To skip this introduction and go directly to read Jeff Weintraub’s In-Depth Analysis “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?” click here.

I was sure in the lead up to the Iraq War that it wouldn’t happen. It seemed obvious to me that it made no sense, and I couldn’t believe that the U.S. would embark on such foolishness. One of my big mistakes, obviously. While Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden and American capacity to wage two wars, one clearly by choice, seemed to be a huge strategic mistake, the war proceeded and escalated, and we have paid.

Nonetheless, I did understand why deposing Saddam was desirable. His regime was reprehensible. I respected those who called for opposition to its totalitarianism, from the informed Kanan Makiya to my Central European friends, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, et al. I even said so at an anti-war rally.

Yet, connecting the means at our disposal with the desirable end of a free and democratic Iraq seemed to me to be an extraordinarily difficult project, and I had absolutely no confidence that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Company could pull it off. How could my intelligent friends who supported the war not see that? I actually had a number of heated public discussions with Michnik about that.

Once begun, I hoped that the intervention would be short and sweet, and hoped that a democratic transition could be managed, but as we now know these hopes were frustrated. From every point of view, the war was a disaster: for the Iraq, the region, the U.S., and the project of democracy, and the way the war was fought, as it was part of a purported global war against terror, compromised American democratic principles. As time has passed many of the early supporters see all this and have changed their judgments, and those who haven’t, such as John McCain, choose not to focus in their speech and action on the question of entrance into the war, but rather on the exit, the so called surge, which they purport explains limited American successes.

But I am curious: what have become of those who as a matter of principle supported the war? And what have become of their arguments? A few brave souls have stuck to their positions. To have a richer understanding of our recent past and to reflect on the challenges of the day, I think it is worth paying attention. Thus, today’s In-Depth post: Jeff Weintraub’s “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?”

To read Jeff Weintraub’s In-Depth Analysis, “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?”click here.

Accused of being an optimist once again last year, I was sure that Barack Obama would be re-elected and that this potentially had great importance. As the election contest unfolded, it seemed to me that Romney and the other Republican candidates made little sense and that a broad part of the American electorate understood this.  A major societal transformation was ongoing and Obama gave it political voice: on the role of government, American identity, immigration, social justice and a broad array of human rights issues. Thus, I think the re-election has broad and deep significance, and I conclude the year, therefore, thinking that we are seeing the end of the Reagan Revolution and the continuation of Obama’s.

But, of course, I realize that my reading is a specific one, and partisan at that. My friends on the left are not as sure as I am that Obama really presents an alternative. From their point of view, he just puts a pretty face on the domination of global capitalism and American hegemonic military power. I have to admit that I view such criticism with amusement. It takes two forms. The criticism is either so far a field, so marginal, that it is irrelevant, leftist sectarianism, which is cut off from the population at large, confined to small enclaves in lower Manhattan (where I work and have most of my intellectual discussions) and the upper west side, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Austin, Texas, Berkley, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Brooklyn and the like. Or there is the happy possibility that the critiques of Obama and the Democrats engage popular concerns and push responsible political leaders to be true to their professed ideals. I have seen signs of both of these tendencies, significantly in the Occupy movement. I hope the leftist critics of Obama pressure him to do the right thing. Marriage equality is an important case study.

I think the criticism of Obama from the right is much more threatening. If conservative critics of Obama don’t take seriously the significance of the election results, they are not only doomed to failure, they may take the country down with them, evident today as we are purportedly falling off the fiscal cliff.

Michael Corey in his response to my post on the Obama revolution exemplifies a significant problem.

“President Obama waged a very successful campaign; however, there is a darker side to it. One of the major reasons he was successful was his ability to destroy Romney’s reputation with innuendo and misinformation. President Obama also adroitly avoided dealing with major policy issues concerned with the longer term viability of a number of programs. President Obama is likely to get his way on tax rate increases and many other tax issues without giving up anything because he is more than willing to drive over the fiscal cliff, and then introduce his own legislation next year. It probably will work, but will have numerous unwanted negative consequences. When elephants dance, the grass gets trampled.”

I think Corey is mistaken about the elections, and though this is good willed, it is serious. To propose that Obama won by vilifying a good man, Governor Romney, is to ignore the significant principled differences between the two Presidential candidates and their parties. Obama emphasized economic recovery and a Keynsian approach to government spending. He proposed to address the problems of the cost of Medicare by working to control our medical care costs, more in line with costs and benefits in other countries that have significantly sounder public health. Obamacare is his solution, though his conservative opponents don’t take this seriously. If conservatives don’t face this, if they don’t take seriously that new alternatives to market fundamentalism are being presented, they can continue to work to make this country ungovernable, their apparent strategy for the past four years. I think they will suffer as a result, but so will everyone else in the States and, given our power, way beyond our borders.

But the situation is far from hopeless. There are numerous signs of hope. I am impressed by posts on Deliberately Considered by our contributors over the year as they reveal grounds for hope here and abroad.

Ironically, the Republicans might address their problems by moving ahead, while looking backwards.

And then there is the hope founded in the work of extraordinary individuals, who can and do make a difference, such as Vaclav Havel. See tributes here, here and here.

There is the engaged art of resistance, as it criticizes the intolerable, as in the case of Pussy Riot in Russia, makes visible distant suffering through artistic exploration in far flung places such as Afghanistan, and illuminates alternatives in Detroit, a central stage of the collapse of industrial capitalism.

And new media present possibilities of new forms of public deliberation and action, see this and this for example.

The possibility of action should work against cynicism, which is often confused for criticism, but actually is a form of resignation.

But I am not an myopic optimist. Suffering is knitted into the social condition, something I hope to investigate more systematically with my colleague Iddo Tavory in the coming year, starting with two posts in the coming week. Indeed as proof that I am well aware that naïve optimism about the future is mistaken, I view the last post of 2012 as one of the most important. The death of innocent victims through the force of arms has enduring effects. Richard Alba underscores this through personal reflection and professional insight. We all then suffer whether the violence is the result of accident, domestic or state violence, through the widespread arming of American citizens or the use of drones apparently far from home. Let’s hope next year is a better one.

It is odd in the extreme to read about a devastating storm in New York, listen to my local public radio station, WNYC, from Paris and Rome. It took a while to find out how my son in Washington D.C. and his wife, Lili, in Long Island City were doing. I also have been worried about my mother and sister and sisters-in-law, and their families, in their homes in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. All seems to be OK, with very significant inconvenience. My friends and neighbors, my house and my community center, these I don’t know about and am concerned. The Theodore Young Community Center, where I swim and where I have many dear friends, in fact, is still without its basketball court after the devastation of tropical storm Irene. All this while I have been enjoying my family just outside Paris, taking a beautiful stroll in Paris on Monday and having a nice first day in Rome. I hurt for my friends and family as I am enjoying European pleasures topped off yesterday with a wonderful dinner with my dear colleague, Professor Anna Lisa Tota of the University of Rome.

