"To pursue a so-called Third Way is foolish. We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for a socialism with a human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit that we are not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed"
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Klaus is swinging a hammer at the seductive centrist fantasy that history can be negotiated into a tidy compromise. Calling the “Third Way” “so-called” is a deliberate delegitimization: he frames it as branding, not substance, a marketing term designed to spare voters the discomfort of choosing sides. The target is the perennial promise that you can keep socialism’s moral aspirations while discarding its coercive machinery - a promise he treats as politically naive and historically dishonest.
The loaded memory here is the Prague Spring and its famous slogan, “socialism with a human face.” Klaus invokes the 1960s not as nostalgia but as a scar. For Czechs and Slovaks, that experiment ended not in a policy seminar but under Soviet tanks, followed by “normalization,” censorship, and a forced retreat into public cynicism. In that context, “it did not work” is almost an understatement; it’s a refusal to allow Western-style managerial optimism to flatten lived experience into an abstract debate about models.
His real move is to deny reformers the comforting language of efficiency. “A more efficient version of a system that has failed” reads like a warning about technocrats who treat ideology as a software update. Klaus insists on explicitness because vagueness is how compromised projects survive: you rename the same architecture, promise kinder administrators, and call it progress. The quote is less an argument about economics than a demand for moral and historical clarity from post-communist politics - no euphemisms, no “faces,” no reruns.
The loaded memory here is the Prague Spring and its famous slogan, “socialism with a human face.” Klaus invokes the 1960s not as nostalgia but as a scar. For Czechs and Slovaks, that experiment ended not in a policy seminar but under Soviet tanks, followed by “normalization,” censorship, and a forced retreat into public cynicism. In that context, “it did not work” is almost an understatement; it’s a refusal to allow Western-style managerial optimism to flatten lived experience into an abstract debate about models.
His real move is to deny reformers the comforting language of efficiency. “A more efficient version of a system that has failed” reads like a warning about technocrats who treat ideology as a software update. Klaus insists on explicitness because vagueness is how compromised projects survive: you rename the same architecture, promise kinder administrators, and call it progress. The quote is less an argument about economics than a demand for moral and historical clarity from post-communist politics - no euphemisms, no “faces,” no reruns.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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