The story may be apocryphal. But those attending the David-like President during his inaugural state visit to Germany in January 1990 were reportedly left as breathless as Goliath-like Chancellor Helmut Kohl during the early seconds of their first-ever encounter. ‘How would you react to this idea?’ asked the crumpled Havel, less than diplomatically, mug of beer and cigarette in hand. ‘Why don’t we work together to dissolve all political parties? Why don’t we set up just one big party: the Party of Europe?’ Chancellor Kohl evidently glanced sideways and fell silent for a few seconds before recovering his footing. He reclaimed protocol by issuing the customary warm diplomatic congratulations to the new President of Czechoslovakia. He then asked his distinguished revolutionary guest whether he would care for something more to drink before formal talks got underway, as they promptly did, on matters other than the Party of Europe.
Something of the exuberance of political youth no doubt animated Havel’s upstart question, but the theme of Europe — regardless of whether or not the story was true — quickly matured into one of the favourite and most effective weapons within his arsenal of political speeches and foreign-policy initiatives. His familiarity with the subject extended back to his teenage years, when for instance he and Radim Kopecký had made plans to develop a European-wide federation of youth along non-Communist lines. Havel had also done enough browsing in the family library to know by heart the oft-quoted and re-printed remark of Karel Čapek, first published when Havel was two years old: ‘If you were to look for Czechoslovakia on the map it would suffice to place your finger precisely in the middle of Europe; it is there,’ wrote Čapek. ‘Just halfway between North and South, and between West and East, just in the middle between the four Seas whose shores outline the complicated contour of Europe. To be anchored in the very heart of Europe is not merely a geographical location, but it means the very fate of the land and of the nation that inhabits it.’415
Following the triumph of totalitarianism in Russia and Germany, and the Munich agreement, this type of pro-European sentiment tended to become unfashionable, even embarrassed by finding itself in a verbal alliance with violent power. Europe tended to become a dirty or suspicious word, soiled by Mussolini’s talk of ‘European civilization’ and Nazi propaganda against ‘Asiatic and Jewish Bolshevism’. The subsequent defeat of German and Italian fascism, combined with the military advances of the Soviet Union into central Europe, meant not only the geopolitical subdivision of European territory. It also meant that the attempted symbolic revival of ‘Europe’ and the political quest for peaceful European integration — beginning with such experiments as the European Coal and Steel Community and the Treaty of Rome — necessarily excluded Czechoslovakia, confirming its consignment to the sphere of ‘Eastern Europe’ under Soviet domination. Havel himself never accepted the geopolitical arrangement, and tried repeatedly to challenge it publicly. The Charter 77 initiative was in this respect a turning point, because the whole underlying principle of the Charter was its bold attempt to act as if European-wide agreement and co-operation on matters of human and civil rights actually existed in legal and political form. The revolutions on the western fringes of the Soviet empire in the autumn of 1989 dramatically confirmed this presumption. Suddenly, like the walls of Jericho, the barbed wire and concrete and guns dividing Europe lost their function. Europe was again free to negotiate its own peaceful reunification.
Havel’s cheeky question to Chancellor Kohl pointed in this direction. Kohl may have retreated into his shell — according to the story — and vowed from there on to handle Václav Havel with a loud voice and powerful manner, and to restrict political arguments with him to in camera sessions. For Havel, the outcome of his cheeky question was altogether different. Quick off the mark, and well ahead of most of the political spectrum in his own country, he chose to embark on the boldest move of his time in the office of the President. His foresight was to be rewarded with the greatest single achievement of his presidential career: to bring back international respect and recognition, even admiration, for his tiny country by beginning the slow and delicate and fraught process of negotiating the re-entry of the Czechs into the structures of European integration.
