Russia in Global Affairs

For citation, please use:
Drulák, P., 2025. Human Rights Foreign Policy: A Skeptical Perspective. Russia in Global Affairs, 23(2), pp. 108–128. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2025-23-2-108-128

International support for human rights seems to be an idea you can hardly oppose unless you are a ruthless dictator or a wicked individual. It is based on the faith in universality and solidarity. It is alleged that Western countries discovered universal rights and freedoms that every human should enjoy and every ruler should respect. To guarantee them, they designed laws and institutions which by default are universal, too. This universalism implies an obligation—both moral and legal—to promote respect for human rights in other parts of the world as well. This is how a human rights foreign policy (HRFP) is legitimized. It aims to protect people living in “less enlightened” parts of the world and liberate them from discrimination by their governments.

It has often been argued that the West’s successful support of Eastern European dissidents during the Cold War should be replicated globally. This argument was embraced by Václav Havel and other leaders, activists and intellectuals to launch an ambitious HRFP in Prague after 1989. Its motivation was threefold.

Firstly, its authors believed that they had a moral obligation to do it. Like Havel himself, some used to be dissidents themselves supported by the West. They wanted to repay this support by supporting others who were not as lucky and who still lived under political oppression.

Secondly, the dissidents believed that their own experience provided them with a mission for which they were better prepared than their Western friends; the HRFP was supposed to turn into a distinctive Czech contribution to the international community.

Thirdly, this sense of mission nicely matched the foreign policy goals of the U.S. and some other Western countries, which were happy to reward the new Czech HRFP with funding and political recognition. Thus, support of HRFP has traditionally drawn on both genuine admiration for the dissidents’ experience and an expectation of Western rewards.  

This critical review of Czech HRFP is written from a practitioner’s perspective based on the author’s experience of an academic who briefly served as a deputy foreign minister to return to academic work thereafter.

Three traditions of Czech HRFP

The usual story about contemporary Czech politics boils down to two opposing notions: principle vs. pragmatism. In the 1990s, this clash was embodied in the strained relationship between principled President Václav Havel and pragmatic Prime Minister Václav Klaus. Later, the clash was led by the late President Havel’s self-proclaimed disciples who fought against the alleged populism of President Miloš Zeman and Prime Minister Andrej Babiš.[1] The former claimed allegiance to noble ideas and the latter focused on power and money. It can be argued that the pragmatic perspective implies either ignoring human rights or accepting them inasmuch as they pay off politically or economically, whereas a principled perspective calls for promoting human rights as advancement on the universal path of human progress.

Now, despite strong human rights rhetoric in Czech public debates, there is no principled approach to Czech HRFP. The most influential school of Czech HRFP was shaped by American neoconservatism that advocates aggressive promotion of democracy and human rights steered by U.S. geopolitical interests (Halper and Clarke, 2004). It offers a strange mix of black-and-white moralism and military interventionism. In Czech neoconservative HRFP, Czechia and the U.S. are assumed to share the same democratic values and the key strategic goal of promoting civic rights (but not social or economic rights). Czech neo-conservatives believe that this goal cannot be hampered by considerations of Czech national sovereignty, as the universality of human rights transcends any sovereignty and should be bolstered by the U.S. military force if needed.

The neoconservative perspective was consistently defended by President Václav Havel.

The pragmatic approach has been quite influential in Czech HRFP. Its pragmatism is mainly economic and focuses on immediate economic gains and what it considers national economic interest. Czech pragmatists are reluctant to raise the human rights issue and if they do so it is only under pressure from the U.S.—the guarantor of Czechia’s national security. Václav Klaus and Miloš Zeman, who both served as prime minister and president, stood up for this pragmatism.

Finally, beyond the dichotomy between neoconservatism and pragmatism there is also a cooperative perspective of Czech HRFP. It differs from pragmatism in that it takes human rights seriously and acknowledges their intrinsic value for humankind. But it also differs from neoconservatism in that it respects national sovereignty, relies on diplomacy, and considers human rights in their entirety, that is, as civic and economic rights, and independently of the U.S. and other great powers’ interests. The cooperative perspective never became mainstream within Czech HRFP, but it was shared by a handful of left-leaning activists, intellectuals, and politicians. Its most vocal representative was former dissident and the first democratic foreign minister Jiří Dienstbier, who, as an independent intellectual, criticized the U.S.’s military interventions, believed in diplomacy, and pointed to the significance of social rights.  

Havel’s HRFP—Unpolitical and Neo-Conservative

Czech HRFP was conceived by dissident and playwright Václav Havel, who was propelled into presidency by the fall of communism in 1989. Up until the end of his presidency in 2003, he was the principal political promoter of HRFP. However, given his adherence to “unpolitical politics” and mistrust of political parties (Keane, 1999; Suk, 2013; Kaiser, 2014), Havel failed to transform his moral understanding of human rights into a viable political concept that would gain domestic political support and become part of Czech foreign policy. Instead, he launched his own personal and idiosyncratic HRFP that was not shared by the governments, with Czechia’s position in the UN on Cuba being the only exception.

Nonetheless, a number of important non-state actors, NGOs and media, which eventually took a neoconservative path, emerged under his influence.

Havel was a left-leaning liberal, but he did not follow any clear political ideology. Among the dissidents he tended towards centrist positions, which made him an ideal consensus seeker and spokesman for this diverse group.[2] Moreover, his Charter 77 was considered the most important dissident initiative in Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, when he became president and launched his HRFP, he lacked any guiding political concept for it. His policy was then shaped by the circumstances of its making and his personality. Three of these stand out.

First, Havel loved powerful public gestures, and his HRFP could be seen as a series of such symbolic gestures: inviting the Tibetan exile leader Dalai Lama to the Prague Castle, donating the building of the former communist parliament in the center of Prague to Radio Free Europe, and meeting with Salman Rushdie. His penchant for spectacular moves[3] is rooted in his profession of playwright but also in his family tradition.[4] So Havel’s gestures were effective in the first years of his presidency as they reflected the early 1990s euphoria, but with the split of Czechoslovakia in 1992, its HRFP met with growing skepticism or outright rejection by the pragmatic governments led by Klaus and Zeman. 

Second, Havel despised political parties and party politics (Keane, 1999; Suk, 2013; Kaiser, 2014). He argued from the position of moral values which he believed should stand above politics. As in his dissident times, he felt obliged only by his own conscience. By believing that his HRFP should be above party politics he also put it above any democratic debate. Since this anti-political moralism could not work, Havel became increasingly isolated in Czech politics.[5] His human rights gestures were not followed by practical steps, which could only be taken by the governments that were indifferent or hostile to him after 1992 (Eyal, 2000, 2003).

Yet this does not mean that Havel’s HRFP was completely ignored. It found support in two important audiences. At home, his policy was supported by the Prague-centric cultural elite: journalists, NGO professionals, intellectuals, and activists. On the international level, Havel’s personality and gestures were appreciated by the U.S. leaders, and major international media made him into a moral icon.   

Third, not only did the U.S. leaders and media appreciate Havel’s policy (Kaiser, 2014), but his HRFP evolved under the strong influence of American neo-conservativism. Havel was a life-long admirer of America while the U.S. government and foundations provided important assistance to his dissident activity since the late 1970s (Kaiser, 2008). The very concept of Charter 77 matched the then U.S. strategy (Moyn, 2010). Once in the presidential office he was ready to correct his position to comply with the American interests.

His most famous turnabout was linked to his position on NATO. In 1990, he leaned towards the Czech dissidents’ premise that both NATO and the Warsaw Treaty should be dissolved and replaced by an inclusive pan-European security organization. It was George H.W. Bush himself who then explained to Havel that the U.S wanted to keep NATO (Kaiser, 2014). Havel learned fast. Within a few months he turned into a staunch supporter of NATO and an early advocate of its Eastern expansion. To justify this turnabout, Havel presented NATO not as a military alliance designed for territorial defense but as a human rights organization whose mission was to protect and spread democratic values. In a similar vein, he later supported all U.S. military interventions (in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq) as serving the cause of human rights. He thus established a neoconservative link between human rights and national and international security. Havel’s most (in)famous manifestation of this link was his insistence that NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was “exclusively humanitarian.”[6]

This orientation to the U.S. interests permeated the whole of Havel’s HRFP. The governments criticized for human rights abuse were either post- or neo-communist regimes, or otherwise unfriendly to the U.S. (Cuba, Russia, Serbia, China, Belarus, Iran, North Korea, Myanmar) while the policy was blind to the abuses perpetrated by U.S. allies (e.g., Israel, Kosovo, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan) or by the U.S. itself. This geopolitical bias of Czech HRFP was not left unnoticed: its critics pointed out that it contradicted the universalism of human rights, while its neoconservative defenders considered the U.S. the only credible force for the advancement of human rights in the world and appreciated Havel’s links with Washington.

