Excerpt from the Address of the President of
Czech Republic, His Excellency Vaclav Havel
on the Occasion of Jackson H. Ralston Prize Ceremony Stanford University, September 29, 1994

Is conflict of civilizations the most probable future course of humanity?

Practically the entire world is now connected by thousands of political, economic and communication networks and bonds. We are aware of one another, and we have thousands of common habits, technologies, modes of behavior, and civilization forms and aims. I understand the world of today as a single global civilization and I would call the conflicts that loom in the future merely conflicts of individual cultures or spheres of civilization.

One of the countless sources of growing tension between these spheres is that they are being forced to live closer and closer together within a single civilization, and thus they are more and more clearly aware of their mutual differences or of their own particular "otherness".

The only salvation of the world today, now that the two biggest and most monstrous totalitarian utopias humanity has ever known- Nazism and Communism - have collapsed, is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society and the

free market. The most dynamic civilization of the last millennium, evolved from a blending of classical, Christian, and Jewish elements, has spread and has imprinted its character on the entire global civilization. It has created and developed these values and demonstrated that respect of them will guarantee the greatest degree of human freedom, justice, and prosperity.

Yet, even if this blueprint appears to Western man as the best and perhaps only one possible, it has left much of the world unsatisfied. To hope in such a situation that democracy will be easily expanded and that this in itself will avert a conflict of cultures would be worse than foolish.

Many politicians and regimes espouse democratic ideas in words but do not apply them in practice. Or they give them an entirely different content than the West gives them. We hear that these concepts are so closely bound to the Euro-American cultural tradition that they are simply not transferable to other milieu, or that they are only a lofty-sounding disguise for the demoralizing and destructive spirit of the West and the byproducts of its values: materialism, crisis or authority, consumerism, selfish material success, and absence of faith. At the same time, people in many parts of the world are of two minds. On the one hand, they long for the prosperity they see in the West; on the other, they reject the importation of Western values and lifestyles as the work of the devil.

In short, democracy in its present Western form arouses skepticism and mistrust in many parts of the world. I admit that I too am not entirely satisfied with this recipe for saving the world. It is hopelessly half-baked. In fact, it is really only half a recipe. I am convinced that if this were not the case, it would not evoke the mistrust that it does.

This mistrust lies in the limited ability of today's democratic world to step beyond its own shadow, or rather the limits of its own present spiritual and intellectual condition and direction, and thus its limited ability to address humanity in a genuinely universal way. As a consequence, democracy is seen less as an open system - a set of possibilities that continually must be sought, redefined and brought into being. Instead, democracy is seen as something given, finished, and complete as is, something that can be exported like cars or television sets, something that the more enlightened purchase and the less do not. A mistake lies in the way its values are exported, which often betrays an attitude of superiority and contempt for all those who hesitate to automatically accept the offered goods.

What then is that other, missing side of the democratic solution? Wherein lies that forgotten dimension of democracy that could give it universal resonance?

I am deeply convinced that is lies in that spiritual dimension that connects all cultures and in fact all humanity. If democracy is not only to survive and expand successfully to resolve conflicts of cultures, then it must discover and renew its own transcendental origins. It must renew its respect for that non-material order which is not only above us but also in us and among us, and which is the only possible and reliable source of man's respect of himself, for others, for the order of nature, for the order of humanity, and thus for secular authority as well. The loss of this respect always leads to loss of respect for everything else -- from the laws people have made for themselves, to the life of their neighbors and of our living planet.

Were I to compare democracy to life-giving energy, I would say that while from the political point of view it is the only hope for humanity, it can only have a beneficial impact on us if it resonates with our deepest inner nature. In other words, if democracy is to spread successfully throughout the world, and if civic coexistence and peace are to spread with it, then it must happen as part of an endeavor to find a new and genuinely universal articulation of that global human experience. It must expand simply as an environment in which we may all engage in a common quest for the general good.

But first, our own democracies must once more become a place for quest and creation, for creative dialogue, for realizing the common will, and for responsibility, and that they must cease to be mere battlegrounds of particular interest. Planetary democracy does not yet exist, but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it: It is the very Earth we inhabit, linked with heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and the commonalty of the human race be newly created, with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us, and all of us together. The authority of a world democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe.