History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Anyway, this is not a French-style cohabitation, in which an executive president with great powers can, as it were, win the political battle. Havel’s present constitutional position as nonexecutive president is more comparable to that of the president of the Federal Republic of Germany, an office held until recently by a man whom he much admires, Richard von Weizsäcker. In his Summer Meditations, Havel wrote that, in his dream vision of (as he then still hoped) Czechoslovakia, “At the head of the state will be a grey-haired Professor with the charm of a Richard von Weizsäcker.” And as I read Havel’s speeches, especially the more recent ones, I notice some similarities—not least in a small but revealing feature of the prose. The most characteristic feature of President Weizsäcker’s style was the rhetorical question. “Of course my office only permits me to ask questions,” he would say, before launching a series of rhetorical questions that added up to an extremely clear statement of his own views. Am I imagining things, or is Havel increasingly using the same device?

  One can take this particular comparison a stage further. It is an open secret that there was considerable tension between the patrician, Protestant, intellectual President Weizsäcker and the provincial, Catholic, and less ostensibly intellectual Chancellor Kohl. In private, they could be quite rude about each other. In public, some of President Weizsäcker’s elegant rhetorical questions could be understood as digs at the chancellor; some of the chancellor’s remarks could be interpreted as barbs in the other direction. But they certainly never descended to anything like the public Punch and Judy show that the Klaus-Havel duel has at times become, with everyone knowing who is the unnamed object of each elliptical speech; every occasion being interpreted in that light; and ordinary Czechs sometimes having the impression that if Havel came out in favor of eating spinach then Klaus would be sure to come out the next day against eating spinach—on impeccable neoliberal grounds, of course.

  Instead, both Kohl and Weizsäcker scrupulously observed the constitutional proprieties and, at best, tried to turn their differences into complementarity rather than discord. The result was one of the most effective double acts to lead any European state in recent history. It contributed very substantially to the peaceful achievement of German unity. If the Czech president and prime minister were to achieve such a division of labor, it would doubtless be a great service to the Czech Republic—at home, in Europe, and in the wider world.

  To be sure, this, so to speak, Weizsäcker role would be some miles down from that new spiritual dimension that Havel dreamed, and perhaps still dreams, of introducing. Indeed, as the German example illustrates, in the wider European context it would not even be new. There is also a real question whether the ex-president of Czechoslovakia might not actually have a greater influence in Europe and the world today were he again able to speak with his own unique voice as an independent intellectual. But the die is cast. For another few years, at least, he will go on in the Castle, suffering up there for us; a living exemplar of the dilemmas of the intellectual in politics; condemned, like the central character in one of his own plays, to play out a role that he feels is not truly his own; and haunted and taunted by a slightly threatening character who even bears the same name. Such absurdist tricks the divine playwright plays.

  4

  With that somewhat Havelesque reflection, my Prague tale of intellectuals and politics is told, five years, almost to the day, after I told the story of the revolution of the Magic Lantern. Now, as then, I have tried to tell the story as honestly as I can, at the risk of indiscretion and of causing offense. Are there any conclusions to be drawn, any lessons even? There are, I think, possible implications for the Czech Republic, for the position of intellectuals in postcommunist Europe, and, most tentatively, for the place of intellectuals in Europe altogether.

  For the Czech Republic the immediate question is, Can the premier and the president possibly achieve the kind of moderately harmonious public relationship which Kohl and Weizsäcker achieved? Almost certainly not. Since this is a new democracy, the constitutional roles are not defined as clearly by law or by precedent. The two have very different political views of the way the new Czech state should be built. Klaus, the Thatcherite, gives absolute priority to economic transformation, even at the cost of corruption and illegality on the way. “Speed,” he says, “is more important than accuracy.” At times he seems inclined to Mrs. Thatcher’s view that “society” does not exist. Havel, whose politics, inasmuch as they can be defined in ordinary terms, are those of an ecologically minded social democrat, stresses the importance of culture, local government, civic participation, and civil society.

  Above all, though, it is a clash of personalities and biographies. The Tale of Two Václavs is not simply that of the intellectual Havel versus the politician Klaus. To be sure, Havel is a more important intellectual and Klaus a more effective politician. But what makes it so difficult is precisely that both are intellectuals in politics, as the PEN episode vividly illustrated.

  This is what makes the story at once unique and representative, for all over postcommunist Central Europe intellectuals are wrestling with similar dilemmas. Many who have gone into and remain in politics will find the dichotomy I present too sharp. The former dissident and former foreign minister Jiří Dienstbier, now the leader of a small opposition party, commented in a newspaper interview after our PEN discussion that, while he agreed with my basic argument, he did not feel that as a minister he had been working in half-truth. Those, now quite numerous, who after 1989 went into but are now again out of politics will find it easier to accept such a clear dichotomy. Those who never ventured into politics will find it easier still. But they have their own problems.