However, this geopolitical bias occasionally allowed for a transformation of the HRFP from President Havel’s personal moral gesture into a governmental policy. The pragmatists in the government were ready to embrace human rights if they believed that they would score points with Washington. That was the case with the Czech initiative in the UN Commission on Human Rights that initiated resolutions condemning Cuba. This policy started in 1998, when the U.S. failed to garner enough support for its own draft resolution regarding Cuba (Pštross, 2004). That was a slap in the face for U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was of Czech descent and was in regular contact with Václav Havel (Kaiser, 2014, p. 197). No doubt Cuba must have been part of their conversation, especially since Czechia had just been elected to the UN Commission on Human Rights. However, 1998 was also the year when the U.S. Senate ratified the Czech Republic’s accession to NATO, which made the Czech government particularly sensitive to any U.S. concerns. Thus, the MFA stepped in. Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Palouš, a former dissident and Havel’s intimate, agreed with the U.S. diplomats that Czechia would submit a draft resolution on human rights in Cuba next time, as the UN members were expected to consider Czechia less partial in this respect than the U.S.[7]

These expectations were confirmed. In 1999, Czech diplomats in the UN managed to have the resolution passed, succeeding where the U.S. had failed a year before. Since then, Czechia acquired the reputation of the main European critic of Cuba (Pštross, 2004). The official interpretation of this new policy stressed the Czech communist past, which implied the Czech Republic’s moral obligation to support the victims of the Cuban communist oppression, while also claiming that the policy strengthened the country’s international reputation. From the Czech government’s perspective, the ensuing Cuban hostility and its partly justified claims that Czechia was acting as a U.S. pawn were the price the government was prepared to pay for Washington’s favor.

However, apart from Cuba, the Czech governments steered clear of an active HRFP and left it to President Havel’s speeches. Prime Ministers Klaus and Zeman were pragmatists, and their foreign ministers, Josef Zieleniec and Jan Kavan, were no Havelian human rights defenders either. Zieleniec was a pragmatist and a key architect of Klaus’s political party but with scant interest in foreign affairs. Kavan was a former exile, a member of the left wing of the British Labor Party whose approach to HRFP was cooperative rather than neo-conservative. Still, Kavan appointed Havel’s neoconservative intimate Palouš his deputy in the vain hope of improving his strained relationship with the president (Kaiser, 2014).

Given the lack of government interest in HRFP, Havel and his friends developed alternative channels of human rights promotion: NGOs and media. Two NGOs were especially important in this regard: Havel’s own project[8] Forum 2000 and the public charity People in Need (PiN). The Forum was founded to organize regular conferences of global leaders and thinkers in Prague, where they would reflect on the state of the world and the promotion of liberal democratic values. However, it also organized seminars, workshops and co-ordination events networking human rights activists from Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America (Cuba and Venezuela), China and other countries. Its long-time Executive Director Oldřich Černý embodied the neoconservative link between human rights and security. Before assuming his position in the Forum, he had served as national security advisor to President Havel and as the director of the newly-founded Czech foreign intelligence service.     

PiN drew on the humanitarian activities of Czech volunteers who organized humanitarian assistance to disaster victims in Eastern Europe. During the 1990s, it grew into a nongovernmental giant with important activities in development assistance and human rights promotion. Its partnership with the Czech public TV network was an important catalyst of this growth.[9] Its current budget is roughly comparable with the budget of the Czech counter-intelligence agency and represents a third of that of the MFA. Its human rights program has included providing support and training to activists in Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia where it has been banned), Central Asia (after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, PiN had a large development project there), Latin America (Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador), and other countries. Its founding director Šimon Pánek was a student leader during the 1989 events in Prague. Before founding PiN he had worked as an advisor to President Havel, who later mentioned Pánek several times as his desired successor in the presidential office.

Both organizations developed their human rights activities under U.S. guidance, receiving neoconservative ideology, know-how and funds from Washington.

They could count on a number of foundations and agencies which previously supported dissidents and which stepped up their activities in Prague after the fall of the communist regime, such as Soros’s Open Society Foundation. However, the National Endowment of Democracy (NED) played a special role in this respect.

