The Prague Post Online: Opinion: Bad mood

September 6th, 2008

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Bad mood

Awkward revolution followed by mistakes and national malaise
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January 30th, 2008 issue

By Gia Emilia Castellano

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and Dominik Jůn

On a cold, damp Saturday in November, perhaps 200 Czechs gathered at Prague’s Narodní třída in the center of the city to mark the 18th year of freedom from communist oppression.

It was a far cry from the estimated 250,000 that filled Wenceslas Square at the height of the revolution in 1989, when anti-government protests ultimately brought an end to the communist regime.

The 2007 “celebration” was somewhat muted by a mixed bag of demonstrations, from opponents of Czech plans to approve a

U.S. radar base on its territory, to nationalists demanding more autonomy for the Czech Republic.

Former President Václav Havel once spoke about the country suffering from a “bad mood.” Looking around the streets of Prague on what was meant to be a day of celebration, his words sounded painfully understated.

A false hope

Why has the sense of pride, finally uncorked after centuries of oppression and disappointment, not solidified in the years following 1989?

According to former Civic Forum dissident Jan Urban, the answer is simple.

“We were naive. We thought communist oppression was the only reason why the government didn’t work. We automatically believed that, once the oppression was gone, everything would reverse. Essentially, we thought the ending of communism was a solution in itself,” Urban says.

Today, many of the dissidents who fueled the revolution have retreated from politics. The vacuum this left has been filled by political opportunists, who many believe robbed the country and ushered in a new era of corruption and greed.

The result is a distinctly gloomy national mood.

In 2002, Havel described “the world of fairy tales” that he and the nation were catapulted into with the ending of the Cold War, and the “hard fall to earth” that soon followed.

According to Urban, a particular Czech trait has played a crucial role in slowing progress here.

“Passivity goes back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For 150 years, this has been a constant feature in Czech politics.”

Indeed, since the days of the Habsburg Empire, the Czech people have had to deal with many, often involuntary, transformations of “national identity.”

“Cynicism is the cheapest and easiest way to escape responsibility. You feel responsible, you act, but that could be too risky. So it is easiest to be cynical and do nothing,” Urban says.

The revolution

In the autumn of 1989, the anti-reformist, hard-line communist Czechoslovak government was living in a bubble. The Berlin Wall had already fallen and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was providing the catalyst for the downfall of Soviet communism across Europe and beyond.

On Nov. 17, around 15,000 demonstrators gathered at Národní třída to mark International Students’ Day. The protest soon turned into an anti-government rally. Riot police responded in a particularly heavy-handed manner, ultimately attacking several participants.

In the ensuing days, demonstrations turned into strikes, and students were soon joined by much of the country. The communists attempted a false “revolution” purging many of the old guard such as Communist Party leader Milouš Jakeš and installing a moderate reformer (Karel Urbánek) in his place.

But the Civic Forum organization, led by Havel, would not retreat from its demands for free and fair elections. In the end, the communist government had to concede, and 40 years of one-party rule came to a peaceful end.

By unanimous vote of the federal assembly, Havel was elected president Dec. 29, 1989. His dissident credentials were unquestionable, and his background as a playwright seemed to perfectly embody the cultural awakening that provided the backbone to the Prague Spring of 1968.

Sadly, Havel’s grand ideas for the nation were weakened, not only by waning Czech resolve, but also by the split of Czechoslovakia in 1992.

Furthermore, Havel lacked the necessary political know-how to keep a firm grip over the inner-workings of the government system. His unpolished political style alienated him from Parliament, making it nearly impossible to transform the country into a truly open and transparent democracy.

Soon, the president’s lofty words and visions were being undermined by greedy opportunists and shady businessmen. Corruption scandals and “affairs” soon became the order of the day, a state of affairs that has continued unabated to this day.

A troubled transition

Could the dissidents have done more to prevent the political vacuum in the country being filled by these corrupt opportunists? The biggest problem was that dissidents “didn’t know what they wanted,” Urban says.

Another mistake that understandably left Czechs feeling they had been duped once again was that there was no punishment offered to those who left the state in ruins (former President Gustáv Husák was given amnesty from prosecution Dec. 8, 1989, and many other key figures also escaped prosecution).

How could it be that a movement, driven in the name of human and civil rights, would allow communist leaders, who so clearly violated those rights, to go unpunished?

“We never gave people a sense of justice,” Urban says. “You need to give people a sense of justice, marking [communism] evil and our vision good.”

Had this been done, Urban believes Czechs might have felt like something had been done to right the wrongs against them. But, since it didn’t happen, Czechs were left with a growing sense of resentment and cynicism.

At the same time, Prague Radio journalist Jan Richter reminds us that the times leading up to the Velvet Revolution were very different from the communist persecution committed in the 1950s.

“People were not being treated as badly as they had been before, and it would have been impossible to punish all those that were guilty. How do you choose who is the worst, and then should be punished? If you wanted to prosecute communists who were in positions of heads of state, then you would have had no one left.”

Questions of just who was guilty of what continue to dog all post-totalitarian societies. Jan Urban explains, “Czechs are always reviewing their past, and using it in present politics. Right now, the majority of the political elite don’t want to remember what they did before 1989. For example, you have former communists in right-wing parties. Unfortunately for them, the revolution was organized and led by dissidents and students who are not in politics anymore. So no present political figure was involved.”

The anti-Havel?

If one figure embodies the complete antithesis of Havel’s notion of a civil and civic Czech Republic, it is the country’s current president, Václav Klaus.

If Havel led the dissident transformation of Czech politics, then without question, Klaus found himself at the center of its more political core — Parliament. Serving as prime minister from 1992 to ’97, Klaus oversaw a period in national politics that was marked by botched privatizations, corruption and scandal.

In 2003, he was elected by Parliament to succeed Havel as president. In direct opposition to Havel, Klaus came to embody not what Czechs should or could aspire to, but what communist rule had made them — defeatist, small-minded, ignorant, nationalistic and ever in search of simplistic answers.

Whereas Havel had asked, in true JFK-style, what Czechs could do for their country, Klaus offered a cocktail of new answers — all of which demanded nothing from the populace other than compliance. Environmentalists were now the threat; civic organizations were anti-democratic; Friedman-omics were the answer, etc., etc. Unsurprisingly, this appeal to the basest instincts has given Klaus a surprising level of popularity in the country. But the price may have been the mood, if not the soul of the nation.

Recipes and cures

Some claim that the civic responsibility Havel so incessantly advocated needs to come into play once again, be it via grassroots organizations, determined investigative journalism, modern and new political parties, or education oriented toward much-needed public awareness and concern over political issues.

For only the second or third time in history, Czechs have the opportunity to determine their own destiny. As such, the cure to the current malaise lies with the Czechs themselves. More civic participation, more political activity, greater awareness and perhaps even a new revolution of sorts — one that clears out the political “dead wood” that has been clogging and sinking the Czech psyche for more than a decade.

The alternative is summarized by a letter written by Havel to Husák in 1975, one that appears as true today as it was back then: “If a self-defensive fear underpins our attempts to preserve what little we possess, then the main motivator for self-advancement becomes little more than selfishness and careerism.” Perhaps those words should be displayed above the heads of today’s members of Parliament?

— This article was written as part of The New Presence internship program with New York University and reprinted with the permission of The New Presence. For more information about The New Presence, go to www.new-presence.cz.

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