Story of Czech Republic and Vaclav Havel [individual assignment]
STORY OF CZECH REPUBLIC AND VÁCLAV HAVEL
In 1967, students staged anti-Soviet demonstration in Prague. Starting from January 1968 these demonstrations became more extensive and large-scale. The head of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek, who had recently assumed his office, made a statement about “the necessity of democratization of socialism” and launched a liberalization policy that led to the weakening and eventual abolition of censorship. At the same time, anti-Soviet sentiments were becoming more widespread in the country. In response to these developments, the Soviet authorities sent troops to Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968 (Operation Danube). As the Czech government was prohibited from using military force, Czech people confronted Soviet troops with their own forces, in an action that became known as the “Prague Spring.” Eventually the protestors were suppressed by tanks in 1968, resulting in the death of over 100 people; 500 citizens of Czechoslovakia were injured. Václav Havel, a renowned Czech writer and playwright and future prominent intellectual and politician, whose anti-Soviet proclamations and work was largely popular among Czech youth from the late 1960s, was the first to confront these developments openly. The communist government arrested Havel and threw him in prison for 4 months and his plays were prohibited. After he was released from prison, Havel continued participating in the dissident movement and soon established an organization named Charter 1977. Havel was arrested once more, and this time sentenced to 4 years in prison.
In the 1980s, civil unrest in Czechoslovakia returned. In response to the brutal dispersal of a peaceful manifestation of students on November 17, 1989, and under the initiative of Havel, the “Civic Forum” was established, which later spearheaded the most large-scale and widespread movement for liberating Czechoslovakia from the communist regime. The Catholic Church was actively involved in civil activities, and although the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia did not carry as much weight as it did in Poland, it clearly supported the citizens. The process ended successfully with elections in 1990, the defeat of the communist party and the coming of Havel into power.
Throughout his political work, Václav Havel highlighted many times the role of civil society participated in the Czech Republic in the fight against the communist regime. He often talked about the idea of civil society and attributed great importance to the development of true civic activism in the post-totalitarian epoch.
“Civil society, at least as I see it, is simply one of the great opportunities for human responsibility for the world.
I certainly do not need to stress how important it is in today’s world, which is endangered by so many different threats, that we cultivate opportunities of this kind.
This finally brings me to the point that perhaps most clearly concerns in the same measure both my fellow citizens and yourselves: In the world of today – enveloped by a global, essentially materialistic and widely self-jeopardizing civilization – one of the ways of combatting all the escalating dangers consists in the systematic creation of a universal civil society. In my opinion, the state in the next century – in the intrinsic interest of a rapidly growing humankind – should visibly transform itself from a mystic embodiment of national ambitions and a cult-like object into a civil administration unit, and it should get used to the necessity of delegating many of its powers either to the levels below it, that is, to organisms of civil society, or to those above it, that is, to the transnational or global – and thus actually civic – communities and organizations.
I am certainly not against patriotism. We should love our country at least as much as we love our family, our village or town, our profession, as well as the planet on which we are destined to live and on which we have, among other things, the country that is our home. I am only against nationalism – a blind elevation of national affiliation above everything else.
Nor am I against any religion, any culture or any specific tradition of the human civilization. I am only against all kinds of fanaticism or fundamentalism which, again, blindly elevates one level of human identity above all its other levels.
It seems to me that the most open arrangement – one that best enables all types of human self-identification to develop alongside one another – is an arrangement based on the civic principle, an arrangement founded on faith in the citizen and on respect for him.
One of the most important expressions of such a civic arrangement is that which we call civil society.
I wish you success in your deliberations on this subject, in the faith that all those who reflect on it without bias advance us all towards a better future.”
Expert questions
1. What are the facts of the case?
2. What was the outcome?
3. What factors appear to have been significant in the outcome? Explain your reasoning.
4. What does each of the cases (Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Ukraine) have in common?
5. How are the cases (Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Ukraine) different?
6. What can be learned from both the similarities and differences of the cases?