The Velvet Revolution and Václav Havel

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Jonathan Fortier: No matter what your thoughts may be on any particular topic, it can be hard to feel comfortable expressing those ideas in today’s highly charged social climate. But as dangerous as words can seem, they’re a powerful tool as well, one we should all be more willing to utilize over more coercive means, especially in the face of actual totalitarian threats. All that and more on this episode of The Liberty Exchange.

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Jonathan Fortier: I am Jonathan Fortier, Director of Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. This is the first episode of Liberty Exchange, and we thought, what better way to launch our podcast than to have a conversation about Václav Havel. Havel was a Czech dissident who modeled courageous opposition to totalitarian power and argued for the necessity of talking across ideological lines in the struggle for individual freedom. To discuss Havel, I’m joined by Milan Babík. Milan has lectured at Williams and Dartmouth Colleges prior to joining the faculty at Colby College in Maine, where he teaches international relations, American foreign policy, 20th century history, and the politics and history of Europe. Babík was born in Šumperk, Czechoslovakia during the Normalization era, and was 10 years old when the Velvet Revolution transformed life in Czechoslovakia. Milan went on to complete school in the US, then to the UK, studying at the London School of Economics in Oxford, where he completed a doctorate in politics and international relations in 2009.

Jonathan Fortier: Babík has written on Wilsonian statecraft, political religions, narrative theory, and the role of language and fiction, and thinking about international politics. Last year, he organized a conference on Václav Havel in the crisis of Western liberal democracy. Babík is the recipient of the Crystal Heart Award from the Czech Center in New York City, recognizing public diplomacy efforts, promoting friendship and cooperation between the Czech Republic and the United States. In today’s episode, we discuss his childhood experiences growing up in Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution, the importance of language in shaping politics and reality, and what we can learn from Václav Havel’s fight for greater freedom, and the necessity to live authentically in the midst of totalitarian threats. We hope you enjoy it.

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Jonathan Fortier: Milan, welcome to Liberty Exchange.

Milan Babík: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Jonathan Fortier: I was drawn to talk to you after I saw the very impressive event you put together at Colby last year, bringing many, many people to talk about Havel and talk about his legacy. I thought before we delved into to that event and some of the themes that emerged out of that, it would be great to get a sense of your history as a Czech national and how you came to Havel and what Havel meant to you when you were growing up and as you were pursuing your studies and your research. So, I think I’ll begin just with a series of questions about your time in the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia, as it was then. You were a 10-​year-​old boy during the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Many people were watching that from afar with excitement and amazement, but you were there in the country. What are your memories of those months and how would you convey the sense of excitement and instability at that time?

Milan Babík: I have very vivid recollections of the day or the few days when everything started because the disruption was was palpable. It was everywhere. Even for a 10-​year-​old, it was impossible to miss that something important was going on, something that was very out of the ordinary and so on. I was walking back home from an evening choir practice, choir session. I was essentially a singer. I participated in a choir, 40 girls and myself. I hated it at the time. But in the evening, I was walking back home as I frequently did, and I had to walk across town in Šumperk. And I always passed by the theater, which is an old big building right in the center. Nothing ever happened there in the evening. It was always quiet deserted.

Milan Babík: Except that day, there was a couple of people sitting there quietly on the steps, and they had the Czech flag, Czechoslovak flag, actually, a couple of them. They had candles. It was by no means a demonstration. Was nothing loud. Nothing nothing of that sort. But it was a sight that was very different from what I was used to, and it definitely immediately triggered my curiosity. What is going on? Why are they here? And so on. Up to that point, the only kind of demonstrations, anytime that you would show the Czechoslovak flag would, be the official Mayday parades and so on and so forth. So this was quite extraordinary, this public citizen initiative. And then I came home and I asked my parents, “What’s going on? Would you happen to know?” And I do remember the response right away, “We do not know. We are not gonna pay any attention.” That was that night.

Milan Babík: But within a few days, once this all gained traction, once it started showing up on TV, once the Civic Forum was formed, schools started shutting down. In other words, we suddenly didn’t have classes. We could take a day or two off. And even when we went to school, the regular rhythm of our classes was disrupted. Suddenly, teachers would not be talking about the subject matter in Czech or geography and whatnot, and we would be discussing entirely different things, what is going on around us and so on, which was also very different. Education was very scripted upto that point. You would stick to the textbooks and you would do exactly what was in them and follow the curriculum. Except now it was much more organic. Suddenly we’re engaging with the world outside of the classroom, and that too was very new, very different.

