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Sir Ernest Satow celebratedly added to the prerequisites of a diplomat the qualification of "use of intelligence and tact."' To that maxim the former dissident and later Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel added "good taste," which he explained serves politics, and by extension diplomacy, better than a graduate degree in political science.
Applicable to both the content and expression of his beliefs, "good taste" is only one of several metaphors Havel used to express his ideas. When he was elected President of Czechoslovakia on 29 December 1989 he said unambiguously that the beliefs he expressed in his writings2 of the 1970s and 1980s were all the more applicable to public life once in political office and that he had not strayed or modified those beliefs.3 He stated unambiguously that his foreign policy derived from that thinking. He explained, for example, that:
a sense of responsibility grows out of the experience of certain moral imperatives that compel one to transcend the horizon of one's personal interests and be prepared at any time to defend the common good, and even to suffer for it. Just as our "dissidence" was anchored in this moral ground, so the spirit of our foreign policy should grow and, more important, continue to grow from it.4
He sought to put his personal style and priority on his politics generally. As an author he was concerned about the importance and accuracy of the word; as a playwright he employed symbolism and staging. Just as he believed politics could benefit from "good taste" so he sought to inject literary techniques into political life.
While the term symbolism is obviously connected to literary criticism, it is taken here as the expression of abstract ideas through the use of inferences and images.5 These will be examined in Havel's diplomacy, as an instrument of his foreign policy, particularly with respect to dialogue with other states and in certain aspects of negotiations. This article is primarily concerned with Havel's diplomacy as Federal Czechoslovak President, namely from the period of December 1989 to July 1992, although it draws on illustrative examples from the Czech Republic as well. While Havel also became President of the Czech successor state, one of the article's observations will be that the use of symbolism diminished...