His campaigning for the Czechs’ formal re-entry into Europe, using the Velvet Revolution as a springboard — ‘bringing the Czech Republic into the European Union and into the twenty-first century’, as he put it to a close friend,416 was undoubtedly helped along by the remarkable parallel resurgence of wider interest in European integration, stretching from the second half of the 1980s into the 1990s. During Havel’s several presidencies, many observers and whole electorates welcomed various treaties, including the Single Europe (1992) Act, while most political leaders throughout the region willingly co-operated in such forums as the European Parliament and the annual meetings of the European Council. The spirit of European unity also appeared on the military front. Franco-German co-operation seemed nothing short of a miracle; the formation of a European Common Security and Foreign Policy was widely interpreted as a small (if incomplete) victory in Europe’s struggle to control its own affairs; while for the first time ever — during the Gulf War — European countries acted in unison to defend their perceived interests outside of Europe. Even some part of the elites within the two countries that had traditionally felt least at home in Europe — Britain and Russia — seemed to be persuaded of its importance.
Picking up the threads of this trend, Havel began to sew using the same sharp principle that Jean Monnet, the most famous political architect of Europe, himself applied to the subject of European integration: if you want to change the world, find the most powerful point of leverage against the status quo instead of short-sightedly mucking around with present-day details. Havel did so in various different ways, each pursued simultaneously.
Intense efforts to repair and consolidate diplomatic relations with the various member states of the European Community (as it was still called in January 1990) was the most obvious step to be taken. During the first flying year of his presidency of Czechoslovakia, Havel made state visits to Berlin, Munich London, Paris, Rome, Lisbon, Strasbourg, Madrid and Barcelona, among other European cities. Meanwhile, he foresaw that his country’s re-entry into the European mosaic of states required some co-ordination with the other newly independent central-eastern European states that had just emerged from under the Communist rubble. ‘Good relations with our neighbours are in the fundamental interest of each of our countries as well as in the fundamental interest of Europe as a whole,’ he said to a NATO summit in Brussels, called in early January 1994 to foster ties between itself and the four member states (the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary) of the so-called Višegrád group.417 The speech was well received. It convinced enough domestic opinion that going into NATO — the American-dominated military alliance whose formation was spawned in part by the coup de Prague a half-century earlier — would help to stabilize Czech democracy and make the Czech economy more attractive to foreign investors. The speech also evidently helped to consolidate agreement favouring the redefinition and acceptance of the Partnership for Peace, a scheme conceived in the previous October by NATO defence ministers as a way of fostering ties between central-eastern Europe and the alliance. ‘Our countries have very similar views on the Partnership for Peace’, said Havel following a handshake from President Bill Clinton after the Brussels meeting. ‘I would be happy if today the city of Prague could emerge as a symbol of Europe standing in alliance.’ Shortly afterwards, Czech entry into the military alliance that acts as policeman of the European region seemed a foregone conclusion — as it proved to be in March 1999 — with the NATO announcement of plans for joint training and the holding of military exercises on the soil of the Višegrád states. A few weeks later, as NATO bombs rained down on Serbia, Havel told delegates to the fiftieth-anniversary summit of NATO that the Czech Republic now formally belonged to ‘the Western sphere of civilization. The same is true,’ he added, ‘of Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria and other Balkan States.’
Then there was the need to tackle some difficult questions concerning relations with Germany. Just before the Velvet Revolution, Havel drafted and sent a private letter to President Richard von Weizsäcker.418 Anticipating controversial remarks made during a Czechoslovak Television interview a few weeks later, Havel apologized on behalf of the citizens of his country for the ‘profoundly immoral’ treatment of the ethnic German populations of the country immediately after the military defeat of Nazism. Havel confessed that no peaceful and good-willed rapprochement between the new Germany and his own country — and no new relationship with the wider Europe — would be possible unless public recognition was given to the scale and brutality of the Czechs’ treatment of their own ethnic German citizens. He noted that during the years 1945-1946 — Havel was speaking from experience as the owner of property at Hrádeček once owned by a victim — at least 2.5 million ethnic Germans were violently hunted out of the country, leaving behind perhaps only a scared minority of 200,000 survivors of the exodus. Such treatment was unacceptable, argued Havel. No good reasons could justify it. All Czechs and Slovaks should feel ashamed of what they or their distant relatives had done. The memory of it should for ever be preserved, and any future repetition of it could only be avoided, he implied, if a new treaty of understanding between the two countries was drafted, and signed. He concluded: ‘Czechoslovak democrats owe German democrats something.’