  The intelligentsia—one of the characteristic phenomena of modern Central and East European history—is now everywhere engulfed in sweeping change. This world of “circles of friends,” of milieux, where artists, philosophers, writers, economists, journalists all felt themselves to belong to the same group and to be committed to a certain common ethos (albeit often honored in the breach), was something anachronistic in late-twentieth-century Europe—but also something rich and fine. Its extraordinary character was summed up for me in a phrase that Ivan Klíma used in describing how he and his fellow writers had set out to revive the dormant Czech PEN club in 1989. “I was,” he said, “authorized by my circle of friends.” The peculiar world of the intelligentsia under communism was one in which you sought authorization from your circle of friends.9

  Freedom has changed all that. With remarkable speed, the intelligentsia has fragmented into separate professions, as in the West: journalists, publishers, academics, actors, not to mention those who have become officials, lawyers, diplomats. The milieux have faded, the “circles of friends” have dispersed or lost their special significance. Those who have remained in purely “intellectual” professions— above all, academics—have found themselves impoverished. Moreover, it is the businessmen and entrepreneurs who are the tone-setting heroes of this time. Thus, from having an abnormal importance before 1989, independent intellectuals have plummeted to abnormal unimportance.

  Yet to say that is to assume that we know what their “normal” importance would be. But do we? Is there any wider European normality in this respect, toward which postcommunist Central Europe might be either moving or contributing? In Britain the term intellectual is used rarely, being regarded as something Continental and slightly pretentious. Yet, as Byron said of the word longueurs, though we have not the word, we have the thing in some profusion. And the things exist on both left and right—although here, as elsewhere, the right tends to identify the very idea of “intellectuals” with the left.

  In Germany, the days of the great public role of writers such as Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass seem to be over. However, some of the country’s most interesting political debates are actually conducted by intellectuals, on the Feuilleton pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and in smaller journals. Yet here, too, you have the phenomeno
n of right-wing intellectuals denouncing “the intellectuals,” meaning left-wing intellectuals: in this case, for their failure to welcome the unification of Germany.

  In France, there have been writers and thinkers identified and identifying themselves as “intellectuals” at least since the time of the Dreyfus affair and the Manifeste des Intellectuels. Yet I doubt that anyone would today venture to write a Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels, as Sartre did in 1972. Partly, no doubt, out of an awareness of the awful misjudgments and moral failures of intellectuals in the twentieth century—and not least French intellectuals, including, notably, Sartre. Partly because there are no obvious new utopias to be embraced—except utopian liberalism, which is a contradiction in terms. Partly, perhaps, because they are too busy appearing on television and generally competing in a crowded entertainment market.

  Yet at the same time, there is, in all the major West European countries, a real crisis of popular confidence in the professional politicians, seen to be out-of-touch, self-interested careerists, tainted by corruption. The Italian debacle haunts us all.

  In this sense, Havel’s call for a new spiritual and moral dimension to be introduced into politics might seem to be relevant, after all, for Western Europe. That was what many in Western Europe felt and hoped at the moment of the Magic Lantern five years ago. But the lesson is surely not that this is a time for intellectuals to enter politics, in the narrow sense of trying to become prime ministers or presidents. No, this is a time for intellectuals to be both resolutely independent and politically engaged—which means, among other things, criticizing prime ministers and presidents. Politely, of course. Constructively, wherever possible. But above all, clearly.

  Four years later, in November 1998, Havel returned to this subject when receiving an honorary doctorate at Oxford. Referring in his acceptance speech to our earlier exchanges, he acknowledged that intellectuals have borne a heavy responsibility for some of the worst regimes in history. But he argued that, at a time when politicians tend to follow opinion polls and the media rather than to lead their citizens, there is a crying need for men and women of larger vision to enter politics. Intellectuals, he said, can participate in politics either by holding office or by holding up a mirror to those in power. You can be an office-holder or a mirror-holder. But I would continue to insist that a healthy democracy requires a very clear separation of roles between the two, and that the primary, even the defining, role of the intellectual in politics should be that of mirror-holder.

  MARTA AND HELENA

  IT’S NOVEMBER 1994, AND WE’RE AT THE LUCERNA PALACE in Prague, built by a millionaire developer in the early years of this century, expropriated by the communists, but now returned to his sons, Ivan and Václav Havel. Tonight’s guest stars are the Golden Kids, a sixties pop group whose members haven’t performed together for nearly twenty-five years, since they were banned by the communist authorities after the Soviet invasion. They are Marta Kubišová, now aged fifty-three; Václav Neckář, fifty-two; and Helena Vondračková, forty-seven. They wear black. They jive. They sing “Hey Jude” and “Massachusetts” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “The Mighty Quinn” and even, God save us, “Congratulations.”

  The audience, like the Golden Kids, is middle-aged: men in shiny suits, white shirts, and ties, women in blouses, as if for the opera. They sweat amid the faded Jugendstil gilding and candelabra. Sometimes they clap along. But when the Golden Kids sing “Suzanne,” there’s just total silence:

  Suzanne takes you down

  To her place near the river.

  You can hear the boats go by:

  You can spend the night beside her.

  Tense and heavy with regret: the silence of the middle-aged remembering sex.

