Can Democracy Be Established Undemocratically?
16. 12. 2019
/
Muriel Blaive
čas čtení
16 minut
In
9 November 1989 I was elated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and cried
with happiness. A few days later, I was extremely impressed by an
image I saw in a French magazine: that of demonstrators in Prague,
sitting on the ground with candles and flowers and facing policemen
that were armed to the teeth and holding their transparent shields in
a threatening way. I was so dazzled by the demonstrators’ courage
and moral rectitude that I fell in love with Czechoslovakia there and
then. A few months later I wrote my first scholarly work on Charter
77 and the following year my masters thesis on Václav Havel, in
which I had to struggle to exert any critical mind over my
hard-concealed exaltation.
In
other words, the Velvet Revolution and its euphoric atmosphere
determined the course of my life, as it did of so many other
people’s. However, it is certainly fair to say that not all
promises of the revolution were fulfilled and it is time to
critically examine the revolution itself. The following text was
first published by Public Seminar, which functions as the blog of the
prestigious New School in New York. It is meant as an opening
statement for a discussion, not as a revelatory, definitive, would-be
“historical truth” on the Velvet Revolution. It is not even a
novel interpretation - I only put together fragments of research by
several historians and tried to bring them together in a coherent
narrative. I recently argued in the columns of Britské listy for a
national reconciliation concerning the communist past. I now argue
that the latter can only occur after a critical and self-critical
debate, one of the kinds that Havel was advocating for in his famous
essays Letter to Dr Gustáv
Husák (1975) and The
Power of the Powerless (1978.)
(The
following text was originally published on the server Public
Seminar:
https://publicseminar.org/essays/can-democracy-be-established-undemocratically/.
Jeffrey Goldfarb gracefully allowed Britské
listy to reproduce it.)
November
17th,
2019 was the thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in
Czechoslovakia. This revolution, marvelous though it was, and its
aftermath, I believe, demonstrates that creating a mature democracy
out of thin air is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. The
apparent success of the revolution hid flaws that appeared to be of
secondary importance at that pivotal moment, but that came back to
haunt the fragile democracy. The premium placed on legal continuity
and on the disarming of any potential violence in 1989 would be paid
for dearly later on, in terms of the popularity, and even legitimacy,
of the country’s post-communist regime.
A Czech version of this article is HERE
In
9 November 1989 I was elated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and cried
with happiness. A few days later, I was extremely impressed by an
image I saw in a French magazine: that of demonstrators in Prague,
sitting on the ground with candles and flowers and facing policemen
that were armed to the teeth and holding their transparent shields in
a threatening way. I was so dazzled by the demonstrators’ courage
and moral rectitude that I fell in love with Czechoslovakia there and
then. A few months later I wrote my first scholarly work on Charter
77 and the following year my masters thesis on Václav Havel, in
which I had to struggle to exert any critical mind over my
hard-concealed exaltation.
In
other words, the Velvet Revolution and its euphoric atmosphere
determined the course of my life, as it did of so many other
people’s. However, it is certainly fair to say that not all
promises of the revolution were fulfilled and it is time to
critically examine the revolution itself. The following text was
first published by Public Seminar, which functions as the blog of the
prestigious New School in New York. It is meant as an opening
statement for a discussion, not as a revelatory, definitive, would-be
“historical truth” on the Velvet Revolution. It is not even a
novel interpretation - I only put together fragments of research by
several historians and tried to bring them together in a coherent
narrative. I recently argued in the columns of Britské listy for a
national reconciliation concerning the communist past. I now argue
that the latter can only occur after a critical and self-critical
debate, one of the kinds that Havel was advocating for in his famous
essays Letter to Dr Gustáv
Husák (1975) and The
Power of the Powerless (1978.)
(The
following text was originally published on the server Public
Seminar:
https://publicseminar.org/essays/can-democracy-be-established-undemocratically/.
Jeffrey Goldfarb gracefully allowed Britské
listy to reproduce it.)
November
17th,
2019 was the thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in
Czechoslovakia. This revolution, marvelous though it was,
The Czech
dissidents were confronted at the beginning of the 1989 revolution
with two major obstacles: they were not professional politicians,
which is a diplomatic way of saying that they were complete amateurs
in organizational, political, and economic matters; and, crucially,
they were not representative of the majority of the population. In a
private poll undertaken at the beginning of December, just a couple
of weeks after citizens first protested in Wenceslas Square,
Czechoslovakia’s most famous dissident, Václav
Havel,
was mentioned as a potential presidential candidate by only a
negligible part of the population. The dissidents did represent the
right side of history—the collapse of communism in Europe, that was
unthinkable at the beginning of November. It was the new normal by
January. But their unilateral claim that they alone were best
situated to attain the country’s primary goal of democracy led them
to take many liberties with it. As the subsequent decades would show,
the fact that the dissidents were legitimized by the first
post-communist elections did not erase the damage to standards of
acceptable political behavior that they unwittingly made.
