Jacques Rupnik speaks at Prague Spring 50

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04/12/2018 Added

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Jacques Rupnik gives his talk "The Other 1968—Three Readings of Prague Spring" at Prague Spring 50

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[00:00:09.600]Thank you, thank you very much for this kind introduction
[00:00:12.533]and for reminding everybody that I
[00:00:16.130]wrote a book about the history
[00:00:17.610]of the Communist Party of Czechloslovakia.
[00:00:20.310]This is my Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
[00:00:24.155]and anyways, thanks for inviting me here.
[00:00:27.835]This has been a wonderful event,
[00:00:31.130]and given that this has been a long week
[00:00:35.850]we just spoke with James and perhaps we'll try
[00:00:38.214]instead of giving the lecture as I initially intended to,
[00:00:42.080]I will give a sort of an abridged main points of it
[00:00:46.710]and then we can continue in the form of a conversation.
[00:00:50.110]I think this is more appropriate for after a week of,
[00:00:55.894]of lectures and discussions here.
[00:01:03.000]Anniversaries and commemorations as we know
[00:01:07.030]usually tell us more about those who commemorate
[00:01:09.973]than about the events that are being commemorated.
[00:01:14.730]What is interesting to me this year
[00:01:17.650]is that there is a huge amount of
[00:01:22.560]discussions, events, films
[00:01:24.913]about '68 in the west,
[00:01:28.720]and rather little relatively speaking about
[00:01:34.100]in the Czech Republic itself, about the Prague Spring.
[00:01:38.640]Admittedly it's not easy to commemorate
[00:01:40.870]a project that crashed disastrously
[00:01:45.760]and you therefore commemorate the invasion,
[00:01:51.080]I think it was referred to yesterday.
[00:01:54.320]But the '68 events, if they are commemorated
[00:02:00.220]and they are, are part of a more general
[00:02:05.320]this year commemoration of the momentous eights
[00:02:09.340]in Czechloslovak history, and the minister of culture
[00:02:14.130]in the Czech Republic I think recorded some 143 events
[00:02:20.100]where this is going to be commemorated.
[00:02:23.260]I can't think of a single historian
[00:02:25.830]that you would meet in Prague who hasn't just been
[00:02:28.420]or is not about to take part in one of those,
[00:02:31.550]and even a taxi driver who was taking me
[00:02:35.930]after New Year's to the airport was saying you know,
[00:02:40.007]fasten your seatbelt.
[00:02:42.410]This is a year with an eight.
[00:02:44.680]So the year with an eight, that means that yeah,
[00:02:49.030]there are some risks entailed.
[00:02:52.720]And I think it was in this context of the eights
[00:02:55.940]that perhaps we can approach this.
[00:03:00.590]It refers to of course if you put it in that context,
[00:03:04.140]to certain anxieties that are today expressed about the past
[00:03:11.290]and the number eight lends itself rather well to that
[00:03:16.187]because yeah, we know the figure eight,
[00:03:19.990]but if you put it this way it's a sign of infinite.
[00:03:24.800]And the...
[00:03:28.507]If you put it horizontally, it also can refer to
[00:03:32.670]what is known as the Mobius strip
[00:03:35.510]which is a surface with only one side and one edge.
[00:03:41.700]It can be made using a strip of paper,
[00:03:44.020]gluing the two ends with a half twist.
[00:03:47.750]So the twisting is possible in two directions,
[00:03:50.790]and there are therefore two different
[00:03:53.340]mirror image Mobius strips.
[00:03:56.300]A bug crawling on the,
[00:04:01.350]on the Mobius strip would therefore go twice
[00:04:05.920]on the same place before returning to the starting point,
[00:04:10.580]and this is what the Jacques Lacan,
[00:04:15.170]the psychoanalyst has written about
[00:04:21.880]and he considers this double loop
[00:04:24.730]as the revelation of the anxiety of repetition.
[00:04:29.950]Well I don't want to go into any further
[00:04:33.170]into this explanation, but of course when you talk about
[00:04:37.390]'68 and the defeat, and the capitulation of Dubcek
[00:04:41.160]et cetera et cetera, inevitably you are always put
[00:04:45.123]into the context of '38, '48, the previous dramas.
[00:04:51.010]This is the context in which this has been read.
[00:04:55.580]I will...
[00:05:00.260]Not deal with the other eights.
[00:05:02.200]I will focus of course on the one that we are
[00:05:06.340]concerned here today, but I see it's important to remind
[00:05:11.360]that this is in this context that it is
[00:05:14.220]considered in the Czech Republic today.
[00:05:21.330]Just to refer to the way it was understood at the time,
[00:05:27.690]a couple of months after the August invasion,
[00:05:30.600]two English professors of international relations,
[00:05:35.000]Adam Roberts and Philip Windsor wrote
[00:05:37.884]the following opening sentence
[00:05:39.840]to their study of the Czechloslovak spring.
[00:05:42.067]"Czechloslovakia 1968 represented
[00:05:45.447]"an important moment in human history.
[00:05:48.197]"It did not represent an important international crisis."
[00:05:53.270]And this was I think the
[00:05:58.540]reason why an event that was very quickly blown over
[00:06:04.630]by what was considered to be an incident
[00:06:08.967]in the emerging east-west detente
[00:06:13.180]and the real tragedy and trauma this has represented,
[00:06:16.960]not just for the Czechs but for those who cared for
[00:06:20.545]certain ideas and for certain
[00:06:22.600]possibilities of change in Europe.
[00:06:26.890]I suggest to you very briefly,
[00:06:28.690]because this is what we agreed with James.
[00:06:30.480]Instead of giving the lecture as I intended,
[00:06:33.620]I will give three main points of it
[00:06:37.130]and then we can continue in the form of the discussion.
[00:06:40.220]I think this format is much more congenial
[00:06:43.980]and certainly much more preferable for me as well.
[00:06:47.530]So therefore I prefer I would briefly look
[00:06:50.620]at the way the Prague Spring debate
[00:06:56.570]has been seen in the Czech context,
[00:07:00.960]or the Czechloslovak context.
[00:07:02.770]How it features in the central and east European context,
[00:07:07.260]and then about the east-west contrast,
[00:07:13.210]misunderstanding, call it whatever you want.
[00:07:17.084]So first.
[00:07:20.270]The Prague Spring is not what you get in the textbook,
[00:07:24.503]starting on fifth of January
[00:07:26.760]with the election of Alexander Dubcek,
[00:07:29.210]ending with the 21st of August and the Soviet invasion.
[00:07:33.906]No, the Prague Spring is a process
[00:07:39.780]where converged number of
[00:07:44.910]crises of the system at the time.
[00:07:47.920]One has to do with the economy,
[00:07:50.040]and this is the Ota Sik reforms.
[00:07:52.280]He is the author then of a book called The Third Way.
[00:07:57.379]The Czechloslovak question and federalism as it is emerging,
[00:08:04.240]and the third one and possibly the most important
[00:08:07.010]is the emancipation of the whole sphere of culture
[00:08:09.880]from the realm of communist ideology at the time,
[00:08:14.480]and that process was of course a gradual one,
[00:08:19.400]but that emancipation of the sphere of culture,
[00:08:23.660]the culture of background to the Prague Spring
[00:08:26.320]is something absolutely crucial
[00:08:28.210]if you want to understand why it matters.
[00:08:30.640]If it was just for these eight months
[00:08:32.710]with the botched attempt to reform a communist regime,
[00:08:38.050]you could simply shrug and said you know,
[00:08:39.600]this is of interest to people
[00:08:41.287]who are interested in communism.
[00:08:43.840]People like myself who have written a book about it,
[00:08:45.970]but no the reason why people are still interested in that
[00:08:50.350]because the sixties were something important,
[00:08:52.770]and you had then of course related to that
[00:08:55.760]interpretations of the Prague Spring that took that on board
[00:08:59.970]as the triumph, if you want,
[00:09:02.390]of the Czech culture over the communist structure.
[00:09:08.690]It gradually in the society
[00:09:10.830]that was a culture that resonated in the society
[00:09:13.660]and that eventually, under special circumstances in 1968,
[00:09:17.980]could come to the fore.
[00:09:19.720]Gordon Skilling, a Canadian political scientist
[00:09:23.880]and historian has written a book
[00:09:27.530]about 1968 called The Interrupted Revolution.
[00:09:30.720]This is the, probably the most,
[00:09:34.460]yeah accomplished book on the subject.
[00:09:37.570]And he defended a thesis which of course is highly debatable
[00:09:43.130]but it relates to the previous one I mentioned,
[00:09:45.870]and it's more or less about the endurance
[00:09:48.710]of Czech democratic political culture,
[00:09:52.074]which goes back to the,
[00:09:55.950]has roots in the late 19th Century.
[00:09:58.270]Of course the founding moment, the inter-war period,
[00:10:02.230]then the brief democratic interlude to 1945, '48
[00:10:06.310]and somehow '68 in his eyes,
[00:10:08.710]or the sixties if you will,
[00:10:10.030]is an attempt to reconnect with that.
[00:10:12.610]So this is a thesis about the importance
[00:10:14.815]of political culture that is there in society
[00:10:18.060]and that eventually is there
[00:10:20.218]within the communist party membership itself.