This bipartisan agency, funded by the U.S. Congress, was set up by the Reagan administration in the 1980s to become the central institution for promoting U.S. democracy and human rights (Guilhot, 2005). This neoconservative institution has been primarily targeting the leftist regimes that were challenging U.S. interests.[10] It has been trying to destabilize these regimes by giving support to their opposition activists (material support, raising media attention, etc.). Before the NED was founded, it was the CIA that had provided this support, but it could have compromised the activists who could have been demonized as spies. However it is more difficult to discredit an institution promoting democracy and human rights. Moreover, the NED is often hidden behind partnerships with organizations which may seem unrelated to it.

That was the case of PiN and Forum 2000. These were Czech organizations staffed with Czech activists and blessed by Václav Havel, but they adopted the NED’s neoconservative concept of human rights and democracy promotion: focusing on the civic rights while ignoring economic and social rights, focusing on U.S. rivals while ignoring the human rights problems of the U.S. allies and the United States itself, and employing aggressive human rights promotion tactics. The long-time president of the NED, Carl Gershman,[11] was a frequent guest in Prague since the 1990s, being a mentor of both PiN and Forum 2000, on whose advisory board he was sitting until the 2020s. Later on, other beneficiaries of NED support popped up in Czechia, such as the think-tank AMO and the anti-Beijing information website Sinopsis. The neo-conservative-leaning human rights organization later set up a lobbying group called DEMAS.[12]

PiN and Forum 2000 were able to develop their own HRFP in cooperation with the key Washington institution, but they would not have been as successful without the cooperation of Czech media. As mentioned above, PiN’s partnership with the public TV network was essential for its growth. However, there were more media keen on human rights promotion, including the weekly journal Respekt and the two dailies Hospodářské noviny and Lidové noviny (Drulák, 2015).

Respekt started as a dissident journal. In the early 1990s, it was bought by Karl Schwarzenberg. In the 1980s, this exiled aristocrat was a human rights activist supporting Czech dissidents, and after 1989, he became President Havel’s close collaborator. Thanks to Schwarzenberg’s subsidies Respekt could develop into an influential weekly. Later it was bought by Schwarzenberg’s billionaire partner Zdeněk Bakala, who became the main sponsor of the Václav Havel Library and other initiatives of the former president. Respekt embraces all the causes which are important for Czech neo-conservatives, such as threats from Russia and China, dissidents in Russia and Belarus, the partnership with Taiwan, the Dalai Lama and Tibet, Cuban dissidents, democracy promotion in the Middle East or the partnership with the U.S. and Israel.

Bakala also bought Hospodářské noviny, the leading economic daily, which, in addition to economic reporting, gives an ample space to articles critical of Russia and China in line with the Czech neoconservative perspective. Somewhat unusually for an economic daily, it considers them ideological and intelligence threats rather than economic opportunities while also siding with Havel’s partisans against economic pragmatists. Finally, Lidové noviny used to be a dissident newspaper, and despite the change of its owners it kept its neoconservative editorial line. This was the case even after the daily had been bought by tycoon turned politician Andrej Babiš.[13]

Thus, an important part of Czech media promoted “the legacy of Václav Havel,” including support for the neoconservative HRFP. This contributed to the public legitimacy of PiN, Forum 2000 and related organizations and reinforced the general impression that there was no alternative to neoconservative pragmatism. It has also created niches for entrepreneurial politicians who could advance their careers by professing neoconservative convictions. All these factors were at work when the neoconservative HRFP was adopted by the MFA.

Human Rights at the MFA

Except for Cuba the MFA did not play any role in Havel’s HRFP. This changed in 2003, when Havel’s presidency ended. In the ensuing years, the MFA turned into a central institution of the neoconservative HRFP under PiN’s guidance. In 2014, the MFA tried to shift its HRFP away from neoconservatism to diplomacy, which provoked a fierce public debate accompanied by adverse pressure from the U.S.