At least three of
their choices were ethically debatable: they had Havel elected by the
communist parliament; they turned down the direct election of the
president by the people in the name of constitutional stability at a
time when a popular revolution was supposed to be ongoing; and they
purged the communist deputies in a process worthy of communist
practices.
The support of
workers was ensured thanks to false promises such as “there will be
no unemployment and no harsh economic measures.” The Slovaks were
treated with contempt. The fear of what the masses could do was
mobilized, the communist MPs were intimidated, communist authorities
were left free to tamper with the Secret Police files, and in order
to isolate the Slovak reform communists and Havel’s potential
political rival, 1968 throwback Alexander Dubček, the Czech (and
soon-to-be neoliberal) economists were coopted and given free reign.
What else could the
dissidents have done, however, one might ask? The moment, after all,
was sudden, and decisions had to be made fast. Certainly, any
scenario for exiting communism would most likely have led to its own
set of impossible choices
and deleterious
effects. Michael Kocáb, the famous singer and dissident,
recapitulated various possible paths in a recent interview for the
Czech news site, Deník
N.
None was satisfying.
One important key
to understanding this present popular dissatisfaction is to be found
not so much in the outcome
of the revolution as in the way
it was achieved,
confronting what Jeffrey Goldfarb calls “the
social condition,”
i.e. dilemmas that are inevitably built into the fabric of society.
It proved to be as impossible to get rid of a dictatorship with
democratic means, as it was to start a healthy democracy based on
undemocratic practices. There was,apparently, no good solution, all
the more so considering that many communist ideals were still
popular. Not one country was fully satisfied with its own exit from
communism – not even East Germany, the only region that benefited
not only from massive investments in its economy, but from an
unspoiled well of judges, policemen, teachers, administrators and all
other essential professionals needed for the establishment of the
rule of law and a viable economy. Despite all its shortcomings, seen
from Poland, Hungary, or Romania today, the Czechoslovak path does
not look so bad. In fact, until recently, the Velvet Revolution was
understood as a satisfactory rupture.
Yet the Czech
population has become deeply dissatisfied with certain aspects of the
change, particularly the growth of poverty and inequality and the
loss of social security. The scale of the corruption, as well as the
sense of impunity, have rivaled and in fact outperformed the worst
excesses of communism. Even more problematic, the political
atmosphere has become execrable.
Indeed, the last
years have witnessed the beginnings of a momentous re-evaluation of
the Velvet Revolution. The historical and sociological literature had
long neglected to admit that in contrast to the laboriously
negotiated Hungarian and Polish exits, the Czech version, as an
intellectual feat led by heroic dissidents, was no ideal model
either. Václav Havel, it is now underscored, was critical of
democracy long before 1989. In his celebrated 1978 essay, The
Power of the Powerless,
he even discussed something he called “post-democracy.” During
the Velvet Revolution, he and other dissidents played a power game
quite removed from the ethical standards he had made famous as a
writer, intellectual, and dissident. The (communist-elected)
parliament, in particular, was treated with an alarming level of
disdain.
That the dissidents
were political amateurs was pardonable; it is the way they made the
argument that they represented the proverbial “people’s will”—and
then acted on it—that is problematic. Unconsciously mimicking the
arguments of party leader Klement Gottwald, who had put similar
pressure on the democratic president Beneš in 1948 to sign in the
new communist government, Havel insisted at every round of the
negotiations he led with the communist authorities that the people
were getting impatient and that even his popular Civic Forum might
soon lose favor with the mob. In response, the representatives of the
outgoing dictatorship all of a sudden became stauncher supporters of
the rule of law than the dissidents themselves.
This irony became
frankly absurd when the question of the voting system for the new
president arose. It was once again the communists who were in favor
of the more democratic mode (a direct election by the people), rather
than an indirect election by parliament. The communists indeed
counted on their genuine support amongst the population to have the
communist candidate, outgoing Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec,
elected. This communist wager did not take into account the dynamic
of power and popularity that dramatically evolved over the next few
weeks. But as a snapshot of the situation at the beginning of
December 1989, it does speak volumes as to the dissidents’ lack of
popularity and the level of legitimacy that the communists still
enjoyed. The dissidents were claiming to represent the will of the
people but were so concerned about Havel’s chances of winning a
free election that, in the name of “constitutional stability,”
they argued instead for retaining the election of the president by
the (communist-elected) parliament. In other words, they bypassed the
public. This disregard for the popular vote, and the means used to
ensure a parliamentary vote, are problematic from an ethical point of
view. No wonder the expression “velvet hangover” was already in
use by the 1990s.
