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Speech of Prime Minister Václav Klaus on the occasion of being awarded a Honorary Doctorate Degree at the University of Toronto

English Pages, 21. 2. 1997

Mr. President,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Distinguished Guests,

I am extremely pleased and really honored by being awarded the Honorary Doctorate Degree at your University. I am aware of the distinguished list of predecessors who have achieved this recognition and I thank you for including me in this group. I am also aware of the unique position of your University in the Canadian academic life which makes it even more important for me. I take it as a personal award but, at the same time, I know that it is a form of recognition of my country’s achievements in the last several years after the breakdown of communism and of my modest role in this unrepeatable and therefore difficult transformation process, in the transition from communism to a free society.

Let me use this opportunity for saying a few words exactly about this because the relative success of the Czech Republic in this respect is probably the main reason for my being here with you today. And I am convinced that our experience has a broader relevance.

To begin with, I would like to stress that the transition of a whole country to a free society is a goal which - and I am sure you very well know it - cannot be fully achieved and especially cannot be achieved forever. It is a permanent task for all of us regardless of whether we were forced to dismantle the oppressive and human beings denigrating communist system or whether you were lucky not to undergo such an experience and have to guard yourselves only from „creeping socialism“ which is with us all the time.

When discussing our recent developments, I have to mention something that has not been sufficiently stressed or understood and may be even disappointing for some of my fellow-citizens. Nevertheless, I have to argue that the communist system collapsed, that it was not defeated. It collapsed because it already was in an advanced stage of decomposition, because it gradually lost its two strongest constitutive elements - the fear on one hand and the faith on the other. In its final days, the communist system became both soft and unconvincing and such a state of affairs was not sufficient for safeguarding its further continuation. It is an irony of history that communism - sort of - melted down.

This is, however, not the end of the story. It has been often stated that the collapse of communism created a very strange vacuum. At first sight this seems plausible, but it was not the case. What remained was not a vacuum. We inherited weak and therefore not efficient markets and - similarly - a weak and not efficient democracy. Both the economic and political mechanisms were shallow, the political and economic agents (players of the game) were not properly defined and established, some of them were new, all of them were weak and fragile and the outcomes of their interplay were less efficient than in a full-grown free society as you know it from the countries which have never experienced communism. It was not possible to overcome such a state of affairs by introducing a ready made, imported, from outside delivered system. We had to undergo a difficult transformation process. No master-minding of the evolution of a free society by means of social engineering was possible. What we had to go through was a complicated mixture of intentions and spontaneity, of deliberately introduced measures and unconstrained activities of millions of free citizens.

At the same time - and this is my third point - it was not possible to wait for textbook conditions, which would mean waiting for a sufficient degree of market efficiency. The quick abolition of old institutions was a sine qua non for success because it was the only way how to minimize the non-negligible transition costs. The consistency in pursuing a free market course in the following years was crucial and we had to privatize (instead of passively waiting for the emergence of new private ventures), to liberalize and to deregulate as fast as possible.

When I say „we“, it brings me to my fourth point. What about the people? Were they ready for such a rapid change? Does free society presuppose - in addition to the creation of its basic institutions - some set of values or moral standards that would properly anchor the society? Do the people need an interim period of „schooling“? Is such schooling realizable? Are there teachers for such procedure? Are the people willing to be educated? My answer to these and similar questions is simple. The people are always ready and they do not need a special education. What they need is a free space for their voluntary activities, the elimination of unnecessary controls and prohibitions of all kinds. Our experience tells me that the flexibility and adaptability of the people was the main source of our success.

When we talk about a free society, one has to ask what kind of free society we have in mind. Should we try to transform ourselves toward a theoretical model of a free society or toward real societies as we see them in many forms in Western Europe and Northern America? My answer is again simple and more or less straightforward. The closer we get to the ideal case, the better. But reality is much more complicated. Whenever I try at home to avoid introducing an illiberal (in the European sense) legislation or to repeal the existing one, I am reminded of the same law in one Western country or another, or - recently more and more often - I am being told that what I do not want to accept is the recent recommendation or instruction of the European Commission. And this becomes very disturbing and depressing.

After the collapse of „hard“ communism, we succeeded in rejecting reformed communism, we succeeded in avoiding romantic nationalism (with its very negative systemic consequences), in overcoming utopian and therefore dangerous attempts to forget everything and to start building a brave new world based on aprioristic moralistic and elitist ambitions (of those who are better than the rest of us), but we should not lose with statist, interventionist, paternalistic social-democratism which we see in so many free societies to the west of us.

We know that it is our permanent task and duty to attack the expanding state which was - and still is - such an overwhelming tendency of the 20th century, of the century of socialisms with the whole variety of confusing adjectives. We - in the Czech Republic - would like to demonstrate that it is possible to make a return to a free social order.

Mr. President, those were some of the ideas which formed the basis of our thinking while we tried to dismantle communism, ideas which helped us to create a free society. These ideas are in one respect more or less trivial. They are - I am sure - described in the books your students are obliged to use when studying at your University but I know that they are easily forgotten, underestimated, misunderstood, not sufficiently protected or defended. At least this is what I know from the fate of a small, but proud country in the heart of Europe in the last fifty years.

Toronto, February 21, 1997