Mediaboss Marketing

The Civic Forum

The idea of the Civic Forum had been discussed in Czech dissident circles as far back as the 1970s. Whats surprising however, is how much it shared with the vision of some forward-thinking communists at the time.

In his book The Prague Spring: Departure into a New World, Martin Schulze Wessel describes the remarkable new conception of the Communist Party that Petr Pithart came up with during the Prague Spring of 1968. Pithart, who had been a party member since 1960, went on to collaborate with Havel in dissident activity, becoming Czech prime minister in 1990.

Like Havel, Pithart did not want to copy the Western parliamentary model which in the minds of the public was associated with the corruption, scandals and fragmented party landscape of the interwar First Republic. Instead, he argued that the Communist Party should be an empty framework, a platform, where the process of continual confrontation of opinions, which are also verified by societys praxis, is organised by the vanguard, who are recognised and respected by society. The Party was to become more a continuum of progressive ideas than a continuum of apparatuses.

Today, this proposal seems strikingly reminiscent of the later Civic Forum, which was an empty framework for the exchange of progressive ideas that emerged from the Velvet Revolution. Both were innovative political formations that were supposed to overcome the limits of both the Eastern and Western systems, in which Havel after Patoka saw a single super-civilisation in crisis.

Yet while Havels ideas seem to overlap with those of reformist communists during the Prague Spring, he did not endorse them in 1968. Instead, he advocated notably, in a dispute with the author Milan Kundera in the late 1960s a return to the normality of Western civilisation.

Somethings wrong here. Is Havels idea of non-party politics really a return to normality? During the Velvet Revolution he argued not only against parties, but against a return to capitalism and for the dissolution of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Whats more, by a return to normal, Havel meant freedom of expression and an end to the arbitrary power of the secret police but he overlooked the fact that Western civilisation was no paragon either in this respect. In the 1960s, the US was waging war in Vietnam and there were mass radical protest movements in the US, France, West Germany and elsewhere. Segregation of the African-American population persisted, while France and Great Britain were or had recently been at war with national liberation movements in their colonies, using brutal tactics of suppression.

How can we explain Havels blindness to these things in his polemic with Kundera? Perhaps Havel just didnt want to admit how radical his ideas were at the time, or that they resonated with those of the Prague Spring because that would have implied a partial endorsement of a communist system he opposed.

Read the original:
Vclav Havel and the meaning of socialism - Open Democracy