I’ll be scolded for adding this to the comments, but the truth is, if Havel attained high office, he would be bad for the world. While he’s been a leader in the transition from the fake communism of Eastern Europe, he’s not a thoroughgoing friend of Liberty. Like most Europeans, he believes in a politically controlled world economy. He said this in 2004 (in, AFAIK, CMIIAW, an article in the journal The New Presence):
“The end of the bipolar world represented a great opportunity to make the international order more humane. Instead, we witness a process of economic globalization that has escaped political control and, as such, is causing economic havoc, as well as ecological devastation, in many parts of the world.”
This mindless babble sounds like something Naomi Klein would say — it’s sloganeering laced with willful ignorance. In fact, the world was never “bipolar,” there is no “international order” (nor should there be), and the more globalization comes under political control, the more likely it will be a disaster for the poor, who could be its biggest beneficiaries. Ecological devastation predates and is not caused by globalization, but by the corruption that is the ineradicable norm in the “developing” nations.
We don’t want people like Havel running governments. There are too many Utopian control freaks already. Give the man credit for the great good he has done; he played his role, and admirably. Now he should retire. It would be a blunder to give him the power to mess up free trade and economic development.
