Vaclav Havel

PRAGUE – Since the election of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010, Ukraine has experienced a significant and alarming deterioration in its democratic framework. Fundamental tenets of a democratic society, such as freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press are increasingly...

All revolutions, in the end, turn from euphoria to disillusion. In a revolutionary atmosphere of solidarity and self-sacrifice, people tend to think that when their victory is complete, paradise on Earth is inevitable. Of course, paradise never comes, and — naturally — disappointment follows. That...

The fifteenth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution on November 17, 1989, which brought an end to 41 years of communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, is an opportunity to ponder the meaning of moral behavior and free action. Today we live in a democratic society, but many people — not only in the...

Perhaps it is the experience of a man who endured forty years of Communist rule after the Nazi Occupation. Maybe it is the experience of inhabiting a country in the center of Europe, a place which has for centuries been a crossroads of Europe’s spiritual currents, geopolitical interests, and...

Glorification of the nation state as the climax to the history of every national community, as the only thing in whose name it is permissible to kill or for which it is worth dying, is passing. Generations of democrats, and the horrors of two World Wars, have brought humanity to the realization...