Vaclav havel and the meaning of tragedy in politics and law.

• Author: Normey, Rob

Vaclav Havel, who died in Prague shortly before Christmas in 2011, was a great dissident hero and champion of civil liberties who played a vital role in opposing the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. He became a powerful rallying voice in the peaceful overthrow of the totalitarian political system that had for so long seemed indomitable and impervious to change. This remarkable period has gone down in history as the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Up to that point, Havel was first and foremost a playwright. His works had gone underground following the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring, in 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to put an end to all thoughts of creating "socialism with a human face". The initial phase of the Velvet Revolution culminated with the breathtaking turnaround whereby Havel, the dissident who had been harassed and often imprisoned by the state, was elected the first post-Communist President. He would go on, improbably, to an important second career as a four-time President and a moral beacon who aspired to a new form of democratic politics that was based on principles of inclusion, tolerance, and full respect for the fundamental rights of all citizens.

Given Havel's many achievements, including his highly regarded essays on politics and moral conduct, his published speeches and the high standing he obtained in the world , it is quite difficult for we who admire him so greatly to consider his political career to have ended in failure. But one of his biographers, John Keane, in Vaclav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (2000) clearly views his later career to have involved squandered opportunities and concludes that his political vision was not realized. In homage to Havel's marvellous skills as a dramatist, Keane, a well-known Australian political scientist, has tried his hand at a biography written at least in part as a drama--the drama of Havel's life against the backdrop of the enormous changes that convulsed Czechoslovakia throughout the twentieth century. Hence, some of the tragedy is really the tragedy of his nation: the Nazi invasion and domination during WWII: the Soviet "liberation" followed by a Communist electoral victory and then liquidation of the democratic order; the Dubcek reforms and the savage suppression of all attempts to liberalize the political order.

The last quarter of the biography makes the argument that Havel's time as President, after a return to democracy and a free and open...