John Keane - Vaclav Havel

I wasn't sure at first I was going to be able to put up with Keane's style.  I'm beginning to warm to the fact that he makes no attempt to pretend to objectivity.  The freewheeling manner of his narrative voice gives him a chance to editorialize quite frequently.  At times, it generates quite a bit of insight.  A lengthy diversion on Dubcek's political fortunes made a useful point about what he calls the "politics of retreat." 

Dubcek and his opponents have always judged him by the sine qua non of political measurement - did he gain or lose power?  Dubcek, however, found himself in a situation little discussed, but that has actually been fairly common in my lifetime.  Keane points out that in the "politics of retreat," a politician who has determined to liberalize or even bring an end to a totalitarian system soon finds out that he has "to be ruined for the good of others."

Keane's lengthy list of those who had to learn this "most difficult of all political skills" included Dubcek of Czechoslovakia, Kadar of Hungary, Suarez of Spain, Karamanlis of Greece, Jaruzelski of Poland, Gorbachev of the USSR and to some degree Khrushchev before him.  He might have added De Klerk from South Africa.  Considering how crucial this activity has been to the history of the 20th century it's interesting that we haven't given it more thought and recognition.  I think to some degree we share the career politician's scale of measurement of success - did he gain or lose power?  In the politics of retreat, however, the crucial values  are

• the courage to recognize the need to "withdraw and retreat from unworkable political positions" BEFORE those positions become undeniably disastrous (it's no virtue to flee Saigon before an advancing army).
• an attachment to the rightness of what needs to be done that supersedes what you know you would have to do maintain yourself in power.

Even those whose liberalizations seemed to be failures (Khrushchev, Nagy, Dubcek) can be seen as having created crucial turning points in the history of their totalitarian systems.  In time the seeds they sowed would be reaped by others.