinking.  Nevertheless my
federalism doesn't go so far as to deny any nation its right to self-
determination, and I believe that if Slovak society wants and yearns for
its own state, then it has an incontrovertible right to have it.  All the
same I also believe that this independent Slovak state, just like the
independent Czech state, is actually only a sort of historical phase, a
kind of preparation for a future federation.

     "After the last parliamentary elections the Czech political scene was
diametrically changed.  How would you interpret the fact that two groupings
rising out of the former Civic Forum, namely the Civic Movement (OH) and Civic
Democratic Party (ODA) gained fewer votes than the Communists or the Repub-
licans of Milan Sladek?

     There are many reasons, one could write a whole book about them.  But I
will at least mention some of them.  One is the electoral law.  Personally,
I struggled for a different one, than the one according to which we finally
voted.  A further reason is the ability and will of certain parties actually
to behave like political parties, who want to win elections, who do everything
necessary to that end, who run a proper campaign, engage expert advice for it,
and so on.  OH did not have that powerful will to build a party as such, it
was led by individuals, partly burdened with various state functions, to whose
carrying out they gave precedence over building the party and striving for its
victory.  A further reason is probably rooted in a certain polarization of
society, which is again a corresponding feature of the historical phase we are
in.  And one could find a whole series of other such reasons.

     "Bohemia today stands on the threshold of its own statehood.  What does
the name -- Czech state -- signify?  To which traditions should it adhere?
It seems that Czech politicians today avoid this theme and assert that there
will be time enough in the future to think about it.

     That is connected to the fact that the Czech state is arising as it were
involuntarily.  The Czechs have identified with Czechoslovak statehood for the
last 75 years, they felt themselves to be Czechoslovak patriots, the idea of
a Czech state during the last decades had no special base since it was merged
with the idea of Czechoslovak statehood, and thus today, when the Czech state
faces the task of establishing itself, we can observe a certain amount of
bewilderment and hesitation.  There is much discussion about this, much talk
of the idea of a Czech state, of Czech interests.  For myself I would like to
say one thing about that.  I believe that the market economy is a condition of
existence, an unavoidable prerequisite and part and parcel of the building of
this state.  But I also believe that this in and of itself would be little.
The market economy is the program of many lands from Bohemia to Hong Kong, and
one could hardly found a state only on this idea, because then the question
might arise, why not become the seventeenth Bundesland of the Federal Republic
of Germany, why have an independent state because of the market economy when
it is a universal program.  I believe that it is necessary to seek further
dimensions of Czech political tradition and Czech statehood.  One of them is,
in my opinion, something which has from time immemorial always returned and
reappeared in Czech political life.  And that is the sense of a certain wider
responsibility.  When Czech policy was egoistical, it was unsuccessful.  When
it grasped the fact that the stability and prosperity of the Czech lands was
possible only on the basis of a certain Central European and European stability
then it was successful.  This sense of internal responsibility, this sense that
the Czech cause is the human cause, for all humanity, appears from St. Vaclav,
Charles IV, Jiri z Podebrad, Comenius, Masaryk, Patocka.  It returns to Czech
history again and again.  It seems to me that it is this political line that
ought to be encoded into the foundations of this independent Czech state, and
that it should be thus also a guarantee of its prospects of a sort.

     "What is happening in Slovakia is a mystery to us.  Is this the culmi-
nation of the national renascence, that is a process of the 19th century, or
is it nostalgia for the good old days of socialism?

