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Havel and the Future of International Relations
Fabio Petito
In the context of a civilisational approach international relations should be redefined. A new structure for the world order must facilitate the coexistence of diverse cultures and peoples, based on a common perception of transcendence.
The aim of this paper is to sketch the idea of a 'dialogue of civilisations' as an argument for the moral basis of the contemporary globalised and multicultural international society. The proposal for a dialogue of civilisations, officially launched by the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mohammad Khatami, but also envisioned in similar forms by other political leaders and actors, has been made the object of a plethora of conferences and international meetings especially since the designation of the year 2001 as the United Nations Year of the Dialogue Among Civilisations. Yet, in my view, not enough has been done by experts of international relations and political theorists to clarify and articulate its possible meaning for the future of international relations. It is the purpose of this paper to start filling this void by drawing inspiration from the analysis Václav Havel has developed along the last ten years to respond to what he describes as "the central political task of the final years of this century... the creation of a new model of coexistence among the various cultures, peoples, races, and in the religious sphere within a single interconnected civilisation".
Before I proceed to a critical reconstruction of Havel's reflection, however, one premise and some preliminary comments are in order. Havel has never used the specific formula of 'the dialogue of civilisations' and has in many respects a very different starting point from Khatami: he is consciously and intentionally speaking from the very heart of Western intellectual tradition and has also been politically for a variety of reasons (and not only because of his institutional duty as the President of the Czech Republic) among the strongest supporters of NATO as one of the institutions embodying the Western political community. It is my contention, however, that along the years following the end of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, the then President of the Czech Republic articulated in his speeches an insightful and coherent analysis of the very same issues raised by Khatami although under the different rubrics of 'multipolar and multicultural civilisation' and 'search for unity in diversity'. Furthermore, Havel seems to me to provide a more fitting starting point than Khatami in the specific historical, political and cultural context from which the World Public Forum has arisen. But let us proceed with some preliminary comments to set the stage for our discussion.
Dialogue of Civilisations against the Background of the 'End of History' and the 'Clash of Civilisations'
The end of the Cold War bipolarity, strategically focussed on spheres of influence and managed through the common language of a realistic ethics of statecraft, brought about, among many other things, a large debate on the future of world politics and, more importantly for our discussion, on the need to rethink the moral basis upon which a new international coexistence should be constructed. In this context, two intellectual reactions soon became the unavoidable opposite references for any discourse on the post-Cold War international order: Francis Fukuyama's End of History and Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations.
For Fukuyama world history, after the defeat of communism, had reached its end as a dialectical process and liberalism, now the only game in town, represented the only rational model available worldwide in the final consolidation of the linear progress of mankind. From his perspective, the problem of the new moral basis of international coexistence is greatly simplified—if not finally resolved—by the globalisation of liberalism; Greater international homogeneity based on the liberal values of free market, democracy, and human rights provides the conditions to develop some form of cosmopolitan polity (here the recipes are varied) and fulfils the Kantian ideal of a perpetual peace in the international relations jargon, the final victory of liberalism, by eliminating or at least substantially mitigating the two defining features of the modern international society, anarchy and war, marks 'the end of history' of international relations as we have known them.
For Huntington instead the ideological conflicts that had characterised the Cold War would be substituted by cultural conflicts occurring along the fault lines of civilisations. The 'clash of civilisations' thesis puts forward not only a framework, which Huntington describes as the best available geopolitical map, to understand post-Cold War international relations but also an argument for a new moral basis of international relations: an international order based on a plurality of civilisations and grounded in a minimalist morality of coexistence, mainly understood as an ethics of prudence and reciprocal non-interference to prevent the threat of the clash of civilisations.
These two theses, which originated as academic arguments, soon became powerful political frameworks used by key political actors to justify political choices and decisions. In particular, the connection of the 'end of history' with the policies of important economic organisations such as the IMF and the WTO is well-known, as also with the views of the executives of MNCs as well as the democracy-promotion strategy supported by the Clinton administration. In a similar fashion, the 'clash of civilisations' has often been associated with NATO's new strategies, the more conservative foreign policy attitudes of the USA towards China and the so-called rogue states as well as political organisations campaigning against multicultural society. Of course, after 9/11, the 'clash of civilisations' is again at the centre of the debate on how to explain and make sense of that tragic event.
I take the idea of the dialogue of civilisations as being a third political reaction to the end of the Cold War, which has not yet been sufficiently politicised because it has not yet been clearly articulated. The blame for this lack of conceptual elaboration lies with the mainstream intellectual and academic view of the (liberal) West, which believes more or less explicitly that this idea is wishful and abstract thinking with no practical policy implications, if not a rhetorical escamotage used by some illiberal (read, non-Western) politicians. But what is this dialogue of civilisations about?
