When president Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University last autumn, he devoted his acceptance speech to the subject of the intellectual and politics, explaining that Oxford is the home and workplace of an intellectual "with whom I have been debating the subject for years." He was referring to Timothy Garton Ash. Here we print lightly edited passages from the speech, and a response to continue the debate.
Vaclav Havel: "It is my conviction that the world requires truly enlightened politicians who are broad-minded enough to consider those things which lie beyond the scope of their immediate influence... We need politicians who can rise above the horizon of their own power interests or of the interests of their parties or states and act in accordance with the interests of humanity.
"I hear the usual objection to this: a politician must be elected, and people vote for the person who thinks the way they do. So, a politician must, whether he likes it or not, be mainly an embodiment of the prevailing sentiment or of particular short-term interests. He cannot be a herald of unpopular truths or of something which may be in the interests of the future of humanity but which most of his electorate regard as a threat to their current pursuits.
"The true art of politics is the ability to win people's support for a good cause even when the pursuit of that cause interferes with their interests at that moment... This must not, however, turn into an illusory search for future universal prosperity.
"It must be said that there are intellectuals who elevate themselves above all human beings... Let us remember how many intellectuals helped to create the various modern dictatorships. Indeed, almost none managed without their assistance or direct leadership...
"Intellectuals in politics should make their presence felt in one of two ways. They should either accept political office and use that position to do what they deem right, not just hold on to power. Or they should hold up a mirror to those in authority, to make sure that the latter do not begin to use fine words as a cloak for evil deeds."
Timothy Garton Ash: I applaud Havel's appeal for politicians capable of putting the long term before the short; of persuading public opinion rather than being swayed by the latest opinion poll; of leading rather than following. He is one of very few European politicians in the 1990s to have done this. But there is a problem with his claim that "people vote for the person who thinks the way they do." Is this so? Doesn't the contemporary personalised televisual election campaign actually project an image of the politician as unreal hero? Isn't the unrealistic and dangerous expectation of contemporary politics precisely that politicians should not be like us? For example, we may have messy private lives, but they must be paragons of virtue.
Havel's salutary comments about intellectuals leading people astray in "an illusory search for future universal prosperity" looks like a reference to communism. It can also be read as a criticism of the free-market utopianism of which the Czech Republic has had its share in the last few years, under Prime Minister V?av Klaus.
Yet I am still not quite satisfied with Havel's conclusion about the two ways in which intellectuals can engage in politics: as office-holder or as mirror-holder. People who are by formation intellectuals can go on to be good politicians. They are often more far-sighted (though not often more effective) than those career politicians who have practised nothing but politics. It is also true that, having held power and office, such people can be among the sharpest observers of politics. The Chancellor of Oxford who presented Havel with the doctorate, Roy Jenkins, is an example.
But I would continue to insist that you cannot simultaneously be both an intellectual and a practising politician, because they are two different roles. A healthy democracy needs this separation of roles, just as it needs the separation between judges and politicians or civil servants and politicians. The job of the intellectual in politics is to hold up a well-lit, critical, truthful mirror to the powerful-a mirror in which they can see themselves without the illusions nourished by the sycophancy which surrounds power; and to hold it up so that readers and voters can see them, too.
The practising politician simply cannot use words in the same way that the independent intellectual can. He has, at best, to be more cautious and guarded. And if he is a party politician competing for power then his proper business is not to "live in truth" (to recall a phrase of the dissident writer Havel) but to work in half-truth.
Both roles-office-holder and mirror-holder-are necessary in a liberal democracy. One job is not better or worse than the other; but they are different. The political systems which have descended into dictatorship are those without a clear separation of the office-holders and the mirror-holders.
This is the rule. The exception proves the rule. Havel is, in so many ways, the exception. He has come closer than almost anyone to the political feat of holding up a truthful mirror to yourself. But there aren't many like him.
