December marked ten years since the death of the Czech playwright and statesman Václav Havel. Even from this vantage point, it’s not easy to understand the legacy of this contradictory personality.
On the one hand, in the Czech Republic, which he led after the fall of communism, he is being sanctified. Havel is becoming an empty symbol of freedom and democracy and an icon of the liberal Right, which uses him as the foundation of its narrative that the triumph of liberal-democratic capitalism was a moral victory over the evil of communism. On the other, critics of Havel’s legacy are prone to making the one-sided argument that he was a mere political stagehand, making props for plays that were actually written and directed by the US, both on the domestic and international scene.
Yet these interpretations underplay the originality of Havel’s ideas, which were based on a critique not only of the communist system, but of the victorious West. Havel proposed an alternative to what the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka called “super-civilisation”. This describes a system in which everything is turned into mechanical procedures and instruments, where automation and soulless rationalisation dominate – something prevalent in the West, as well as under state socialism. These two economic systems, argued Patočka, were therefore entering the same crisis. Western civilisation had managed to hide it better, but that only made its crisis even deeper.
