Former President of the Czech Republic Václav Havel left distinct political, philosophical and artistic legacies. Kieran Williams writes that while his words still hold great meaning, they require reading, re-reading and sometimes struggling with texts that were intended to unsettle.
Central Europe recently marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions that ended Communist rule. Such moments provide opportunities to reflect on the legacy of one of the figures most associated with those events, Václav Havel (1936-2011).
In his case, it is more appropriate to speak of not one but three legacies, reflecting the different dimensions of his public life: a political legacy as President of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and of the Czech Republic (1993-2003); a philosophical legacy from his pre-1989 dissident activity; and an artistic legacy as a playwright spanning his whole adult life.
Havel’s political legacy
Havel left behind no party of his own, and the one he supported at the time of his death, the Greens, have been out of the Czech parliament since 2010. Instead, he used the presidential pulpit to champion democracy, human rights, civil society, environmental awareness, European integration and spiritual renewal. These values continue to be promoted by two institutions that he did create: the Václav Havel Library and Forum 2000.
The Czech Republic is due for legislative elections later this year, and one of the cleavages separating the parties and their voters is where they stand in relation to Havel. The centre-right parties in the current government (and President Petr Pavel, elected in 2023), could be said to be on the pro-Havel side of the line, especially in international relations.
The government’s programme vowed to honour the “tradition of Havel’s foreign policy”, which partly accounts for the Czech Republic’s ardent support for Ukraine and Taiwan. The agenda for the Czech presidency of the Council of the European Union in July-December 2022 was modelled on Havel’s 1996 speech “Europe as a Task”. Havel was also cited as a role model for Zuzana Čaputová, President of Slovakia from 2019 to 2024.
Like the late US President Jimmy Carter, Havel felt he had to use his office to tell the country hard truths, and like Carter had his detractors as well as admirers. While Havel’s standing in public opinion has risen posthumously, he remains dismissed or hated among supporters of the two parties that might form the next government, the populist Action of the Dissatisfied Citizen (ANO) of former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy party (SPD). Even with Pavel in the presidency until at least 2028, an ANO-SPD government would be an even greater departure from Havel’s legacy than was the first Babiš administration (ANO in a minority coalition with the Social Democrats).
Havel’s philosophical legacy
Globally, Havel is better known for his pre-presidential role as one of the most famous dissidents in the Soviet bloc. His involvement in groups such as Charter 77, his essays such as “Power of the Powerless” (1978), his spells in prison (and the letters he wrote there), and then his part in the peaceful end of Communist rule continue to inspire campaigners for democracy and human rights worldwide. Since 2013, courageous activists have been recognised by the Council of Europe’s Václav Havel Human Rights Prize.
That the 2024 recipient, María Corina Machado, was unable to accept the award in person because she was in hiding from the Venezuelan regime, and six of the eleven previous winners were in prison at the time of the ceremony, shows the terrible odds that nonviolent resistance faces today. Over the past twenty years, authoritarian states have become more adept at fending off challenges, especially by twisting the internet to their purposes.
On social media, Havel’s carefully crafted thoughts are reduced to anodyne aphorisms, in particular his catchphrase from 1989 that “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hate”. And in English-speaking countries, some conservative intellectuals have latched onto the famous greengrocer vignette from Havel’s “Power of the Powerless”, as if to imply that today’s Culture War critics of “woke” policies are the equivalent of Cold War dissidents. In this environment, Havel’s philosophical legacy is in danger of being reduced to cliché or parody.
Havel’s artistic legacy
Going back still farther in time, before Havel was a dissident, he was a playwright. It was thanks to his success in the theatre that he had the social capital to start writing protest letters to Communist leaders fifty years ago. And the genius of his art was to produce eighteen tragicomic plays that have had an uncanny knack for staying open to reinterpretation in line with changing conditions.
Even Havel’s earliest or less famous plays can speak to our current crises, whether it be “Garden Party” (1963) following an ambitious young man through departments of government liquidation; “Increased Difficulty of Concentration” (1968) depicting sexual cruelty and the use of artificial intelligence to assess human personality; “Conspirators” (1971) plotting the return of a dreaded strongman to power; “Beggar’s Opera” (1972) blurring the political and the criminal worlds; or “Leaving” (2007) putting political narcissism on painful display.
After leaving office himself, Havel lamented the paradox that the more he became a celebrity, the less he was able to use that fame to shock audiences into undertaking the “existential revolution” he said the world needed. With the passage of years, he risks the fate of men such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who in death are turned into revered but non-threatening icons (or, in Havel’s case, a kitschy meme). Havel’s works and words still hold great meaning but require reading, re-reading and sometimes struggling with texts that were intended to unsettle.
For more on Havel’s legacies, see the essays co-edited by the author and David S. Danaher, Václav Havel’s Meanings: His Key Words and Their Legacy (Karolinum Press, 2024).
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Marcin Kadziolka / Shutterstock.com
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