Howls of protest greeted the proposal. But Havel was unflinching. There were many who pointed out that the exodus of ethnic Germans was just punishment for their support for Hitler’s totalitarianism. While they claimed their right to a homeland, they had in fact renounced their home country of Czechoslovakia. They deserved everything they subsequently got. There were other critics who spotted that the apology to Germany was a prelude to negotiating entry into the European Community of states, in which Germany already exercised important powers. The reaction was something like: ‘We’ve only barely begun to free ourselves as a country after more than fifty years, and now we’re being asked to subordinate ourselves again, this time to the Germans and their Brussels agents.’
Havel aimed two barrels at such rhetoric. He singled out ‘Czechocentrism’ and ‘provincial mistrust’ towards the wider world as the rotten foundations on which anti-German xenophobia rested. Time and again — on television and especially during his weekly radio broadcast from the presidential estate at Lány419 — he attacked narrow-mindedness, ignorance of the wider world, and intolerance of others. He maintained that such attitudes were pointless, except to justify Czechs and Slovaks taking a political path that led nowhere except into a blind alley of isolation. Such attitudes also served secretly to reinforce the widespread unspoken assumption, to which Neville Chamberlain notoriously gave voice, that central Europe is another world, well off the main highways of world affairs, and really not worth a detour. Finally, he said, such attitudes had had murderous effects in the past, and they might well do so in the future, unless checked.
Havel tried to buttress his attack on anti-German xenophobia by standing on ramparts made from several different — not entirely compatible — arguments. He continued to remind his audiences that a cosmopolitan sense of responsibility for others is a citizen’s duty — just as he had emphasized in the play Redevelopment, or Slum Clearance (Asanace[1988]), when the character Zdeněk Bergman reacts to news of the death of the wise idealist Plekhanov: ‘Confronted with his death, we realize that we must bear our portion of guilt for it, for we, too, are responsible for the sad state of this world.’420 Havel tried to add substance to his call for cosmopolitanism by repeating Čapek’s theme of the Czech lands as the geopolitical crossroads of Europe. He tried as well to recast the same theme as a defence of Mitteleuropa. ‘It was often in Vienna or Prague before anywhere else that potential threats to humanity appeared,’ he told an Austrian audience. The long and often unhappy history of cultural and political contacts among the peoples of Mitteleuropa — Havel’s definition was fuzzy — now placed the region in ‘the front line of the fight for democracy and stability in the whole of Europe’. Czechs and Slovaks should not gaze at their navels. They had the duty to think of themselves as members of a wider proto-political community that could serve as the hub of ‘the West’s ongoing efforts to live in peace and security’.421
Havel’s vague definition of Mitteleuropa was perhaps deliberate, considering that in his hands it functioned as something resembling a future Utopia designed to stimulate the hopes and dreams of present-day citizens and governments. The idea of Mitteleuropa evidently excluded ‘Eastern’ countries still haunted by the ghosts of Russian power and ‘Western’ countries like Britain, for whom the post-Communist lands were still regarded as far-away countries about which we know nothing (a prejudice voiced by Neville Chamberlain when Havel was still in nappies). But whether Havel intended to include in Mitteleuropa countries as diverse as Sweden and Slovenia, Poland and Hungary and (parts of) Italy, was unclear. Presumably, his defence of the region included Germany, which is perhaps one reason why in his various efforts to demonstrate the need for cultural and political solidarity between Czechoslovaks and Germans he was strangely hare-lipped about the Holocaust. It was as if Havel made a political calculation not to stir up trouble with his country’s neighbours. When the subject of the Holocaust did arise, Havel’s vague argument — surely one of the most problematic in all of his political and artistic career — was as soothing to guilted Germans and quisling Czechs as it was objectionable to concerned Jewish ears in both countries. In the Holocaust, he said in a 1993 address at The George Washington University, ‘the Chosen People were chosen by history to bear the brunt [of responsibility] for us all. The meaning of their sacrifice is to warn us against indifference to things we foolishly believe do not concern us.’422 Terms like ‘history’ and ‘Fate’ seemed designed to highlight the undeniable fact that the Holocaust is now part of our received historical tradition, so that any present and future efforts to look forward to a future freed from totalitarian power are compelled to look backwards, to force us, again and again, to face up to what some human beings did to others for the first time ever. Yet the trouble with Havel’s talk of ‘Fate’ and ‘history’ is that it so easily caused insult. Personal and group responsibility for the Holocaust was fudged, or dissolved into talk of abstract non-actors going under the name of forces with a will of their own.
