In 59 days that shook the world, dissident playwright Vaclav Havel was swept out of political detention into the presidency of Czechoslovakia. Last week Havel delivered to a joint meeting of Congress an extraordinary speech about democratic ideals, the rebirth of the human spirit and America's role in the post-cold war era.
"Twice in this century the world has been threatened by a catastrophe. Twice this catastrophe was born in Europe, and twice you Americans, along with others, were called upon to save Europe, the whole world and yourselves.
In the meantime, the U.S. became the most powerful nation on earth, and it understood the responsibility that flowed from this. But something else was happening as well. The Soviet Union appeared, grew and transformed the enormous sacrifices of its people suffering under totalitarian rule into a strength that, after World War II, made it the second most powerful nation in the world.
CREATING THE FAMILY OF MEN
All of this taught us to see the world in bipolar terms as two enormous forces -- one a defender of freedom, the other a source of nightmares. Europe became the point of friction between these two powers, and thus it turned into a single enormous arsenal divided into two parts. In this process, one half of the arsenal became part of that nightmarish power, while the other, the free part, bordering on the ocean and having no wish to be driven into it, was compelled, together with you, to build a complicated security system to which we probably owe the fact that we still exist.
The totalitarian system in the Soviet Union and in most of its satellites is breaking down, and our nations are looking for a way to democracy and independence.
This, I am convinced, is a historically irreversible process and, as a result, Europe will begin again to seek its own identity without being compelled to be a divided armory any longer. Perhaps this will create the hope ) that sooner or later, your boys will no longer have to stand on guard for freedom in Europe or come to our rescue, because Europe will at last be able to stand guard over itself.
But that is still not the most important thing. The main thing is, it seems to me, that these revolutionary changes will enable us to escape from the rather antiquated straitjacket of this bipolar view of the world and to enter at last into an era of multipolarity in which all of us, large and small, former slaves and former masters, will be able to create what your great President Lincoln called "the family of men."
THE PATH OF PLURALISM
How can the U.S. help us today? My reply is as paradoxical as the whole of my life has been. You can help us most of all if you help the Soviet Union on its irreversible but immensely complicated road to democracy. It is far more complicated than the road open to its former European satellites. You yourselves know best how to support as rapidly as possible the nonviolent evolution of this enormous multinational body politic toward democracy and autonomy for all its people. Therefore, it is not fitting for me to offer you any advice.