Václav Havel at the End of the Cold War: The Invention of Post-Communist Transition in the Address to U.S. Congress, February 21, 1990

Abstract

A mere three months after the peaceful Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and less than a year after his last imprisonment under the communist regime, playwright-turned-president Václav Havel stood before a joint session of U.S. Congress in February of 1990. In his address, Havel marked, for his American audience, the new freedoms being established at home. More than just a victory lap, however, Havel’s visit articulated the importance of the invention of post-communism, as the end of the Cold War had to be constructed for his global audience. Havel’s version of invention in the speech used temporality and embodiment as key rhetorical materials—as he emphasized the opportune moment of the end of the Cold War, he also embodied the higher moral sense of responsibility and democratic civic culture that he believed the moment called for. However, this inventive process was understood differently by his American, European, and Czech audiences, and his attempts to transcend Cold War frames were highly contested. Havel thus became a complex symbol of the transition between the Cold War and the post-Cold War, which showed the tensions around the implementation of a “new world order.”

Keywords:

• Cold War
• Eastern Europe
• Internationalism
• Presidency
• Rhetoric

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Martin Medhurst for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful help in the revision process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I do use the terms “East” and “West” in this essay, recognizing the pitfalls of such designations, but they prove important because these are concepts actors like Havel were still employing during transition (in this case, the West encompasses NATO nations, and the East, the Warsaw Pact nations).