Epilogue: Into the European Union

Abstract

In The Power of the Powerless, written in the last decade of communist rule, Václav Havel hypothesizes about the intellectual and behavioural responses of citizen subjects dominated by a pervasive ‘post-totalitarian’ system. Here he outlines a widespread practice of living ‘the lie’ of the double-consciousness that the post-totalitarian system elicits. While most subjects of the system are fully aware of the system’s fallaciousness and corruption, they nevertheless participate in its constitutive rituals to avoid detection and subsequent sanctions that would jeopardize their existential prospects. This complicity with the post-totalitarian system, Havel persuasively argues, however rooted in an understandable desire for self-preservation, nevertheless strengthens the repressive powers of the state.