'Havel na Hrad' - Thirty Years On

Souvenir Series #12

Thirty years ago, on the 17^th November 1989, a series of political protests began in Czechoslovakia which culminated in the peaceful passing of totalitarian one-party state power from the Communist Party, who had ruled the country for 41 years, to an open democratic, multi-party system. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe had begun earlier that year with the rise of solidarity movements in Poland and Hungary, but really got going with the highly symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th. Watching these events unfolding as they were reported each evening on BBC TV News broadcasts in the UK, it seemed like a miracle was occurring. After so many years living with the threat of the Cold War, and having seen only very recently the brutal authoritarian state suppression of the student led democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square just a few months before in the tragic summer of 1989, the magnitude of these events felt huge. The Eastern Bloc seemed to suddenly fall apart like a house of cards. The opening up of East Germany (GDR), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and just two years later the actual collapse of the USSR itself truly signalled that the world was entering a genuinely new era, one which seemed to be characterised with unbounded hope and forward-looking optimism. I was entering my early teens at this time. I had always been fascinated and frightened in equal measure when watching the Soviet military parades on the TV News bulletins. The ranks of goose-stepping soldiers marching past the Kremlin followed by huge mobile rocket launchers laden with ominous-looking ballistic missiles motoring past the grey faced grandees of the Soviet Communist Party leaders seemed such a contrast to our own rather quaint and faintly ridiculous-looking Trooping of the Colour ceremony every year!

Sometime around Christmas that year at a family gathering I eagerly quizzed a relative who had been travelling in Europe at the time of these remarkable events. He’d managed to get to Berlin and then he’d travelled on to Prague in time to witness the Velvet Revolution as it happened. On 29^th December the former dissident playwright, Václav Havel, was elected as free Czechoslovakia’s new President. This was something which really fascinated me – how could a playwright become a President? – My relative was handing out chips of concrete smashed from the Berlin Wall to everyone as historic souvenirs when he ducked out of the room. Returning a moment later he placed a crumpled roll of papers into my hands telling me I could keep them. Intrigued I unrolled the large sheets to find they were a set of posters, each bearing the smiling face of the dissident playwright with bold red letters proclaiming “Havel na Hrad” – “Havel to the Castle.” The Hrad being Prague Castle, the official office of the President.

I knew even then that these were important, tangible pieces of history. Only a few years later I too travelled to Europe and the former Eastern Bloc. I went on two student exchanges to the newly reunified Germany – first staying with a West German family in Hannover, and then secondly staying with an East German family in Berlin. These two experiences had a profound effect upon me. They gave me a realistic grounding upon which to build a greater understanding of these events. The peaceful resistance movements which stood up to these totalitarian regimes fascinated me. My interests at school in literature and activism concerning human rights issues began to coalesce at this time, hence, following on from that initial question of how could a playwright become a President, I became very interested in samizdat (banned and unofficial literature circulated privately and secretly in typescript) as an underground phenomenon, as a means of resistance, and an expression of the irrepressible human urge towards freedom. Later on at university, as part of my undergraduate degree in anthropology, I researched and wrote a short dissertation on the subject of samizdat and civic resistance. On the wall of my bedroom in my student digs at the time, blu-tacked above my desk was one of the posters of Václav Havel which I’d been given that Christmas back in 1989.

I read a lot of Václav Havel’s plays and his political prose. I particularly liked the Vaněk Plays which managed to twist situations, suspicions and sympathies through clever word-play in the fine tradition of absurdist theatre. Essays such as ‘Power of the Powerless’ which expressed his concept of resistance through the everyday acts of choosing to ‘live in truth’ rather than buying into the little lies which make us all complicit in our own oppression seemed to resonate beyond the totalitarian constraints which he was fighting against, it seemed to me that they could equally well apply to the way we choose to live and organise our lives in the West and how much credence and legitimacy we afford to our own political leaders and the kind of powers they exercise over us in our collective name. It seems ironic that the Castle which Havel managed to enter after so many years of frustration and persecution was perhaps somewhat prophetically akin to the Castle which inspired the Prague born writer, Franz Kafka, to which his much beleaguered character, K, was never granted admittance. That idea of the everyman pitted against the overwhelming bureaucracy of the impenetrable machine which is trying to break him is a theme which has continued to intrigue me, and in many ways has evolved or transmuted even into the core question of my current PhD research – how the individual fits into and navigates the enormity of the systems of imperialism and global history, how we each strive to survive especially if we’re not fortunate enough to be in the upper echelons who seem to have all their advantages handed to them on a plate.

