Police having a hard time loading pistols, are sharing out last supplies
The police are struggling with a shortage of 9mm ammunition, which is fired by the service-pistols of practically every officer of the law. Police commanders assert that a disturbance in the procurement procedure is at fault and that they’re already preparing a new one. Meanwhile well-supplied police agents are sharing with those having trouble with their supplies.

So go ahead, head on over there, find some outlet ready to sell/rent you some firearms (harder than in the US, but by no means impossible), and go to town: you’ll surely out-gun the local authorities. Especially after you realize, along with me, that that picture of a well-filled box of ammo at the top of the on-line article indicates no relief: those are military rifle-grade rounds, not pistol ammunition.

                          

Students of European history know that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was involved in World War I on the German side (the “Triple Alliance”) from the very beginning – logically, since that Empire was dominated administratively by German-speakers. However, a large part of its soldiery was made up of Slavs, with no particular affinity for things German. (Which Hungarians, however, did have – but that’s another story!) Finding themselves on the Russian front, ordered to fight and kill fellow Slavs on the other side of the trenches, many of these soldiers soon found that they would rather just desert at the first opportunity – and indeed, then form into units on the other side that would fight for the Russians.

Strictly speaking, the label “Czechoslovak Legions” also applies to units on the Western Front in France, and elsewhere, made up of Czechs and Slovaks willing to fight for the Allied (i.e. Britain, France, USA) cause in exchange for getting the right to ask for their own country after the fighting stopped. But that label is mostly interpreted as referring to the “legion” with the most spectacular escapades, namely those units fighting for the Russians – since in 1917, that Russian government for which they were fighting ceased to exist. The legions then chose to fight against the Communist regime that replaced it late that year, meaning they were heavily involved in the cause of the so-called “Whites” in the Russian Civil War. The “Whites” lost, of course, but the Czechoslovak Legion held itself together the whole time, and actually managed to make its way all the way across Asia to Vladivostok – traveling mainly by rail, it must be admitted, although it’s also maintained that they were also transporting the Czar’s gold-treasure with them (and that gets heavy!) – and thence thousands of miles more by ship to a long-delayed homecoming to what in fact had in the meantime become an independent Czechoslovakia.

It was an epic adventure, and there’s little doubt that these soldiers’ efforts did contribute substantially towards the inclination of Western political leaders at the Paris Peace Conference to give them their brand-new state. On the other hand, they did fight the Communists, meaning that when their country was under Communist rule from 1948 until 1989 any recognition of their feats, or honor shown to surviving veterans, was taboo. That was all OK again after the Velvet Revolution, though, and today there’s a commemorative statue to the Legionnaires standing in Palacky Square located in downtown Prague on the east bank of the Vltava river.

So much for that. But now the Czech Defense Ministry has a new project called Legie 100 (“Legion 100″), intended to honor the Legions further as the 100th anniversary of their exploits approaches. It wants a proper museum, or else a commemorative train; it wants further monies for the maintenance of legionnaires’ graves, it even wants to make a film.

Sorry, Cant’ Afford It

In short, it wants Kč 600 million (€150 million) – but, as is the case most everywhere in the West these days, that sort of money is not just lying around. Quite the opposite, in fact: contemporary Czech politics is currently preoccupied not with the Legion, but with the struggle to finance ordinary government operations (plus a fresh attempt to put public pensions on a more-solid basis). In particular, the Czech government is now blazing new fiscal ground by proposing the abolition of the “reduced rate” value-added tax rate of 10% so that everything that is taxed at all when bought and sold is subject to the “high” rate of 20% – food, books, baby’s booties, you name it.

Even if you don’t follow Czech politics at all, that sort of proposal should be enough to convince you that the Gzech government feels itself in dire need of more tax revenues – meaning, on the other side, it’s not going to be very receptive to any new spending proposals. The Legionnaires – or rather, those who wish to honor their memory, since there are very few actual Legionnaires still alive – might just be out of luck. No less than the Czech Foreign Minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, has felt the need to put in his two-crowns’ worth: “The Legionnaires definitely had their significance, [but] that amount I regard as extravagant. We have problems that probably weigh on us more.”*

If the story of the Czechoslovak Legionnaires appeals to you, it’s likely you’ll have to be satisfied with setting a Google Alert for the private fujd-raising appeal for Legie 100 that will surely come soon. Also, the next time you visit Prague, do pay a visit to Palacky Square – it’s near a major tram-line intersection!

* If you’re now thinking “What business does the Foreign Minister have in making pronouncements about a domestic budget question?” then our two great minds do think alike. But there’s another angle: Schwarzenberg is actually Prince Schwarzenberg, with a personal family history that goes way back to the German-speaking nobility of the Austrian Empire. It’s even likely that, secretly, he dismisses the Legionnaires as having been no better than traitors to the Austrian cause!

                          

In the end though, President Klaus intervened, there were a lot of meetings, everyone forgot about how anti-corruption they were supposed to be, and the current government managed to sail on. With that settled, what do we now see – and in the pages of the country’s leading business newspaper, no less! – but today’s piece by one Petr Honzejk entitled The Czech Republic is better than it seems. Masaryk’s “do not fear and do not steal” is coming back in style.

Make no mistake: the title is the basic message, but I’m glad to give you the lede as well:

There’s no use in fooling oneself. It’s enough when we can use a little realism. We live in a better country than we ourselves think.

Talk about looking on the bright side! With this latest Environment Ministry affair everyone is wailing “Nothing has changed!” Honzejk writes – but they’re wrong! Hey, at least there was a whistle-blower in the first place, who resisted all the lucrative pressure exerted to shut him up! And look, the minister resigned the same day the charges came to light – that has never happened before! He goes on:

This isn’t some exercise in naïveté. Nor the obligatory pre-Christmas optimism. Only a mention that, so long as we choose anything other than a self-tormenting point-of-view, we will see a better country in all directions than a year ago.

Like: Hey, we got a new government this year and escaped that “Paroubek goulash populism” we were all stuck in coming into 2010! (Jiří Paroubek actually was Prime Minister from 2005-06, but I guess he has continued to have a lot of behind-the-scenes influence.) And it’s a new government committed to enacting reforms! he adds. Stipulated – but surely his position as a writer for Hospodářské noviny enables Honzejk to be aware of the shameful compromise that has kept this government propped up, as well?

It’s almost comical, the happy-talk rabbits he tries to pull out of his hat here while trying to retain an even-handed, judicious tone. “[The Czech political scene] is no utopia,” he concedes, “as the Motolska Hospital affair showed us this year.” (Wait, I never even heard about that one! But I probably don’t want to know!) But look, research shows that the amount of illegal software installed on Czech computers has declined! Hooray!

No, the Czech Republic can no longer be regarded as belonging to the “Wild East,” he asserts. After all, the EU has decided to put the office of its Galileo GPS program in Prague. And the British news paper The Telegraph recently named Prague “the best vacation destination in the world,” while no less than the New York Times back in April had a laudatory (if rather short) travel article about the country’s #3 city, Ostrava (over on the eastern border).

OK, Prague is very nice to visit, but about Ostrava I don’t know for sure, having never visited there. However, my suspicion is aroused by phrases in that NYT piece like “Ostrava’s most famous symbol was a 1,033-foot-high slag heap” and “grimy reputation” and “derelict sites.” I suspect the travel writer is trying rather too hard here to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear – as is, for that matter, Petr Honzejk in his “don’t worry, be happy!” article. That his argument can be put forth in a leading business newspaper must certainly be the very definition of “protest[ing] rather too much“; we should rather all keep in mind the Economist’s rather more gloomy conclusion: for the Czech Republic “[t]he gloss is off.”