[00:10:23.600]That was part of Gordon Skilling's thesis.
[00:10:28.938]I met him when he was writing the book.
[00:10:31.060]I was a mere student then,
[00:10:32.610]and we had then discussions about his title,
[00:10:37.040]The Interrupted Revolution.
[00:10:39.210]I was telling him you know what revolution?
[00:10:42.100]But for him, the logic of the kind of reforms
[00:10:45.670]that were being undertaken,
[00:10:47.120]starting with the abolition of censorship and the whole,
[00:10:50.394]meant fundamental change
[00:10:52.810]and this was impossible to sustain in a communist regime
[00:10:55.810]and therefore it had a kind of revolutionary dimension.
[00:11:00.130]I'm not going to dwell on that argument.
[00:11:03.880]That is a long gone debate,
[00:11:07.135]but the thesis about Czech democratic exceptionalism
[00:11:11.600]was clearly related to all the literature
[00:11:14.610]about the Prague Spring.
[00:11:18.010]The other interesting debate about '68
[00:11:22.618]opposed two probably best known Czech writers
[00:11:29.512]internationally, and that's Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera.
[00:11:37.439]And I think it's worth to revisit the debate
[00:11:39.360]simply for...
[00:11:43.110]Because it acquires with the time certain,
[00:11:46.710]different perspectives than when it actually took place.
[00:11:52.120]Kundera wrote a piece saying basically
[00:11:56.240]the Prague Spring is a momentous event
[00:11:59.470]because its significance goes beyond this country,
[00:12:05.070]or even beyond this region.
[00:12:06.750]This attempt at...
[00:12:09.810]This distancing itself or breaking away
[00:12:12.600]from Soviet style communism, and at the same time
[00:12:16.830]taking distance from western capitalist system,
[00:12:20.850]that ideal of combining democracy and socialism
[00:12:26.270]is a unique thing, and although it has been defeated
[00:12:30.282]it remains an important ideal
[00:12:32.620]and he goes on to say you know we are even greater in defeat
[00:12:36.340]than we are during the Spring itself.
[00:12:40.250]Well that is a highly debatable proposition.
[00:12:43.820]Anyway, this is Czech uniqueness again,
[00:12:47.540]you know like in the 15th Century Reformation.
[00:12:50.499]Again, we had to be defeated but that's because we were
[00:12:55.280]ahead of the times, so to speak.
[00:12:56.670]He doesn't put it that way.
[00:12:58.336]That's my
[00:13:00.890]facetious comment on it.
[00:13:02.670]Havel replies to this by saying
[00:13:06.960]yes, the Spring was great
[00:13:09.710]and thanks for that, and it was wonderful,
[00:13:12.300]and the restoration of all the freedoms and civic rights,
[00:13:15.920]et cetera et cetera.
[00:13:19.030]Great, last time we had it was 30 years ago
[00:13:21.870]and most civilized countries in Europe
[00:13:25.952]actually consider this as normal.
[00:13:29.870]So we were simply correcting the abnormality
[00:13:33.493]of our situation, reverting to normal.
[00:13:37.960]And it's the word normal, as opposed
[00:13:40.020]to the normalization that followed of course,
[00:13:43.070]that is of interest perhaps, of lasting interest.
[00:13:46.270]What is it that in '68,
[00:13:50.740]was understood as normal,
[00:13:52.760]and what is it we today maybe understand
[00:13:55.770]as normal part of democracy
[00:13:58.950]or liberal democracy of the time?
[00:14:01.995]This was the Czech debate about '68.
[00:14:09.960]For a long time I think everybody thought,
[00:14:14.100]including myself of course, and I still think that
[00:14:17.296]yeah, Havel had clearly showed that not,
[00:14:22.380]well not only this was not such a
[00:14:24.560]great exceptional Czech invention, but also the defeat.
[00:14:32.070]Kundera says we are great in defeat.
[00:14:33.840]Well, the ideals are maybe great,
[00:14:35.960]but at the same time we are
[00:14:37.210]plunging in this totalitarian tunnel
[00:14:39.240]and God knows when we're going to see
[00:14:42.016]the light at the end of that tunnel.
[00:14:44.210]So no Messianic, no megalomania
[00:14:49.330]which was sort of a part of the,
[00:14:54.360]part of the Kundera argument.
[00:14:56.980]I think if you reread the Kundera piece today,
[00:14:59.670]especially the second reply to Havel,
[00:15:02.133]you see that some of the questions that he asks
[00:15:05.740]about what is normal precisely
[00:15:08.690]is I think relevant for today,
[00:15:11.680]or at least for the developments after '89.
[00:15:15.490]What is it actually you are reverting to
[00:15:18.315]when you get rid of the communist system?
[00:15:22.870]Okay that was the Czech debate,
[00:15:25.872]and it is sometimes worth revisiting.
[00:15:30.576]I said I will be quick, so I must speed up.
[00:15:33.640]The second, I can be really quick on the second part
[00:15:38.250]because that's well trodden path,
[00:15:41.170]and that's about the central
[00:15:42.520]and east European dimension of it.
[00:15:45.100]This is 1968 Prague Spring of the supreme stage
[00:15:49.620]of reformism in eastern Europe.
[00:15:51.680]Okay, nowhere have the reforms of the post communist era
[00:15:55.430]gone as far and nowhere were the limits tested that way,
[00:16:02.480]and of course the crushing of those reforms
[00:16:08.070]meant basically as Leszek Kolakowski put it,
[00:16:11.953]this marked the clinical death of Marxism in eastern Europe
[00:16:16.730]under the tanks, under the Russian tanks in Prague.
[00:16:21.000]So that's, that is one part.
[00:16:24.640]It is the end of the discussion about how to reform,
[00:16:28.310]how to reform the system.
[00:16:30.177]It returns with a vengeance 20 years after
[00:16:35.500]with Mikhail Gorbachev.
[00:16:37.416]Zdenek Mlynar Was referred to in the previous discussion.
[00:16:41.340]The translator of Zdenek Mlynar
[00:16:43.080]is present and we salute him.
[00:16:45.236]It's Paul Wilson, but in case you,
[00:16:49.970]you did translate him no?
[00:16:51.770]If I understood you correctly.
[00:16:53.690]You didn't, Mlynar's book, you did okay.
[00:16:58.401]So Mlynar was a classmate of Gorbachev
[00:17:03.697]at the university.
[00:17:06.050]They were roommates, they were close friends
[00:17:08.220]and the, he was a member of the bureau
[00:17:11.260]of the Czechloslovak communist party in '68.
[00:17:14.000]That connection between
[00:17:15.300]the Prague Spring and Gorbachev mattered
[00:17:18.477]for the kind of ideas Gorbachev was developing
[00:17:22.130]20 years too late and in a botched manner
[00:17:25.270]and Perestroika as we know turned into Catastroika
[00:17:28.780]and absolutely unraveled the system
[00:17:33.910]rather than reforming it.
[00:17:35.670]Thus we're confirming the thesis
[00:17:38.620]about the irreformability of the system.
[00:17:41.370]What is interesting is that Gorbachev himself understands it
[00:17:45.560]or at least in a way understands it
[00:17:49.230]when he talks to Jiri Dienstbier
[00:17:51.240]on the first occasion when Jiri Dienstbier
[00:17:53.540]a '68 journalist who becomes a dissident, stoker,
[00:17:57.041]and suddenly in December '89 minister of foreign affairs,
[00:18:02.670]on the first meeting with Gorbachev
[00:18:04.830]he says something about the crushed hopes of 1968
[00:18:08.490]and Gorbachev replies by saying
[00:18:10.417]well in '68 we haven't just strangled
[00:18:14.216]the Prague Spring in Czechloslovakia.
[00:18:17.460]We have strangled ourselves.
[00:18:20.420]So basically there you have the full story.
[00:18:23.970]The strangling of the Prague Spring prepares the ground
[00:18:29.380]for the unraveling of the Soviet system,
[00:18:32.940]and in that way prepares the ground for 1989.
[00:18:38.030]The third dimension of '68
[00:18:42.817]is not just Czech or east central European communism.
[00:18:46.340]It's about east and west.
[00:18:48.733]In a way the previous conversation already led us into this.
[00:18:56.810]You have, and lots of writings about '68 cover that,
[00:19:02.360]present the '68, the international dimension of '68
[00:19:09.430]focusing on the simultaneity of those revolts of course.
[00:19:14.100]And there is the simultaneity.
[00:19:17.350]There is the idea of the challenge to the establishments
[00:19:23.870]in different circumstances of course.
[00:19:26.699]In fundamentally different circumstances.
[00:19:29.860]In different parts of the world.
[00:19:32.080]In east and west Europe in particular,
[00:19:36.550]and the challenge to the Cold War division of Europe
[00:19:40.460]because if you challenge the systems in both sides
[00:19:43.330]of Europe, you are of course challenging the status quo
[00:19:48.380]that was established.
[00:19:50.190]The second focus was about the generational aspect.
[00:19:53.831]That is obviously yeah the focus about the youth revolts
[00:19:59.330]and this huge, so generational literature.
[00:20:01.790]This is the revolt, this is a clash of generations
[00:20:04.450]et cetera et cetera, and yeah.