And I push on, talking about my work with colleagues and students first here in Italy and next week in Poland. This morning, I am off to give a lecture at the University of Rome to a group of film and media Ph.D. students, on media, the politics of small things and the reinvention of political culture. I decided to post today a lecture I gave in Gdansk last year which was a variation on the same theme: the project of reinventing democratic culture. The lecture highlights the links between my political engagements of the past and how they relate to the political challenges now. I will return to Warsaw and Gdansk with a follow up next week. In all the meetings and in the “in-depth post” today, I am struck by how important a creative relationship between the politics of the central stage and of the margins is central to a vibrant democratic culture and politics. I will be thinking about this with deep concern as I speak here in Europe and look from afar at the election back home.

To read “Reinventing Democratic Culture: Then and Now,” click here.

It’s good to be back in Gdansk. It is especially good to be invited by The European Solidarity Center to give this lecture at the All About Freedom Festival. It’s a visit I’ve long wanted to make, and an occasion that seems to be particularly appropriate.

The last time I was here was in 1985. I was on a mission in support of Solidarity, to observe the trial of Adam Michnik, Bogdan Lis and Wladyslaw Frasyniuk. Adam had written an open letter to “people of good will” in the West to come to the trial, published in The New York Times. He also earlier through The Times Warsaw correspondent, our mutual friend, the late Michael Kaufman, asked me personally to come. It was a request I couldn’t refuse.

When I arrived I was under constant surveillance. I was denounced by Trybuna Ludu [the Communist Party official organ] for not understanding the nature of socialist justice, when I tried but was refused entry into the courtroom. It wasn’t a leisurely visit. I communicated with Adam through his lawyers. We planned together a strategy to keep going an international seminar on democracy we had been working on before his arrest. He asked for books. I did not have the occasion to go sightseeing. And the sights to be seen weren’t as beautiful as they are today.

That was one of the most dramatic times of my life. Not frightening for me personally (I knew that the worst that was likely to happen to me was that I would be expelled from the country), but very frightening for those on trial, and for the mostly unrecognized heroes of the Solidarity movement, the workers, the union leaders, the intellectuals and lawyers who during my visit helped me move through the city and make my appearance, and who risked imprisonment for their everyday actions in making Solidarity. While I then met Lech Walesa, as well as Father Jankowski [a Priest associated with Lech Walesa, who after the changes became infamous for his anti-Semitism], I was most impressed by those who acted off the center stage. They were so dedicated to and worked so hard for the cause of freedom, without apparent prospects that it would be won and without fame or fortune for themselves. It was clear to me that they created their freedom in their persistent actions. This is a key to my talk today.

What I saw then and what I observed and studied in my research and political activities in the 1970s and 80s throughout Poland and also among its neighbors, has shaped my entire intellectual life. It’s the touchstone of my work as a social theorist and researcher. I could explain in a four hour lecture how just about every one of my writings, certainly all of my books, have been informed by what I observed here, even when I am writing about my own country or about the Middle East, two other areas where I have done research and which I will explore with you today. I am, we are together, deeply indebted to the sung and unsung heroes of Solidarity. But today, I am concerned less with the debt, more with the insight that their actions provide.

I will focus on two theoretical points: “the politics of small things” and “the reinvention of political culture,” (the title of my two most recent books) in order to think about the project of reinventing democratic culture, a pressing one in my country, and in much of the world today. I will try to present a clear and condensed account of the theoretical points, and then think about them with you by considering instances of the project of the reinvention of democratic culture. I will compare the way things were here then, when I first visited your city, to the way things are now, in my country, and I will look ahead a bit to the way things might be in one of the centers of geopolitical conflict in the world today, the Middle East.

In retrospect, thinking about this part of the world and my experiences in it in 20^st century, I gained two key theoretical insights which help illuminate the global situation in 21th: 1. Small things matter, democracy is in the details of everyday life interaction, and 2. Political culture is not just a matter of destiny, but also one of creativity.

First my notion of the politics of small things: a concept drawn from the political theory of Hannah Arendt and the sociology of Erving Goffman, and developed by looking carefully at the day to day life in the democratic opposition and alternative cultural activities here in Poland.

When people meet and speak in each other’s presence, and develop a capacity to act together on the basis of shared commitments, principles or ideals, they develop political power. This power is constituted in social interaction. It is realized in the concerted action. It has its basis in the definition of the situation, the power of people to define their social reality. In the power of definition, in the politics of small things, there is the power of constituting alternatives to the existing order of things. When this power involves the meeting of equals, respectful of factual truth and open to alternative interpretations of the problems they face, it is democratic. As Arendt has theorized, such meeting, talk and action constitute political power as the opposite of coercion. As Goffman investigated, this power is constituted in the expressive life of the involved people. Power by acting together, expressively created, such power has been highly consequential.

In Poland, the significance of the politics of small things was apparent during the Communist experience, contributing to the quality of life in People’s Poland, and it became a force that put an end to the experience. Its importance is underappreciated in the present political environment. I will explain by providing snapshots of experience, highlighting their significance.

As I remember the day I arrived to observe the trial of Michnik, Lis and Frasyniuk, I feel as if I was moving through an American spy thriller. Met at the Warsaw airport. Taken to an apartment. Underground solidarity, broadcast equipment in the apartment, solidarity TV and radio. After an hour or so, I was put on a train to Gdansk, given instructions to go to an apartment in the old city of Gdansk. A few minutes after I arrived on that rainy night, the phone rang. Whoever just arrived, the caller reported is being following by the authorities. I was observed from the moment I arrived in Warsaw by both the authorities and the underground. The next day I tried to enter the courtroom. I walked in a cloud of solidarity supporters and activists, women pushing baby carriages were the most impressive. Each step I took during my ten days, the authorities of the People’s Republic and the network of solidarity activists surrounded me, revealing the two sides of power. The authorities had the full power of the Party State, the secret police, the nomenklatura and the Soviet alliance behind them. Solidarity’s power was grounded in the persistent capacity of people to act together. That this power persisted and was very real was confirmed when it persisted after martial law, not to mention its ultimate triumph in 1989.

Indeed I think it is important not to interpret the meaning of Solidarity by its ultimate victory. It was not only a means to this end.  The people I met in the early and mid eighties did not anticipate the defeat of Communism and present day Poland was way beyond their imaginations. Their activities, and I believe their significance for us today, are best understood as a continuation of what they had done in the past. We misunderstand if we impose teleological meaning upon them. There was a hope that the activities then would contribute to a more decent future, but there was mostly an appreciation that it contributed to a more decent present. A world where an unjust political trial was met with fear, resignation and silence was not acceptable, even if the fall of the regime was unimaginable. Acting together immediately changed the situation for the better.

Michnik himself explained the logic of this action in his classic essay “The New Evolutionism.” This essay, together with Vaclav Havel’s classic “The Power of the Powerless,” helped me imagine my idea of the politics of small things. Thus I understood the theater movement I studied here in the early 70s and Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1979.

I wrote my dissertation on a theater movement, Polish Student Theater including such groups as Kalambur and Nawias of Wroclaw, Teatr Stu and Pleonazmus of Krakow, Teatr Plastyczna of Lublin, Teatr 77 of Lodz and Teatr Osmego Dnia of Poznan. In these theaters and in their audiences the power of the politics of small things was revealed. They were not engaged with regime or anti-regime politics. Their importance was that they provided a zone of independent sensibility for their performers and audience. In these theaters a different Poland was not only imagined and performed. It actually existed. They did not support the regime or attempt to reform or overthrow it. They created a life apart from it.

