Politics & Power Quote by Vaclav Klaus

There is a quiet power move in the way Vaclav Klaus frames this: not as a grand speech, but as paperwork. A "five-page statement of principles" sounds bland by design, and that’s precisely the point. In post-1989 Central Europe, legitimacy wasn’t won only in the streets; it was consolidated in documents that could be circulated, cited, and treated as proof that a new order had something sturdier than revolutionary adrenaline. Klaus is reminding you that the real hinge of transition is often administrative: whoever drafts the principles gets to define what counts as reform.

The phrase "I also helped" is calibrated modesty that still plants a flag. It’s coalition politics in a sentence: he signals participation without sounding like a lone hero, while ensuring the record shows he was in the room where the future was being written. "Issued in late November" matters, too. Timing is a form of authority. Late November places the text in the early scramble of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, when public expectations were volatile and institutions were up for grabs. Get your principles out first, and you narrow the range of imaginable alternatives.

Calling it "the first public expression" underscores that the new government needed a narrative before it could fully become a government. Principles are pre-policy: they tell citizens, rivals, and foreign observers what kind of state is being built, and they quietly set the boundaries of what will later be called "pragmatic" or "necessary". Klaus is describing authorship as statecraft.