First of all, since the dialogue of civilisations as a political discourse was set and framed against the background of the 'end of history' and the 'clash of civilisations theses', a preliminary answer to the question may well explore more in detail the comparisons and contrasts with these two theses. In a simplified and schematic way, it can be said that the dialogue of civilisations shares essential analytic assumptions with the thesis of the clash of civilisations while normatively it is closer to the approach endorsed by the thesis of the end of history.
In fact, against the analytical and empirical case about the globalisation of liberalism being the last stage of modernisation and secularisation of the world, the dialogue of civilisations stresses the global resurgence of culture and religion in world politics and identifies in the quest for cultural authenticity the main political issue in the new relationship between the Western and non-Western world. But whereas Huntington sees the clash of civilisations scenario as a mainly social-scientific prediction, from the stand point of the dialogue of civilisations it is a dangerous possibility produced by wrong policies that need to be opposed.
On the normative side, it is self-evident that the proposal for a dialogue of civilisations was formulated as a reaction to the clash of civilisations thesis. In simple terms, the former is designed to prevent and the latter to avoid conflict. The reason why from rather convergent empirical considerations and analyses, the supporters of the dialogue strategy reach very different conclusions from Huntington has to do, in my view, with the very different notion of (international) politics these two positions assume: where Huntington subscribes to a realist political framework, the dialogue strategy is committed to a more idealist framework closer to the notion of politics implicit in the end of history thesis. In the first case, struggle for power is perceived to an unavoidable necessity and international politics implies conflict recurrence and repetition that can only be partially mitigated by a consequentialist ethics of statecraft based on non-interference. In the second case, both an idealist's commitment to politics as a search for justice and a liberal understanding of politics as conversation prevail, and as a consequence, international politics is perceived as a realm where progress, however difficult, is possible on the base of an ethics of ends.
Saying that, however, does not imply that the dialogue of civilisations as an argument for the moral basis of contemporary international society can be interpreted as a via media theoretical position between the clash of civilisations and the end of history; rather I want to argue that if the attention is shifted from theory to practice, the radical distance of the dialogue of civilisations from the other two theses becomes apparent. In particular, while both Huntington and Fukuyama share a pragmatic political commitment to what I call a Western-centric and liberal global order, the dialogue of civilisations points towards and calls for a review of the core Western-centric and liberal assumptions upon which the normative structure of the contemporary international society is based.
From this perspective, the idea of a dialogue of civilisations as an argument for the moral basis of a multicultural and globalised international society represents the only powerful normative challenge to the contemporary political orthodoxy. In other words, what I take to be at stake here is nothing less than the nature of international relations in the new millennium. It is with this background in mind, that I now want to turn to Havel's contribution to the idea of dialogue of civilisations as a framework for the future of international relations.
Havel and 'Unity in Diversity': Different Cultures within a Single Civilisation
Havel believes that today "humankind is entering an era of multipolar and multicultural civilisation" and that the historical roots of this epoch-making change are to be found in the end of the colonial era and the collapse of communism, the two main sustaining structures of what he terms the 'artificial order' of the last century. However Havel uses 'civilisation' in the singular to emphasise that the emergence of a multicultural international society is taking place at the very time when "our planet is being enveloped by a single global civilisation". In other words, Havel has grasped the two faces of contemporary international society: at once globalised and multicultural; or, in a more pessimistic tone, the central tension between globalisation and fragmentation. Using the metaphor of the 'common room' already artistically developed in some of his plays as a consequence of his own experience of sharing a prison cell, Havel eloquently explains that: "our contemporary civilisation could thus be compared to a common room in which we are doomed to live together, but which does not change the fact that each of us is a different being. More than that, as we become more numerous, and the conforming pressure of the present civilisation increases, we seem to be ever more irritated by others' dissimilarities, feeling an ever greater urge to defend our individuality against all that may tend to dissolve it in some cosmopolitan sauce—or even against anything that is simply different".
Against the Technology of World Order: The Search for a New Global Ethos
To this worrying and potentially dangerous situation, Havel—following the call of the 'ethics of responsibility' to which he has entrusted his vocation as dissident first and as statesman later—feels obliged to respond. Havel rejects the possibility that a viable political solution for the management of this emerging multicultural and multipolar civilisation may lie in some minor adjustments of the contemporary structure of international society or even in some major institutional change within the present international framework. According to him "The salvation of the world cannot begin with the invention of mechanisms for coexistence, that is, the technology of world order. The only way to begin is by seeking a new spirit and a new ethos of coexistence. It is only from this that the techniques and mechanism can gradually emerge, by which I mean the appropriate international organisations and negotiating systems".
The rejection of the 'technology of world order' is part of Havel's broader reflection on the state of politics in our 'post-modern' condition. For Havel the intellectual response and political resistance to any form of top-down, impersonal, mechanistic, manipulative social engineering and theoretical deduction—whether in its communist or capitalist version—lies on the "one true power that all persons have at their disposal, their own humanity" as it is found in their own 'Lebensvelt', that is 'the natural world' or 'the world of lived experience' or in Havel's own words "[that] flow of life which is always taking us by surprise". This is why for Havel "It is not enough to take the set of imperatives, principles, or rules produced by the Euro-American world and mechanically declare them binding for all. Different cultures or spheres of civilisation can share only what they perceive as genuine common ground, not something that a few offer to or even force upon others. The tenets of human coexistence on this earth can hold up only if they grow out of the deepest experience of everyone, not just some of us".
Havel, in other words, makes a similar argument to the one put forward by various communitarian thinkers who have highlighted the relevance of the social ethics of 'really existing communities' in the search for a new global ethos in contrast to the rights-based cosmopolitan—but, first of all, Western-centric and liberal—ethos of the supposedly emergent global civil society. Genuine universality can only emanate from somewhere, and in this respect the liberal cosmopolitan tradition is just one of many and is rooted in a particular, spatially confined region of the world. What must come into play is the recognition of the 'unspecial' standing of liberalism and then an understanding of what else is out there. But where to look for this shared minimum ethos to ground the tolerant coexistence of different cultures within a single civilisation?
The Need for Transcendence: Genuine Universality and Global Responsibility
Havel's response to this key question is developed in two stages: first, from a historical and anthropological standpoint, a high degree of similarity in the moral standards of different cultures and traditions is acknowledged; then, a second essential similarity is found in the fact that the moral foundations upon which different civilisations or cultures are built have always had transcendental, or metaphysical, underpinnings: "It is scarcely possible to find a culture that does not derive from the conviction that a higher, mysterious order of the world exists beyond our reach, a higher intention that is the source of all things, a higher memory recording everything, a higher authority to which we are all accountable in one way or another".
These two critical points lead Havel to contend that: "All of this clearly suggests where we should look for what unites us: in an awareness of the transcendental". This is according to Havel the only path, however narrow, available for today's global civilisation to start understanding itself as a multicultural and a multipolar one. But how to reconcile this solution with the image of Havel as the typical engaged intellectual of our post-modern (and post-metaphysical) era?
To better understand what Havel has in another context explicitly referred to as "the need for transcendence in the post-modern world" we also need to consider his analysis of the lack of global political responsibility in our time and his argument that to restore humanity's sense of responsibility for the world this responsibility must have a metaphysical anchor.
In fact if, on the one hand, Havel identifies the emergence of a truly multicultural era as the main challenge for the future of international relations, on the other he has constantly been warning of the fatal threats that the contemporary technological global civilisation is increasingly generating: environmental problems, the growing social antagonism and economic injustice brought about by the global market economy and the risks associated with modern research and technology such as losing control over the arsenals, nuclear proliferation, computer piracy or terrorism, and possible abuses of genetic engineering. As Havel has observed on several occasions the problem is not the lack of knowledge to confront these impending threats, but rather the fact that: "the world is lacking in real determination to reverse [these] unfavourable trends. As if, through some sort of inertia and against the call of common sense, the prevalent concept was that of 'après nous le déluge'—that is, immediate interests taking precedence over long-term ones. In my opinion, this is so because the humanity of today—without being properly aware of it—is losing the age-old humility before the secret of the origin, the order and the intentions of Being, that is, before that which reaches far beyond us; consequently, people are also losing a sense of responsibility for the world as a whole, and of responsibility before the eyes of eternity".
As a consequence, in the same way the incapability to face the challenges posed by the plurality of spheres of civilisation manifests itself in vain attempts to devise the technology of a world order, so all the projects designed to tackle these threats merely try to regulate their impact using technical or administrative instruments—what Havel has described as technical tricks to reduce the unfavourable impact of other techniques—but never touch the basic trends of development which breed these threats. In other words, Havel's hypothesis is that the crisis of global responsibility is a logical consequence—perhaps the politically most dangerous one—of the modern (Western) conception of the world as "a complex of phenomena controlled by certain scientifically identifiable laws... That is, a conception which does not question the meaning of existence and renounces any kind of metaphysics or any kind of metaphysical roots".
This is why for Havel to articulate an adequate political response to this current situation, something like an 'existential revolution' is needed: The need for transcendence is, first of all, a call for full humanity, that is to regain awareness that we are not the creators but mere components of the mysterious order of existence. This is a necessary precondition to the creation of a new global responsibility since, according to Havel "the atheistic nature of this civilisation coincides deeply ... with the hypertrophic pursuit of individual interests and individual responsibilities together with the crisis of global responsibilities."
Havel, however, is fully aware of the huge difficulties involved in such a course as well as of the abstract nature of his exhortation—"how to revive this awareness [of the transcendental] which was once common to the whole human race [and] how to do this in a way that is appropriate for this era?", he ask frankly and dramatically. Not only that: further challenging his own argument he wonders whether there is "any sense in trying to turn the human mind to the heavens when such a turn would only aggravate the conflict among our various deities". To this latter key question—that he has addressed on several occasions especially after the 'clash of civilisations' thesis became popular—his response is twofold: firstly, he points to that spiritual dimension that connects all cultures and religions—"the original spiritual and moral substance, which grew out of the same essential experience of humanity"—as a unifying starting point for a new code of human coexistence that would be firmly anchored in the great diversity of human traditions and in their common pre-modern and pre-technological humanistic wisdom; secondly, in the form of an exploratory hypothesis he envisions a dialogue between different traditions driven by a will to mutual understanding and "whose purpose lies not in undermining the individuality of different spheres of culture and civilisation but in allowing them to be themselves more completely", which he has also described as a search for unity in diversity.
The Practice of Dialogue of Civilisations: The Cases of Democracy and Human Rights
It is interesting to note that the modality in which Havel envisions this political dialogue differs substantially from the philosophical models based either on liberal proceduralism (Rawls) or communicative rationality (Habermas): To put it simply, it does not demand the use of a neutral language such as the Rawlsian idea of 'public reason' nor does it restrict the dialogical interaction to the Habermasian emphasis on 'the argumentative authority of Reason'; rather, elaborating on the philosophical nature of this cross-cultural dialogue in a discernibly Gadamerian language, Havel contends that: "the preconditions for this [dialogue] are genuine openness... and the ability to step beyond the confines of our own habits and prejudices. Identity is not a prison; it is an appeal for dialogue with others". In other words, genuine dialogue whose aim is mutual understanding does not require the neutralisation of identity nor the hiding of metaphysical differences behind the idea of 'the politically reasonable'; instead it is at the very heart of our different identities and communitarian belongings, in the acknowledgment of the deep otherness of the other, that understanding paradoxically becomes possible.
Justifying the philosophical possibility of this dialogue is however not enough to dismis the charge of abstract thinking and is of little political relevance for future international coexistence: a practice of inter-civilisational dialogue needs to be developed in order to concretely show how dialogical fusion with non-Western cultures and their non-liberal forms of politics can positively contribute to the construction of a more peaceful, just and humane world order. In this respect, there are two paramount political issues that Havel has explored in the broader context of the call for a dialogue among different cultures and traditions: democracy and human rights.
In his article 'Democracy's Forgotten Dimension', Havel argues against the idea that the globalisation of liberalism à la Fukuyama and in particular the US-led strategy of promotion of democracy can effectively prevent the conflicts along cultural lines that he sees—in line with Huntington—as the greatest threat to the future of international relations. According to Havel, the idea that the rapid spread of Western values (democracy, human rights, civil society and free market) will almost automatically result in the modernisation (read Westernisation) of non-Western countries via the dissemination of democratic institutions in the cosmopolitan perpetual peace anticipated by Kant, simply ignores the strong demand for cultural authenticity coming from the non-Western world. It also fails to address the mistrust and criticisms of "what many cultural societies see as the inevitable product or by-product of these values: moral relativism, materialism, the denial of any kind of spirituality, a proud disdain for anything superpersonal, a profound crisis of authority and the resulting general decay, frenzied consumerism, a lack of solidarity, the selfish cult of material success, the absence of faith in a higher order of things or simply in eternity, an expansionist mentality that holds in contempt everything that in any way resist the dreary standardisation and rationalism of technical civilisation".
Havel, however, believes that this great mistrust of democracy in many parts of the non-Western world has less to do with democracy in itself than with a version of Western liberal democracy that is "hopelessly half-baked", that has forgotten its spiritual/transcendental dimension in the sense that has been described by Jacques Derrida as "something that remains to be thought and to come (à venir)... a democracy that must have the structure of a promise". In other words, a democracy "that is a set of possibilities that continually must be sought, redefined and brought into being [and not] something given, finished, and complete as is, something that can be exported like a car or a television set, something that the more enlightened purchase and the less enlightened do not. This is why, referring to the global crisis of democracy—and pointing to the increasingly evident crisis of democracy in the West—Havel argues that a possible way out resides in a dialogue between East and West, in an interaction that is pursued without anyone losing his own identity but which leads to the rediscovery of the original, long-forgotten, transcendental roots of both civilisations:
Thus—to put it in simplified terms—if the East can borrow democracy and its inherent values from the West as a space in which a reawakening sense of the transcendental can restore authority, then the West can learn from the East what true authority is, what it grows from, and how it conducts itself. I think in this context of Confucius, who so aptly described what it means to wield genuine authority. His standards have very little in common with the ideas of today's men of the whip. To him, authority be it in the father of a family or the ruler of a state is a metaphysically anchored gift whose strength derives from his or her heightened responsibility, not from the might of the instruments of power he or she may wield.
The dialogical encounter results not in a 'pick and mix' synthesis but in the rediscovery of a deeper agreement hidden in the long-forgotten common existential dimensions of these different traditions. This is an illustration of Havel's more general hypothesis that the moral basis for the creation of a new world order has to be found "in a clear awareness of its multicultural character, in a radical enhancement of its inner spirit, and in a concerted effort to find the shared spiritual roots of all cultures, for they are what unites all people".
The second concrete political issue that Havel has discussed in this context is human rights. Havel is convinced that the idea of human rights needs to be a founding pillar of any meaningful framework for international coexistence, but at the same time he argues that, "it must be anchored in a different place, and in a different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world".
As a consequence, Havel proposes to emphasise the spiritual source of human rights, even to rewrite the Declaration of Human Rights in a language that deep down is familiar to all great cultural and religious traditions. This dialogical encounter may bring this fundamental realm of political coexistence closer to non-Western cultures, making life harder for "various autocrats who have sought to legitimate their evil actions by pointing out the 'otherness' of their cultures", and at the same time "closer to us who come from the Euro-American environment, for we seem to be the ones who are most inclined to lose sight of the spiritual dimension of the values we believe in, and of the metaphysical origin of the rights we claim; and to regard documents like the Declaration of Human Rights simply as some kind of good business".
The Dialogue of Civilisations as Normative Structure for Contemporary International Society
As I said at the beginning of this paper, the dialogue of civilisations is first of all a critique of the contemporary Western-centric and liberal global order not only in the sense that it opposes Western political hegemony but also, and more importantly, because it calls for the reexamination of the core Western-centric and liberal assumptions upon which the normative structure of the contemporary international society is based. The reconstruction of Havel's thoughts reveals some theoretical and political lines that should influence any reflection on the future of international relations.
Firstly, if the normative structure—the global ethos—of future global coexistence is to be genuinely universal, it cannot only be liberal and Western-centric. Genuine universality requires a sharp awareness of the presence of different cultures and civilisations in world affairs; in many ways it must also spring from it. A fundamental vacuum is imbedded in cosmopolitan liberalism, a political tradition that forecloses the centrality of cultural and religious identity in the everyday practice of "really existing communities", reducing politics to what Havel would polemically call a technology of the world order.
Secondly, any reflection on a principled world order, based on dialogue of civilisations must acknowledge the fundamental ethical and political crisis of the secularised and liberal Western civilisation. This consideration is essential to Havel's discussion of the inability of our post-modern technologically-oriented and scientifically-conceived world to articulate a global political responsibility. To this critical situation, the dialogue of civilisations seems to emshrine the promise of an answer, or rather to chart a path towards an answer; The need for a metaphysical anchor for transcendence in our post-modern world leads to the present dialogical encounter with the pre-modern humanistic wisdom of the great world civilisations and traditions.
Finally, the international situation places on all of us a moral obligation to embark on policy of inter-civilisational understanding. It cannot be ignored that since September 11, 2001, in the very year designated by the United Nations as the 'Year of Dialogue of Civilisations', the shadow of a future 'Clash of Civilisations' has generated a climate of global war. Furthermore, the search for a new global ethos, unity in diversity, is even more needed today to defend the plurality of world politics against any imperial temptation; for in the words of Gadamer "the hegemony or unchallengeable power of any one single nation. . .is dangerous for humanity. It would go against human freedom" and this is especially true in the words of Havel, for a man who has lost his age-old humility before the secret of cosmic origins.