Such life apart became a societal experience in 1979. I think is the way to understand the profane significance of the Pope’s visit. To be sure, he was an opponent of Communism. But when he came here and was greeted by millions, they were not engaged in a political demonstration, but in a religious and social one. People did not flock to see the Pope and celebrate mass with him as an explicitly political, anti-regime act, instrumentally directed toward the defeat of Communism. Their activities were ends in themselves, and they came to see themselves differently. Clearly seeing this laid the groundwork of Solidarity, revealed a collective shared understanding that the Polish people had a different character than that which was imagined in the official Communist press, a perception that could imagine people acting on their own independent of officialdom, as indeed occurred on a grand scale not only when the Pope greeted the public, but also in the planning of the event.

The relationship between power and culture changed, as the nature of the culture and of the power was changed. More in a moment about that. Let’s look elsewhere to understand what was involved here.

A poetry salon in Damascus, Syria, I read about last year, before the Arab Spring, reminded me of Polish student theater. Both the theater movement and the salon are examples of constituted free zones in repressive societies. They both are examples of the politics of small thing. They, further, both demonstrate the possibility of re-inventing political culture, the possibility of reformulating the relationship between the culture of power and the power of culture.

The secret police were present at Bayt al-Qasid, the House of Poetry, in Damascus, The New York Times reported in an article published last September. Yet despite the presence of a significant arm of the repressive state, this has been a place where innovative poetry has been read, including by poets in exile, politically daring ideas are discussed, a world of alternative sensibility has been created. Not the star poets of the sixties, but young unknowns have predominated. The point has not been political agitation nor to showcase celebrity, but the creation of a special place for reading, performance and discussion of the new and challenging.  The Times article quotes a patron about a recent reading. “‘In a culture that loathes dialogue,’ the evening represented something different, said Mr. Sawah, the editor of a poetry Web site. ‘What is tackled here,’ he said, ‘would never be approached elsewhere.’”

In this poetry salon and in Polish theater, people interacted with each other on the basis of common interest in the arts. On a regular basis they presented themselves to each other, developed a shared definition of the situation, and through the expressive gestures developed a setting of trust and experimentation. Art not politics prevailed. Cynics would say that the Polish theater and the Syrian salon are safety valve mechanism, through which the young and the marginal can let off steam, as a repressive political culture prevails. But in Poland, the “safety valve” overturned the official culture, even before the collapse of the Communist regime, as I explored in my book Beyond Glasnost: the Post Totalitarian Mind. And now something remarkable is developing among Syria and its neighbors.

I am not asserting that a happy ending is necessarily the result of such cultural work: the fall of Communism, the Arab Spring. But I do want to underscore that the very existence of an alternative sensibility in a repressive context changes the nature of the social order. Poland was not simply a totalitarian during the Communist era, and the Syria of a year ago was not simply repressive. That country now is in a virtual civil war. Yet, with amazing persistence, the most violent repression has been met with incredibly sustained non-violent resistance. I believe that these miracles are not conceivable without the experience of places where the possibility for dialogue was established, places where poetry and theater could prevail, and because of this, political culture can be, has been reinvented – in Syria, at least for a discrete number of people in a particular location at a particular time. But the limits of today may be very different tomorrow. This I learned as I observed my Polish friends.

Milan Petrusek, a pillar of integrity and a major figure in Czech social science, died last week. In this post, Hana Cervinkova pays tribute to him and to Alena Miltová, his wife. Together, they have been quiet heroes of Czech social science, culture and public life. I have long appreciated their work and benefited from it. It has been a privilege to know them personally. I publish this remembrance with sadness and appreciation. -Jeff

The world of Czech social science is a rather small community concentrated in several academic and research institutions in this country of ten million people. Today’s quality institutions in Prague and Brno are results of the complex process of the post-1989 (re)construction of various disciplines (including sociology, political science, anthropology, philosophy and economics), following their almost total destruction during the Communist rule. While in Poland, for example, a distinct tradition of critical social thought developed despite official restrictions prior to 1989, Czechoslovak social science was subject to all-encompassing censorship that concerned not only indigenous production, but also the prohibition on translations of Western theoretical texts. Leading Czech and Slovak scholars who dared to express critical and independent views were quickly removed from academic and research positions. As a result, the struggle for the (re)construction of the Czech and Slovak social science that began in 1989 was a difficult and somewhat solitary task wrought with many predicaments that characterized academic and scholarly work in this small post-traumatic professional community. Once the borders opened, some (including me) decided to temporarily or permanently emigrate to countries with larger and better established professional milieus. The task of shaping the local tradition was taken up by a few exceptional personalities who dedicated their professional lives to the building of institutions that allowed for the Czech social sciences to grow.

The professional wisdom, patience and resoluteness involved in this process is personified by the work Miloslav (Milan) Petrusek and Alena Miltová – an exceptional couple to whom many Czech social scientists owe their careers and some of us much more than that. These sociologists chose to play different, yet complementary roles in the post-1989 reconstruction of Czech sociology and social sciences more generally. In 1990, Milan was already an established sociologist, albeit with twenty-years as a dissident, during which he had been removed from the official position in the academia. Between 1970 and 1989, this leading Czech scholar worked as an assistant librarian in the university library, secretly publishing a samizdat journal Sociological Horizons and contributing to other Czech samizdat publications with his own texts and translations. After 1989, he threw himself fully into both a scholarly and administrative academic career. He played the leading role in the building of the School of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague where he served for two terms as the Dean. Throughout this intensive administrative period (including a term in the position of a University Vice-Provost), Milan published and earned the highest academic degrees. In addition to important sociological monographs, he edited the Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Sociology and wrote textbooks that continue to be used as classics in the country. Milan was also one of the closest advisers to President Václav Havel and later he co-founded Václav Havel’s library. Perhaps of all his different roles and careers, however, the most important to him was teaching. Milan Petrusek was a professor par excellence – a professor who treated teaching with passion and a sense of mission for cultivating future generations of Czech sociologists.

In 1991 Alena Miltová, who held a Ph.D. in sociology decided to leave a research career at the Czech Academy of Sciences and established a private publishing house that specialized in the social sciences – publishing both translations and original work. With a hard-to-describe modesty, she has operated this enormous undertaking from a small one-room office, rented from the Academy of Sciences in the center of Prague. In 20 years, she has published over 250 titles, including classic works by such authors as Georg Simmel, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Halbwachs, Thorstein Veblen, Erving Goffman, Clifford Geertz, etc. It is Alena, through her publishing house SLON, who played a key role in the filling of the great gap in Czech language literature after 1989 – the legacy of Communist censorship.

Even though they might not put this as their greatest achievements, one needs to see both Alena and Milan as highly successful institution builders in the very complicated milieu of post-socialist Czech social sciences. They both created the necessary institutional infrastructure for generations of Czech scholars to come.