[00:20:07.080]Superficially you can identify
[00:20:10.657]the same dress code, the same hair,
[00:20:13.880]the same music they listen to
[00:20:15.530]and the same challenge to the establishment
[00:20:20.010]that they post politically.
[00:20:21.650]I noticed that there is the new word
[00:20:25.100]that the experts from the Oxford Dictionary
[00:20:28.779]have chosen as the word of the year,
[00:20:33.850]and that's youthquake,
[00:20:36.400]and they did that last year.
[00:20:38.860]And they define it as "significant cultural, political,
[00:20:42.937]"and social change arising from actions
[00:20:45.707]"or influence of young people."
[00:20:47.360]Okay, so this is youthquake.
[00:20:50.395]That's one reading of '68, sort of transversely
[00:20:55.115]east and west and of course you can add to it
[00:20:58.990]that all these movements were united
[00:21:01.020]in their respective defeats.
[00:21:02.330]They all in one way or another,
[00:21:04.460]have not succeeded at least on their initial agenda.
[00:21:08.960]But of course more interesting is that
[00:21:10.480]the simultaneity is not similitude,
[00:21:14.030]and that not only you have very different itineraries
[00:21:20.118]of '68ers after '68.
[00:21:23.110]Of course being the '68er in Prague,
[00:21:27.180]in the years that Paul Wilson has described
[00:21:30.180]meant something else.
[00:21:33.900]You know, massive purges and the marginalization
[00:21:38.060]precisely of that independent sphere of culture
[00:21:40.838]that I had referred to before.
[00:21:44.075]And the '68ers in the west,
[00:21:48.440]to whom I will return in a moment.
[00:21:54.770]If I had to spell out in a telegraphic style
[00:21:58.180]the main differences, I would say
[00:22:01.840]in Prague the theme was return to Europe.
[00:22:05.560]You know, the slogan of '89 it was already there.
[00:22:08.390]In a survey published in
[00:22:13.380]they asked people a simple question
[00:22:16.760]from where to where with whom?
[00:22:20.400]And Ivan Svitak, the philosopher,
[00:22:23.370]the (speaks foreign language) of '68
[00:22:27.195]gave the shortest answer.
[00:22:30.140]From Asia to Europe, alone.
[00:22:33.910]That was his version of what '68 was about.
[00:22:39.900]Return to Europe.
[00:22:42.650]Meanwhile in the west,
[00:22:45.560]Europe was not exactly the subject.
[00:22:48.240]Europe was either considered as a common market,
[00:22:51.210]this capitalist market that was being established,
[00:22:56.660]or it was associated with
[00:23:01.900]post-colonial guilt, and you had
[00:23:04.430]the decolonization had just begun
[00:23:06.660]and therefore the focus was more on the third world.
[00:23:09.470]So the war in Vietnam.
[00:23:12.530]If I had, again in a nutshell you could say Ho, Che, Mao.
[00:23:16.290]You know this is a shortcut, but they were
[00:23:18.610]looking elsewhere, outside of Europe for inspiration.
[00:23:24.395]The second difference is that
[00:23:29.220]radical '68ers in the west
[00:23:31.200]would have little time for so-called
[00:23:36.560]bourgeois freedoms or even election affairs.
[00:23:39.560]What else, you know if you were emerging
[00:23:42.130]after 20 years of Stalinism,
[00:23:44.075]a restoration of bourgeois freedoms
[00:23:46.450]was not such a terrible thing,
[00:23:48.555]and the same thing goes of course about
[00:23:51.594]the consumer society, which was a prime target
[00:23:54.518]of the '68ers in the west,
[00:23:56.930]and if you're emerging from 20 years of socialist scarcity,
[00:24:01.595]you know consumption is not such a thing to be scorned of.
[00:24:06.960]So you have
[00:24:11.435]major differences among them,
[00:24:14.690]and I think that...
[00:24:18.100]I think Milan Kundera put it in a nutshell
[00:24:24.690]in a text he wrote 10 years after in Paris.
[00:24:28.510]And I can quote from that because I think it deserves it,
[00:24:33.150]and it's also a nice followup
[00:24:34.980]to his debate with Havel in '68.
[00:24:38.994]So he describes the contrast as follows.
[00:24:41.417]"Paris May '68 was an explosion of revolutionary lyricism.
[00:24:45.617]"Prague Spring was the explosion
[00:24:47.667]"of post-revolutionary skepticism.
[00:24:50.217]"May '68 was the radical uprising
[00:24:52.459]"whereas what had for many years been leading
[00:24:57.017]"towards the explosion of the Prague Spring
[00:24:59.957]"was a popular revolt by moderates."
[00:25:03.200]I love this definition.
[00:25:04.210]The popular revolt by moderates.
[00:25:06.875]And then one more, if we have the time.
[00:25:12.370]One more quote from this.
[00:25:13.907]"Paris '68 challenged the basis of what is called
[00:25:17.267]"European culture and its traditional values.
[00:25:19.757]"Prague Spring was a passionate defense
[00:25:21.477]"of European cultural tradition in the widest
[00:25:23.737]"and most tolerant sense of the term.
[00:25:25.657]"A defense of Christianity as much as modern art."
[00:25:28.590]Et cetera et cetera.
[00:25:29.423]"We all struggled for the contribution of all of the above."
[00:25:34.510]Et cetera.
[00:25:35.343]So, he makes I think a very
[00:25:39.078]good contrast, which
[00:25:44.540]is important to bear in mind
[00:25:46.314]because the misunderstandings of '68 have I think
[00:25:51.030]marked people on, and sometimes
[00:25:55.960]the current misunderstandings.
[00:26:00.640]I'm not saying they can be traced to that,
[00:26:02.467]and that would be, but there is the sense
[00:26:04.820]that you have not understood what we went through,
[00:26:07.980]or we have not understood what you were bragging on about
[00:26:13.450]and those misunderstandings from way back
[00:26:15.739]have followup I think in the context
[00:26:18.539]in today's European politics.
[00:26:24.880]It is worth however, this is a contrast.
[00:26:27.960]You may want also to remember the exchange
[00:26:32.690]and the dialogue that went through.
[00:26:35.700]They were a number of it.
[00:26:37.050]There was a Christian Marxist dialogue.
[00:26:39.570]Prague was a major center of that,
[00:26:42.539]and you had, you had of course the important
[00:26:50.760]intellectuals or philosophers from Prague.
[00:26:52.670]Probably the most influential books published at the time
[00:26:56.820]where Karel Kosik's Dialectic of the Concrete,
[00:26:59.310]Kosik influenced by Ian Petuchka
[00:27:01.377]who was trying to humanize Marxism,
[00:27:04.030]was trying to reformulate Marxism
[00:27:07.470]and had a very rather civilizational pessimism
[00:27:12.100]about modern world and modern technology,
[00:27:15.670]and in contrast you had the other author
[00:27:17.970]that was most published at the time in the west,
[00:27:20.610]most translated.
[00:27:21.500]I'm talking about the author that was most
[00:27:23.660]translated in the west at the time, Radovan Richta's
[00:27:27.220]Civilization at the Crossroad,
[00:27:28.860]who on the contrary had this sort of optimism
[00:27:32.270]about the so-called scientific and technical revolution.
[00:27:34.800]Incidentally, Kosik's humanization
[00:27:39.030]through phenomenology of trying to combine
[00:27:42.440]Marxism and phenomenology was not compatible
[00:27:46.810]with the normalization that followed,
[00:27:48.510]but Radovan Richta scientific and technological revolution
[00:27:51.815]certainly was, but the...
[00:27:56.120]I think what is interesting is
[00:27:59.260]despite the differences I have stressed,
[00:28:02.330]is to see that convergence has taken place
[00:28:05.314]in the following decade.
[00:28:08.170]If you take what, if you look at what happened
[00:28:11.290]to the radical '68ers in the west,
[00:28:15.074]most of the important intellectuals
[00:28:17.490]or the people that I happen to have seen over the years
[00:28:21.930]because I was sort of a middle man with the countries
[00:28:25.300]of central Europe and particularly with Prague,
[00:28:28.550]you see gradually how they let's say the radical left
[00:28:34.940]became abandoned Marxism and became anti-totalitarian left
[00:28:42.830]and then later anti-totalitarian liberals, more or less.
[00:28:46.450]This was the trajectory, and yeah.
[00:28:51.154]And this was true not just in Paris,
[00:28:53.500]but this was true in Berlin,
[00:28:55.210]in other places like that and that created the conditions
[00:28:59.906]for a convergence for the meeting of,
[00:29:03.890]at least for a dialogue with dissent in central Europe
[00:29:06.880]and particularly under the impact
[00:29:08.720]of Charter 77 and Vaclav Havel.
[00:29:10.900]It was Havel's essays were mentioned.
[00:29:15.920]Paul has translated them into English.
[00:29:17.940]I translated one into French.
[00:29:20.280]The open letter to Husak.
[00:29:22.230]That was in the summer of '75
[00:29:24.034]that I translated that, and I remember
[00:29:26.650]the impact it had then.
[00:29:29.660]There were a number of circumstances.
[00:29:32.295]There was Solzhenitsyn in 1974 and then there was Havel,
[00:29:36.192]there were a few other things
[00:29:37.025]and basically if you take 10 years after '68,
[00:29:41.170]the '68ers that were ignorant about Prague in 1968 were
[00:29:48.240]basically on the same wavelength,
[00:29:50.860]receptive to the message of dissidence
[00:29:56.013]in Paris, but also in London, in Berlin,
[00:30:00.790]in Rome, et cetera et cetera.
[00:30:02.390]So that convergence I think
[00:30:09.090]is the important legacy,
[00:30:11.980]and in a way it help explain
[00:30:18.240]why the writings of dissent in central Europe
[00:30:22.670]could have such an impact.
[00:30:24.380]They were the receptors, they were the disseminators
[00:30:27.806]of those ideas, and I'm not sure
[00:30:33.710]how much it worked the other way.
[00:30:35.290]That is much more difficult to assess, but yeah.
[00:30:38.630]The impact of dissent, charter 77 in particular
[00:30:43.630]and of Havel's writing was absolutely considerable.
[00:30:48.600]So the fact that in the east,
[00:30:54.630]this is the main contrast that will remain.
[00:30:57.620]In the east, the legacy of '68 was defeated,
[00:31:00.906]and those who were associated with it
[00:31:03.613]driven to the sidelines, marginalized,
[00:31:07.830]driven underground as was mentioned.
[00:31:10.280]In the west I would say, it was the opposite.
[00:31:13.140]The '68ers flourished, were successful.
[00:31:17.911]They abandoned the idea of revolution,
[00:31:22.440]but they converted their...
[00:31:29.310]Initiatives, incentives, visions, ideas
[00:31:33.070]into a variety of social movements
[00:31:36.540]and basically from, from the environmental issue.
[00:31:42.330]The greens were born from '68.
[00:31:44.780]The feminist movement, the gay liberation movement,
[00:31:48.410]the whole ideas about multiculturalism.
[00:31:50.320]A long list of left liberal issues if you want
[00:31:53.630]had associated with liberalism
[00:31:56.760]are, were brought about by the '68,
[00:32:00.580]by the '68 generation.
[00:32:03.591]How do you account for that?
[00:32:06.140]Why did they...
[00:32:11.671]It is my reading of '68,
[00:32:14.850]it was coached in the Marxist language.
[00:32:17.050]At least I'm talking about
[00:32:18.170]those who were the active militants.
[00:32:20.530]I'm not talking about the rank and file students
[00:32:22.830]who were marching in the demos.
[00:32:25.240]It was coached in the language of Marxism and of revolution
[00:32:28.570]because revolutions tend to think of themselves
[00:32:33.990]or speak of themselves in terms of the previous revolution.
[00:32:37.070]So they were using the language
[00:32:41.688]if you want of 1917 the same way 1917
[00:32:46.513]when it was referring to Paris commune in 1871,
[00:32:50.490]and the Paris commune was using the language
[00:32:52.800]of the French revolution.
[00:32:54.490]So you have always revolution that is
[00:32:59.190]using the language of the past, but in fact it was not,
[00:33:03.210]it was a revolution of the future
[00:33:05.420]because all the movements I have referred to,
[00:33:07.990]this is the big transformation that took place
[00:33:10.669]after '68 and that the '68ers brought about,
[00:33:14.400]and this is incidentally why they are
[00:33:16.350]so pleased with themselves, because unlike in Prague,
[00:33:19.729]where they were expelled
[00:33:22.880]from everywhere they are everywhere.
[00:33:25.080]In the media, in all the advertising, et cetera.
[00:33:29.530]They've done fine, thank you very much
[00:33:31.410]and so this is perhaps also an explanation I started
[00:33:36.080]by saying that why there is this celebration
[00:33:39.821]the 50th anniversary in the west is more intense
[00:33:43.390]than in the east, because it's probably the last chance
[00:33:45.750]for that generation to, for a bit of self celebration
[00:33:49.460]can never harm.
[00:33:51.740]So this is the
[00:33:57.030]east-west contrast, and the convergence
[00:34:01.440]basically between dissent,
[00:34:04.330]dissidence in Prague if you want,
[00:34:05.760]or dissidence in central Europe
[00:34:08.070]and the post '68 generation in the west
[00:34:12.100]converging to human rights, civil society,
[00:34:17.207]environment, and number of themes
[00:34:19.986]that are converging and the...
[00:34:26.890]When I said that each revolution thinks of itself
[00:34:29.722]in terms of the previous one,
[00:34:33.290]if you look at the symbol of the movement in Paris,
[00:34:38.567]Danny Cohn-Bendit.
[00:34:41.850]He was no communist, he was an anti-communist.
[00:34:43.890]In fact, '68 from that point of view in Paris,
[00:34:46.670]although they were using this revolutionary language,
[00:34:49.850]was an anti-communist thing
[00:34:51.160]because it was against the communist party.
[00:34:54.160]The communist party was against the movement of '68,
[00:34:56.670]against the student, and they were leading a campaign.
[00:34:59.840]We will not let the country be messed up
[00:35:01.927]by a German-Jew Cohn-Bendit,
[00:35:07.340]and suddenly the demonstrators.
[00:35:08.730]Yesterday it was referred the intelligence of the crowd,
[00:35:11.290]the demonstrators would be shouting
[00:35:12.830]we are all German Jews et cetera.
[00:35:15.350]This was a response to the communists,
[00:35:18.270]and it was Cohn-Bendit who attacked
[00:35:20.487]when Aragon the communist poet came for a discussion,
[00:35:25.370]he starts saying that he's a Stalinist creep et cetera.
[00:35:28.970]There was a very strong anti-communist moment
[00:35:32.028]formulated in leftist radical language
[00:35:35.740]which then of course once the wind blew over
[00:35:38.330]became anti-totalitarian liberal,
[00:35:42.450]liberal libertarian.
[00:35:44.567]That is what Cohn-Bendit would stand for,
[00:35:48.620]and the people who don't like them would add bo-bos.
[00:35:52.140]Bourgeois boheme, bohemian bourgeois.
[00:35:54.530]So you have lib-lib, liberal libertarians
[00:35:58.320]and we established bohemian bourgeois.
[00:36:01.040]This is the fate of the '68 generation,
[00:36:03.570]and I'm being a bit unfair perhaps
[00:36:06.260]with many of them, because the
[00:36:09.830]engagement with dissent and with particularly
[00:36:12.310]with the Czech situation with Havel was genuine,
[00:36:15.990]and a lot of very interesting exchanges took place then.
[00:36:20.830]Incidentally I would say,
[00:36:23.360]and I will maybe come to a conclusion after that
[00:36:29.730]so we can follow in the form of a conversation,
[00:36:33.430]what strikes me is the contrast
[00:36:36.270]between the intensity of the dialogue,
[00:36:39.785]of the exchanges that took place in the 1970s
[00:36:49.641]and I'd say from the second half of the seventies
[00:36:50.930]to the end of the 1980s,
[00:36:54.200]between east and west Europe.
[00:36:57.325]Not just with the post '68 generation of course.
[00:37:03.289]The audience was much broader,
[00:37:06.585]but the intensity of the dialogue
[00:37:08.662]when Havel had a text published
[00:37:11.747]in any western capital, this was important news
[00:37:16.520]and somehow that dialogue vanished or yeah,
[00:37:22.100]after 1990.
[00:37:26.920]That has perhaps something to do with what happened
[00:37:30.290]to the role of intellectuals and the place of culture
[00:37:32.729]in our societies east and west.
[00:37:36.070]Intellectuals mattered.
[00:37:37.600]Dissident intellectuals prosecuted mattered
[00:37:41.662]in those societies, and the world mattered outside as well
[00:37:47.530]and the post '89 period is the era of the eclipse
[00:37:52.970]or the demise of the public intellectuals
[00:37:56.210]and also it is related to the changing role of culture
[00:38:02.739]in our culture and communication in our society.
[00:38:07.960]To conclude I wanted to be very short
[00:38:10.870]and unless I'm not keeping my word.
[00:38:16.570]Just to conclude on 1989,
[00:38:22.750]1989 is clearly an anti 1948.
[00:38:29.190]Okay, dismantle the communist regime.
[00:38:31.840]It is of course an anti '38 because '38
[00:38:36.810]the western democracies betray Czechloslovakia
[00:38:40.170]whereas in 1989
[00:38:44.040]they welcome...
[00:38:48.520]But 1989 is also in a way an anti '68.
[00:38:56.660]You know many people in the west were reading 1989
[00:38:59.400]as a kind of continuation, you know.
[00:39:02.800]I said about Gordon Skilling's thesis,
[00:39:04.617]you know Czech democratic tradition.
[00:39:06.340]It is there, it continues in adverse circumstances
[00:39:09.439]and therefore you have a, no.
[00:39:12.640]1988 from that point of view was a break.
[00:39:15.810]It was no longer about democratizing socialism,
[00:39:19.350]but it was about democracy.
[00:39:21.200]It was not about reforming the socialist economy,
[00:39:24.034]but it was making a clean break.
[00:39:26.200]No third way.
[00:39:28.330]The slogan was third way leads you to the third world.
[00:39:31.600]That was the cliche that Vaclav Klaus used and others,
[00:39:37.610]and yeah that was the clear departure from '68.
