這是一篇回顧並檢討捷克脫離鐵幕後的民主進程發展，非常值得一讀。
1989年捷克紫色革命，第二年蘇聯軍隊全部退出捷克，從此開啟捷克的民主進程。百分之九十的捷克人民懷抱熱情參與第一次的自由選舉，當然，在後共產時代的歡愉中，捷克人期待的比可能的多。
首先，突然的自由帶來一連串利用時局煽動群眾的人與過程，接著捷克分裂為二個國家，斯洛維亞及捷克，一九九ｏ年代的國企私有化，更導致國家財產被私佔、偷走，估計損失了一年的國民所得。甚至貪污腐化滲入捷克各階層，至今仍完全根除。
現在捷克已成為典型的民主國家，其問題一部分是捷克的，一部分也是後共產國家的，但更多是現代文明共同的挑戰。公民不滿到處可見，選舉投票率愈來愈低，大眾對政府國會的信賴感也在消退。
歐盟也同樣問題重重，選民抱怨政治人物對其問題漠不關心，政治人物只關心選舉花招。政治缺乏願景，不只在捷克，似乎整個歐盟皆如此。
不過，大部分的捷克人了解，縱使是一個不完美的民主也比過去謀殺無數人、壓迫人權的舊政權好。紫色革命十七年後，捷克仍沒有出現模範民主政治，但是，誰有呢？至少，我們的經濟成長、人民的生活水準改善。這就是紫色革命令人心動的成果了。
Sweet and sour fruits of the Velvet Revolution
Jiri Dienstbier International Herald Tribune
Published: October 8, 2006
Shortly after midnight in December 1989 I was on the way from the Velvet Revolution’s Civic Forum coordination center to a late dinner, with the British commentator Timothy Garton Ash, a specialist of the upheavals in Central Europe. Suddenly Garton Ash asked me: ”What will come after?” Jokingly, I replied: ”Either counterrevolution or Western consumer society”.
We had no idea whether Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime would try desperately to cling to power. But with Mikhail Gorbachev’s refusal to use force it became clear that - to borrow a line from a well-known Czech poet - ”It was time that rent the curtain.” Events were soon moving much faster than we could have expected.
In the space of a week, I moved from being a dissident forced to stoke boilers in the Prague metro system to being foreign minister, and within a month Vaclav Havel was the new president of Czechoslovakia. Photographs of Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and myself cutting a path through the barbed wire that had long marked the frontier between our countries were beamed around the world as a symbol of the fall of the Iron Curtain.
In the Kremlin the following February, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and I signed the treaty on the withdrawal of the Soviet troops that had been occupying Czechoslovakia ever since they were sent in to suppress the Prague Spring in 1968.
For my generation, our return to the European cultural space that our country had always belonged to was a dream come true. In the years before 1989, a few of our citizens had collaborated with the regime, but most had made up a silent majority that did not. A few kept a small candle of hope burning by joining the active opposition through literary or journalistic work in samizdat form, or for foreign media and radio stations.
Freedom’s victory would have been fulfillment enough for any one person’s lifetime. More than 90 percent of Czechoslovak citizens enthusiastically took part in the first free elections to express their joy at the regime’s demise and the restoration of democracy. But in their euphoria, they expected more than was possible.
When the Civic Forum began in the autumn of 1990 to dissolve into political parties and movements, that inevitably became a demagogic process. As after the liberation of any society, some people who proved unable to find positive or creative roles began to relive the struggles of our recent past. Suddenly we found there were many latecomers to the fight against Communism who were now compensating for their lack of courage before November 1989.
Then came the controversies that led to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The division was peaceful and Czecho-Slovak relations have been better than we might have expected, possibly because both sides wished to make up for feelings of failure. Nevertheless, it was generally perceived that the unitary state had not been dissolved by the people but by the authoritarian winners of the Czech and the Slovak elections.
During the privatization drive of the 1990s, many assets of value were lost, and some were stolen. The economic cost has since been estimated at up to a full year of our gross national product. Some people wanted to get rich quickly, and didn’t care how they did it. Corruption penetrated Czech society, and has proved difficult to wipe out.
Today, the Czech Republic is a typical democratic country. Our problems are partly Czech, and still partly post-Communist, but more and more they are the challenges common to modern civilization. Citizens’ dissatisfaction is growing everywhere, and participation rates in elections are dwindling, while public confidence in government, Parliament and the whole political process is ebbing away.
Globalization’s consequences and doubts about the ”big bang” EU enlargement were behind the defeat by voters in France and the Netherlands of the European constitutional treaty, and the subsequent Europe-wide mood of skepticism. Voters suspect politicians of being indifferent to their problems, while politicians learn how to manipulate election campaigns, succumbing all too easily to the results of opinion polls and to pressure from influential minorities. Luxembourg’s prime minister, Jean- Claude Juncker, put it in a nutshell when he said: ”We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re- elected once we have done it.”
Today, politics lacks vision, not just in my country but in the whole European Union. The trend is against closer EU integration and toward national self-protection. Although the free movement of people, goods, capital and services has been the European goal ever since the Treaty of Rome, there are still obstacles that prevent European citizens from working in some member states. And free movement of services now seems forever postponed.
We Europeans apparently haven’t yet fully understood that today’s fears and problems can be resolved within a framework of European states, that we can successfully deal with the challenges of a globalized world only if we reassert the position of Europe - of our small western peninsula of the Eurasian land mass - as a world player.
Modern communications technologies don’t promote a common political culture in Europe, even though a few serious news organizations still exist. But most of them, while proclaiming their independence, in reality serve the political and financial interests of their owners. To ensure their profits, many newspapers have replaced serious news analysis with stories about the lives of stars. If the ”medium is the message,” the message is not too encouraging because communication is descending to the level of the least cultured in society.
Most members of Czech society know, however, that even an imperfect democracy is better than the former regime, which early on murdered hundreds of people and sent hundreds of thousands to concentration camps; and even during its long years of decay after the death of Stalin, continued to persecute independent-minded people.
Seventeen years after the Velvet Revolution, we Czechs still don’t have an exemplary political scene - but who does? The liberation of creative potential has, however, led to an extraordinarily successful growth of the economy and our standard of living. I was over 50 when I learned how to use a computer, an almost inaccessible article in 1989. Today, young people browse and surf the Internet as if it has been here for ever, and even in elementary schools most children have mobile phones.
It is well known that we Czechs are predisposed to pessimism. The great Czech writer Karel Capek said in the 1930s that if he asked a friend ”How are you?” and the answer was ”Well,” he would wonder whether his friend’s wife or child was dying. But we are nevertheless able to improvise and adapt to any conditions. I strongly suspect that the standard of living and quality of life of Czech citizens is much higher than our GNP would indicate.
Some time ago in Paris, I asked a young woman near the Sorbonne for street directions. She asked: ”Êtes-vous français?” ”Non, je suis tchèque,” I answered. She smiled and said: ”Moi aussi.” She had just passed her university entrance interview. Over the past decade, I have met hundreds of Czech students in Oxford, Chapel Hill and many other university towns. Thousands of young Czechs are now working and in Britain, Sweden, Ireland and the United States. Their view both of home and the world is completely different from that of the generations of Czechs and Slovaks who were imprisoned for half a century behind the Iron Curtain, and is a heartening outcome of the Velvet Revolution.
(Jiri Dienstbier, a spokesman for the Charter 77 dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, became foreign minister after the Velvet Revolution. This article appeared in the magazine Europe’s World.)
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