No such depersonalized talk of ‘history’ infected his discussions of nationalist politics. With one eye on the Balkans war unleashed by the Milosevic regime in the early 1990s, Havel roundly-condemned nationalism, ‘the hatred for anyone who seems to be playing the traitor to his roots or who claims different roots’. He pointed out that Communism and nationalism have a common mind-set. ‘Both simplify the world,’ he said, ‘divide it into friends and enemies, the chosen and those condemned to contempt, into “us” as the better people and “them” as the worse. They do not examine individual merit or guilt, but prejudge, pigeonhole and, thus, divide society into the meritorious and the culprits.’ And he went on to warn that the germs of nationalism are highly contagious. ‘Czechocentrism’ could ruinously conspire with Balkan nationalisms to succour little nationalists elsewhere in Europe. ‘The fate of the so-called West’, he concluded, ‘is today being decided in the so-called East.’423
These various arguments against ‘Czechocentrism’ were greeted with yet more howls of protest, at which Havel took aim with a second barrel. It was imperative, he argued, to move as quickly as possible towards a new treaty that resolved once and for all the bad feelings produced on both sides of the border by the cruel expulsion of ethnic Germans and the brutality of Nazism. A breakthrough along these lines came at the end of February 1992, when Havel met with Chancellor Kohl to sign a friendship treaty that included assurances of German support for Czechoslovakia’s full membership in the European Community. In spite of a week of small but lively street protests — in Prague demonstrations of up to 5,000 people voiced concerns about the dangers of German territorial and economic domination — the atmosphere of the endorsement ceremony in the Castle’s opulent Spanish Hall was festive. Havel, Kohl and their advisers raised champagne glasses in honour of the new ‘spirit of commonality’. Havel was forthright. ‘We are laying the foundations for good, friendly relations between our nations,’ he said. ‘We are shaping the future, setting the grounds for a fast way for Czechoslovakia into the family of European nations.’ Kohl reciprocated the generosity. ‘We have stood over too many graves in this century,’ he said. ‘We have shed too many tears. The time has come for us to learn from history. It is in this way that I understand our decision to help your country.’424
After the break-up of Czechoslovakia, the friendship treaty in effect had to be renegotiated all over again. It was nonetheless a watershed agreement, and not only because it served as the written precedent for a pattern of inter-governmental negotiation that would lead ultimately to full membership within the European Union. The treaty — acting like a lance to a boil — also served to publicize the lingering grievances against such agreement. Few denied the material advantages offered by the treaty, which in addition to German support for Czechoslovak membership in the European Community also included provision for security measures, scientific collaboration, environmental protection and basic cultural, economic and governmental co-operation. The critics were vociferous about other matters, especially the reference in the treaty to the ‘expulsion’ of 2½ million ethnic Germans four decades earlier. A spokesman for Landsmannschaft, a pressure group representing them, told the business daily Hospodářské noviny that the pressing question of restitution had been left unresolved by the treaty. The Czech Septimius, who had by now worked his way up the political ladder to become federal Deputy Prime Minister, agreed. ‘We are now signing a treaty that leaves unresolved the most dangerous issues,’ Klaus said bitterly. He too objected — on free-market grounds, as ever — to the word ‘expulsion’, which ‘could be a friendly gesture offering [Germany] certain moral satisfaction for the severity of this process carried out after the war’. But, he continued, ‘the context in which this word is used in the treaty could germinate certain legal claims [by ethnic Germans] in the future’.