A subversive birthday greeting to 'Ferdinand Vanek', a character in one of Havel's plays, published in an official Communist Party-run Newspaper on Vaclav Havel's birthday in 1989

It’s no wonder then that one particular essay of Havel’s painted a vivid picture which has never faded from my mind. It’s a short piece of prose, playfully titled ‘Meeting Gorbachev,’ originally published in 1987 only two years before the events of the Velvet Revolution and Havel’s election as President, in which he describes how one evening, whilst he is out walking his dog he happened to pass a theatre, outside which a small gathering of people are waiting to get a glimpse of a great man. The great man is Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the USSR, who was on a State visit to Prague and was being entertained at a gala performance that evening. Havel stops to watch the ‘Glasnost Czar’ and finds himself (despite his opposing convictions) gradually being seduced by the man’s charisma, sucked into the collective spirit of anticipation he unconsciously finds himself waving at Gorbachev and Gorbachev waving back in that strange disconnected sense of intimate connection which arises between a celebrity and their fan, fused together by the unreal intoxication of close proximity. Havel was by no means a wholly obscure, nor unknown character at this time, but even still, despite the thawing of authoritarianism which Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost (Openness) and Perestroika (Restructuring) were beginning to initiate, that leap which propelled Havel to the Castle still seemed almost unimaginable at that time. Yet only two years later in his first Presidential New Year’s Address he was able to speak candidly to the Czechoslovakian people, opening with the following words: “For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. – I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.” – No longer a playwright leading a dissident movement, he was now leading a nation in transition, a world leader – like Gorbachev, standing on a world stage.

In the summers of 1992 and 1993 London seemed to be full of second-hand market stalls selling off old Soviet memorabilia. I used to rummage through these – mostly army surplus: old uniforms, enamel badges, fabric patches, peaked caps and the like. I never bought anything, though I knew acutely that these things were the material remnants of an era which had now ended – these were tangible pieces of history which were slowly being dispersed and lost, merging into the blank space of the future, dissolving memory into the stuff of history books and dusty museum displays. The few tangible pieces of this history which I had in my possession – two tiny fragments of the Berlin Wall, four posters of Václav Havel, and a small, blue toy Trabant – were more than enough for me, because they were part of a lived experience, my lived experience, something which was greater than the sum of its parts. The experience of seeing real Trabants beetling about the streets of Berlin, of talking to German friends from both sides of that former dividing Wall, the Iron Curtain itself, hearing what life had really been like for them and how it had all so suddenly fallen apart and what they felt about it. Seeing and touching and breathing-in the last days of that moment in history for myself, and the fact that it was all suffused with that genuine sense of hope and optimism was something which had entered too deep into my soul to ever be forgotten or subsumed even by the passing of time. I can still picture it all so clearly in my mind.

It’s amazing now to talk to younger friends and colleagues who have no or next-to-no knowledge of these things. The Cold War is just a murky blank, merely the backdrop to old James Bond movies and redundant spy novels. It’s a defunct era. This seems almost incomprehensible to me, but that is simply the way of the world. Time does move on. And the world has changed so much in just the last two decades. We’ve accelerated at light speed, our fingers firmly pressed to the fast-forward button. The recent past has been all too swiftly eclipsed. But such memories and experiences are the important things which we really need to pass on. I realise now that it must have felt very much the same for my grandparents’ generation in the decades that followed on from the Second World War; they understood how vital it was that their life stories and experiences should be passed on. Some say that history is cyclical – that it has a tendency to repeat itself if we’re not careful. The current rise of nationalism and its discontents are proof enough, should we care to notice it.