Milan Babík: So I have very sort of exact precise memories of the days in November 1989, the first week or two, including the massive demonstrations that would soon start taking place all around the country, not just in Prague. There would be big gatherings in public squares in Šumperk as well, with thousands of people and speakers and so on. And that too was extraordinary. Going out with my parents, my grandparents, who lived with us to these events really at the beginning of the winter season. So it was really cold, really chilly. The weather was not pleasant. And we would stand there and we would freeze to death, but we would be there and we would be listening, and everybody would be very captivated and you could feel the energy in the crowd.

Milan Babík: I don’t think that there was any sense of fear. I think it was this spontaneous gathering that was just erupting from within society. Everybody was extremely kind and nice to each other, complete strangers, and you could glimpse some of that from the gatherings in Prague where you would have Wenceslas Square filled with tens of thousands of people, but everybody would make way for the ambulance coming in to retrieve somebody who got lightheaded, or perhaps was indisposed in another way. So it was this massive, just massive coming together. It was an existential moment. It was not just a political moment. It was it was much deeper than that. I did not have the terminology, the vocabulary and the concepts to think about that as a 10-​year-​old, but you could feel it. You could feel that energy erupting from somewhere and deep within the society.

Jonathan Fortier: Were your parents very interested in the political discussions that were occurring at the time? Did you grow up in a context, in a family and in a community that was engaged in the ideas, or were people just trying to get by and try to disengage from the political discussions?

Milan Babík: So, it was an interesting home and an interesting household that I grew up in. My parents did not talk politics at all. They were very disengaged. And in that regard, I think they were quite sort of typical in that regard. Most Czechoslovaks throughout the late 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, the Normalization era, they really checked out. It was a country that was completely depressed in the wake of the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact. Everybody saw what happened to the Prague Spring, so they all checked out, didn’t want to talk about it, realized that their careers, their everyday lives would be seriously affected if they were to start talking about these things.

Milan Babík: But in my household, in my home, as I mentioned, my maternal grandparents are part of the equation as well. And they, especially my grandfather, was not afraid. His history was much, much deeper, longer. He was born during the Interwar era in 1920, just after World War I. So he remembered the First Republic, the Democratic Republic and Masaryk and so on. The same held for my grandmother. And they had to undergo quite the ordeal during World War II, separated and fighting on the Eastern front actually on the German side. I mean, that’s a classic central European history, extremely complicated. And then once once he came back from war, he became an engineer. Eventually bought the house that we lived in, and he did that really just a few months before the invasion of 1968. So he spent his life up to that point running away from the Soviets and trying to fight them.

Milan Babík: And in 1968, he bought a home, and within a few months of that purchase, the Soviet set up shop literally next door. We had Soviet barracks flanking the house from two sides. So that was the home into which I was born. The Soviets were part of my everyday reality. I considered that completely natural. There were no reasons to question their presence. It’s simply the world you’re born in. Except for my grandfather who just kept pestering them with insults and throwing garden vegetables across the wall, and so on. So there was always something to make you wonder, what’s going on here? And eventually, how did these soldiers got here? What’s going on with this country? Even as a 10-​year-​old, you had that, or I had that on my radar, once again, not in ways utilizing political theory and complicated national history, but through the microcosm of these relationships and people right under the roof of the home into which I was born.

Jonathan Fortier: You grew up in Šumperk, but then you earned a scholarship to study in the US. Where did you go to study school in the US?

Milan Babík: I attended Berkshire School in in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. It’s a small boarding school, college prep school. There are many in that area. So that’s where the foundation that organized that scholarship competition in the Czechoslovak Republics. At that point, there were two separate republics following the disintegration of Czechoslovakia. That’s where I was sent to. I actually did not have much say over the specific choice of the institution. The foundation essentially worked with about 20 institutions in the United Kingdom and in the United States, and their representatives had the sort of final pick out of the finalists. So I simply walked into the gymnasium of Šumperk, which is where I was a sophomore at that time, a And one morning, my English teacher yelled across the entire atrium and said, “You are going to America,” and then proceeded to inform me that there is a letter waiting at the post office for my parents to be picked up from Prague, from the representatives of the foundation. And we were off to the races, so to speak.

Jonathan Fortier: So when you came to the US to study, you would’ve been a teenager?

Milan Babík: Yes, I was 16 years of age, yes.