Czechoslovakia’s privatization laws specifically precluded restitution claims by owners who lost their property before 1948 and, in any case, the negotiators of the treaty supposed, as Kohl himself openly admitted, that the European Community would serve as the future framework within which ‘solutions for the settlement of foreign claims’ would be found. Havel was more strident. He implied — it was not put quite so cynically — that the problem would wither away with the decline in the numbers of ‘first generation’ ethnic Germans. ‘This issue, which seems to be controversial and dramatic at the moment, will gradually lose its controversial and dramatic nature,’ he predicted. To which he added remarks about the basic principles of European integration. Those who continued to think in narrowly retributionist terms understated the co-operative spirit that Brussels was now trying to foster. The key point, Havel said, was that the European Community vision of a Europe without borders would make it ‘possible for any European, including a Sudeten German, if he or she wants, to work, live, and invest in our country’.
The remark typified another move made by Havel in support of the Czechs’ return to Europe: his efforts to provide a sophisticated moral-philosophical justification of the long-term process of European integration. Compared with other statesmen and stateswomen in the European region, Havel proved that he could himself write unaided the best — and the most thoughtful — speeches on the subject. His inaugural address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in early March 1994 was typical.425 Havel acknowledged all that had been so far achieved through negotiation. Given how much ‘unrest, chaos, and violence’ Europe had suffered in the twentieth century, it was a near-miracle that so much common agreement and successful institution-building had been achieved in so little time, he said. He criticized those — he surely had in mind personalities like Margaret Thatcher and Václav Klaus — who misrepresented the European Union as a new Moloch with an insatiable appetite for otherwise freedom-loving individuals, groups, regions, nations, and states. He instead spoke of the Union as ‘a space that allows the autonomous components of Europe to develop freely and in their own way in an environment of lasting security and mutually beneficial co-operation based on principles of democracy, respect for human rights, civil society, and an open market economy’.
Havel pointed to the nightmare alternative — genocidal war in the former Yugoslavia — before reiterating that the post-Communist countries of Europe had seen enough of such bloodshed this century. He stated bluntly what many of his fellow Czechs would not dare even to whisper. ‘Yes,’ he said, Czechs were ready to join the European Union ‘because we know it will repay us many times over, as it will all Europeans’. He then praised the Maastricht Treaty of Union as a ‘great administrative work’, as ‘a remarkable labour of the human spirit and its rational capacities’ — in order to criticize its lack of ‘a spiritual or moral or emotional dimension’. European integration could only succeed, he concluded, if it were given ‘charisma’. Something like a new charter of European Union was required. It would give to ‘millions of European souls an idea, a historical mission and a momentum’. The European charter would ‘clearly articulate the values upon which it is founded and which it intends to defend and cultivate’. It would also ‘take care to create emblems and symbols, visible bearers of its significance’.