It was between 2003 and 2007 that the MFA became the central HRFP institution in the Czech Republic. This transition was triggered by the end of the presidency of Václav Havel, who was succeeded by sovereignist and pragmatist Václav Klaus. That was the end of the presidential HRFP and a moment of uncertainty for the professional future of Havel’s collaborators. Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda recognized the political opportunity. He decided to raise the political profile of himself and his small Christian Democratic Party by adopting the neoconservative HRFP and hiring Havel’s collaborators.[14] Moreover, he used the newly acquired EU membership to regularly raise the Cuban human rights issue and become a vocal supporter of Israel.[15] Finally, Svoboda appointed PiN’s Executive Director Tomáš Pojar to the position of deputy minister

These steps had several effects, including a good press and the U.S. embassy’s praise of Minister Svoboda. More importantly, the MFA set up a special unit called TRANS, whose mission was to support regime change in small countries which were seen as hostile to American interests, such as Cuba or Belarus. The unit was headed by Gabriela Dlouhá, a former Havel collaborator who, after a stint at the MFA, joined PiN. This unit then grew into a full-fledged department—the Department of Human Rights and Transformation Policy (HRTP). The fact that this department did not belong to the legal section as is customary[16] but to the international security section was evidence of its political significance.

Apart from the usual bureaucratic and conceptual stuff the HRTP had three important functions: giving instructions on human rights issues to the Czech missions at multilateral institutions (the UN, the EU, the Council of Europe), defining the bilateral human rights agenda regarding priority countries, and distributing public funds to Czech NGOs promoting human rights abroad (Bílková and Matějková 2010). Whereas the first two functions are common in MFAs, the third function is unique to the Czech ministry. It was linked to the money pipeline set up by people close to PiN to fund projects of PiN and other NGOs organized into the DEMAS network. The annual sums going through the pipeline have never been insignificant; in the second decade of this century, they doubled the MFA’s budget for public diplomacy, tripled appropriations for supporting Czechs living abroad, and by far exceeded the MFA’s support for economic diplomacy (Drulák, 2015). However, this was only one of several pipelines bringing public money to the human rights NGOs.[17] These money pipelines were a major administrative achievement of the former executive director of PiN in his capacity of deputy minister.   

But the influence of PiN on the MFA went further than that. It was not only about money but also about ideas and people. The adoption of the HRFP by the MFA necessitated conceptual work and elaboration of strategic documents (Bílková and Matějková 2010). In this respect, PiN served as a major source of ideas and a role model thanks to its real expertise coming from hundreds of projects, its high reputation in Czech media, and a broad array of people involved. Tomáš Pojar and Gabriela Dlouhá were the most prominent of them but not the only examples of the staff rotation between the MFA and PiN. Other former activists joined the MFA, and senior MFA officials were cooperating with PiN or Forum 2000. They were part of a larger neoconservative network of human right activists and security experts in diplomacy, NGOs and media that chose Václav Havel as its symbol and was glued together by its loyalty to the George W. Bush administration and its disappointment with Barack Obama.[18]

While the foundations of the MFA’s HRFP were laid under Minister Svoboda, it was under his successor Karel Schwarzenberg that it developed much further. With his past as a human right activist, a close collaborator of Havel and the publisher of Respekt, he seemed to fulfil the Czech neo-conservatives’ dreams. Some might have been disappointed with the fact that he was not a neoconservative himself.[19] Schwarzenberg was a compromise-seeker who tried to take into account the pragmatism of President Klaus and the prime ministers, but also the neoconservatism of his followers in media and civil society, and among diplomats. In this respect, Schwarzenberg’s HRFP tended to be cautious, trying to avoid unnecessary conflicts; he preferred quiet diplomacy to Havelian public gestures. For example, he did not avoid meeting the Dalai Lama, but he did it as a private person in a hotel rather than at the MFA. On the other hand, under his tenure the neoconservative network and the money pipelines thrived despite radical budgetary cuts at the MFA, which laid off hundreds of employees and closed a dozen embassies. 

It was against this backdrop that an attempt to move the MFA’s HRFP from neoconservatism to diplomacy was made in 2014. That year the government led by the Social Democracy Party took over and Social Democratic Foreign Minister Lubomír Zaorálek appointed me as his deputy.[20] As a leading parliamentarian Zaorálek was a long-time critic of the neoconservative focus of Czech foreign policy. But we also agreed that the HRFP should not be abandoned in favor of pragmatism advocated by President Zeman.[21] Instead we believed that it should be transformed towards diplomacy, which we associated with the personality of Jiří Dienstbier.[22]

This transformation was my responsibility. It started with a new look at the HRFP in the government’s policy statement. I suggested the following wording: “… human rights include civic and political rights as well as economic, social, and environmental rights; they can be effectively promoted only in conditions of mutual respect and dialogue.”[23] Even though it may sound innocent, the statement signified a radical departure from the current HRFP. First, it argued for enlarging the human rights concept to include economic rights, which was the political left’s long-term concern ignored by both neo-liberal pragmatists and the neoconservative network.