[00:39:48.271]You understand why this is happened
[00:39:50.990]and why it was Havel who embodied 1989
[00:39:54.028]and not Dubcek.
[00:39:57.625]That is fairly clear.
[00:40:01.680]It has however some implications or consequences about
[00:40:09.020]what happened after, and about the world of today
[00:40:11.910]and I cannot develop it now.
[00:40:13.600]I will simply mention two things.
[00:40:15.400]One of them is what has been for better or worse
[00:40:18.630]associated with '68 was a part of
[00:40:23.330]utopia and political thinking.
[00:40:26.010]You have a future visions.
[00:40:29.660]Maybe utopian, maybe misguided, et cetera
[00:40:32.650]and some of them badly defeated
[00:40:34.410]like the, like the Czechloslovakia Spring,
[00:40:38.110]but you had that dimension.
[00:40:40.554]That has vanished in the post '89 world.
[00:40:43.754]We live in the tyranny of the present,
[00:40:46.575]and that has to do with that.
[00:40:49.970]The end of that
[00:40:54.400]utopian, and the only utopias that are left today
[00:40:57.780]are the utopias, technologically driven utopias.
[00:41:01.420]You know people who promise that was,
[00:41:05.060]based in this country in California, you know.
[00:41:07.680]Enhanced humanity and yeah.
[00:41:11.070]So these are technologically driven utopias,
[00:41:14.500]but they are utopias of individual sort of
[00:41:20.020]salvation rather than collective projects,
[00:41:23.400]so end of utopia is one dimension.
[00:41:27.570]The second is
[00:41:31.410]1989 didn't want to imitate.
[00:41:33.660]You don't want to reinvent the wheel.
[00:41:35.590]You don't want to start new experiment.
[00:41:37.660]No experiment was one of the slogans.
[00:41:41.060]Okay no experiment, but therefore
[00:41:43.600]you are in the imitation mode.
[00:41:46.932]And the...
[00:41:50.690]If you are imitating,
[00:41:53.730]you should bear in mind at least you should think about
[00:41:57.880]what is it you are imitating?
[00:41:59.711]And if you're imitating a model that is itself in crisis,
[00:42:04.410]you may eventually discover that you have a problem
[00:42:08.810]and I will
[00:42:11.950]therefore return to Havel on this mode,
[00:42:15.650]what has been therefore not just dismissed
[00:42:18.930]the utopian element of '68 for better or worse,
[00:42:23.000]but it was also the legacies of dissent
[00:42:27.530]have been forgotten after 1989 including the thinking
[00:42:30.949]about the nature of the system
[00:42:35.650]east and west.
[00:42:37.540]What is it that we were going to imitate?
[00:42:40.930]Vaclav Havel in 1984 in a text called
[00:42:47.280]Politics and Conscience says the following
[00:42:50.670]and I will end with that.
[00:42:53.557]"The totalitarian systems warn of something
[00:42:56.677]"far more serious than western rationalism
[00:42:59.607]"is willing to admit.
[00:43:01.047]"They are most of all a convex mirror
[00:43:03.677]"of the inevitable consequences of rationalism,
[00:43:06.347]"a grotesquely magnified image of its own deep tendencies.
[00:43:10.557]"An extreme offshoot of its own development
[00:43:13.567]"and anonymous product of its own expansion.
[00:43:16.737]"They are deeply informative reflections of its own crisis.
[00:43:21.617]"Totalitarian regimes are not merely dangerous neighbors.
[00:43:25.057]"Even less some kind of avant garde of world progress.
[00:43:28.337]"Alas just the opposite.
[00:43:30.427]"They are the avant garde of a global crisis
[00:43:33.077]"of this civilization, first European
[00:43:36.207]"then Euro-American, ultimately global."
[00:43:40.060]So the word globalization is not yet around,
[00:43:44.360]but the thinking, Havel is thinking in those terms
[00:43:49.370]and that means if this is the way he is thinking about
[00:43:55.194]the communist system and about European modernity as a whole
[00:44:03.627]if the communist system was a distorted mirror
[00:44:06.689]of the crisis of our civilization,
[00:44:09.230]well then the fact that the communist is disappeared
[00:44:12.920]doesn't solve your problem.
[00:44:14.800]You're still left with the problem
[00:44:18.010]and the disturbing questions associated with it.
[00:44:21.650]And if you are addressing those questions,
[00:44:24.660]well you might on your way return to
[00:44:28.770]on the double loop to 1968,
[00:44:32.690]and the forgotten legacies of the dissident movements.
[00:44:38.170]Thank you for your attention.
[00:44:39.631](applause)
[00:44:50.720]By the translation of Havel
[00:44:53.720]and the reception of Havel in France
[00:44:56.330]because as you know, France is one of those places
[00:44:59.770]where intellectuals dominate and there's a tendency
[00:45:02.720]to think seriously about what intellectuals write.
[00:45:06.150]So how did Havel compare to other intellectuals
[00:45:09.384]who affected French debates in the past?
[00:45:13.940]For example during decolonization.
[00:45:16.290]Could you compare Havel to find out
[00:45:18.780]the effect on the intellectual class groups?
[00:45:22.240]Well it's a completely different period you know
[00:45:24.060]when Fanot published he'd only done
[00:45:27.102](speaks foreign language) et cetera
[00:45:28.023]with a preface by Sartre, et cetera.
[00:45:30.440]We are in a period where yes,
[00:45:33.730]there is decolonization and there are Marxism
[00:45:37.230]is still widespread in the intellectual circles
[00:45:41.530]and there is a great confrontation with the regime.
[00:45:46.720]When Havel's texts start arriving,
[00:45:49.806]and incidentally he was less known
[00:45:53.186]than some of the other prominent intellectuals.
[00:45:57.145]Around '68 he became known with his essays essentially
[00:46:03.640]and then with Charter 77.
[00:46:05.780]And that was already a different time,
[00:46:12.350]because as I said the,
[00:46:15.670]that sixties generation which was influenced
[00:46:18.770]by a radical left, seeking a new left kind of ideas,
[00:46:24.250]they had moved into a different mode.
[00:46:27.420]They were questioning the systems of power east and west
[00:46:33.230]and they were reading Havel in their own way.
[00:46:35.590]I'm not always saying that they understood Havel.
[00:46:38.346]That is a debate, but Havel clearly had interlocutors.
[00:46:43.580]Andre Glucksmann was one of the first who called me up,
[00:46:48.900]1975 it was, and I was editing for one week
[00:46:53.845]in the Weekly Liberacion.
[00:46:56.320]They gave me one week about Czechloslovakia,
[00:46:59.721]and two pages, so I was using the text that we are having
[00:47:06.480]and I asked Glucksmann who had then just published a book
[00:47:10.690]which was a devastating critique of totalitarianism
[00:47:16.940]and I said do you want to write something for this issue?
[00:47:20.516]And he did, and we established this contact
[00:47:23.923]and he was a big reader and influential
[00:47:28.130]disseminator of Havel's thinking,
[00:47:31.110]and there were many others.
[00:47:32.903]The theater people, not just in France but everywhere,
[00:47:37.920]but in France in particular
[00:47:39.110]at the Avignon Festival every year
[00:47:41.160]you know there was a Havel event.
[00:47:42.800]So the impact was absolutely enormous,
[00:47:47.010]and you could say that
[00:47:51.360]those of us who were engaged in this exchange
[00:47:54.610]between Prague and western Europe,
[00:47:58.890]a small network has developed.
[00:48:01.280]We knew each other, we saw each other,
[00:48:04.140]we would exchange texts and that was a complicated,
[00:48:08.060]you know the reception was enormous
[00:48:09.770]and this is why I contrast it with what happened after,
[00:48:13.440]because I felt that this dialogue has fizzled away
[00:48:18.702]and that's a great shame,
[00:48:21.660]especially when we see that Europe
[00:48:23.170]would need such a dialogue today.
[00:48:28.640]So Liberacion devoted a week to Prague?
[00:48:32.600]That's my understanding of what you said?
[00:48:35.183]Liberacion is a left communist--
[00:48:38.643]It was not communist.
[00:48:40.943]A left left left, but had you know pretty strong ties
[00:48:45.680]to the communist party at certain points.
[00:48:49.190]No, didn't it?
[00:48:50.320]No, not the post '68 Liberacion.
[00:48:52.600]No they weren't.
[00:48:53.433]They were left wing anti-communists if you want.
[00:48:56.750]Anyway that's not of interest to this.
[00:49:00.037]Questions?
[00:49:05.970]Ah I can't resist, Jacques.
[00:49:10.280]You...
[00:49:14.560]You presented a very elegant,
[00:49:18.510]very French construction of
[00:49:24.740]using the metaphor of the French revolutionaries
[00:49:29.570]of May 1968 using the language of the previous revolution.
[00:49:35.740]It's great, it's aesthetically it's very satisfying,
[00:49:40.770]but then you went on to say that Daniel Cohn-Bendit
[00:49:45.330]and the others may have been
[00:49:49.100]anti-communist because the French communist party hated them
[00:49:53.650]and my impression is that this is
[00:49:57.330]pretty far in history a little.