Jonathan Fortier: And did you notice dramatic differences between North American life and life in the Czech Republic?

Milan Babík: Absolutely. So I, of course, came with a set of perceptions in my head. I had certain expectations as to what I would find in the United States. It was impossible, really, to escape images of the United States in the years following the Velvet Revolution. I mean, ice hockey is big in the Czech Republic, and back then, in the early 1990s, Jaromir Jagr, was at the beginning of his professional career here in the United States, winning one Stanley Cup after another with the Pittsburgh Penguins, and we were all crazy about that. So we would be getting up at 1:00 AM to watch the NHL games, which up to that point were not available. It was something extra ordery. And of course, all kinds of brands and chains, McDonald’s opening their first store in Prague.

Milan Babík: So America had this flashy appearance. We tended to associate it with, let’s say, urban landscapes and skyscrapers, and of course, wealth and success and such. And then when I came to the United States and proceeded straight to the Berkshires, which are very rural, and it’s an isolated, fairly isolated campus sitting next to a very small town of really just a few hundred people, it didn’t line up. So, it felt like something that was completely at odds with the outward image of America, what I might call packaging of America in Czechoslovakia or the Czech Republic at that time. So I had difficulty adjusting. It was not exactly what I expected. It was not Manhattan. It was not the skyscrapers. It was not all that.

Milan Babík: And of course, in Czechoslovakia at that time, and even in the Czech Republic today, we simply do not have the kind of boarding schools, residential boarding schools, a campus that would sit summer in the mountains or in the woods, relatively secluded. That’s something that we are not familiar with. So in that regard, it was a very interesting experience. It was an early lesson in the power of images and how they shape your perception of the world, and then what’s underneath them, which may not really correspond. And it triggered some really interesting exchanges with my parents and grandparents, because, of course, they were very eager to find out how I was doing, what the school was like, and so on.

Milan Babík: Back then, there was no internet. There were no mobile phones. It was all about letters, which we wrote. They would take 10 days to travel each way, so the conversation would span a month. But they would be asking me, “Can you send us any pictures of the skyscrapers? Can you send us any pictures of the cities?” And all I could respond with would be would be images of the woods and the dorms and the chapel perhaps, and for them, it was quite disappointing. You’re not in America.

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Jonathan Fortier: I’d like the shift to Havel’s influence on some of your thinking. Do you remember when you first encountered Havel? Was it when you were in school in the Czech Republic, or was it later in your studies? What was the moment when you first really discovered him?

Milan Babík: My initial encounter with him really corresponded with the Velvet Revolution. When he entered the national stage, so to speak, in the spotlight, that is when I became aware of him as this new face, this person around whom seemingly everything was revolving, starting in November 1989. I do have to admit that up until that point, I was not familiar with him at all. I don’t think that his name ever was mentioned in our household, unless perhaps in some private conversations that my grandfather might have had with my grandmother. But my parents certainly did not. If they were familiar with him, they did not reveal that to us children, my brother and myself. So he literally did not exist for me. I was not aware of him. I think the experience was different or would’ve been different if I were in Prague, in the city of Prague, where I know that he was a member of what you might call the dissident community of intellectuals and so on.

Milan Babík: His place were quite popular in certain circles, obviously not the official circles, but there was a buzz surrounding him, which really started in the ’60s. But in Northern Moravia, where Šumperk is located, part of the Sudetenland region, about three and a half hours by train from Prague, that was a different situation. So that was my first exposure to him, when we started talking about him in school, when we started seeing him on TV, when we all watched his New Year’s address in 1990 where he famously essentially said, “As the newly or recently inaugurated president, I assume my fellow citizens that you did not elect me to tell you again that our country is flourishing.” So that authenticity, that was also extremely different. And then my encounter with him obviously continued.

Milan Babík: Interestingly, I started reading him in the United States in high school at Berkshire, and then at Colby College, which is where I did my undergraduate degree. So in translation, in some of my European, Central European politics courses, I would supplement that with going back to the Czech texts and expanding my knowledge. But this is where I became more familiar with the ideas that I already heard when I was 10 or 11 in the form of the various slogans and manifestos and proclamations and speeches that he gave during the Velvet Revolution, during the protests, speaking to the crowds and so on. So here is where I gained a little bit of depth, became familiar with his place, read his letters to Olga, his Power of the Powerless.

