Hello, I am honored to be given a chance to address this conference and apologies at the same time that I cannot be with you in Vilnius. I have so many other things to do; my life is complicated; so you have at least received this video greeting or video message. I was asked to say a few words about Václav Havel, playwright, dissident, political prisoner, then hero of the Velvet Revolution of 1989, then president of Czechoslovakia and Czech Republic and still a voice that should be heard today.
Václav Havel’s life is complicated, so I will only focus on one small episode of his life and offer it to your consideration. This is what happened in first half of 1975. Václav Havel was a public intellectual and he wrote and published a letter Dear Dr. Husák in April of that year, I recommend you to your attention. It is available so you can read it. In which he addressed the Secretary General of Communist Party and Václav did not know that Dr. Husák was going to become Czechoslovakian president a few weeks later. It was some sort of internal discussion among the comrades in the Politburo and in this capacity will travel to Helsinki to sign on Czechoslovak behalf final act of Helsinki conference and participate in that way in the Helsinki process that was about to start through this final act. Václav Havel wrote in this letter, listen: “In our offices and factories work goes on, discipline prevails. The efforts of our citizens are yielding visible results in a slowly rising standard of living: people build houses, buy cars, have children, amuse themselves, live their lives.
All this, of course, amounts to very little as a criterion for the success or failure of your policies. After every social upheaval”, what happened in Czechoslovakia 1968, “ people invariably come back in the end to their daily labors, for the simple reason that they want to stay alive; they do so for their own sake, after all, not for the sake of this or that team of political leaders.. Not that going to work, doing the shopping, and living their own lives is all that people do. They do much more than that: they commit themselves to numerous output norms which they then fulfill and overfulfill; they vote as one man and unanimously elect the candidates proposed to them; they are active in various political organizations; they attend meetings and demonstrations; they declare their support for everything they are supposed to. Nowhere can any sign of dissent be seen from anything that the government does.
These facts, of course, are not to be made light of. One must ask seriously, at this point, whether all this does not confirm your success in achieving the tasks your team set itself-those of winning the public’s support and consolidating the situation in the country. […] I make so bold as to answer, No; to assert that, for all the outwardly persuasive facts, inwardly our society, far from being a consolidated one, is, on the contrary, plunging ever deeper into a crisis more dangerous, in some respects, than any we can recall in our recent history. […]
The basic question one must ask is this: Why are people in fact behaving in the way they do? Why do they do all these things that, taken together, form the impressive image of a totally united society giving total support to its government? For any unprejudiced observer, the answer is, I think, selfevident: They are driven to it by fear..
So far, it is the worst in us which is being systematically activated and enlargedegotism, hypocrisy, indifference, cowardice, fear, resignation, and the desire to escape every personal responsibility, regardless of the general consequences. […]
So far, you and your government have chosen the easy way out for yourselves, and the most dangerous road for society: the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances; of deadening life for the sake of increasing uniformity; of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power. […]
As a citizen of this country, I hereby request, openly and publicly, that you and the leading representatives of the present regime consider seriously the matters to which I have tried to draw your attention, that you assess in their light the degree of your historic responsibility, and act accordingly.”
So what Dr. Husak, President Husak did, he traveled to Helsinki and in his capacity of the head of state, signed the final act of that conference and connected Czechoslovak internal policies criticized by Havel with international process with the three baskets of the Helsinki initiative. The first basket regarding European security, the second dedicated to issues of cooperation in the area of culture, economy, science, new technologies and the environment. And the third demanding cooperation among all participating states in the humanitarian field, free exchange of information, contacts among family members separated by the Iron Curtain and the issues of human rights.
Just a quick reminiscence, in connection with the first basket, ten principles were formulated by which the Helsinki process initiated by the final act was to be guided. They were sovereign equality, respect for rights arising from sovereignty, refraining from the threat of force or use of force, unviolability of frontiers, territorial integrity of states, peaceful settlement of disputes, non-intervention in internal affairs of other states, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms including freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, equal rights and self-determination of people, cooperation among states, honest fulfillment of obligation under international law.
It sounds very nice and attractive but obviously under the given circumstances, peaceful relationships of states with different social and political systems and non-intervention into domestic matters meant for Czechoslovak people that this situation Václav Havel was pointing to, was to remain and that people were some sort of in the hands of those leaders who were trying to come up through Helsinki initiative with some positive evolution.
It is clear that the basket referenced later in declaration of Charter 77, Václav Havel was one of the first spokepersons, it was January 1977, was only third in order of priorities and that the interpretation of the above mentioned principles, principle 7, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms including freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief and 8, Equal rights and self-determination of people and 9, Honest fulfillment of international law obligations was strictly subordinated by the states of the peace and socialism camp led by the Soviet Union to the leading role of principle 6, Non-interference into domestic matters. So you have here two things, existential perspective of Charter 77 led by Havel and international policies on the other side declared in the Helsinki Final Act and Helsinki process that started after this act was adopted. So the question is what happened after?
Was the Helsinki process strong enough to overcome obstacles and inertia of the political system in which we lived with other Europeans in 1975, 76, 77 and was able to bring us step by step through the follow-up conferences and processes with the Helsinki process to this fundamental change that took place 13 years later — Velvet Revolution, fall of communism in our part of the world, fall of Soviet Empire and beginning of a new process in Europe, democratization and transition from totalitarianism to democracy.
So I think today, 50 years later, maybe, we want to ask ourselves to what extent and in what way the Helsinki process, whose beginning in 1975 we are now commemorating, can serve also as a starting point for understanding our current situation and as a guide for politically that is future-oriented actions.
And what we must start with today, just as we did 50 years ago, is in my opinion the Helsinki third basket, the civic dimension of international politics, civic participation in discussions led by politicians and professional diplomats, the empirically verified fact that these three dimensions of the Helsinki process must be distinguished, that is the diversity must be respected and the way to effectively address them, but they cannot be separated from one another. And in this sense, in my view, the current cardinal questions are, what is Russia’s current place within OSCE, into which the Helsinki process, CSCE, was institutionalized in 1994, given that under Putin’s leadership it has decided to openly ignore the principles that stand as its foundation.
Can the Helsinki process, originally conceived for 35 participating states, 32 European countries, plus the Eurasian Soviet Union, the United States and Canada, become an inspiration in the current post-European world, in a world characterized by an increasing degree of interdependence among all states existing on the planet Earth, both large and small, in a world where European civilization confronts and is confronted and must reasonably communicate with non-European civilizations, in a world where global phenomena, especially the rapid development of artificial intelligence, radically change the place where human life takes place, in a world where the questions and problems arise that the politicians who conceived the Helsinki process in the 1970s could never have dreamed of and therefore were not able to anticipate and consider all the new phenomena that surround and overwhelm us today in their own thinking.
So I think that there are so many questions we need to look at when we, on the one hand, have perspective of Václav Havel and the crowd of those who signed Charter 77 and other dissidents and human rights activists that emerged in this time in all countries in our region, including the Soviet Union of course, and inter-state international politics in hands of diplomats, politicians, world leaders.
And I think that we should be optimistic that this third dimension is still around, that it can inspire us what happened in the past in our efforts to overcome the challenges and obstacles we are confronted with today.
So good luck for the conference, I hope that I will be able to follow up your conclusions, your discussions, and that we will be able to meet each other at some point and go on with this discussion.
Thank you.