                          

Not to worry, though, because French president Nicolas Sarkozy praised Obama’s move as an “excellent decision,” and the editors at Le Monde make it clear that they agree (Hand extended). Yes, the proposed deployment was going to be expensive, for a weapons system about which there remained significant doubts that it ever would actually be able to do what was designed for. But don’t forget the diplomatic dividends, either, Le Monde reminds us. These mainly involve Iran, which is supposed to start multilateral talks with a range of western countries starting on October 1; Obama’s action sends them a message of “good will and realism.” And Russia? Obama’s gesture was directed there to an even greater extent, but Le Monde’s editors unfortunately do not expect to see any corresponding gesture from the Kremlin anytime soon.

By the way, mention should also be made of the announcement by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, noted in Le Monde’s news coverage of the American announcement, that the “SM-3″ missiles which are now to be the replacement anti-missile system will be deployed in turn from 2015 in Poland and the Czech Republic. First of all, that is a bit over-determined: mainstream US news reports put it instead that deployment of those missiles to those countries is but a possibility. And that’s a good thing, too: recall that the original ten defensive rockets that were to be intalled in Poland were designed to counter Iranian missiles of intercontinental range. Poland presumably is a good spot to deploy those – just take a string to your globe to check out the great circle route from Iran to the USA – but that is probably not also the case for defense against the short- and medium-range missiles which are now assumed to be the only Iranian threat for many years to come. In light of this, these suggestions that Warsaw and Prague will eventually get their missiles after all have to be regarded as sheer political bull-headedness – “We won’t let anyone tell us we can’t station missiles in Eastern Europe!” – rather than anything based on considerations of military effectiveness.

                          

Check out that article title again (with whose translation I promise I took only very slight liberties), though: could someone kindly e-mail to me the German expression for “damn with faint praise”? Kirchgeßner’s purpose here is clearly to bend over backwards to cast the Czech presidency in the best-possible light. His piece’s very first sentence (i.e. after the lede) is “Probably no country has encountered such hostility during its EU presidency as the Czech Republic,” going on to cite all the EU and other national officials (especially the French) who cast doubt on the Czechs’ very competence to handle the assignment, and who continued to cruelly snipe at them thereafter – mostly behind-the-scenes, of course. What is more, it turned out to be a tough time to take up the job, what with the world financial crisis, Israel’s attack into Gaza, new disputes about ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, etc. – oh, and also the latest installment of the perennial Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute, which actually gave the Czechs the opportunity to mediate effectively and so chalk up an early success to their credit.

In reality, though, Kirchgeßner’s piece might just as well have been quite a bit shorter; all he really needed to do was cite the no-confidence vote of March 24 and then come full-stop. Because when you’re EU president you just don’t do that, you just don’t break up the government that for six months is more than a national government, that is in fact entrusted by the rest of the EU to provide at least a little trans-national leadership and for sure quite a lot of trans-national administrative effort and leg-work (to consult, set up meetings, establish agendas, etc.). Numerous other countries, with domestic political scenes just as fractious as the current Czech one or even more so (e.g. Italy), have taken care in the past to start preparing long beforehand to call a temporary truce to their national political conflicts to ensure that they could provide the governmental continuity for the EU presidency that is absolutely necessary – to go a good job and, basically, not to let the rest of the EU down. The Czechs could not do that, and so they should be condemned, not have excuses made for them. (And this does not even take into account the obstructive anti-EU snipings of Czech President Václav Klaus before, during, and after the de facto period of the Czech presidency.)

In essence, remember all that bad-mouthing by the French and all the rest, mentioned above, that the Czechs would not be able to handle the job? Well, they were all proved right, on March 24. And you can forget about “better luck next time,” because there probably will never be a next time: if the Lisbon Treaty is finally ratified, that will do away with the whole system of six-month national EU presidencies in favor of a one-person, elected EU President.

“But it’s easy to overlook that the Czechs are very friendly towards Europe,” Kirchgeßner writes towards the end, looking frantically for some silver lining. They punished the Social Democratic Party – widely seen as responsible for the Topolánek government’s fall – in the recent European elections; they also seem not to think much these days of their Eurosceptic president, either. OK, but what about the Slovaks or the Slovenes, whose friendliness towards the EU arguably goes much further than that of the Czechs, in that they have already taken the bitter economic medicine required to bring themselves within the eurozone? They will never have the chance to serve as EU president, nor will Poland, the most important country of that 2004 EU-entrance cohort of all. But the Czech Republic did get that chance – it’s all a function of the alphabetical-order of a country’s name, belive it or not – and messed it up royally.