  There’s another story being played out on stage this evening: the story of Marta and Helena. Marta Kubišová was a Czech heroine of the Prague Spring in 1968. A song called “Hymn for Marta” became a rallying song of the time. After the Soviet invasion, she was banned. For twenty long years, until 1989, she did odd jobs, worked as a clerk, had close friends among the dissidents. In the middle of the “velvet revolution” she made her first comeback—a moment I will never forget, at once rapturous and terribly sad. Barely able to sing, due to the engulfing emotion, she whispered into the microphone, “Časy se měni.” “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”

  Helena Vondráčková took a quite different path after 1969. She continued performing and was seen often on state television. She collaborated.

  Now their paths have met again. Will virtue have its reward? Or does none of that matter anymore? Helena—tall, blonde, and still very much in practice—seems to dominate at first. She’s younger, more professional, and the audience knows her from television. Perhaps they even feel a little easier with her, for most of them collaborated, too, or at least made little compromises to keep their jobs. Marta—older, shorter, black haired—is a shade slower, and you feel the nervousness in her voice.

  But, somewhere in the middle of the evening, the emotion begins flowing toward her. People bring bouquets of flowers up onstage after every number (opera habits), and the flower count is going Marta’s way. Then the whole concert stops, and the stage is full of embarrassed men in suits. They represent Supraphon, Fiat, Interbanka, Seagram—the commercial sponsors of the evening. Awkwardly, they hand out platinum discs and bottles of champagne. And there’s a raffle; first prize, a Fiat Punto. The prize-winners come up onstage, say a few words into the mike, and kiss the stars.

  One, a comfortable-looking man in jeans, shambles up and says he’d like to thank all the performers, every one, “but above all, above all, Mrs. Kubišová.” And we all applaud loud and long, and we know what he’s thanking her for, and it’s not for her singing this evening— it’s for her twenty years of silence.

  But now everyone is sweating, and everything is mixed up together, the Marta of then and the “Mrs. Kubišová” of now, the pop heroes of the 1960s and the business heroes of the 1990s, the memories of sex and the memories of national protest, and today’s hope of a Fiat Punto.

  Yet there’s an ever bigger circle closing here: a European circle. For these are also our songs: This is our past. Sixty-eight was one of those very rare moments when the experiences of people in Western and Eastern Europe really did meet. For all the differences between Prague and Paris, Liverpool and Leipzig, people under thirty here and there moved to the same rhythm, sang the same lyrics, shared something of the same protest, the same emancipation. Then the Russian tanks rolled in, and the paths of experience diverged, as did those of Marta and Helena, and the years slipped away.

  Now, a quarter century on, East and West have come together again, like Marta and Helena, here in the Havels’ Lucerna Palace, in this postmodern stew of middle-aged longing and regret, under the sign of Seagram, and the shared meaning of history is:

  Yeh yeh yeh yeh yeh yeh yeh da da da da

  Hey Jude.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1994

  25 OCTOBER. British prime minister John Major announces an inquiry into standards in public life, headed by a senior judge, Lord Nolan. The “Nolan committee.”

  11 NOVEMBER. The United States announces that its troops will no longer enforce the arms embargo against Bosnia.

  13 NOVEMBER. In a referendum, 52.2 percent of Swedish voters approve of their country joining the EU on the terms already negotiated.

  15 NOVEMBER. The EU’s Court of Auditors highlights the problem of fraud in the Common Agricultural Policy and the so-called structural funds.

  27–28 NOVEMBER. In a referendum, 52.4 percent of Norwegian voters oppose their country joining the EU on the terms already negotiated.

  9–10 DECEMBER. An EU summit in Essen outlines the “pre-accession strategy” for enlargement of the EU to include some former communist countries. It also discusses terms of the EU’s relationship with states across the Mediterranean. Other major summit themes are improving competitiveness and creating jobs.
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  11 DECEMBER. Russian forces invade the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

  13 DECEMBER. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is questioned by magistrates investigating corruption in three subsidiaries of his Fininvest business empire. Vladimír Mečiar becomes Slovak prime minister for the third time, leading a “red-brown” coalition of right- and left-wing parties.

  22 DECEMBER. Berlusconi resigns as Italian prime minister after the Northern League withdraws its support from his coalition.

  1995

  1 JANUARY. Austria, Finland, and Sweden join the EU. Establishment of the World Trade Organization. A four-month cease-fire in Bosnia, negotiated by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, comes into effect but is ignored in Bihač, one of the UN’s “safe areas.”

  9 JANUARY. Seven former members of the East German politburo, including former party leader Egon Krenz (see above, p. 4), are charged in connection with shootings at the Berlin Wall.

  13 JANUARY. In Italy, former treasury minister Lamberto Dini forms a government, after the collapse of the Berlusconi government.

  27–30 JANUARY. Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum, an extraordinary annual gathering of business and political leaders, with a scattering of intellectuals thrown in for stimulation and entertainment. A giant ego-feast on Thomas Mann’s “magic mountain.” (His great novel Der Zauberberg, “The Magic Mountain,” was set here.) I have a memorable dinner with the financier and philanthropist George Soros, whom I know from his pioneering charitable work for open societies in Central and Eastern Europe. He is one of a very small group of people who have been good both at making money and at spending it.