Continuities with
past practices continued to surface. The constitutional lawyer who on
November 29th,
1989, endeavored to have parliament erase the three articles from the
Czechoslovak constitution that guaranteed the leading role of the
Communist Party was none other than the author of this very same
communist constitution in 1960: Zdeněk Jičínský. During the
interim, he had become a dissident and Charter
77
signatory. But how could the 1989 revolutionaries convince the
communist MPs to elect their archenemy Havel? Jičínský was the
author of a November 28th
proposal to have dozens of deputies recalled for “abusing their
mandate and not minding the will and interest of the people.” An
existing law, passed in 1971 to formalize the post-1968
purges
of reform communist MPs, Dubček sympathizers, and Prague Spring
enthusiasts, allowed for this. One of its victims had been none other
than Zdeněk Jičínský.
Historian Kieran
Williams reminds us of other troubling parallels with past practices.
Several institutions were established in 1989-1990 to deal with the
Ministry of Interior, which encompassed the infamous Secret Police
(StB) and its archives: one of those was a network of “three-man
screening commissions.” These troikas consisted of one former StB
officer, discharged after 1968 for having supported the Prague
Spring, one member of a citizens’ committee, and one current
employee of the ministry. Such networks of “vigilant citizens”
and “screening troikas” are yet again unnervingly reminiscent of
the Action Committees that stormed the country after the February
1948 communist takeover and fired many citizens who were not vocally
committed to the nascent communist dictatorship from their positions.
Once the Round
Table negotiations were progressing and the communist President
Gustáv Husák had resigned, a new president had to be elected.
Michael Žantovský claims that the presidential election was settled
between Václav Havel and communist Prime Minister Marián Čalfa on
December 15th, adding with his customary humor: “… this was a
parliament so used to taking orders it would have elected Dracula if
told to do so by the government.”
This statement is
amusing but is contradicted by old and new research. According to
Jiří Suk, the communist MPs were in fact strongly determined to
resist the pressure from below and above, to engage themselves fully
in the democratic process, and to gain greater social recognition for
their role as MPs. On December 13th,
they endorsed the resignation of the most compromised apparatchiks
among them, elected a new presidium, and declared their intention to
have the new president elected directly by the people. This path
offered them greater moral satisfaction than being humiliated into
electing Havel before they were discarded and purged. But the
revolutionary constitutionalists—Zdeněk Jičínský, Pavel
Rychetský and Petr Pithart—publicly disavowed a direct election
and pleaded for the continuity of legal practices. MPs who disagreed
would be “helpers of the devil”, they said. The only way for them
to redeem themselves was to elect Havel president and adopt the new
constitutional order on the basis of which many would be soon
dismissed. As Jiří Suk explains it, “In the name of a radiant,
democratic future, the MPs – who had indeed been elected
undemocratically but who were now professing to respect democracy –
were forced to adopt non-democratic practices.”
It got worse. Jiří
Suk cites Jiří Svoboda, the soon to be president of the Czech and
Moravian Communist Party (KSČM), according to whom several communist
MPs refused to endorse this “arrangement” and planned to
demonstratively resign from their mandate. In view of this impending
fiasco, a meeting of the parliamentary club of the communist MPs was
called on December 27th.
Secretary Vasil Mohorita and Prime Minister Marián Čalfa threatened
the communist MPs with “a criminalization of their political
attitudes” and with “hangings on the lampposts.” The MPs were
made to vote repeatedly until they reached unanimity, says Svoboda.
Čalfa later acknowledged that he had been “very brutal.”
Two days later, on
December 29th,
Havel was unanimously elected Czechoslovak President by the
parliament. When the positions of many communist MPs were indeed
redistributed in January, they tended to favor Czech over Slovak MPs.
The Slovaks were indignant – this was the beginning of the end for
Czechoslovakia. Moreover, Havel’s choice for the post of Minister
of Interior, Richard Sacher, kept the head of the Secret Police in
place for several weeks. General Alojz Lorenc was thus free to tamper
with police files, which fatefully discredited the entire
transitional judicial process. Czech memory politics have not
recovered from this blow.
It might be time
today to reevaluate the course of the Velvet Revolution: to accept
Czechoslovakia’s exit from communism as better than some (violence
would of course have been worse) but as an imperfect process
nonetheless. It would be useful for the Czech Republic today to
acknowledge that many of the problems of post-communism originated in
the material impossibility of finding a way out of a deeply ingrained
dictatorship without compromising democratic principles. There is no
shame in having wanted democracy to succeed, and in improvising
amidst great constraints to make that happen. What has
become problematic over the decades since is the refusal to
acknowledge the shortcomings of the revolution and to address them,
and thereby to finally turn the page of “post-communism.”
We are not there
yet. On November 17th,
2019, for the thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution,
President Zeman skirted any state commemoration while Prime Minister
Babiš only held an indoor celebration with the prime ministers of
the Visegrád group – while 200,000 to 300,000 demonstrators had
called for his resignation the day before. He extolled Václav
Havel’s courage and admitted he was not proud to have been member
of the Communist Party before leaving the country for Slovakia. The
heads of the Czech state could not face the public at what should
have been a festive and symbolic time. Democracy still waits to be
built.
This article was first published HERE
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