While the writing of this piece is motivated by Milan’s sudden death on August 19^th, I cannot write about him without thinking about Alena – they were inseparable in life and in my mind. I loved getting postcards from the many different places that they visited on their European sojourns. Neither of them drove a car. They used public transportation to go to distant places, sometimes on the invitation of their friends or former students who owed their international careers to their support. In 2010, they visited me in Wroclaw. We spent a wonderful four days filled with discussions about social sciences, literature and the academia. I remember asking Milan for advise on my upcoming career decisions – he unquestionably supported my return from the high-profile public job to full-time academic career. Their visit was planned to coincide with the New School’s Graduate Faculty’s Democracy and Diversity Institute run by Elzbieta Matynia, who was at the time beginning to work on the book of correspondence between Adam Michnik and Václav Havel. Milan helped her to locate sources. It was a memorable visit, because in the 1990s, Milan and Alena were key members of the Graduate Faculty’s Democracy Seminars, and in Wroclaw they met up with GF faculty that helped create that exceptional transatlantic community of public and academic intellectuals, leaders of dissent in their homelands.

I suspect that Alena’s and Milan’s travels always had intellectual subtext – even going for a two-week health visit to a spa involved packing and transporting manuscripts, dissertations and reviews. I remember getting up at six in the morning woken up by our baby son when they were visiting us in Wroclaw, finding Milan hard at work over books from our library, taking neat handwritten notes in his paper notebook with a pencil.

I feel it was a gift that I was able to see them last time together just few weeks ago. They were very happy spending their vacation in the picturesque corner of northeast Bohemia near my family house. The place – Babiččino údolí (Grandmother’s Valley) tied to the history of Czech literature belongs to a favorite domestic family destination. Grandmother’s Valley takes its name from a book by the 19th century Czech feminist writer, Božena Němcová, who wrote a Czech children’s classic in which she describes her childhood spent here under the care of her grandmother. Milan, Alena and I had lunch in the restaurant of the small hotel where they were staying not far from a historic museum created in the houses and locations described in the book. As usually, we talked about the social sciences and Milan was keenly interested in developments in the Polish academia. He mentioned his latest book project, but he spent most of the time talking about his students, about teaching and new evaluation standards in the Czech research community. He was concerned with what he perceived was the lowering standard of academic quality, the waning of enthusiasm both among students and professors.

But Milan’s eyes brightened as he shared news of his new project – a sociology discussion group composed of his former and present doctoral students. The “Tribe,” as they called themselves, gathered regularly in Milan and Alena’s small Prague apartment and spent evenings discussing sociology. The meetings were structured and began with a three-hour seminar, followed by less structured discussions over wine. It seems poignant that this great professor of Czech sociology, who did not give up his passion for sociology and took to samizdat when he was fired from the academia by the Communists, would decide to renew his currently disenchanted students’ passion for sociology in the private space of his home. It is hard not to notice the resemblance between his home-based meetings with students and the flying seminars that he was a part of in the private spaces of Communist Central Europe.

With Milan Petrusek’s sudden death, Czech sociology looses one of its most important architects. However, I feel strongly that I should end this remembrance on a hopeful note: his intellectual legacy will be continued by his students to whom he was devoted until his unexpected death on August 19th.

The burial ceremony is taking place today in Prague on August 29, 2012, the 27th anniversary of Milan’s and Alena’s marriage.

Postscript: On October 5, 2012, Miloslav Petrusek will receive the prestigious VIZE 97 Prize from the Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation, awarded annually on Václav Havel’s birthday to internationally renowned scholars, scientists and public intellectuals. It is emblematic that neither the donor, nor the laureate, who knew each other well, will be personally present at this year’s ceremony – both Havel and Petrusek were born in October 1936 and neither of them lived to celebrate their 76th birthday.

In December of 2011, I took part in a very interesting conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference participants were asked to respond to the work of the media theorist, Daniel Dayan (my dear friend and colleague and Deliberately Considered contributor) and to answer a straightforward question – “Is democracy sick of its own media?”

I presented a mixed answer: yes, when in comes to troubling developments in television news; no, when it comes to the effervescence of television satire and the social media. I closed with a proposal to Daniel to co-author a book, linking his ideas about “monstration” with mine about the politics of small things. While a book may or may not be forthcoming, a dialogue here at Deliberately Considered will appear in the near future.

In my paper, which I present here as an “in-depth” post, focused on the American case, I argued that we live in both the best of times and the worst of times concerning the relationship between media and democracy. Fox Cable News is relentlessly confusing fact with fiction with partisan intention, and serves as a model of media success, both financial and political, while responses to Fox including by the TV satirists, the famous “fake news” journalists, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, on Comedy Central, who also have interesting imitators around the world, present important challenges to Fox and its influence on common sense.

These media developments, I sought to demonstrate, are connected to significant new American social movements: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. In the case of OWS, and other new “new social movements,” social media is of crucial importance. They are providing new health to democracy globally in many different political contexts.

I maintained in my Sofia paper, that the relationship between social media and OWS is a significant manifestation of the way the politics of small things have become large in our world. I see in this a demonstration once again of what Vaclav Havel called “the power of the powerless.” I am now facilitating a wonderful workshop on this, with young scholars, investigating this power as it is constituted in Russia, Romania, Morocco and Poland, as well as the United States. More from them in the future.

To read the full In-Depth Analysis of “Fake vs. Fox News: OWS and Beyond,” click here.

Martin Butora co-founded Public Against Violence, the major democratic movement in Communist Slovakia, in November 1989, and served as Human Rights Advisor to Czechoslovak President Václav Havel (1990–1992). Between 1999 and 2003, he was Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the US. He is the honorary president of the Institute for Public Affairs, a public policy think-tank in Bratislava. His most recent books are Druhý dych (Second Wind), 2010, and Skok a kuk (Jump and Look), 2011.

Everyone knew it would happen one day and many sensed it was going to be soon – and yet, speaking about it, every word weighs a ton. The fact that he stayed with us this long was a miracle. Right until the very last moment, with extreme effort, he made sure his voice was heard wherever human dignity was at stake, wherever hope needed to be instilled. He did so with his characteristic sense of duty and responsibility.

As someone born into a wealthy family, he was ashamed of his position and privileged upbringing and longed to be like other children: he felt “an invisible wall” between himself and the others. His family background heightened his sensitivity to inequality, his distaste for undeserved advantages.

Hope as an orientation of the heart:

Vaclav Havel understood hope as an anthropological quality that pertained not only to politics. Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world, he used to say. Either we have hope within us or we don’t: “It is a dimension of the soul. It’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.” Hope is not prognostication, he emphasized, “it is an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”

In this sense, hope for him was not synonymous with optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of the outcome. This is an extraordinarily strong message in a world that found hope yet lost it time after time – a message that is universal as well as unique, personal and individual.

His life story as writer, playwright and later politician played out over a period of some six decades. As a thirteen-year-old, he tried to compile a “newspaper.” Later, he banded together with a group of poets in “Club of 36,” writing an essay for them on Hamlet’s Question. It was also his question, one to which he’d been seeking an answer as a technician in a chemistry lab, working as theater stagehand and lighting assistant, and later as playwright, president and statesman, as well as – in between – working in brewery and being a sheet-metal welder in jail.

Living in truth:

In August 1969, on the first anniversary of the Soviet invasion, in a letter to Alexander Dubcek, he outlined three options for a Prague Spring politician. He could exercise self-criticism, admit his mistakes and accept Brezhnev’s version of events. He could submit quietly and wait to see what happens next. But he could also “tell the truth, stick with it and reject everything that turns it upside down.”

The letter goes on to present a prescient scenario of the consequences arising from each of these positions. “Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance,” he wrote. It can help people realize that it is always possible to stick with one’s ideals and have integrity, that there are values worth fighting for; and that there are leaders worth believing in.

In this letter he had inadvertently defined the blueprint for his attitude to life. It has come to be known as “living in truth,” an integral part of it being the willingness to sacrifice oneself. Through his own way of life, for which he paid in prison terms, Havel seemed to “redeem” the silent majority of society for accommodating the regime for many years.

Forty years later, he commented on President Obama’s decision not to receive Dalai Lama due to an upcoming trip to China. “It is only a minor compromise,” he said, “a compromise which actually has some logic to it.” But exactly with these minor compromises start the big and dangerous ones, he added.

Caring for the soul as well as for the public space:

It was not only a “life in truth” that has brought him together with Czech philosopher Jan Patocka, one of the most influential Central European philosophers of the 20th century who died of a brain hemorrhage following a series of interrogations by the secret police for having signed the Charta 77 manifesto. It was also another key tenet of his life and thinking – “caring for the soul,” an attempt to anchor human actions in morality.

Havel admirably combined this nurturing of the soul with a caring for public affairs and the public space, which he understood in its widest sense and which he has influenced and helped shape in ways more distinctive and varied than hardly any other public actors in the history of the last third of the last century and first decade of this.

He did so as a man who supported and initiated small independent “islands of self-reflection and self-liberation.” He did so as the president of two states. He did so as an authority in the pan-European public space. He did so as a defender of and a critical commentator on the West. And last but not least, he did so as a unique voice in the global space of human civilization, through his ability to attract and bring together personalities capable of contributing to its future.

But caring for the public space wasn’t just a matter of abstract theoretical reasoning – it was closely linked to everything that is happening right now and right here, to the shape of our culture and our country. In his eyes, the battle for survival waged by the fringe theatres and galleries of Prague wasn’t just a battle for subsidies: it was a battle for the very meaning and character of the state.

The city, he had warned, was spreading like a cancer, “obliterating our countryside with its warehouses and mega-warehouses, parking lots and garbage tips, super- and hypermarkets and, above all, the vast wastelands created in between all these.”

“Litmus paper”

One of the roles Vaclav Havel played in Slovakia was that of an extremely sensitive “litmus test.” For it wasn’t only sociologists who would regularly discover that people who had trusted him had a greater desire for European integration, were more tolerant of various versions of otherness, more open towards members of minorities, had a more critical view of both fascism and communism.

Havel had tried to preserve the common state of Czechs and Slovaks, because he was convinced it was meaningful. Yet, after the 1992 election, when the Slovak and Czech political representatives under the leadership of Vladimir Meciar and Vaclav Klaus concluded that the state had to be divided, he did not resist them.

President Havel was different from President Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, who had maintained regular contact with Slovakia before the creation of the first Czechoslovak state in 1918, traveled there frequently, and over many years had nurtured relations with the local political elite as well as with Slovakia’s budding intelligentsia.

Initially, the only people Václav Havel knew tended to be his writer friends and, later, dissidents. However, he had gone a long way toward getting to know his partners, and the fact that he treated them as partners was key. He neither patronized nor demonized Slovakia. After the country split, he helped make sure the Slovak Republic ended up in the same political, economic and security space as the Czech Republic. And he often and respectfully commented on what Slovakia had managed to achieve in two decades of reforms.

His views have had long-lasting resonance. In the summer of 2008, he attended Pohoda, Slovakia’s largest music festival embracing also theater, film, literature, and NGO fora. The discussion with him was held in a big crowded tent and those unable to get in could watch it on a huge screen. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday and some ten thousand people, who had still been in nursery school in 1989, had gathered round, standing or sitting in the grass. An eerie silence reigned and the vast space resounded with the voice of the shy, yet convincing and charismatic man, who shared with the audience his experience of building a new world and encouraging those present to be part of it.

Present more than ever:

When he was in opposition, he was as much part of the “protest dissent” as of the “reflective dissent.” While the former type, the frontline, was intent on showing lies and hypocrisy of the regime, representatives of the other type of dissent – writers, philosophers, historians, theologians, psychologists – analyzed the state of society and the prospects for change. It was this original “dual role” that had cemented Havel’s leading position before November 1989, as well as during the revolutionary days. And he did his best to adhere to this dual role even after 1989, when he found himself confronting countless dilemmas and arguments. He longed to keep a critical distance and a clear-eyed view of the various aspects of the new regime, to meld the “ethics of conviction” with the “ethics of responsibility.”

A week before his passing, on December 10, 2011, he attended a ceremony in Prague to receive the award of the Bratislava-based Jan Langos Foundation for his contribution to the defense of human rights. It was to be his last appearance in public. He thanked the Foundation for the award and me for the laudatio and shook my hand as vigorously as his strength permitted. Later on, when he sat in the corner of a big hall, he quietly told me and my wife Zora how happy he was to see small groups emerging and active citizens speaking up.

His departure marks the end of an era. He has been a moral anchor and an intellectual mirror both in bad times as well as in happy moments. His words and deeds have mattered more than other powers of the world. It is impossible to express how much we will miss him, particularly today, as the Western world is once again in crisis. However, it is beyond doubt that his legacy remains with us, perhaps more than ever. What a paradox, Mr. Havel. Vaclav. Dear friend, somewhere up there in heaven.

A version of this tribute was published in the Slovak daily SME, Bratislava, on 12/19/2011.

He never was a politician. He never wanted to be one. In this, he embodied the post-communist dream of an anti-political politics. Many, very many Czechs could not forgive him just that. When they put him at the Prague Castle, when they saw him in the legendary president T.G. Masaryk’s seat – they wanted him to play a statesman. And play he did, throughout his life he was a man of the theater. But he was a playwright, not an actor. As time went by, voices were heard that he is not fit for the position he holds. When people now say “he was an intellectual, a playwright, and a politician – in that order” it sounds more like a judgment than a description. Yet, little of that domestic criticism seemed to trickle through the borders of the Republic, and so the discrepancy between the international appreciation and the domestic disenchantment grew. Disenchantment is a good word. It was not Havel that changed. It was the Czechs who changed their expectations. He enchanted them with his charisma, his life-story and charm. And they (many of them) later did everything, to escape and deny that enchantment, as if they were ashamed of it. Inarguably, they owe him a lot. And so do the other nations in the region, because to our luck it was him and not any other former oppositionist that became the face of Central Europe in the early 1990s.

Havel appeared in Czechoslovakia’s public life in the 1960s as a writer – a young, avant-garde playwright. He was a declassed bourgeois, a descendant of a great Prague family. His grandfather – Vácslav Havel – was an architect, a leading representative of Czech modernism. His uncle Miloš established the famous film studios on the Barrandov hills. The father, Václav M. Havel, a friend of Masaryk’s, apart from building houses was also building institutions – the Czech Rotary and YMCA. If for the Czechoslovak Communist Party there ever was an archetype of a class enemy, it was him – the young blonde playwright, a frequent to the arty “Slavia” café. They wouldn’t allow him to study at the university; they expelled him from the economic school. However, already in 1963 the Theater on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí), which would become one of his homes, staged his first play. And so, when he spoke out against censorship at the famous 4^th Meeting of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, which pushed the country towards the Prague Spring, he was already recognizable. When in 1968, he clashed with Milan Kundera on the issue of the “Czech fate” (the two writers would differ on many things since), he became an important figure of the country’s intellectual life. And he did not cease to be one even despite the repressions of the so called “normalization.” His open letter of 1975 to the party’s general secretary – “Dear Dr. Husák” – was an early symptom of the nascent Czechoslovak dissent – the morally anchored political opposition dedicated to the defense of human rights.

