April 04, 2007  Even though Charter 77, a dissident human rights proclamation signed in the former socialist Czechoslovakia in 1977, lost its raison d’etre with the fall of communism in 1989, there is still much to be learned from this historic document and the political movement that took its name, according to Martin Palous, Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United Nations. The advent of Charter 77 created a public space in Czechoslovakia, and this is key, Palous said in a lecture at the Watson Institute. “If you want to understand political processes of today, you should study our public spaces and how they were created,” he said. Palous likened this space to Socrates’ polis, and he also drew a parallel between Socrates and the Czech philosopher and Charter 77 spokesperson Jan Patocka.

Patocka saw Charter 77 as the creation of a sort of polis, or public civic space, important because it allowed political participation of a diverse “Central European tea party” of liberals, Christians, communists, eccentrics, and others. By viewing the link between Socrates and Patocka, said Palous, one can see Patocka’s ideas as a bridge between the past and the future. Patocka did not follow the conventional view that human rights were a modern offshoot of globalization, but rather the realization of an innate human morality.

In 1977, “the deadening silence of a regime was broken and… life emerged,” with the signing of Charter 77, said Palous during his talk entitled, “30 Years after Charter 77: Jan Patocka’s Message for the 21st Century.” The charter was an accompaniment to similar international human rights covenants signed that year, he said, of which Czechoslovakia was a party. Palous quoted one of the opening paragraphs of the charter to demonstrate:

“Charter 77 is a free informal, open community of people of different convictions, different faiths and different professions united by the will to strive, individually and collectively, for the respect of civic and human rights in our own country and throughout the world -- rights accorded to all men by the two mentioned international covenants, by the Final Act of the Helsinki conference and by numerous other international documents opposing war, violence and social or spiritual oppression, and which are comprehensively laid down in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Palous interpreted Patocka’s polis in this case not as the charter’s signatories, nor only Czech citizens, but rather a larger international community. Globalization has internationalized the human rights debate, he said, but the future of democracy nevertheless depends on installing plurality as a basic condition within our diverse political systems. This is a message we can learn from Socrates and from Jan Patocka both, he said, and carry it with us into the 21st century.

By Watson Institute Student Rapporteur Liana Paris ’07


Watch a webcast of the lecture here.