bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1998) — Summer 1998 // Été 1998, p. 44
RESISTANCE & REVOLUTION — VACLAV
HAVEL’S CZECHOSLOVAKIA by Rob
McRae, Carleton University Press,
331 p., $27.95
Vaclav Havel might well be remembered by historians for providing the best vision as a world leader in the final years of this century. His speeches, plays and essays have been read by diplomats, writers and legislators around the world. The author of this book is a prize-winning Canadian diplomat and former professor of political philosophy. His treatment of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and its philosopher leader has lessons for virtually every foreign service official of any nation, but most especially our own.
Most noteworthy is the importance of McRae’s spouse, Lynn. She supported his work, allowing him to maximise his involvement with the principal actors of the opposition at key moments. She also illustrated the heading on each of the 47 chapters. Clearly, there was a close partnership between the two of them throughout the events described in the book.
McRae’s unorthodox diplomacy was based on monitoring the regime’s compliance with the Helsinki and other international human rights accords which it had freely entered into presumably expecting that Western governments would ignore what was happening on its streets. Fortunately for McRae, his ambassador, the now-retired Barry Mawhinney, colleagues in Prague (particularly Pierre Guimond), and his headquarters in Ottawa allowed him to pursue human rights concerns to the limit throughout 1988-89. His inside view of events provides fascinating reading
In passing, we learn much of interest about the fall of the Soviet Union. For example, Alexander Yakovlev (the longtime Russian Ambassador to Canada and Gorbachev’s key reform thinker) came to Prague in the fall of 1988 to criticise the regime’s brutal crushing of civilian protests. The hard-line apparatchiks in the capital fumed.
Havel was clearly the dominant figure throughout, notwithstanding that he failed on their first meeting to make much of an impression on McRae. The more the author got to know Havel and the other dissidents, fortunately, the more his commitment to the defence of human rights appears to have grown. More than once, McRae was almost expelled by the Prague Foreign Ministry.
By mid-1989, just after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Havel and Alexander Dubcek (of the short-lived Prague Spring of 1968) were calling separately on Cardinal Tomasek to celebrate his 90th birthday. A petition circulated at about this time, demanding religious freedom in Czechoslovakia, obtained fully 600,000 signatures.
A decisive moment described in the book was the decision of the Hungarian government in August 1989 to permit its citizens to enter Austria. A gaping hole in the iron curtain quickly emerged. Thousands of East Germans flooded into Czechoslovakia. The Berlin Wall soon fell, but in mid-November events moved in the opposite direction in Prague with a brutal crackdown on protesters.
We see the birth of Havel’s Civic Forum, a coalition of groups calling for respect for human rights and the restoration of democracy in Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Revolution was over when 200,000 people filled Wenceslas Square in Prague in late November ’89. Havel, the former jail inmate, was soon assuring the population that “history is coming back to our country”. When Dubcek addressed the same crowd, it was as if the Prague Spring of two decades earlier had returned
The remaining half of the book is devoted to Havel’s route to the presidency of his country. One episode here involved the triumphant return of the Canadian Thomas Bata, then 70, to Prague for the first time since 1946 to offer his support for Havel. The successful campaign by Civic Forum to marshall support for Havel in the Federal Assembly is sketched. Communism was quickly dismantled across Czechoslovakia.
There is much more of interest to Canadians: the late John Hasek of Toronto organised hundreds of Canadians from many walks of life to teach English across the new democracy. Our two populations shared the same political culture based, McRae concludes, on principle-centred leadership. We observe Havel’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to position Civic Forum as a political home for all high-minded Czechs and Slovaks.
The subsequent break-up of Czechoslovakia is presented in detail against the background of the USSR and Yugoslav experiences. Slovaks deeply resented being a puppet republic of the Czechs for decades. McRae concludes that all the parties competing for seats in the Federal Assembly in 1990 were essentially Czech and Slovak republic parties running federally, with much less interest in attempting to serve Czechoslovakia as a whole. Defending the honour of their respective constituencies became a new fault-line in the absence of the former authoritarian glue which held the country together. The chasm grew. When the Slovaks insisted on decentralisation, many Czechs who opposed this demand resolved to “go it alone”. Havel himself opposed separation, but his advocacy of staying together was simply not strong enough to hold the two republics together.
In a few short years, Havel went from being public enemy number one in a totalitarian state to one of the most revered statesmen of our planet. McRae’s book on how he did it will certainly interest readers of bout de papier.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1998) — Summer 1998 // Été 1998, p. 44. Read the rest of this issue →