Although his works were not staged and disappeared from bookstores, the communist regime itself helped to preserve his popularity and public awareness. After the Charter 77 was published, Husák’s bureaucracy unleashed a campaign of hatred and slander known as the “Anti-Charter.” Soon afterwards, the public radio broadcast a piece entitled “Who is Václav Havel?” It is difficult to come up with an example of a worse shot-in-the-foot in the history of Eastern European communism. Those who had not yet heard of the Charter now were aware of it. Those who never heard of Havel, now knew, that he is an enemy of the system. For many that was the highest compliment and a certificate of credibility.

And so when along with other members of the Committee for the Defense of Unjustly Persecuted (VONS) he was sentenced to four and a half years, the defiant Czech bard Jaroslav Hutka dedicated him a ballad: “Havlíčku, Havle.” Playing on the proximity of the names, in the song Hutka replaced Havel with the 19^th century romantic Czech intellectual Karel Havlíček Borovský, who was banished and imprisoned by the Austrians, because his ideas about truth and law were too dangerous. The similarity of both figures was striking. Thus the domestic, Czechoslovak legend of Václav Havel was born.

Soon, however, it was outgrown by the international legend. In search for trans-border allies, the Workers Defense Committee (KOR) of Poland would seek to establish contacts with the Charter. Havel was symbolically put on the editorial board of the samizdat opinion periodical “Krytyka,” although back then he was still nearly anonymous for the Poles (his name – sometimes misspelled). The famous meeting of KOR and Charter representatives on a mountain trail at the Czechoslovak-Polish border in 1978 was a symbolic breakthrough. Rumor has it that Adam Michnik talked Havel into writing an essay, one that would later become internationally acclaimed as “The Power of the Powerless.” It is difficult to judge if that is true. If it is then (in no attempt to reduce the importance of his own writing), this would be Michnik’s greatest contribution to universal anti-totalitarian thought. For Havel, unlike Michnik or Jacek Kuroń, was always able to pinpoint a universal truth in an individual experience. Though he wrote about Czechoslovakia, he never wrote solely for Czechoslovakia. Perhaps it was his fantastic sense of drama that enabled him to see every issue, every conflict, and every choice from many angles. And most importantly – to find a way to very different audiences. “The Dissident” in Havel’s writing becomes a dramatis persona, which the reader observes and gets to understand. In the “Power of the Powerless” he was able to grasp the tragic condition of post totalitarian life, seemingly untranslatable for the Westerners, in the quasi-comic character of the greengrocer. In the same manner, he managed to build an intellectual bridge between Eastern European opposition and the Western peace movement in the extremely important, but somewhat forgotten essay “Anatomy of a Reticence.”

While his essays benefited from an uncommon profoundness because of their dramatization, Havel’s plays became more political, and thus unfortunately flatter. Timothy Garton Ash, the most important constructor of the Czechoslovak dissident-playwright international legend, made a note of that already in the mid-80s. It was the essays, as well as the incredible, thrilling and multidimensional collection of prison letters to his first wife, Olga, that secured a place for Havel in the global intellectual pantheon.

When in November of 1989 the citizens of Prague took to the streets to chant down the dictatorship, to jingle it down with thousands of key-rings, Havel naturally appeared at the head of the movement (the Civic Forum). And when the time came to chant for a new leader to the Prague Castle, the hundred-thousand-strong crowd in unison chose the playwright, whose plays were not seen in Czechoslovakia for twenty years, whose name was supposed to be erased from popular consciousness. “Havel to the Castle – Havel na Hrad!”

This is where a new chapter of the fairy tale begins, about the everyman Vašek, who became king (partly) against his will. Although already in the 1980s he was a western media darling, after he took office a true “Havelmania” erupted. Havel enchanted the world, led Czechoslovakia (later only the Czech Republic) and the whole region “back to Europe,” and singlehandedly built the image of stability and political culture of Central Europe (a concept that was close to his heart). Let us be frank. The fact that three Central European states joined NATO in 1999 and that the European Union let eight formerly communist countries join in 2004 was partly his accomplishment. This first political move, however, became something that many fellow-dissidents could not forgive him. When he assumed office, he wanted to play according to dissident rules, conduct diplomacy based on human rights, morality and truth. The turning point was probably the Bosnian War and the growing domestic tension in his homeland, inevitably sliding towards a divorce (back then it was not yet certain how “velvet” it would be). Havel bet on security, he bet on America. He believed that for certain higher values, such as freedom and human rights, it is worth to fight for – even armed. That is why he supported the bombing of Serbia, the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. It would not be wise, however, to hold this against him. A majority of the former Eastern European oppositionists trotted down that path. But outside the mainstream, the anger and disappointment grew.

As a president, he never ceased being a dissident and an intellectual. He didn’t feel well in a world, where the motto “truth shall prevail” was at times only a sticker on a jar of filth. He quickly made enemies at home, in the Czech Republic. The greatest was probably the current president Klaus, whose entire political career is basically cast around the struggle with Havel and his ghost. Watching the thousands of mourners on Venceslas Square, the thousands of mourners accompanying Havel’s coffin back to the Castle, I guess now his ghost will be more powerful than ever. Even despite the fact that since he left office his political power declined further and further (in 2010 he gave a moral blessing of publicity to the Green Party, which didn’t even make it past the electoral threshold to parliament).

His 75^th birthday in October this year was a kind of festival of nastiness big and small. Many of them even below the region’s press culture average. The most pathetic of titles to my taste was “75 women for the 75^th anniversary”. Havel the womanizer. A very often heard allegation, all the more bizarre that we are talking of a not very prude country. The other allegation was that he drank too much – and that he didn’t treat himself seriously enough. Instead of a king, an artist on the throne – Rex Bohemiae in both meanings. Not a philosopher, not yet a jester – a writer.

Where did this popular antipathy come from? It is easiest to blame the “dissident complex.” Only a few hundred people signed the Charter 77. A few more took part actively in various forms of opposition, which in Czechoslovakia was much riskier than in the neighboring Poland. The dissidents’ legend, with their undeniable civil (and human) courage and a demanding, grandiose, almost highfalutin rhetoric of “living in truth” (Havel and Václav Benda built it on the foundation of the philosophy of Patočka, the Charter’s intellectual godfather) – all this was tiresome and even irritating for the “silent majority.” The antipathy was enhanced by the almost limitless international praise for the president, speaking in his serious, low voice with a characteristic “ahr.” And so the attacks were sometimes cruel and pathetic. “He plays such a smartass, and he cheated on his wife” or “just buried the first one, and now he gets another, younger one.”

