The European Council on Foreign Relations

Vaclav Havel: the best president Slovakia never had

Date: 21st December 2011  |  Author: Jana Kobzova ,

Categories: Europe and the world,
Tags: , czechoslovakia, slovakia, vaclav havel

It was December 1989 and I was a school girl in what was then Czechoslovakia. I had flu and so instead of going to school or accompanying my parents for the protests, I stayed at home and watched TV. This is where my first memory of Vaclav Havel comes from: he was trying to pass through a big crowd of his supporters, smiling, with his fingers forming the letter ‘V’ for victory. I hadn’t heard of this man before, of his extended stays in prison, dissident activism or playwriting. At that time, I didn’t even know that it was Havel who in his 1975 letter to the then Secretary General of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Gustav Husak wrote the best analysis of how and why the communist regime in Czechoslovakia sustained itself: “why do people behave as they do; why do they do everything that put together creates an impression of a totally unified society, totally supportive of their government? I think that the answer is clear to each detached observer: they are driven by fear”.

Most people will remember Vaclav Havel for what he did before and right after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia and rightly so. Yet I’d like to pay my tribute to this man for what he did in 1990s for Slovakia, after the country he was the president of, Czechoslovakia, ceased to exist. The Czechs and Slovaks peacefully dissolved their state at the end of 1992. While the independent Czech Republic has pursued a more or less direct – although still painful – path of economic and political liberalisation, this was not the case in what used to be eastern part of Czechoslovakia.

Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, who dominated the Slovak political scene until 1998, focused above all on concentration of power and enriching himself and a few of his cronies. His talk of ‘multi-vector foreign policy’ masked a lack of vision and an unwillingness to observe basic democratic principles, presenting cheap nationalism as an alternative to the EU or NATO. As a result, Slovakia dropped out of the first Central European ‘regatta’ of states such as Poland, Hungary or Czech Republic, which joined NATO in 1997 and which had good chances of becoming first post-communist members of the European Union. In the words of the US Secretary State Madeleine Albright, Slovakia ended up being ‘the black hole of Europe’. Most NATO or EU members seemed resigned to pursuing deeper relations with Warsaw, Budapest and Prague and leaving the rest of the region to its own devices, hoping for gradual if lengthy improvements.

Surprisingly for many, Havel, previously an opponent of NATO and believer in a greater role of the OSCE in European security, also stepped in and vocally called on the Western leaders not to forget about the rest of the Central Europe, including Slovakia. His speechat the conference in Bratislava in May 2001 which gathered 9 Central and Eastern European countries that hoped to join the EU and NATO was considered the strongest statement yet on the merits of NATO expansion into the Baltic region and other Central European countries by a leading politician of a NATO member state. Havel's efforts to ensure continuation of the NATO’s enlargement – and for Slovakia not to be left out of it – have helped enormously. It is also thanks to him that after Meciar was voted out of power in 1998, both NATO and the EU lent support and assistance to Slovakia and eventually embraced it as a member of both institutions in 2004.

Havel will be missed for so many reasons - a keen fan of Lou Reed or Rolling Stones, a friend of Bill Clinton, Aung San Suu Kyi and other world leaders, he helped defeat communism in Czechoslovakia. As president of an independent Czech Republic, he used his international authority not only to help his country punch way above its weight, but also to help his former Slovak compatriots to return to the community of well-governed democracies at the end of the 1990s. For me, Vaclav Havel will be also missed as the best president independent Slovakia never had. 

Share or like this blog post Print this post