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Commencement Speech at the DePaul University, Chicago

English Pages, 13. 6. 1999

I am extremely pleased and honored to be asked to deliver this prestigious speech and to receive the honorary degree from your university. I take both as a personal honor but I take it as well as an honor for my country which has been - in the last decade - undergoing a dramatic reconstruction after forty years of communism. My country, the Czech Republic, has already become an open, pluralistic and democratic society and is now, at least I believe, a firm part of the family of free countries.

In human life and human society, there are always ends and beginnings. Today´s graduates have arrived at the end of one important stage of their life and will begin a new one very soon. I am sure they are well aware of that. They will start a different life, characterized by new challenges, by new responsibilities, by new promises, by new hopes and dreams. We all wish them success, knowing that they deserve it.

We are – all of us – approaching another end, the end of the 1990´s. The decade started with many hopes connected with the collapse of communism and with the end of the Cold war. At the same time it was the promising moment of “take-off” in many developing countries and in addition to it was the era of triumph of Reaganite–Thatcherite policies in several developed countries. The ideas of liberty and free markets were on the winning side, both “hard” and “soft” versions of socialism were visibly in retreat.

The atmosphere at the end of the decade is, however, quite different. We have another war – in Yugoslavia (and together with it serious doubts concerning the NATO´s mission in the future). We are aware of dangerous tensions in several regions of the world (India vs. Pakistan, Turkey, Middle East, etc.). We should not forget enormous economic, social and political problems in some developing countries. We are witnesses of the increasing gap between expectations and reality in many post-communist countries (because communism is already forgotten and in spite of all the undeniable recent achievements our citizens have not yet reached the living standard of DePaul University graduates). We see the expansion of regionalism (especially in Europe, together with the deepening of the European Union). We see the side effects of globalization – in the economic field as well as in the cultural sense. We see the steady growth of many sophisticated types of regulation, controls, prohibitions and commands which were implemented in the last decade in many mature, developed countries of the Western world.

Why did it all happen? Did we start the decade with wrong expectations? Did we base our expectations on the wrong interpretation of underlying trends or tendencies? Did we introduce mistaken policies? Did we underestimate new dangers which suddenly appeared? Or, perhaps, is the situation not so bad and we just do not correctly examine or interpret the results and achievements? In any case, the perception – as always – dominates the atmosphere and because of that, we do face and in the years to come will face difficult challenges.

We are approaching not only the end of the decade. We do approach the end of the century as well. We have to take, therefore, a longer-term view. The evaluation of this, so called American century is very diverse and diversified. Looking at it from a small country in Central Europe, we can say that the twentieth century brought us two wars, two occupations of our territories and two dangerous ideologies – fascism and communism. We were three times liberated – from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, from German occupation and from communism. Only three decades – the twenties, the thirties, and the nineties – were the episodes of freedom and liberty which is approximately one third of the century. Knowing the circumstances, it is very difficult to say whether it is a good result or a bad one. And especially as compared to whom or to what other era of our own history?

The 20th century was, of course, the century of an enormous increase of welfare, of the beginning of large-scale use of consumer durables (especially of cars), of holidays spent away from our homes (or even countries), of TV´s, of mobile telephones, of Internet, but it was – as well – the century of “La Rebelión de las Masas” (The Revolt of the Masses), the century of constructivism, of technocratic ambitions, of the “abuse of reason” and of the “pretence of knowledge” (Hayek), the century of the huge immodesty of human mind.

We – naturally – try to look into the next century. It will be the century of our today´s graduates. They will build it on the basis of their own intentions, dreams and abilities but they will do it with the heritage we have prepared for them in the past. Someone like me, someone coming from a former communist country, has to keep stressing – in this context – one point which you, perhaps, take for granted. I insist that it should not be taken this way. I speak, of course, about freedom. We should never forget that the absence of freedom, not its presence is the normal state of affairs in the history of mankind. We have to fight for freedom, when there is no freedom, but we have to fight for the preservation of freedom, when there is freedom. There can never be a final victory.

For that reason I am convinced that we have to let freedom to remain to be the axial principle of our world. I do not consider “fairness” (or social justice) to be a good alternative. I will always prefer free trade to fair trade and, similarly, free speech to fair speech. I do not consider “environmentalism” to be an alternative because it introduces another version of etatism, of apriorism, of fundamentalism, because it asks us to neglect competing goals and visions and the unavoidable existence of difficult and unpleasant trade-offs. I do not consider the now fashionable “communitarism” to be a suitable alternative either because of its moralism, elitism, collectivism and anti-liberalism (in a European sense). I am also afraid of the “technocratic modernism” which disrespects human relations, social organization, economic arrangements and political processes and which longs for building a “Brave New World” of sophisticated machines and of information technology.

There must be, of course, limits of freedom. They should be imposed upon us either internally, which means they must be connected with our own behavioral patterns or externally, which means they must be connected with rules or norms formulated by society. Do we have enough of both of the needy constraints? Being aware of many pathological phenomena in our societies I am afraid that our answer tends to be a negative one.

I see, therefore, the principal challenges of the next period in the following way: how to increase or deepen our responsibility without changing undemocratically our minds and how to redefine or reformulate the formal rules without creating a controlled society. We do not possess many guidelines how to achieve it, but two of them seem to me important.

The first one is a cautious warning: the changes should be incremental, not absolute. We have to move at the margin only.

The second one is similar: when there is the slightest doubt while making a choice between more control and less control, choose always less!

Both my simple recommendations reflect my experience with my life in a totalitarian communist society. They may reflect my oversensitivity which is, hopefully, understandable. I wish the new graduates success in their personal lives and in their future productive involvement in the solution of the problems of our times.

Václav Klaus, Chairman of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, Commencement Speech at the DePaul University, Chicago, June 13, 1999.