[00:49:59.720]I mean they may have been anti Soviet communists,
[00:50:03.600]but there was a whole ethos of the May events
[00:50:09.720]which was pro Chinese communist, pro Mao,
[00:50:14.133]pro Cuban communists et cetera et cetera,
[00:50:18.640]and I think we need to remember that some of these people
[00:50:22.168]went on to become the red factions
[00:50:26.680]in Germany and Italy in the 1970s
[00:50:29.540]and did some terrible things,
[00:50:32.067]adhering to the ideology of their
[00:50:37.510]own way of the communist ideology.
[00:50:41.400]So I would not dismiss it entirely,
[00:50:44.310]but perhaps you didn't mean it that way, so...
[00:50:48.190]But I just wanted to make the comment.
[00:50:52.010]Well I mean, I did refer to the fact
[00:50:54.650]that they looked to the third world for inspiration.
[00:50:57.890]They were disappointed in the proletariat in the west.
[00:51:00.360]It was not revolutionary anymore,
[00:51:02.420]or not sufficiently revolutionary
[00:51:03.930]and they turned to, for inspiration to the third world
[00:51:08.880]and this is why I put it in a short cut, Ho Che Mao.
[00:51:12.800]I mean people forget how important
[00:51:14.017]the Vietnam War was in the west.
[00:51:15.747]I mean this country, I mean this week
[00:51:18.440]Martin Luther King died, so this is
[00:51:20.588]you know the race issue and Vietnam.
[00:51:24.180]This is you know, and Berkeley the free speech movement.
[00:51:27.270]You have that, the ingredients of '68 in America.
[00:51:30.340]You have, each country had its own '68.
[00:51:34.270]The it's true that in western Europe
[00:51:36.908]because of the influence of communist parties
[00:51:42.780]or of Marxism, lot of the radicals went that way
[00:51:47.760]and some of them went, as you rightly said,
[00:51:50.560]to even violent extreme.
[00:51:54.690]But that I think in retrospect,
[00:51:59.230]I'm not saying this didn't exist.
[00:52:02.430]First of all this didn't happen
[00:52:03.582]in France, which is interesting,
[00:52:06.940]and I think Sartre's influence was the decisive.
[00:52:09.560]I asked Andre Glucksmann what is his interpretation?
[00:52:12.630]Why was there no violent temptation?
[00:52:15.610]He said at least Sartre told them to stop there.
[00:52:20.890]I mean he liked radical rhetoric,
[00:52:22.850]but not actual violence.
[00:52:25.930]And incidentally, he wrote about Prague Spring of 1968.
[00:52:34.620]He wrote as an introduction
[00:52:38.120]to Antoni Leonin's book (speaks foreign language)
[00:52:40.180]You may know that book in Czech.
[00:52:41.580]This is interviews with leading Czech writers,
[00:52:44.160]intellectuals, you know with Skvorecky, with Havel,
[00:52:49.370]Komensky, I mean I think there are practically
[00:52:51.460]it's a kind of who's who
[00:52:52.530]of Czech literary scene at the time.
[00:52:56.540]There is an introduction by Sartre.
[00:52:58.130]It's called The Socialism that Came in from the Cold.
[00:53:01.200]So he's at the moment when he's a crazy '68er
[00:53:04.114]in the French context if you want.
[00:53:06.340]I mean I'm using crazy '68,
[00:53:08.390]and he's writing this preface
[00:53:10.870]basically denouncing the Soviet system
[00:53:14.200]and that shows that yeah, he had at least
[00:53:21.070]belatedly understood what the invasion was about.
[00:53:25.970]And incidentally, I was as a student then,
[00:53:29.670]I was pestering you know these prominent intellectuals
[00:53:34.070]when we needed to petition for somebody,
[00:53:36.131]they confiscated Kocmanek's manuscripts.
[00:53:39.910]There was a petition, or somebody was arrested
[00:53:41.932]and I remember once I wanted Sartre's signature.
[00:53:48.480]Oh yes, I know for what.
[00:53:49.690]We were trying to do,
[00:53:51.954]there was an international tribunal about Vietnam.
[00:53:56.640]That was set up you know about the crimes
[00:53:59.100]committed in Vietnam, and I said well we should
[00:54:00.830]do something about the crimes
[00:54:02.030]that they're committing in Czechloslovakia.
[00:54:04.440]So I had a sort of similar kind of profile.
[00:54:09.010]We will examine, we will present
[00:54:11.240]all the things that the communists are doing after '68.
[00:54:15.851]So I went on getting prominent name, et cetera.
[00:54:19.650]So eventually it took me major efforts to get to Sartre,
[00:54:24.810]and he didn't have much time so he says
[00:54:28.280]well what's about this?
[00:54:29.260]I say well it's about you know Czechloslovakia
[00:54:31.848]and we want to do this and that.
[00:54:33.500]He interrupted me immediately and said yes, put my name
[00:54:37.560]and I said you know but it was very difficult
[00:54:40.390]to get hold of you, et cetera
[00:54:41.800]and he says in the future, whenever you need my signature
[00:54:46.114]you use my signature for Czech.
[00:54:52.620]So this is...
[00:54:57.320]Kind of loose use of his name,
[00:55:00.750]but it only worked because it was associated
[00:55:03.484]somehow with the Prague Spring
[00:55:05.687]and he had,
[00:55:09.870]this is a bit of a digression.
[00:55:11.980]I think he had two visits to Prague.
[00:55:14.140]One was a rather unfortunate one.
[00:55:17.980]He came to Prague I think in the early sixties.
[00:55:20.610]People were hoping to hear Sartre, the existentialist.
[00:55:26.404](speaks foreign language)
[00:55:28.545]You know the existentialist,
[00:55:29.378]and you know by then he was trying
[00:55:31.130]to become a pseudo-Marxist or something like that,
[00:55:33.610]and everybody was you know in the,
[00:55:36.360]at the university where he gave his lecture
[00:55:37.960]everybody was terribly disappointed.
[00:55:39.430]So this was a frustrating encounter with Sartre,
[00:55:42.130]and then the, I forgot which play of his they were showing
[00:55:46.720]in Prague in the fall of '68 and he came there,
[00:55:50.960]and yeah you have an element of schizophrenia.
[00:55:54.070]Here is this radical May '68er in paris,
[00:55:59.090]and he is a very radical opponent of Soviet invasion
[00:56:03.223]and in Czechloslovakia.
[00:56:06.660]And what I said about the signature simply says you know,
[00:56:10.060]I'll do anything if I can help.
[00:56:12.180]That was the posture, so you can damn the guy
[00:56:14.920]about his blindness.
[00:56:15.990]Why was he such a fellow traveler
[00:56:17.430]for so long and not seeing?
[00:56:19.430]You can give him credit for seeing belatedly
[00:56:23.063]what was wrong with his previous position.
[00:56:33.620]Thank you very much.
[00:56:34.940]One brief question.
[00:56:36.480]Isn't it a little bit of an irony
[00:56:37.790]that in '68 we tried to have sort of socialism
[00:56:41.130]with a human face where socialism already was sort of
[00:56:43.510]capitalism with a human face.
[00:56:45.340]So I wanted to ask where is this humanity
[00:56:47.610]that the left was so much craving for?
[00:56:49.920]So once humanity's going to the left,
[00:56:51.470]and now suddenly in '68 we're trying to be more humane
[00:56:53.790]by going to west.
[00:56:57.670]So that's question number one.
[00:56:58.780]The second question is more practical.
[00:57:00.500]What was, or could you compare,
[00:57:01.920]what was the international diplomatic reaction
[00:57:04.320]to the Russian invasion of Czechloslovakia?
[00:57:08.120]And could you compare that with the reaction of today
[00:57:10.220]with what happened in England for example?
[00:57:12.460]Thank you.
[00:57:14.130]Okay, well on the first,
[00:57:17.170]I mean one of the big things of the sixties
[00:57:19.240]was how we get rid of the Stalinist hold on Marxism
[00:57:26.140]and of course, you know the idea that
[00:57:29.100]infrastructure determines the superstructure
[00:57:31.600]so you change the economic and social relations
[00:57:35.810]and that will change people's minds,
[00:57:37.830]and if it doesn't change fast enough
[00:57:39.480]you may reeducate them and you may
[00:57:41.607]give history a push, you know?
[00:57:43.460]By using certain coercive methods, okay.
[00:57:47.366]We know about that.
[00:57:50.570]No, the whole sixties was this rediscovery
[00:57:53.506]of Marxist humanism that put men
[00:57:55.950]at the center of the socialist project.
[00:57:58.260]So this was forget about the...
[00:58:02.170]And this is where people like Kosik et cetera came in.
[00:58:04.950]So sort of the humanization of Marxism
[00:58:08.700]and this was not necessarily in their mind
[00:58:10.844]going full way to the west
[00:58:13.900]because there were people in the west
[00:58:15.850]moving in those directions, so they were
[00:58:19.470]meeting halfway, and this is why you had these dialogues.
[00:58:23.720]I'm not saying that these dialogues were,
[00:58:25.703]I mean if you read this stuff today probably
[00:58:28.310]I'm not sure it was all very interesting,
[00:58:31.530]but it's the idea of the dialogue.