The main set of posters I was given were designed by Joska Skalnik, using a photograph taken by Miloš Fikejz, and show Havel very much as a man of the people with the call to send ‘Havel na Hrad.’ The second poster is a version which depicts Havel in a much more statesman-like manner, dressed in a smart suit and with the tag line promising a ‘guarantee of free elections.’ Both posters are notably in the national colours of white, red and blue. Thirty years is a long time ago now in many respects. Even though there are still many people alive who remember those events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of the USSR – people who  remember it all far more intimately than I do. I feel it’s important that these remembrances on each major anniversary shouldn’t be allowed to fade quietly from our collective memory. And so perhaps my small part in keeping those memories preserved and accessible for the future has been partly fulfilled in a small way this year by my donating those election posters – as tangible pieces of history – to the British Library to mark this thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution; where I hope they will be used by curators and visitors in the study rooms and in future exhibitions seeking to understand and interpret the past, and to remember those days in Czechoslovakia in the last two months of 1989, when anything seemed possible and all possibilities seemed so positive; when the future was still to be found and was still something to be looked forward to.

Also on 'Waymarks'

"The Wind of Change" - Germany 1991 & 1993 

Rest In Peace - Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

Questioning the Future - As A Historical Paradox

The Fall of Globalism, the Rise of Populist Nationalism, & the Question of 'Global History'

It seems as though the world is changing fast these days. It’s hard to keep up at times. There’s a lot of talk about a new age of uncertainty. And it seems as though many people are trying to gain some perspective on what is actually happening around us, but often it’s hard to see the wood for the trees when you are in the midst of the forest.

The internationalised future which appeared to have dawned in the last decade of the twentieth century seemed to presage an auspicious start to the new millennium. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, borders were beginning to blur, barriers began to be replaced by bridges – Europe was becoming more united with the establishment of the Schengen zone and a common currency, the founding of the World Trade Organisation, the economic rise of big countries such as China and India – globalism seemed to have been given the green light. The dichotomy of the Cold War era was now redundant, a new era of international harmony seemed a realistic possibility. But then everything began to change, and the changes seemed inconceivably contrary to all those optimistic expectations. Instead, the new century began with the unprecedented horrific spectacle of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York in 2001, which in turn precipitated the ‘global’ war on terror. A cultural dynamic had shifted dramatically, and today the repercussions are still reverberating from this seismic shift.

Then there was the financial meltdown of 2008. The pillars of the present world system suddenly seemed to be standing on political and economic foundations which were (and still are) dissolving with spectacular rapidity. Capitalism was in crisis. That optimistic new dawn, we were now being told, had been replaced by a new ‘age of austerity.’ The global financial downturn augured and helped to incubate a growing sense of disenfranchisement and disillusion. The green grass of the future had yellowed and dried to tinder. Hence the unexpected rise of popular nationalism seems to have suddenly spread out of nowhere, like wildfire. One can’t help wondering if this – our present time – is but the calm before the conflagration? Are we about to watch our world burn as that former optimistic future seemingly goes up in flames?

2016 may well come to be seen as a momentous year for global history. With the precarious onset of Brexit (perhaps for the EU as much as for the UK) in an uneasy near centre split of 52% versus 48%; the similarly narrow margin in the election of Donald Trump on a xenophobic nationalist platform (the likes of which, some outlets have been quick to tell us, ‘the West’ has not seen since the fall of the Weimar Republic) has prompted a great deal of worried navel gazing in public discourse, with pundits looking to history for similar precedents, and there by logical extension to historians in an attempt to unfathom the all-too-often hasty conclusions which some folks seem to be drawing from such history lessons. It is no wonder historians are being asked to step up to the task. These days the zeitgeist is ghastly. How often now do we read of the “lessons from history” being bandied about as a favourite phrase of the moment in the press and media?