All this is history now. Havel described a pessimistic vision of his own descent into oblivion in his last play – “Leaving.” Reality will be, however, different from the theater, because Havel was a man of a totally different format than the self-ironically diminished Chancellor Rieger. With the passing of Václav Havel closes an extraordinarily important chapter (or better – act) in the history or Central Europe. A “Dissident” with a capital “D” – a man for whose sake that word itself changed its meaning – is leaving the stage. His essays, although written under the post-totalitarian condition, show the way for individual’s actions in the face of the state and any other dehumanized system, in relation to certain immovable moral truths. A standing ovation, though with a heavy heart. The curtain falls.

The text first appeared in the Polish internet weekly  Kultura Liberalna on Monday, December 19^th.

While I cannot claim the privilege to have been one of Václav Havel’s friends, he loomed large in my life, first in my teenage years when I was coming of age in Communist Czechoslovakia and later through my extended sojourns abroad – in the United States and now in Poland. Václav Havel is profoundly irreplaceable. Together with millions of other Czechs, I owe him my freedom.

The season’s first snow was falling heavily last Sunday afternoon when I was making my way to Wrocław along winding, mountainous roads returning from my family house on the Czech side of the border. The going was very slow as the line of cars, mostly with Polish tags, headed back toward Poland after spending a weekend in the Czech mountains. My small son was sleeping in the back seat. In the quiet of the ride, I listened to Václav Havel’s voice recorded five years prior when he spoke on Czech National Radio about the place theater held in his life. Czech radio stations were responding to the news of the former President’s death with rebroadcasts of past interviews, as if they wanted to extend his presence among us.

In this moment of deep sadness when time seemed to have stopped altogether, my thoughts turned back to an important moment in my childhood. I must have been eleven when I decided to take part in a school recitation competition. To help me prepare, my mother taught me a poem by the Czech Nobel Prize laureate, Jaroslav Seifert. In the poem, Seifert commemorated the day when the first Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garyk Masaryk died. Masaryk, like Havel, died in early hours of the morning. The poem, which I still remember, is entitled, To kalné ráno – The Grey Morning. My mother read the poem out loud to me repeatedly until I knew the words by heart, stopping to take breaths before each softly sounding refrain: “Remember my child, that grey morning.” Thanks to Havel, I realize today that my mother’s choice of Seifert, an unpopular author with the Communist government, was an example of the power of the powerless, something my mother bestowed upon me along with a sense of agency, as I took the stage to read the verse publicly at a time when we lacked any hope that Communism would ever end. The atmosphere of Sunday afternoon of December 18, 2011 when I was driving back to Wroclaw and the mood reflected in Seifert’s poem about September 14, 1937, connected Masaryk and Havel – those two leaders of Czechoslovak democracy – at the moment of their passing and in my memories.

Havel as an absolute authority began to appear side by side with Masaryk in my family’s discourse and in my imagination even before 1989, when my parents discussed news of Havel’s imprisonment of which they had learned from foreign radio broadcasts. Later, Havel’s at first symbolic and then materialized leadership during the Velvet Revolution was something entirely and magically natural. That happened during my senior year of high school, at a time when I was still excited about being able to distribute illicitly his texts in our small mountain town. I met him the next spring by chance in a restaurant on the banks of the Vltava in Prague, where my sister had taken me for lunch after I successfully passed entrance exams to Charles University. Václav Havel was having a beer with his brother at a table in the corner of the small room and I remember how overwhelmed I became with a feeling of personal gratitude that on the very day that the doors to my university studies in the humanities opened up for me I met Havel. One year earlier it would have been an impossible goal to achieve due to my parents’ political incorrectness. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was Havel to whom I owed my freedom and the opportunity to be who I wanted to be, a privilege that my older sister, who never became the doctor that she deeply longed to be, never had.

When I left Czechoslovakia in 1992 to study and work in the United States, Havel continued to play an important role in my life. Almost everybody I met associated my Czechness with Havel and Prague:  my colleagues at the engineering company in Idaho, fishermen in Alaska and intellectuals in New York. In this way, Havel was becoming somebody in my life who allowed me to become conscious of my national identity. It was a complicated process for somebody who was brought up in a family that nurtured a historically grounded wariness of collective emotions, strengthened in my case through the cultural relativism that I learned in my anthropology studies at American universities.  But still, perhaps unconsciously, I have made decisions to remain Czech and maintain my Czech citizenship even when I had different, seemingly more attractive options. I realize now the key role played by Havel in this process of my national identification. Apart from my family, it was he who represented the only possible reference point for a feeling that I could call national pride.

When I arrived in Wrocław in 2003, Havel was no longer the Czech President. For me and my family, his departure from politics meant undeniably the end of decent politics (slušná politika). And the fact that our expectations were soon confirmed unfortunately came as no surprise for us. At a time when we have witnessed the release of banal private conflicts and interests played out in public and in the guise of public good, Havel seemed to be more appreciated outside of his own country. This was especially true in Poland where he had good friends and where he was always respected and admired. Looking from Poland at a time of the crisis of (post)modernity, I appreciated Havel’s larger European and global dimension. His words, through which he tried to return people and especially politicians to decency, no longer seemed directed only to the Czechs. Instead, they were calls to a broader audience for prudence in times of mad recklessness. But Havel’s voice was increasingly lonely in its moral determination. It seemed as if Havel’s politics, based on certain assumptions about ethics, integrity and morality were no longer understood in the world of contemporary politics, where such notions were treated in instrumental terms. But he never resigned from his principles and in his speech in Wroclaw in 2009 at the award ceremony for the Jan Nowak Jeziorański Prize, he confirmed his conviction that slušná politika is not only possible, but necessary. I am immensely grateful that I was able to meet Havel in Wroclaw. I lead him on a tour through Centennial Hall. He was accompanied by Adam Michnik, a man equally unbending in his moral convictions as Havel. I am also grateful that I could spend last Thursday evening in the company of Havel’s Polish, Slovak and Czech friends following the promotion of a new edition his essays in Polish. The great personalities of contemporary Poland leave gradually – Miłosz, Kołakowski, Geremek, Kuroń. We Czechs only have Havel, which makes the pain of our loss that much greater.

There is no way to replace Havel in my life. I look at the shelf where I keep the books he left us and I hold on to the hope that his departure from this world does not signal such tragic times as was the case in September 1937, when the first President of Czechoslovakia, the great humanist Masaryk, died. But it might be worthwhile to call on Seifert once again, who addresses Europe on the eve of WWII. In the last verse of his poem honoring Masaryk, Seifert writes: “Europe, Europe, when the bells start to ring, you should be the first to cry. Europe, terrible over swords and guns, in the light of the candles that were lit. Remember child, this grey morning.” I will remember.

To kalné ráno

Za sto let možná děti našich dětí

svým dětem budou teskně vyprávěti

o šedém ránu 14. září

navěky označeném v kalendáři.

To kalné ráno, to si pamatuj mé dítě.

Až ze všech nás budou už jen stíny,

či prach, jejž čas klást bude na hodiny

života příštích v ranním šeru

chvíle se ozve bez úderu.

To kalné ráno, to si pamatuj mé dítě.

Tu chvíli před půl čtvrtou ranní,

ten okamžik, a konec umírání,

když smrt se dotkla vrásek čela,

a ranní mlhou odcházela.

To kalné ráno, to si pamatuj mé dítě.

Evropo, Evropo, až zvony rozhoupají,

měla bys první být mezi těmi, ktoš lkají.