Second, it argued for developing diplomacy and a cooperative approach with the governments concerned rather than for shaming them in public or supporting political activities of their opponents. The rationale behind this was that the latter acts are not really effective. They salve uneasy conscience of those who do the shaming[24] and they are appreciated by the local activists, who receive money and materials, but they neither change government policies nor impact on the societies they should help.

The human rights community (diplomats, NGOs, journalists) assumed a wait-and-see attitude to this. On the one hand, they did not like the idea of any change in the system, which served them well. On the other hand, they were taken by surprise and were hesitant about how to reply. They were also aware that given my record I could be a potential ally against the mounting wave of economic pragmatism represented by the president and several members of the government.[25] However, this truce did not last long, and a series of battles followed. Three of these were especially important.

To start with, the government decided to unfreeze relations with China to open up new economic opportunities. These relations were then at their low point due to the previous policy that had publicly shamed China for its human rights record, especially in regard to Tibet. The new government pledged to respect the usual standards that China expected from European countries—avoiding meetings between members of the government and the Dalai Lama and keeping purely business relations with Taiwan. Even though the government did not make any further commitments, the shift provoked protests by the human rights community, which were extensively covered by the media. The critics accused the government of betraying the Tibetans and kowtowing to the totalitarian regime. This change was driven by economic pragmatists, but it offered an opportunity to depart from the neoconservative HRFP towards a cooperative approach. Therefore, behind the scenes I explored, jointly with the Chinese embassy, how to cooperate on human rights in a constructive way. The critics eventually lost and later felt humiliated by the Chinese president’s official visit to Prague. However, it strengthened their belief that any change in the HRFP was tantamount to surrendering it to private business interests.

The second battle was conceptual. It started with a debate on China and broadened to a debate on the role of human rights in foreign policy. Because of my public criticism of the neoconservative HRFP and of Václav Havel’s legacy (Drulák, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c) I became the principal public enemy of the status quo advocates. Two parallel debates took place in 2014: among intellectuals and in public.[26] While the right-leaning intellectuals were highly critical in defending the prevailing HRFP and Václav Havel, those on the left were more sympathetic to what I was suggesting, pointing to failures and biases of Czech HRFP. It was the first such debate after almost a quarter of a century since President Havel launched HRFP.

Then there was a debate within the MFA. I asked the HRTP diplomats to redraft the basic conceptual documents so that they would reflect the new political concept of HRFP. They resisted, and instead mobilized neoconservatives both in and outside the MFA to oppose these changes. When the director of this department found out that the proposed changes had the political support of the foreign minister, she resigned. Her resignation further increased the external pressure for my dismissal and the opposition to the shift towards a cooperative HRFP. It got a bad press in Respekt, Lidové noviny and Hospodářské noviny and was rejected by a number of public figures who defended “Václav Havel’s legacy” and warned of the danger of moral relativism. The points of contention were both symbolic and practical. For example, there was a symbolic dispute about the references in the preamble of the MFA’s HRFP concept. The critics objected to including a positive reference to the reformist communism of 1968, which was important for the left, insisting instead on Charter 77 as the only respectable reference. They did not like the reference to Jiří Dienstbier either. Despite his being a dissident, a signatory of Charter 77 and Havel’s first foreign minister, he later criticized the U.S. military interventions which Havel had supported.

The three battles also had a strong Atlantic dimension as Czech neoconservatives put their friends in Washington on alert. On the one hand, the minister and myself believed that our criticism of the neoconservative HRFP and the call for more diplomacy were close to what President Obama was saying. On the other hand, NED representatives and some influential members of the Obama administration were critical of their president’s foreign policy.[27] When, in December 2014, the White House unexpectedly announced the resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba, we applauded it, but we also observed the consternation of many Czech activists and human rights diplomats as well as the sour faces of some senior U.S. diplomats and the NED president, who were in Prague at that moment. However, it was their voice that eventually prevailed.

