Intellectuals in Politics

You have been engaged in a conversation with Václav Havel which he talks about in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books and I wonder if you might share that discussion? He has a more critical view of the extent to which intellectuals should be involved in politics. In his discussion it was not exactly clear where you differed, and I wondered if we might discuss that, because it relates directly to the kinds of responsibilities that you were feeling as you discovered this new role for yourself.

That's exactly right. One has to go back a moment and say that of course the East European oppositions of the 1980s and the velvet revolutions of 1989 were, to a large extent, led by intellectuals, historians, playwrights, and so on. And, incidentally this is a source of considerable envy to West European intellectuals: "Why don't we do things like that? Do intellectuals matter here? Why is nobody throwing me into prison or electing me president?"

This generation of oppositional intellectuals was catapulted into power after 1989 and the argument with Havel is about whether one can remain, at the same time, an active politician and an independent, critical intellectual? Havel continues to maintain that he can do both those things, that in making presidential speeches he is just continuing the essays he wrote as a playwright and oppositionist in the 1980s. I have argued that the two roles are incompatible, that you do have to choose between the one or the other, that there is a necessarily adversarial relationship between power and, to use a very large word, truth -- or between the politician and the intellectual.

But is it the job of the intellectual to inform power about the truth?

No, absolutely not, and that is already the slippery slope I was describing down the road to being the honorable Mandarin, the ersatz politician. No, our job is to find the truth and then to describe it and analyze it as vividly and accurately as we can. "Moi, je ne propose rien," says Voltaire, "J'expose"; and this you cannot do as a practicing politician, very obviously, where you're using words in a different way. You're using words to win votes, to secure the interests of your country. Even as a president above party politics, as Havel is, you can't do that: you're using words in a different way.

And what is it about the political realm? Is it that the actual process of politics involves deceit, the balancing of interests and tactics that are adverse to what is required as you search for the truth?

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, Havel's great slogan for the dissident anti-politics was "Living in Truth." As the intellectual, one should live in truth. The essence of democratic politics is about working in half-truth. We see it every day. The Democrats put one side of the case, the Republicans put the other side of the case. This is central to the business of democratic politics, and my argument with Havel is about precisely that. And I think that the people that have adapted best to post-communist politics are people who immediately accepted that. Many of my former dissident friends are extremely reluctant to accept that, because the whole ethos of the central European intellectual, not just for the last ten years but for the last hundred, two hundred years, has been about that.

It's refreshing to hear you say this because in the West, in the United States, at least since Roosevelt, the temper of the times is that intellectuals are involved and are brought centrally in to the policy debate to shape the ideas that then the politician tries to implement.

Garton Ash Absolutely, this not just an East European or a post-communist problem. It's very much an American problem. Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski are two spectacular examples of academics who have gone into the policy world and, to some extent, come out again, but I do believe there is a disease which one might call Kissinger-itis or Brzezinski-itis, which consists of, while working as a scholar, trimming your analysis and your conclusions in the hope of being on the Washington shuttle. I think it's very widespread and has to be watched very, very carefully. To come back to our earlier discussion, we had that with détente when a lot of analyses of Eastern Europe were trimmed to tell the politicians what they wanted to hear about the benefits of détente.

One of the things that an intellectual must lose as he or she is compromised by persons in power is the sense of moral outrage which, I think it's fair to say, is an important tool when you are an intellectual pursuing the role that you're defining here.

Absolutely. Certainly.

And that was an important tool in the writings about Eastern Europe in the 1980s that were coming from your pen.

I'm reluctant to use the word "tool" about this, because that suggests that morality was used instrumentally.

That was not my intention.

There certainly was a very important moral dimension, both to what was happening and to my own writing about what was happening, and this has been a difficulty for me. Not just for me, but in a sense, for a whole generation of writers since 1989, where the moral dilemmas are much less clear. Black and white have become shades of grey. A Russian friend of mine once said rather nicely that Solzhenitsyn's difficulty now is that he's "morally unemployed." But that's not to say that there aren't evils still to address.

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