Subsequent speeches tried to clarify and detail exactly what he meant by the European ‘idea’. The efforts were unusually philosophical, the turn away from practical politics definite. It was as if the Ichspieler had once again found his footing, a last remaining stage on which to perform to an audience — this time, significantly, one that stretched from Madeira to the Urals, from the frozen Arctic to sunny Cyprus, and even beyond, to interested audiences living in Tokyo, Beijing, Washington, Santiago, Canberra, New Delhi, Cairo, or Johannesburg. The stunning width of his audience matched the breathtaking height of his thoughts. The acrobatics involved talk of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ and its insistence that freedom requires giving allegiance and commitment to ‘the judge above the stars’. There were frequent mentions of the need for Europe to abandon its traditional quest ‘to spread — violently or non-violently — its own religion, its own civilization, its own inventions, or its own power’. Havel even insisted that Europe should stop preaching ‘the rule of law, democracy, human rights, or justice to the rest of the world’. Europe’s key task, he said repeatedly, is ‘to discover its conscience and its responsibility, in the deepest sense’.426
The acrobatics were brilliantly executed and good to watch. And they certainly helped to consolidate his global reputation, and to win him prizes, gold medals, honorary doctorates, several shortlistings for the Nobel Prize, even the honour of being labelled ‘the moral leader of Europe’.427 Yet the odd thing is that nobody spotted the tragic irony lurking within his efforts to become the moral leader of Europe with a global reputation. His campaigning for the Czech Republic’s full entry into the European Union, if successful, would for ever prevent a repetition of the kind of unchallenged charismatic presidential power that he had once enjoyed, during the first months of the glorious Velvet Revolution. During his ten-year string of presidencies, on the domestic front, that charismatic power was subsequently tamed and permanently humbled, check by balance, push by pull, confrontation by confrontation. But on the international scene, in principle, Havel’s power remained unchallenged. According to the Constitution of the Czech Republic (ratified on 16 December 1992), the President of the Republic ‘shall be the head of the state’ and ‘shall not be answerable for the exercise of his function’ (Article 54). Subject to the countersignature of the Prime Minister, or by a member of the government authorized by that minister, the President is sovereign in respect of such matters as representing the state in external affairs, negotiating and ratifying international treaties, acting as the supreme commander of the armed forces, appointing and promoting generals, appointing judges, and accrediting and receiving the heads of foreign diplomatic missions (Article 63).
Havel’s statesman-like battle for Czech accession to the European Union effectively spelled the end of these sovereign powers, in substance if not in name. His daring rescue of a small, humiliated and insignificant country from the Soviet empire, his reinsertion of that country on the map of the world by pushing it towards the European region, had a political price. Full membership in the European Union actually required the creation of a post-sovereign presidency, a sovereign leader who was no longer sovereign. European Union membership required a leader who ceased to be primus inter pares within the upper echelons of the state, who instead is just one leader among three or four handfuls of leaders, who are themselves subject to the constraints and opportunities afforded by obedience to the so-called acquis communautaire, the body of treaties, laws, and directives already agreed by the earlier political architects of European integration.
Future presidents of the Czech Republic may wish to thank — and some will want to curse — Havel for this spectacular change. But, whatever transpires and whatever is thought of the change, the Czech presidents who follow in his footsteps will feel the difference. They will of course sit beside the heads of large European member states; from time to time they will amend or veto their wills. But future Czech presidents will know that among the terms of their election is their acceptance of the fact that they can no longer engage in power politics in the early modern sense. Like the oxygen they breathe each few seconds, they shall have to operate within the kind of institutional framework anticipated in the Maastricht Treaty of Union. Thanks to that treaty, and Havel’s efforts to extend it eastwards, all future heads of Czech state will not be heads of state. They will instead make politics within a three-pillared structure, comprising the original European Communities — the ESCE, EAEC and EC — plus the newly founded Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and co-operation in Home and Judicial Affairs (HJA). They will accept that the stated goal of ‘creating an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe’ (Article A) requires not merely acceptance of the acquis communautaire, but also a relative shift away from policy-making by consensus towards qualified majority voting, plus a quickening pace of Euro-legislation in all policy fields. All future heads of state will recognize that the Treaty of Union ‘constitutionalizes’ the principle of the ‘Union Citizen’. They will understand that the combined effect of such changes, including the monetary union of existing and future member states, is to weaken and dissolve the principle of the sovereign territorial state. In other words — let us call this the European law of power-sharing — all heads of state will accept that they are subject to countervailing supranational powers, even in such fundamental matters as representing the state in external affairs, negotiating and ratifying international treaties, acting as the supreme commander of the armed forces, and accrediting and receiving the heads of foreign diplomatic missions.