Evropo, hrozná nad meči a děly,

ve světle svící, jež se rozhořely.

To kalné ráno, to si pamatuj mé dítě.

Jaroslav Seifert 14.09.1937

President Barack Obama gave a powerful speech today, one of his best. The president was again eloquent, but there is concern here in the U.S. and also abroad in the Arab world, that eloquence is not enough, that it may in fact be more of the problem than the solution. The fine words don’t seem to have substance in Egypt, according to a report in The Washington Post. There appears to be a global concern that Obama’s talk is cheap. Obama’s “Cairo Speech” all over again, one Egyptian declared. Now is the time for decisive action. Now is the time for the President of the United States to put up or shut up. (Of course, what exactly is to be put up is another matter.)

This reminds me of another powerful writer-speaker, President Vaclav Havel. Havel is the other president in my lifetime that I have deeply admired. Both he and Obama are wonderful writers and principled politicians, both have been criticized for the distance between their rhetorical talents and their effectiveness in realizing their principles.

Agreeing with the criticisms of Havel, I sometimes joke about my developing assessment of him. I first knew about Vaclav Havel as a bohemian, as a very interesting absurdist playwright. I wrote my dissertation about Polish theater when this was still his primary occupation, and I avidly read his work then as I tried to understand why theater played such an important role in the opposition to Communism in Central Europe.

I then came to know him as one of the greatest political essayists and dissidents of the twentieth century. At the theoretical core of two of my books, Beyond Glasnost: The Post Totalitarian Mind and The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times are the ideas to be found in Havel’s greatest essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”

However, as president, Havel was not so accomplished. He presided over the breakup of Czechoslovakia, a development he opposed passionately, but ineffectually. He sometimes seemed to think that he could right a political problem by writing a telling essay, often translated and published in The New York Review of Books. He expressed a moral high ground in these essays, but he did not address the tough and messy side of politics. This is a real weakness of the intellectual as politician, the temptation to think if one can put a solution into words, one has solved a problem.

Does this problem apply to Obama, specifically to his speech today? Many on both the left and the right have heard enough of his speeches. They want action.

I watched a PBS News Hour discussion last night in anticipation of the speech today, and this was the consensus of the expert observers. Therefore, I think it is significant how much of this speech pointed in the direction of specific policy developments. Yet, they were placed in a broader historical and moral context. And the words were important. They did politics. They acted. They were speech acts in Austin’s sense.

I was particularly moved by the way the president told the story of the Arab Spring. He gave it great significance. He alluded to the killing of bin Laden, but didn’t dwell on it. He started with the politics of small things and pointed to civilizational transformation.

“On December 17th, a young vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi was devastated when a police officer confiscated his cart. This was not unique. It’s the same kind of humiliation that takes place every day in many parts of the world -– the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity. Only this time, something different happened. After local officials refused to hear his complaints, this young man, who had never been particularly active in politics, went to the headquarters of the provincial government, doused himself in fuel, and lit himself on fire.

There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia, as that vendor’s act of desperation tapped into the frustration felt throughout the country. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets, then thousands. And in the face of batons and sometimes bullets, they refused to go home –- day after day, week after week — until a dictator of more than two decades finally left power.

The story of this revolution, and the ones that followed, should not have come as a surprise. The nations of the Middle East and North Africa won their independence long ago, but in too many places their people did not. In too many countries, power has been concentrated in the hands of a few. In too many countries, a citizen like that young vendor had nowhere to turn -– no honest judiciary to hear his case; no independent media to give him voice; no credible political party to represent his views; no free and fair election where he could choose his leader.”

The president maintained that this power as it spread throughout the Arab world can no longer be easily repressed, and he expressed a conviction that given the media world we now live in the protestors’ “voices tell us that change cannot be denied.”

But that was it for the moving rhetoric. Obama then turned sober and practical. “The question before us is what role America will play as this story unfolds.” And he described what might very well become known as the Obama Doctrine.

“The United States opposes the use of violence and repression against the people of the region. (Applause.)

The U.S. supports a set of universal rights. These rights include free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law, and the right to choose your own leaders – whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus, Sanaa or Tehran.

And we support political and economic reform in the Middle East and North Africa that can meet the legitimate aspirations of ordinary people throughout the region.”

This all sounds quite good, but perhaps empty, as some have maintained. However, the substance of the matter is in the details. It is noteworthy that when the president referred to the importance of universal rights he mentioned not only easy targets, but also Sanaa, increasing the pressure on Ali Abdullah Saleh, our ally in “the war on terrorism” to resign. And later when he criticized regimes that violently repress their citizenry for engaging in peaceful protests, he included not only Libya, Syria and Iran, but also the important American ally Bahrain.

“Bahrain is a longstanding partner, and we are committed to its security. We recognize that Iran has tried to take advantage of the turmoil there, and that the Bahraini government has a legitimate interest in the rule of law.

Nevertheless, we have insisted both publicly and privately that mass arrests and brute force are at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens, and we will – and such steps will not make legitimate calls for reform go away. The only way forward is for the government and opposition to engage in a dialogue, and you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail.”

He spoke to the people and not only to the rulers of the region. He understood that the problem was not only political, but also economic, offering assistance and engagement in economic development as it addresses the needs of ordinary people. Moreover, he promised to listen to diverse voices coming from the region.

“We will continue to make good on the commitments that I made in Cairo – to build networks of entrepreneurs and expand exchanges in education, to foster cooperation in science and technology, and combat disease. Across the region, we intend to provide assistance to civil society, including those that may not be officially sanctioned, and who speak uncomfortable truths. And we will use the technology to connect with – and listen to – the voices of the people.”

He gave a forceful commitment to support religious minorities and strong support to the centrality of women’s rights.

“History shows that countries are more prosperous and more peaceful when women are empowered. And that’s why we will continue to insist that universal rights apply to women as well as men – by focusing assistance on child and maternal health; by helping women to teach, or start a business; by standing up for the right of women to have their voices heard, and to run for office. The region will never reach its full potential when more than half of its population is prevented from achieving their full potential.”

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama was careful but took a strong position. There was a little to warm the heart of those on both sides, but also much that would concern both.

Obama made news and earned the wrath of his domestic opposition by declaring, “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” This earned him an immediate protest by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But he also expressed concerns about the recent Hamas – Fatah agreement and about “symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state.” Thus, the Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri denounced the speech completely.

To my mind, Obama was not tough enough on Netanyahu, but he did move forward. Clearly, something other than complete support for the Israeli right’s position is necessary, contrary to Obama’s hysterical Republican critics. Obama advanced the U.S. position a bit. He said the obvious. The future border between Palestine and Israel will be based on the ’67 borders with negotiated adjustments. That has been the implicit assumption of the peace process for decades. Saying it bluntly, as President Obama did, provides some grounds for progress, suggesting a real response to the Arab Spring.

In his speech this morning, the president gave an account of a rapidly changing political landscape, showing an appreciation of the dynamics driving it and presenting a role for the U.S. to play. It was a broad and impressive depiction of our changing political world. He revealed an understanding of the role of the U.S. in this changing world, and he started playing the role when he turned to the all-important details. He staked out a position.

We will get a sense of how full or empty his rhetoric was today, when he meets Prime Minister Netanyahu tomorrow.