                          

Let me take care to note here that that “sad end” cited in Anýž’s title does not refer to now, i.e. the first week of May, but rather indeed to what was supposed to be the “end” of the Czech presidency according to the calendar, namely the end of June. Anýž already knows that that is going to be sad, mainly because that was when the usual semi-annual US-EU summit was supposed to happen, this time in Washington, but the Americans have now let it be known that they want to postpone it to sometime in the fall, when the Swedes will be EU president. Now, you might well say that the Czechs already had their US-EU summit, and in Prague, which happened over the weekend of 4-5 April, following on from the London G20 summit during President Obama’s European trip. But that was officially an “informal” meeting; the US-EU get-together in Washington was really supposed to happen, as it always does, in June. But it won’t.

Meanwhile, Anýž notes that the phrase “Czech EU presidency” seems to have disappeared entirely from the American media. And he quotes an analyst from the German Marshall Fund (in Washington) that the Czechs basically lost three months off of their presidency by the change-of-government, and that leaves hardly enough time for any member-state to accomplish the desired EU agenda with which it would have started its presidency. At least the Czechs did take the ratification process for the Lisbon Treaty all the way up to the point where it only needs the president’s signature; this ensures at least “sad might-have-been” status in the eyes of fellow EU citizens, whereas a failure of ratification would have marked them as something considerably worse.

UPDATE: Here’s another cost of switching your government in the middle of your term as EU president: you stage summits and hardly anybody important bothers to show up.

                          

Even if nothing ultimately comes of it, this move certainly denotes some new thinking being applied to both Russo-American and Iranian-American relations. Then again, what about the Czechs and the Poles? As is so rightly pointed out in that NYT article (the one I link to above), in those countries “leaders invested political capital in signing missile defense cooperation treaties with the United States despite domestic opposition.”

(A side-note here, if you’ll permit me: The fools! Of course both the Czechs and the Poles should have simply waited until the new American administration took power last January, to see what the lay-of-the-land would be then regarding this proposed missile-shield. For it does seem clear that Obama has his doubts about whether this deployment is worth it even in its own terms, and further that he is willing to bargain it away for something else. It is absolutely true that both governments to a great degree had to shove these treaties, once having signed them, down the throats of some serious domestic opposition, and maybe in the end that would not have been necessary. It was back last summer (2008) when they did sign the treaties, and it should have been painfully obvious that by then the Bush Administration was the lamest of ducks. What also happened around that time, though – as you might recall – was the unpleasantness between Russia and Georgia, and suddenly both the Czech and Polish heads of government were snatching up their pens to sign the treaties with the Americans because of the closer defense guarantee to those states that they necessarily implied. And those treaties still imply that: as the NYT article also points out, the planned deployment of the battery of Patriot air-defense missiles into Poland – and the American troops to man them – will likely still go ahead no matter what does or does not happen with the anti-missile missiles. It’s already a big mess; the Poles and Czechs simply got conned by the Bush Administration into moving ahead too fast with it when there was no need to do so.)

We get some clue about the current outlook in Poland from coverage of this latest development in one of that country’s two main nation-wide papers, Rzeczpospolita. (Title: “Kommiersant”: Sensational offer from Obama about the [missile] shield.”) That “Kommiersant” in the article’s title is the Russian business newspaper of that name, which actually broke the story about President Obama’s letter, calling it “sensational,” and this piece basically recounts to Rzeczpospolita’s readers Russian coverage of that development. To Polish ears it’s ugly, very ugly. The message from Washington, for example, is phrased as a willingness to “forget about” the planned missile installation if the Russians cooperate; the Americans are described in Kommiersant as being heavily dependent on Russia’s help to deal with the Iranians (which is not likely true, anyway).

The bulk of this Rzeczpospolita article actually treats something else that is related, namely a recent interview done by Sergei Riabkov for another Russian newspaper, