I’m very happy to announce that Mike McFaul and Larry Diamond have agreed to become regular columnists for American Purpose.
Mike is currently Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) and Hoover Institution. He was also a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and NSC staff member.
Larry is Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy, also at FSI, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is one of the world’s leading experts on global democracy.
We welcome Mike and Larry to the American Purpose family, and look forward to their future regular contributions.
– Frank Fukuyama on behalf of American Purpose at Persuasion.
At a recent conference held in Prague by Forum 2000 conference, the organization co-founded by Vaclav Havel in 1996 to discuss the challenges facing mankind on the threshold of a new millennium, special attention was paid to Havel’s legacy, since the event coincided with the 90th anniversary of his birth. That legacy is especially important today when the future of democracy, which Havel believed was essential to the preservation of human well-being and world peace, is more threatened than at any time in the last 30 years.
When the Journal of Democracy published a collection of tributes to Havel after his death in 2011, it referred to him as “probably the most revered democratic leader and thinker of our time”—and so he was. He was not just a national leader and democratic intellectual of global stature, but also a renowned playwright, a political dissident, and a global democracy activist. He continued to be all of these things until his very last days, when he issued a statement of solidarity with political prisoners in Belarus and received his friend the Dalai Lama, who said after Havel’s death that the best way to remember him was to promote his legacy.
There are several components of Havel’s legacy that can help to guide us in addressing the challenges we now face. He was, first of all, an unrivalled democracy strategist. His actions—such as nominating for the Nobel Peace Prize brave democratic leaders —were always calculated to strengthen activists at the forefront of the struggle for democracy and to give them hope.
Charter 77, the civic initiative he co-founded and helped lead, not only revived the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion, but also inspired dissidents in China three decades later to create Charter 08, which was signed by over 10,000 Chinese democrats. Havel’s Chinese friends said after his death: “Your Charter 77 and our Charter 08 are iron cousins.” Soon after Oswaldo Paya’s Varela Project had created the first democratic opening in Cuba since the revolution, Havel told him that “each democrat who opposes a totalitarian regime should behave today as if power were to be handed over tomorrow.” This spurred Paya to initiate a secret national dialogue among more than 10,000 citizens in totalitarian Cuba that led to the drafting of an “All-Cuban Plan” that Paya called “a bridge between our current situation and democracy.”