Milan Babík: And of course, this was part of really becoming aware of the broader set of ideas that the underground and the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia was producing, whether it was Benda’s Anti-​Politics and Parallel Polis, Pavel Tigrid working from his French exile and so on. So there was quite a bit of it. And that’s where I started kind of framing all of this in the language of contemporary political theory, international relations and so on.

Jonathan Fortier: What works stood out for you when you started your reading in Havel? What works stood out as being particularly opposite or relevant for what the Czech Republic had experienced? What spoke to you the most in general terms? Was it the fiction, was it the theater plays, or was it the essays or some combination of the two?

Milan Babík: It was really a bit of everything, but as a young adolescent, 18, 19, 20 and so on, I was of course drawn to art, to theater. So his dramatic plays spoke to me in ways that his essays and his more philosophical non-​fiction work could. And that is true about Havel. It also applies to, let’s say, Milan Kundera, one of his great contemporaries, whose novels were also very formative in my intellectual development. So it would be The Garden Party. It would be the place that he was known for in Prague in 1967, 1968, during the Prague Spring. And I would have to single out The Garden Party as probably my favorite. I kept reading and rereading in Czech, in English, and that’s also the play that I use among others. When I talk to my students about Havel, when I take them to Prague every January to really guide them through Central European contemporary history, teach them about the history of totalitarianism in the region, and draw heavily on works of fiction and theater plays and Havel and Kundera and so on, to get them to understand the atmosphere of those days.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah. Havel, like Orwell, thought a lot about the power of language in shaping cultural norms and political ideology. And if I’m not mistaken, The Garden Party pivots importantly on the, in a sense, the bureaucratization of language under Soviet rule or under any totalitarian control. And it seems to me that Havel pursues this concern through his life, which makes sense as a playwright. And then as an essayist, he’s obviously very interested in language and how language operates. But there’s more here with Havel. It seems that language is essential in creating the reality that Czechs were living in under totalitarian or, as he says, post-​totalitarian rule. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, about the significance of language as you understand Havel was exploring it in his work?

Milan Babík: I think you’re absolutely right that language is essentially front and center of his work, not just as a playwright, but also as an essayist. I essentially think that even his famous letters to, let’s say, Alexander Dubček in the wake of the Prague Spring or The Power of the Powerless, with the famous image of the green grocer placing a slogan in his shop window. At the end of the day, I think it all boils down to language, to how we use symbolic expression, whether sincerely or not, and if not sincerely, to what purposes and what it does to us. And in that regard, I see Havel as really a great follower of, let’s say, Orwell in the English tradition. Orwell also reflected heavily on language, whether in his 1984 or in his Politics of the English Language in his essay.

Milan Babík: But I think you’re absolutely right, and I think it shows up right at the beginning of his dramatic career as a playwright with The Garden Party. That was his first play in 1963 when he was just a stagehand at the theater Nazabralý on the Balustrade, which is the smallest theater in Prague, but with a really rich and distinguished history. In December, I believe, it was December 3rd, 1963, this is when The Garden Party showed up, this was when it was first put on, and immediately it generated tremendous buzz among the intellectual and cultural elite, unofficial of course, although times were improving, the atmosphere was a bit more relaxed. This was the buildup to the Prague Spring of 1968.

Milan Babík: But I think The Garden Party is fundamentally about language, about empty phrases that enable the main protagonist, Hugo Pludek, to really climb the social hierarchy, the hierarchy of power, get himself into a position of power by repeating these mindless, empty, almost dadaistic phrases, which are completely unassailable. So that in whichever situation he finds himself, and you have various antagonists in that situation, they cannot attack him for regurgitating these silly, empty phrases. So it’s about the phrase, it’s about Hugo’s mastery of the phrase, and how that phrase turns him into an individual without any kind of identity. He becomes an extension of the bureaucratized system, and that’s what allows him to become somebody.

Milan Babík: He becomes somebody precisely at a point where he becomes nobody, where he loses his identity, having just mindlessly repeated these phrases, empty phrases. And that is the message that Havel is teaching us through that play. And I think that message is relevant well beyond the totalitarian context of Czechoslovakia in, let’s say, the late 1950s, early 1960s. That’s why that language, I think, can be, or that play, why it can be played on and on and on in all kinds of contexts.

Jonathan Fortier: A related idea is this emphasis on truth, truth-​telling, but also living, as Havel says quite literally, living in truth, which I take to mean living authentically, or living according not only to your principles, but according to what you see as reality, and living in accordance with a kind of reality, which is precisely what he seems to be offering a critique of in The Garden Party, as you say. And this seems to relate, I think, importantly to Havel’s criticism of ideology and this sustained skepticism that he has about ideology as a totalizing approach to the world. You want to say a few words about Havel’s critique of this lack of truthfulness in society or the way that people live?

Milan Babík: I think this ties really well into his core concern with language, which is really inseparable from his core concern with truth and living in truth, and as you correctly observe, staying authentic and faithful to one’s own self. I think that’s what it comes down to. After all, what happens to Hugo Pludek in The Garden Party is precisely this leaving himself, becoming alien to himself, so that at the end of the play, when his parents ask him, who are you, which is a really simple question, or should be, he ends up with this long monologue, essentially saying, that’s a silly question. I am this and not this, and he does not have an answer because he does not know. He lost himself precisely by trying to cater to the ideology, so to speak, or figuring out the social mechanism, the bureaucratized society, trying to rise through the ranks. Not being faithful to himself, not using language to live in truth with himself.

Milan Babík: And I think this resonates through everything that Havel had to say. I think this is essentially the substance of his letter to Alexander Dubček. Dubček comes back from Moscow after August 1968, having been released by the Soviets, returns to the country, and Havel writes to him and essentially delineates for Dubček the options that Dubček has in terms of responding to what happened. And Havel says to him quite clearly, well, you can pretend that everything is okay, that we had a counter-​revolutionary force in this country and that the Soviets came to help us. And you can adhere to the official line, to the ideological line. But that would mean that you are not going to be true to yourself. You’re going to teach the citizens of Czechoslovakia that lesson, that it does not pay to be true to oneself.

Milan Babík: Or you can choose something else. You can be courageous, and you can speak out, and it’s going to have repercussions. It’s not going to be the advantageous thing to do, the profitable thing to do, but you’re going to live in truth even when that is not something that’s going to enable you to get yourself into a position of power, into a good job, and so on. And Havel’s preference was quite clear. He also said to Dubček, or you can do nothing and keep silent and pretend that nothing happened, that you have no opinion and behave as a kind of a gray mouse. So I think that this concern with language, with standing up for oneself, for not giving into the pressures of ideology, Even when that means persecution, even when that means going to prison, being harassed, all the things that were happening to Havel throughout the Normalization era, I think Havel, he didn’t just talk the talk, I mean, he walked the walk.

Milan Babík: And as a world-​famous playwright at that point, who had the opportunity to leave Czechoslovakia and would have made a nice living in New York City, for example, that he came back and he chose to stay true to himself. And I think that was extremely important, a message that really kind of resonated after 1989 when people stopped being afraid once the Soviet occupation ended and so on and so forth.

Jonathan Fortier: Do you think that it was his work as a dissident or the fact that he was an intellectual and a successful playwright that launched him so quickly into the spotlight? Seen from the outside, it seemed that he had almost universal support from the people, and he won a clear majority when he was elected as president. What was it about him? Was it the political activity? Was it just his character? Can you account for that?

Milan Babík: I do not think that we can explain all of that. It remains a mystery even to me, this outburst of energy and almost universal coming together around the Civic Forum and Havel as the face of the Civic Forum. It obviously did not last. It lasted for a few months, and then the usual processes of a well-​functioning democracy, which is based on the exchange of different ideas and competing views, that started to take over. But in terms of his universal appeal at that particular time, I think what people were really channeling was the frustration and just the sheer exhaustion after the two decades of normalization following the Prague Spring, that they were just really happy to get rid of all of that, to not have to be forced to pretend that everything was fine, that they could actually speak authentically, let everybody else know what they really think about the situation in the country. I think that was what was really electrifying.

Milan Babík: Once again, I’m not sure that Havel was sufficiently well-​known beyond the elite intellectual and cultural circles, unofficial, of course, in Prague and Brno. I think that his reach in that regard was quite limited. I mean, in small regional towns and in villages, very few people would have been aware, I think, of him, perhaps those still remembering the Prague Spring. But even that was a fairly elite-​driven, intellectual-​driven event, mainly in Prague. I don’t think that there are too many people that were familiar with this place, once again outside of those Prague circles.

Jonathan Fortier: Last year, you organized this event at Colby with numerous speakers, and one thing that struck me about the event you organized is that it was titled Havel and Our Crisis, and you identify at least four principal crises; the crisis of values, the crisis of language, the crisis of truth, and the crisis of kindness. As it happens, we’ve talked for some time about language and truth, but perhaps you can talk a little bit about why you decided to organise the event around crises. Do you think that Havel has something to say about contemporary crises? Was that part of the motivation of organizing it in this way?

Milan Babík: Well, I think that most of us would agree that in the Western world that we find ourselves in difficult times, whether due to COVID-19, the crisis of liberal democracy in the United States, especially in the wake of the US Capitol attacks, the trouble during the most recent presidential election, Donald Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the entire process, attack it, and so on. And more generally, the fragmentation, which is quite palpable, at least in the United States, where people stop talking to each other, where we see so much ideological polarisation, that dialogue basically stops. Things can really escalate. It is becoming more and more about violence, violent confrontations. And just the sheer inability to listen and engage with those whom you know to possess different views from those of your own. I think that’s something that Havel did extremely well under communism. He was always willing to speak to the other side.

Milan Babík: There is also, at least in my view, a big tradition of nonviolent protest that really goes back to Gandhi and others that is present also in Havel. Sort of maintaining your own ground but without going into extremes. He was willing to talk to his minders. All those police details that were essentially attached to him were following him around, he was extremely kind to them. There are several anecdotes that float around about this, His seeing the guard standing outside in the rain and in a cold weather and inviting the guard over for a cup of tea, so on and so forth. Or the famous one about the guard following him one winter afternoon to a sauna, which is where he wanted to go, but the guard had some kind of a cardiac problem, heart issue, could not go in and essentially approached Havel and said, I can’t go in, but I’m going to get into trouble with my superiors for not following you. And so Havel stood outside and waited for a replacement. So if you just pay attention to these, they stand, these examples, in marked contrast to what has been going on around us.

Jonathan Fortier: So I perceive that crisis all over us in the basic fabric of civil society, which is eroding, but also geopolitically. I mean, with the recent attack and the war of aggression waged by the Russian Federation against Ukraine. So that prompted me to come up with this event. I haven’t, except in a few courses on Central European politics, which are taken mainly by students interested in that particular region. It is interesting that at least in my academic training here on this side of the Atlantic, Havel does not necessarily feature on the reading lists. When we study the Western liberal tradition, there is a lot of Locke and John Stuart Mill and so on, but you will not come across Havel, which I think is a great pity. I think that he can teach us many valuable things that perhaps are not as emphasised by the standard canon here in the United States or perhaps even in Great Britain.

Milan Babík: And so I thought that it would be very interesting to bring him into conversation with all these issues that are floating around us today, and I simply chose to thematize those issues along those four broad areas, because, I, once again, think that language is central here, and that it is closely related to truth and values, and authentic existence in keeping with your persuasions and in keeping with your authentic self, and kindness in the sense of being always willing to engage with those who may have a very different viewpoint on this or that, or simply see the world in different terms.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah, this is a nice segue to Havel’s Place and places, because, in some sense, Havel’s Place symbolizes or invites people to engage in this way with empathy and civility, and one of the reasons that we’re talking to you and organizing other Václav Havel related content this week is that this is the 10-​year anniversary of the first Havel’s Place at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. And this has always been intriguing to me, these installations. They’re part art installation and part commemorative monument to Havel and his legacy and the values that he stood for. Do you wanna say a few words about what a Havel’s Place means to you and any experience that you’ve had in establishing a Havel’s Place or visiting a Havel’s Place in your past?

Milan Babík: It’s a metaphor. A Havel’s Place is a metaphor. When you look at the object, the installation, if you will, it is essentially a memorial comprising of two chairs linked by a roundtable with a tree growing through the center. They all have that in common. The execution, the materials, and so on, that may differ, but essentially, you’re always looking at a roundtable, the chairs are joined to it, you can’t move them, and then you have something that’s organic and alive, a tree growing through the middle. I love that it’s essentially a work of art. Bořek Šípek was involved in formulating that idea and then making the first one, I believe, in Georgetown in 2013. But at the same time, it’s obviously extremely important for discussion, for dialogue.

Milan Babík: The message of that artwork is very political. It’s very related to our civil existence as citizens who exchange views peacefully while sitting around a roundtable. Nobody is at the head, and two chairs symbolizing either or, different views which nonetheless come together to engage in dialogue. So in a nutshell, a Havel’s Place, the installation, the artwork, symbolizes to me, his entire legacy. You have a playwright. He sees himself first and foremost as an artist, but nonetheless ends up playing a really important political role, catalyzing political role that changes the fate of a entire country and entire region really, Central Europe. He was not just that important for Czechs and Slovaks but for Poles and for the Hungarians and everybody else in that region, and I think that these are extremely pertinent today, the message of coming together. I think that what they encapsulate is exactly the opposite of what you see on Facebook and the way that we communicate today, the way language is used today, in cyberspace, in virtual reality, on the internet, with the big corporations having done so much through their algorithms and digging people into their echo chambers, to really make dialogue much more difficult. So in that regard, I don’t think that it would be a bad idea to place perhaps the next Havel’s Place or these two chairs conjoined to a table perhaps in front of the corporate headquarters of Facebook or Twitter or X, as it is nowadays called.

Jonathan Fortier: We are interested in many different values at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, but one of them certainly is liberty, and as I understand Havel’s work, he was committed to freedom and having people live in freedom as well as the other values that we’ve been talking about. What do you think Havel’s understanding of liberty was? Do you have a…

Milan Babík: So, I’ll put it this way. I think it’s very difficult to place Havel in the context of the classic liberal tradition. Even when you read his works, you will not find many references to what you would consider classic liberal philosophers. He is in some ways very idiosyncratic, very central European. He dedicates his Power of the Powerless to Jan Patočka, who was a famous Czech phenomenologist. So you have that. Maybe Edmund Husserl. So the philosophical context is this. But I think he’s coming at freedom from a slightly different angle, simply by being who he was, an artist. What is art about? Art is about revealing the world other than as we perceive it, showing that it can be something else.

Milan Babík: It’s fundamentally about freedom, about unlocking new cognitive spaces, being able for the reader, the audience, to imagine something that is familiar to them in fundamentally different ways. Milan Kundera talks about the role of literature and the novel, in terms of pulling down this curtain, he calls it the curtain, that we have draped over our faces in our eyes at the moment when we are born, and we assumed that the world we’re born into has always been that way and will always be that way. And Kundera essentially says that’s the role of artists, in his case, novelists and literary prose fiction to destroy this curtain, to tear through the curtain, just as Don Quixote did and Miguel de Cervantes, and reveal the world other than we assume it is.

Milan Babík: So in that regard, no true artist can function in a society that is totalitarian, that is not free. Artists fundamental require freedom to do what they do, and when there is no freedom or when they feel that they cannot do what they do, when there are any limits to that artistic activity, they will speak up, and I think that’s Havel’s background, that’s how he’s actually coming into politics. Once again, he was not a politician by any means. In some ways, the role of the president was a role that he accepted unwillingly and with hesitation, out of his sense of civic duty, but I think he thought of himself first and foremost as an artist, and artists are very good detectors of freedom or lack of freedom in society.

Jonathan Fortier: And you said earlier that Havel isn’t read very much as a foundational figure or a principal figure in the liberal tradition, and that’s, I think, partly because he is not easily categorized, and he’s not easily pigeon-​holed. It’s difficult to know what genre to categorize him in, artist or essayist, or political dissident, or politician, successful politician, and that’s what makes him intriguing, is that he talks across all those lines and borrows from, or can draw on all of that experience. And in a sense, he is the anti-​ideological person, because he seems to be resisting any particular worldview that is totalizing, that he’s kind of committed to exploring ideas in an organic and creative way.

Milan Babík: Absolutely. I think that’s part of his appeal, at least to me, today, that he is trying to move us away from these big tents, which we like to occupy and define ourselves through. It is no secret that he really disliked political parties and partisan politics. That he always emphasized the individual, authentic individual, thinking for him or herself. So in that regard, if we could be mindful of at least that part of his legacy and his message, I think it would do something to move us away from this extremely toxic confrontational either or black and white thinking that perhaps is going on today in the United States and elsewhere around the world, to a place where we can, again, engage in dialogue, constructive solutions to problems that plague us, that trouble us.

Jonathan Fortier: I think that’s a super place to wrap up our conversation, Milan. Thanks very much for talking with me.

Milan Babík: It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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Jonathan Fortier: Thank you for listening to The Liberty Exchange, a project of Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. This episode was hosted by Jonathan Fortier and produced by Landry Ayres. Special thanks to the rest of the Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org team, including Pericles Niarchos, Allison Yaffee, Grant Babcock, and Paul Meany. If you like this and want more, you can visit us online at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.