[00:58:33.100]Zbigniew Brzezinski at that time was talking
[00:58:35.210]about building bridges, you know?
[00:58:37.120]And there was this idea that basically you could
[00:58:41.800]yeah, that east central Europe could evolve,
[00:58:47.164]you know differently from the Soviet model.
[00:58:49.820]And you have number of people
[00:58:51.927]including Brzezinski and others
[00:58:54.461]who thought that this would be a possible,
[00:58:57.687]I mean and Prague Spring became for them
[00:59:00.530]the incarnation of what they had,
[00:59:04.087]what they had in mind.
[00:59:05.724]Okay, we know how that ended,
[00:59:10.290]but as for the reaction to the invasion,
[00:59:17.190]of course unanimous condemnation.
[00:59:18.980]This was you know, everywhere.
[00:59:21.870]Governments, UN, international organization
[00:59:24.741]but, but, and this is something that I personally,
[00:59:30.890]well not only I could not be satisfied
[00:59:33.950]with simply condemnation or something like that.
[00:59:36.500]This was more of a personal thing,
[00:59:40.210]but also what I had problem with
[00:59:41.760]and this is why I quoted Adam Roberts and Philip Windsor.
[00:59:47.390]They said it is not a major international crisis.
[00:59:50.933]So did they pull up ambassadors
[00:59:51.845]for example, or diplomats--
[00:59:53.003]Yeah they called back ambassadors
[00:59:54.590]and they made protests, but basically
[00:59:58.260]nobody was going to move because at the very same time,
[01:00:02.570]they had negotiations in Washington
[01:00:04.848]about the missiles, the start negotiation
[01:00:08.590]et cetera et cetera, and they were
[01:00:10.040]not going to jeopardize that.
[01:00:13.272]So yeah, that was the...
[01:00:18.190]That was a tragic element that you basically felt yeah,
[01:00:23.920]for diplomacies of western Europe
[01:00:27.160]this was a very unfortunate rhetoric,
[01:00:29.130]but the Russians knew how far, what was the limit.
[01:00:33.940]In fact you should read this western response or lack of
[01:00:39.650]together with what Brezhnev tells Dubcek
[01:00:42.870]and it's again in this Minage book,
[01:00:45.150]he tells the negotiations in Moscow.
[01:00:48.950]Dubcek says oh, we were making socialism with human face.
[01:00:54.140]We were going to make socialism attractive
[01:00:57.390]all around Europe you know and this would be
[01:00:59.300]such a wonderful thing, and Brezhnev interrupts him
[01:01:01.830]and says oh, what do you think, the invasion,
[01:01:06.560]nobody's going to give a damn.
[01:01:08.160]Yes, and will protest
[01:01:13.400]and that will be about it,
[01:01:15.180]and the western communist parties
[01:01:17.340]they are useless as they have been for the last 50 years.
[01:01:22.460]This is more or less the quote.
[01:01:23.830]Well this is, Brezhnev gives a lesson of realism to Dubcek.
[01:01:29.173]What we are interested, we're not interested
[01:01:30.980]in building socialism in western Europe.
[01:01:32.540]We have our sphere of influence.
[01:01:35.220]This is our empire.
[01:01:37.050]This became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine.
[01:01:39.550]Whenever the fate of socialism in one country is threatened,
[01:01:42.360]it's the duty of the whole socialist camp to step in
[01:01:46.740]and the west has accepted it because unlike the
[01:01:52.820]Brzezinski building bridges,
[01:01:54.500]this was detente which was supposed to dismantle the system.
[01:01:58.710]What followed after '68 was detente based
[01:02:02.570]on the recognition of the division of Europe.
[01:02:06.070]So this is a very different kind of proposition,
[01:02:08.530]and this is the ambivalence we had about that process.
[01:02:14.140]'Cause on one hand it's detente.
[01:02:15.670]On the other hand it is accepting the status quo.
[01:02:20.830]What has changed the status quo
[01:02:21.870]of course was the dissidence.
[01:02:24.240]I say I don't want to exaggerate,
[01:02:26.210]but the fact that people took literally
[01:02:28.616]the Helsinki Declaration which was supposed to
[01:02:31.816]stabilize the status quo in Europe
[01:02:35.120]and said it has a sewed basket in it.
[01:02:38.650]It speaks about human rights,
[01:02:40.280]the freedom to impart information,
[01:02:42.640]to disseminate information, et cetera.
[01:02:44.580]They took it at their word, they start to use it.
[01:02:46.530]You had the Helsinki committees in the USSR,
[01:02:49.890]you had Charter 77 et cetera
[01:02:51.850]and once you had that, that became part
[01:02:54.274]of western diplomacy which had been lukewarm
[01:03:00.140]at the time of the invasion, suddenly western diplomacy
[01:03:03.336]had to take on board the third basket,
[01:03:07.790]which was there for show initially.
[01:03:10.210]But they took it literally.
[01:03:11.530]They suddenly made, and it became part of an interplay
[01:03:15.930]between let's say dissidence in central Europe
[01:03:20.120]in Czechloslovakia in particular
[01:03:22.000]and the public opinion in western Europe.
[01:03:25.510]And once public opinion, the media, et cetera
[01:03:27.640]become engaged in this, diplomacy responds
[01:03:30.540]and you had a process
[01:03:32.030]which eventually became subverted
[01:03:34.780]and we know that Helsinki in a way
[01:03:37.060]contributed to the undoing of that system.
[01:03:40.870]So you have yeah, that's an interesting case
[01:03:43.610]for international relations.
[01:03:44.850]You have something which is established
[01:03:46.317]after the defeat of the Prague Spring
[01:03:49.117]which is meant to stabilize the division of Europe,
[01:03:52.098]and you inadvertently put in something
[01:03:57.310]that helps to derail the thing
[01:03:59.348]and it came as a surprise I'm sure to the Russians,
[01:04:03.560]but I think many of the western diplomats
[01:04:05.828]did not anticipate that either.
[01:04:08.050]I think they made good use of it after
[01:04:10.253]in the late seventies and especially in the 1980s.
[01:04:16.148]Thank you.
[01:04:19.470]Thank you for your speech.
[01:04:22.440]I really loved it.
[01:04:26.470]My question relates to what you said about dialogue.
[01:04:30.730]The fact that there was a,
[01:04:33.320]let's say east-west dialogue before
[01:04:36.594]and now that this kind of dialogue is here no more,
[01:04:42.450]but also the fact that the dialogue in the sixties
[01:04:49.490]well in the western Europe had a form of,
[01:04:54.240]or the argumentation
[01:05:01.080]tend to end up in a certain convergence of the sides
[01:05:07.400]that instead of revolution we got,
[01:05:10.810]let's say, multiculturalism, feminism, and all that
[01:05:15.060]as a sort of let's say compromise between establishment
[01:05:18.810]and the radical forces.
[01:05:21.660]Well nowadays we also have a time of let's say
[01:05:25.672]unrest and dissatisfaction and looking for something new,
[01:05:30.840]but as if it does not have a form of a dialogue anymore,
[01:05:37.190]and I mean I wonder if you have the same feeling
[01:05:42.450]and what might be the reason
[01:05:43.960]that even though the situation
[01:05:48.070]is in a way a little bit similar,
[01:05:49.940]this kind of unrest and looking for something new,
[01:05:53.280]but there is like rather than dialogue,
[01:05:57.480]more like digging these borders
[01:06:02.550]and well yeah, radicalization.
[01:06:07.870]So why is that, and maybe...
[01:06:13.336]Just came to my mind, what Tomas Sedlacek mentioned
[01:06:19.370]in his speech.
[01:06:23.220]It is disputable, but maybe somehow
[01:06:26.190]you can also relate it to that dialogue
[01:06:29.517]and dialogue thing.
[01:06:32.770]Tomas Sedlacek said that now we have like
[01:06:37.240]this is a time of politicians
[01:06:39.437]really trying to police people
[01:06:43.060]and doing really what people want
[01:06:47.770]and following all these sociological searches.
[01:06:55.910]But at the same time it is time like people,
[01:06:59.330]as if people feel that politicians
[01:07:03.340]don't listen to them anymore, so this divergence why,
[01:07:11.620]I mean maybe you don't see it.
[01:07:15.500]I mean I think it's a disputable claim,
[01:07:18.840]but maybe it can be related also to the topic of like
[01:07:23.890]dialogue versus radicalization.
[01:07:28.440]Yeah, well the dialogue was born
[01:07:34.580]in the sixties in a period of a fall
[01:07:36.890]when there was this...
[01:07:40.130]Among the common denominators was Europe,
[01:07:44.410]and the second there was a very
[01:07:46.520]loose use of the word socialism.
[01:07:51.075]I think it was again Ivan Svitak who said you know
[01:07:55.310]that socialism, what socialism in '68 could be so diluted,
[01:08:02.160]could be accommodated to absolutely everything.
[01:08:05.310]And indeed you accommodate it to structure,
[01:08:07.440]psychoanalysis, absolutely anything with an ism
[01:08:09.760]you could be accommodating with socialism
[01:08:12.150]and he added including novels by Francoise Sagan.
[01:08:15.540]You know this was how much you can dilute Marxism.
[01:08:20.830]We would still be using this reference to socialism.
[01:08:23.580]So you had a vague common framework
[01:08:26.580]which I think was not...
[01:08:29.830]Was very ambiguous and was hiding the real differences
[01:08:35.100]that emerged later.
[01:08:37.138]Then the real dialogue, for me the real dialogue
[01:08:39.980]started after '68 in the seventies
[01:08:43.218]because it no longer was used simply by,
[01:08:47.980]for some political purposes.
[01:08:49.416]Let's say if you're a communist party,
[01:08:51.583]west European communist parties,
[01:08:53.470]we're using references to the Prague Spring,
[01:08:55.940]this was simply to enhance the democratic credentials
[01:08:58.850]in their respective countries.
[01:09:00.910]The Prague Spring had been defeated,
[01:09:02.190]and they were simply referring to the idea,
[01:09:04.570]oh yeah this was a good idea
[01:09:05.937]and what a pity it didn't work out
[01:09:07.640]but we of course are, okay this is instrumentalization uses,
[01:09:12.640]I'm not interested in that dialogue.
[01:09:14.950]No, the real dialogue came with the dissident movement.
[01:09:19.450]With I mean, Havel was best known in Czechloslovakia,
[01:09:26.818]in Hungary there was Gyorgy Konrad.
[01:09:30.020]In Poland you had Adam Michnik
[01:09:32.717]and Kuron and a number of others,
[01:09:35.210]so you had a whole group.
[01:09:37.280]And similarly in western Europe you had
[01:09:40.053]a number of intellectuals engaged from the left,
[01:09:43.980]but from the right as well
[01:09:45.940]and from suddenly you know there was,
[01:09:48.130]when I said in this small network of supporters of dissent
[01:09:51.820]you had people of all kind of political persuasions,
[01:09:55.332]and it was associated with certain themes.
[01:10:03.520]The critic of totalitarianism
[01:10:06.870]and therefore the idea that you have to rethink
[01:10:12.870]the democratic project.
[01:10:14.930]You cannot do that if you don't have rights
[01:10:20.060]and therefore you have the language of rights
[01:10:22.500]is very much part of that legacy,
[01:10:26.290]and you do not have a democratic project
[01:10:29.360]without the idea of civil society.
[01:10:33.560]So you know the primacy of ethics over politics,
[01:10:37.590]rights, civil society.
[01:10:41.110]You have there series of themes,
[01:10:46.640]and then of course what do they mean in different societies
[01:10:49.630]and a different time?
[01:10:50.463]So this is where the convergence takes place
[01:10:54.060]and it's a very interesting and very serious discussion
[01:10:57.720]that took place, and this is why Havel's texts
[01:11:00.010]were read, but not just Havel's and others
[01:11:02.460]and there was this dialogue.
[01:11:05.300]Why did it disappear after or vanish?
[01:11:07.850]It didn't disappear overnight, but it I think partly
[01:11:13.140]because we lost a common enemy.
[01:11:15.000]We lost a common problem.
[01:11:16.470]The problem was you know Soviet totalitarianism
[01:11:18.630]and the division of Europe.
[01:11:20.020]Suddenly it was no longer there.
[01:11:21.690]The division of Europe was no longer there.
[01:11:23.470]We could meet at endless conferences all the time, and...
[01:11:32.560]What was the theme of the nineties?
[01:11:35.710]Building yesterday, Tomas referred to it.
[01:11:38.590]Building market democracies, et cetera.
[01:11:41.170]Well if you're building market democracies in eastern Europe
[01:11:44.320]this is the new project, this is not a new project.
[01:11:48.140]You're building something that exists in the west okay?
[01:11:50.930]So this is the first revolution without a new project.
[01:11:55.580]The project is to do what,
[01:11:57.760]we don't want to reinvent the wheel.
[01:11:59.130]We don't want the third world.
[01:12:00.220]Okay, so the very good reason
[01:12:02.210]yesterday Tomas used the phrase burning bridges.
[01:12:04.996]You know we have to go fast
[01:12:06.260]and we have to, okay but if your project
[01:12:09.450]is to imitate something that exists as well,
[01:12:12.240]you become less interesting.
[01:12:13.920]I mean the dialogue, they'll say yeah, what else is new?
[01:12:19.400]Oh you want to become, you want a new constitution
[01:12:21.900]or you want to create a market economy?
[01:12:24.920]Yeah that's, yeah we've been doing that
[01:12:27.200]for a couple of centuries.
[01:12:29.030]And therefore, that I think is one of the reasons why
[01:12:35.800]the dialogue was lost.
[01:12:39.300]I'm not, this is not to say who is responsible for that.
[01:12:45.640]Simply the circumstances have changed.
[01:12:47.920]Now, this may be the time when
[01:12:53.520]something of a very different kind
[01:12:56.230]or different kind of dialogue could
[01:13:01.010]resume or be rediscovered.
[01:13:05.240]Why?
[01:13:06.200]Because that cycle, that post '89 cycle
[01:13:10.920]has been exhausted.
[01:13:13.949]What was all, we want to create a democratic institution.
[01:13:18.890]We have them, guess what?
[01:13:20.550]They are in crisis.
[01:13:21.510]We have populist upsurge everywhere.
[01:13:25.940]We wanted to build market economy, wonderful, we have it.
[01:13:30.080]Guess what?
[01:13:31.440]We saw since 2008 a global crisis of the market.
[01:13:36.150]We wanted to return to Europe.
[01:13:38.450]We are members of the European Union, welcome.
[01:13:42.150]Guess what?
[01:13:42.983]Europe is in crisis.
[01:13:44.290]So the project has been mission accomplished.
[01:13:47.410]The project has been that, but it is in crisis
[01:13:50.330]so if you are in this situation,
[01:13:55.010]you can no longer rely on imitating.
[01:13:57.780]You're going to imitate what, Brexit?
[01:13:59.950]You're going to imitate Trump?
[01:14:01.513]What is it you're going to imitate?
[01:14:03.550]So the model is no longer a model.
[01:14:06.390]If the model of liberal democracy is Brexit and Trump,
[01:14:09.850]well then you have a problem
[01:14:10.880]that Orban and Kachinsky incidentally two former dissidents
[01:14:15.472]can say well you know this is our version of
[01:14:19.652]the true conservative values we stand for
[01:14:24.120]and so, in the times of crisis
[01:14:29.090]which is an internal crisis of the project,
[01:14:31.410]as I say has been exhausted.
[01:14:33.710]And if you see the external circumstances that have changed.
[01:14:38.070]Look at our neighborhood in Europe.
[01:14:39.750]I'm talking now from a European point of view,
[01:14:42.574]and I apologize to American friends
[01:14:44.160]but after all Czechloslovakia is at the heart of Europe so.
[01:14:49.400]I can be forgiven for that.
[01:14:51.630]We have Putin's Russia assertive,
[01:14:54.780]you see what's happening in Ukraine.
[01:14:57.570]We have the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in our doorstep.
[01:15:00.520]Collapsing states from Libya to Syria and
[01:15:08.550]civil wars and migrants on the move.
[01:15:12.040]And we have now the US and Trump
[01:15:16.670]which changes considerably the way trans-Atlantic relations
[01:15:22.120]are to be understood.
[01:15:22.953]So suddenly we have to think on our feet.
[01:15:27.650]This is no longer the post, the post '89 world is over.
[01:15:32.110]And the crisis is there, and the populists are on the rise.
[01:15:35.690]So this may be the time not to
[01:15:39.850]simply say oh yeah we interrupted the dialogue
[01:15:43.150]because we were doing catching up with the western model
[01:15:45.610]and now we discovered the western model is in crisis
[01:15:47.820]so this is time to resume dialogue.
[01:15:49.610]No no, it's simply everybody
[01:15:53.970]is confronted with that situation
[01:15:55.882]and not me, but your generation
[01:15:58.840]and the generation of the students who are here,
[01:16:01.540]well they will be the one engaged in that dialogue
[01:16:05.580]and that's, yeah.
[01:16:08.090]If in doing so they rediscover some of the things
[01:16:11.263]that the post '68 generation,
[01:16:16.040]the dissidents have on the way addressed,
[01:16:22.700]I mentioned the prime ethics and politics language of rights
[01:16:29.720]civil society, et cetera et cetera.
[01:16:31.730]Well, that may be a good place to start from.
[01:16:35.970]That may be a contribution to it,
[01:16:37.570]but that dialogue will be completely different
[01:16:41.090]because it will be focusing on other things.
[01:16:43.360]It will not be on how do you create a market economy?
[01:16:46.330]Or how do you mix the markets?
[01:16:48.690]It will be, you know, what kind of
[01:16:53.750]market economy is legitimate, acceptable?
[01:16:58.682]What is, what is compatible with
[01:17:02.170]what a European model of society exists?
[01:17:05.630]If you abandon that idea, well you're left with imitating
[01:17:10.501]well, either the Chinese or the American model
[01:17:13.862]and you will have nothing to contribute yourself.
[01:17:18.790]So I think the Europeans
[01:17:20.030]and especially the younger generation
[01:17:21.550]is now confronted with this new situation
[01:17:23.524]and hopefully that's where the dialogue can start.

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Jacques Rupnik speaks at Prague Spring 50

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