These are bewildering times to be sure. And as someone currently enrolled on a programme of education with the goal of becoming a professional historian, I’ve often found myself contemplating the wider implications of such a career choice and the kind of calling it represents for me personally. It poses questions to which I have no concrete answers. All academics know that a perceptive question simply begets further questioning, but as a discipline our collective historiography is based on the process of asking and reflecting upon such questions. A recent article by Jeremy Adelman in Aeon Essays ruminating on the question: “What is global history now?” has really sparked a diode in my mind and focussed my thoughts a little further on this theme. It’s prompted me to ask myself again the question which every historian should constantly be asking themselves: what kind of a historian am I?

Of one thing I am definitely certain – I’m a global historian. And in reading Adelman’s article I find myself concluding that a 'global history' perspective is still just as relevant now, if not moreso, than it ever was before. My own field, the study of empire, is not a simple analysis of historical determinism; its scope is far, far broader than that. If global history is anything, it is pluralistic. It is as much about the local as it is about the international. You can’t raise questions of imperialism without invoking further questions about nationalism, there is no international without the local – and neither can be mutually exclusive. Hence today’s socio-political shift towards populist nationalism isn’t necessarily a retreat from the global, instead it presents a different set of contradictions to the surface simplicity that this same populist nationalism appears to champion. I, for one, think it is politically short-sighted on the one hand, and on the other, it is disingenuously calculating as a short-term tactic for taking and consolidating control. And clearly it is working. This is happening. 

Recently there’s been much talk in the UK about the nostalgia for empire. There is this harking back to a halcyon view of an untarnished past in which life was better at home in a country which was outwardly confidant and strong, exporting its vision of a just and rational modernity to a benighted and backwards wider world which naturally could only benefit from such an advanced and enlightened benevolence. But many have been pointing out that this is at best a false premise. The past was nowhere near so clear cut, nor so black and white. The study of empire is in effect a study in shades and nuances; it is an analysis of a greyscale of good to bad, benefit to harm, boon friend to bogeyman (cf. Ferguson versus Mishra). Theresa May talks about making a post-Brexit Britain a ‘global’ nation again – but what does that mean?

Surely being an active member of an international union such as the EU was a highly effective way of pursuing such a globalised vision for greater international harmony? Then again, I’m well aware that the same basis for such an arguement can be turned on its head and argued for precisely the opposite. Hence the question: - is a globalised world of individual nation states a more equitable base for a world system than one predicated on a preference for international unions of similar socio-economic ‘friends’ operating in concert? – Some might say it depends on the size of both the economy and the population of the nation state we are looking at. Think of the Philippines and China currently at diplomatic loggerheads over mutually disputed territories in the South China Sea. How can a small country vie with, let alone have its voice heard and respected by a relative superpower? Not all countries can “punch above their weight” as the oft-used trope of nationalist nostalgia in Britain would have us believe we do here in the UK; it’s a phrase which has so frequently characterised the rhetoric of British politicians since the demise of this country’s empire; indeed, whatever their party colour, UK politicians all seem to relish either cooing or crowing about this seemingly paradoxical incongruity of a plucky little island nation retaining its seat at the top table of global powers – history has denied many similarly small or even a fair few bigger nation states such a chance to join this particular club.

But nationalism versus globalism is the real question which Jeremy Adelman’s article set me thinking about. If the recent trend towards globalism has resulted in an unexpectedly inward turn towards parochial or populist nationalism, what follows on from that? – If such a nationalist turn seeks to differentiate a new (or renewed) notion of “us and them”, we have to wonder how such a polarisation is meant to take effect? Not least because the previous trend towards globalism has prompted a greater transnational social integration in so many countries. Many of our most economically burgeoning and flourishing cities are booming precisely because they have become expressly international cities. If the nationalists wish to categorically differentiate their “us” from ‘the other’ they can’t hope to do so on a macro, global level without precipitating doing so on a local, micro level at home too; and so, such a policy would simply end up being endemically fissiparous, or to put it another way, they’d in effect be throwing the baby out with the bathwater – hence some people’s legitimate fear that the implementation of such a policy would in effect equate to pushing a self-destruct button.