There were numerous signals that some people in Washington were not happy about the Czech public debate on Havel’s human rights and about the changes in the human rights concept.

A powerful public signal was sent by NED President Carl Gershman, who published an opinion article in The Washington Post just before Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka’s visit to Washington. Gershman (2014) accused President Zeman and me of “giving up on moral responsibility,” which, according to him, Havel introduced into Czech foreign policy. He reminded the reader of Havel’s warning against appeasement, and of the threat of Russia and China, while explicitly dismissing my criticism of neo-conservativism. Shortly afterwards, another signal came when Prime Minister Sobotka was received by U.S. Vice-President Biden, who lectured him on the significance of Václav Havel and his legacy. Sobotka then let the foreign minister know that he did not need any fight with the human rights community.

Even though the transition from neoconservatism to diplomacy in HRFP was not complete, the MFA phased it out. The resulting HRFP was neither neoconservative nor cooperative. Prime Ministers Sobotka and Babiš, their Social Democratic foreign ministers, and senior MFA officials have since then reiterated their commitment to the Václav Havel legacy but without making any Havelian, high-profile gestures. On the contrary, they have usually kept a low profile on the HRFP issues, for which they were criticized by neoconservative journalists. Also, the MFA has kept the economic and social rights in the HRFP strategy but without encouraging trade unions and the Social Watch to deliver on them. Thus, the whole pie has been left to PiN and its DEMAS associates, making the MFA money pipelines work as they were intended to.

A new neoconservative turn came with the centrist government of Petr Fiala. In its policy statement of January 2022, the government announced that it wanted to “renew the tradition of ‘Havel’s’ foreign policy” for it “is the morally right thing, but it is also advantageous for our State” as it “has managed to secure our place at the heart of European politics.”[28] Also, the government’s numerous calls for a partnership with the U.S. went beyond the usual Atlanticist standards of Czech politics as did its calls for doing less with Russia and China.

*  *  *

With the benefit of hindsight I conclude that the effort to shift Czech HRFP from neoconservatism to diplomacy was naïve and doomed from the very start. I underestimated the material interest and the power of the leading NGOs as well as their control over the media and the MFA staff. I also failed to see the commitment of influential Washingtonian players to the policies which were in contradiction with President Obama’s line. Moreover, I believed that a cooperative turn would be endorsed by the Social Democratic leaders in the Czech government, which was the case only so far as the turn did not entail any political costs. No doubt I could have avoided unnecessary political mistakes, especially in my public communication; however, that would not have changed much. I saw most of the dots, even though not all of them, but I failed to connect them. The effort was based on the naïve belief that the shift would be possible if new software (a new HRFP concept) was embedded into the old hardware (old HRFP institutions and practices). But that is not the case; Czech HRFP can only be either neoconservative or nonexistent.

With that in mind, I argue that Czechia should rather give up on HRFP.[29] The failures of the neoconservative HRFP are numerous. First of all, its geopolitical and ideological biases discredit the very concept of human rights, turning them into another tool of power politics. Also, its muscle-flexing practice provokes an adverse reaction on the part of the targeted governments or inflicts enormous suffering on the targeted country’s population in case of a military conflict. Finally, since the late 1990s, the U.S. has been losing its power, both hard and soft, upon which it itself and its smaller allies, such as Czechia, could build a neoconservative HRFP.

In theory, one could make the case for a cooperative HRFP. But such a policy would require a set of favorable conditions, both domestic and international, which are absent. Domestically, what is needed is professional diplomatic service, an understanding for patient maneuvering behind the scenes, an appreciation of compromise, a dislike for public moral disputes, and a sense of practical results. Czechia’s domestic conditions are not favorable for this since Czech HRFP’s DNA was shaped by Havel’s moral activism, NGOs, media, and the NED. In such conditions the cooperative approach is destined to be rejected as appeasing and cowardly.

However, international conditions are not favorable either. The cooperative approach builds on normative common grounds of the international community. But the early 1990s spirit of one-world global cooperation is no longer present. The increasing rivalry among the major world powers enforces a black-and-white perspective, which is not good for diplomacy as such. It is getting increasingly difficult nowadays to rationally discuss Russia or China in Europe or the U.S. To think about cooperating with them on human rights is utopian. To try to impose human rights on them is dangerous. Western activists thirsting for moral self-satisfaction should look for other means.