The Burdens of Freedom by Kenney Padraic

Author:Kenney, Padraic
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: National Book Network International

4 | Portraits of hubris: democratic politics

On New Year’s Day, 1990, Václav Havel stepped on to a balcony in the presidential castle to address the crowd gathered to cheer his inauguration. He depicted the previous regime as aloof, and ignorant of the everyday lives of the citizens, and congratulated his fellow Czechs and Slovaks on the “enormous strength” they had shown in overturning communism so suddenly and peacefully the previous autumn. Havel promised that policies would be based upon morality, recalling the ideals of Czechoslovakia’s first democracy under President Masaryk.

Politics ought to be a reflection of the aspiration to contribute to the happiness of the community and not of the need to deceive or pillage the community … Politics does not have to be the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculating, calculating, intrigues, secret agreements, and pragmatic maneuvering, but … it can also be the art of the impossible, that is the art of making both ourselves and the world better.

His rousing finale paraphrased Masaryk: “People,” he proclaimed, “your country has returned to you.”1

Havel captured all the optimism of that revolutionary moment in that one line. Note, however, how much faith he places in the workings of politics: The country became the people’s because it had a new president. Indeed, it seemed then that political change alone would make happiness attainable. This perspective owes much to previous revolutions, in which political change, grounded in ideology, appeared to be fundamental. The revolutions of 1989 were not, in contrast, guided by one political elite. Instead, they offered the possibility of varied, even contradictory political solutions. Yet that variety is sometimes overlooked: the apparent lack of a “Third Way” makes it easy to assume that there is but one trajectory.

Throughout the post-communist era, political change has not only been the most noticeable, but also the most easily measured. Each year, for example, Freedom House rates countries’ level of democracy on a scale of 1 to 7, considering the freedom of elections, the independence of the media, the rule of law, etc. In 1989, all except “partly free” (thanks to reformist communism) Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, ranked as “not free”; in 2005, Eastern European countries (with a few exceptions in the Western Balkans, namely Bosnia-Hercegovina, Macedonia, Albania, and Kosovo) have earned the “free” label.2 These assessments, shaped as they are by American assumptions about democracy and capitalism, tell us as much about their authors as about their subjects, however. It is also true that, just as the creation of nation-states from multicultural empires leaves many minorities on the margins, so too democratic change (and the affirmation of property rights, a key measure for Freedom House) excludes many groups that may have felt less excluded before. Thus, political change may also be easier to understand if we approach it having already explored the economic, social, and cultural processes taking place simultaneously. Perhaps then the rapid march of elections, parties, and leaders will not just be a series of names and dates, but trends in a broader regional context.

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