But then again, this might well be the intention ... Indeed, it follows that in the logical progression of such nationalism – anyone perceived to be a foreigner, say because of their colour or their creed, regardless of the fact that they were born in that same country, were fully acculturated therein, and held official papers attesting to their legitimate citizenship, perhaps even being several generations removed from their original immigrant forebears, would count for nothing. They may well end up being stigmatised as the enemy within, as indeed was the case with the Japanese in the USA after the attacks on Pearl Harbour, or worse with the Jews within Nazi Germany and occupied Europe in the 1940s , or similarly with the 'ethnic cleansing' in Balkan nations following the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Undoubtedly, though we might well shudder to consider it, there is every possibility of similar things occurring in exactly this way as the norms of civil society become increasing corroded and eroded by a toxic and exclusionary insularity. I would argue that the key question is not so much how this wave of populist nationalism has arisen or whether history is in any sort of sense repeating itself, though these are certainly important points to consider and debate; but rather, I would venture to suggest that the key question of our time is whether the dichotomy of this dilemma – globalism versus nationalism – is recalibrating and accelerating a new kind of global schism?

In his article Adelman quotes a deeply worrying statement about an imminent cultural collision of East and West apparently made in 2014 by the current chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon: “There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global. Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act.” … Little hope then, perhaps, to echo a famous phrase attributed to Winston Churchill, that “jaw, jaw” might be allowed a chance to take precedence over “war, war.” But more essentially such an overtly militarist stance in terms of the foreign policy of such an intrinsically pluralistic nation does not look sufficiently deeply into the reality beneath its nose on its very own doorstep. You cannot have a dualistic confrontation in the form of a "clash of civilisations" when your own society is already one built upon an integrated internationalist base, as this is in essence blindly self-destructive. The fact that we are clearly so split right down the middle (vide the voting splits for the two opposing Brexit camps, or the Presidential campaigns of Trump and Clinton), I think utterly precludes it. Trying to purge a society of ‘the other’ from within its own midst today would in the end be tantamount to instigating a civil war (think again of the 1990s Balkans War). Ours is no longer a world of near and far. The ‘global village’ is real, we are all living it now, and we are all more closely interconnected than ever before. Take Brexit and the issue of the current right of EU nationals to permanent residence in the UK which has simply highlighted how deeply married Britons are to the Continent, literally in the case of so many transnational married couples who are currently facing the threat of dislocation.

And yet – in looking through this present glass darkly and attempting to envisage the potentially deeply dystopian future that may well now lie ahead of us: what if this populist nationalism ultimately succeeds in its goal of disuniting the globe? – What will follow to police and maintain the new world order which will result from this epic "clash of civilisations"? Will such resurgent nationalism eventually beget a shift to a reinvented imperialism? Will it end in a new Cold War-like stand-off between Crusader and Jihadi? Or will it require a new kind of colonialism? And if so, who will end up being subjugated, colonized, exploited, and controlled as ‘the other’ in this nightmare vision of our collective future –  both at home and abroad? … The globe might well be up for grabs, but in my opinion, taking my lesson from history – the outcome of the impeding tussle will be anyone’s guess to call. But right now – it’s the moment when we stop asking questions which worries me the most.

References & Further Reading

Jeremy Adelman, What is Global History Now? Aeon Essays (March 2, 2017)

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983)

David Cannadine, The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences (Penguin, 2013)

Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton, 2016)

John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (Penguin, 2013)

Pankaj Mishra, From The Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against The West and The Remaking of Asia (Penguin, 2013)

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the 19^th Century (Princeton, 2014)

Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978)

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Knopf, 1993)

Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Ooi Kee Beng, The Eurasian Core and its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015)