     It is true that the national principle is much more widely accepted in
Slovakia than in the Czech lands.  It is also true that society there is more
strongly inclined to a paternalistic type of state.  Both features have there
distinct historical reasons.  One can't say that Slovak history is a history
of the longing for an independent state, that would not be exact.  It is a
history of the longing to be able to decide over their own affairs, which in
certain phases had the form of, for example, the desire for autonomy.  It is
basically the desire to stand on one's own two feet, to be master of one's own
fate, since for a thousand years the Slovaks belonged under someone else's
control, above all under the Magyars.  The desire to decide one's own affairs
is characteristic for Slovak history, but it does not have to, nor did it
always take the form of a desire for an independent state.
     Communism "gleichgeschaltet" everything, from Berlin to Vladivostok there
were the same structures of state administration, the same stars, the same
slogans.  For a long period any sort of need to express one's own distinctness
was suppressed, whether it was national, cultural or social differences.  With
the fall of communism the need to express one's own identity broke through to
the surface, including the national identity, since it was a kind of historical
arrears.  In this region nations have not been able fully to develop their
statehood, because before communism we had the Nazis, before them the Austro-
Hungarian monarchy.  These nations did not have, in contrast to the nations
of Western Europe, enough time to discover their own statehood, to achieve
the required self-consciousness and open themselves later to integrative
processes.  Thus we are catching up with history.  And this touches Slovakia
more than the Czech lands, since the Czechs have had a different history, for
centuries they had their own state, and finally, when an independent Czecho-
slovakia was created, the also considered it to be their own state.
     As far as a certain nostalgia for socialism goes, then it is something
which shows up to a greater or lesser degree in all the post-communist lands.
Even if people dislike the old regime and evetually revolted against it, they
were nevertheless stamped by it in their behavior.  They are accustomed to a
certain structure of values that were given by communism, to all sorts of
guarantees from the cradle to the grave, they were not accustomed to take care
of them selves by themselves, not accustomed to a civil society, and thus they
are coming to terms with their new situation with pain and great difficulty.
But it is different in different countries, and again it shows up more strongly
in Slovakia than in the Czech lands, again thanks to historical traditions,
thanks to the fact that Bohemia was a developed industrial land with a large
entrepreneurial sector, while Slovakia was a less-developed land, rather
agrarian and under communism there was a lot of state investment there, and
actually Slovakia became a little bit accustomed to a system of state inter-
vention, of subsidies and redistribution.  With all this, the industrializa-
tion was not very well carried out, for example in an entire region there is
one giant factory, there is no diversification, and when a factory collapses,
the entire region is without work.  Development there was simply a little
different, and thus the longing for a kind of state dirigisme is also stronger.

     "You have always put forward a `politics springing from the heart, and
not from doctrines'.  You have understood politics as the realization of
ethics.  It seems, however, that this way of thinking about it hasn't
succeeded.  Many people here say that it is an idealistic point of view.
What's your judgement?

     I haven't changed anything in my views about the moral basis of politics.
On the contrary, all my experiences in the realm of high politics again and
again confirm the correctness of such a view.  All the same I have also
discovered that it is unusually difficult to put forward such a conception
of politics against numerically superior particularisms and pragmatism.  It's
interesting that this way of thinking won favor in the Western countries,
in stable democracies that have already gone through the historical phase from
which we have not yet graduated, who have constructed a system of developed
market economy, have tasted all its initial features like commercialization,
the totalitarianism of advertisment, of consumption, and who sense that
something more is necessary, something else.  They have already broken in
all the practical political stereotypes and are a little bit frustrated by it
all and would like somehow to transcend it.  In all my speeches in inter-
national settings this kind of thinking met with great interest, while at
home it generated much less.  We are in a phase in which we are just building
the market economy.  It is a priority for us, and anything at all which does
not concern privatization and market relations is taken a bit like impractical
dreaming, like idealism.  But precisely for that reason it is necessary to
keep on repeating these things, to return to them over and over, whether in
the role of a politician or an independent journalist.

     "We see expressions of nationalism, of xenophobia, of internal conflict,
in many European states.  How do you envision the future of post-communist
Europe?

     The future will be complicated.  These very complications are a great
summons to us to prove that we can unburden ourselves of our particularistic
interests, to prove that we can think in global categories, to accept wider
responsibility, to come closer to the civic principle, to jettison that which
divides us, and emphasize that which unites us.

     "Capek already meditated on the position of the intellectual in the
world.  You are an intellectual and a politician at the same time.  How do
you understand the relation between the responsibility of a politician and
the responsibility of an intellectual?

     I have considered this theme several times already, for example in my
speech to the U.S. Congress.  My main thought is that today's world is in the
midst of a moral crisis.  The way out of this crisis is rooted in a kind of
reconstruction of human consciousness and conscience.  I see this more in
human perception and behavior than in systemic changes and technical tricks.
And this is precisely the territory, in which the intellectual should play an
irreplaceable role, as one whose thinking is always more oreinted to broader
relationships.  So I think that these times are a call to the intellectual
to gain practical political responsibility.  It is very difficult, these
intellectuals by the entire structure of their personalities lean more towards
opposition, they are accustomed to criticize high politics, to consider it
to be something unclean, about which they could only write.  But it seems to
me that the times are on the contrary an appeal rather to them:  if they
are so clever, then let them carry their cleverness out in pratical politics.
If they say "a", they should also say "b".
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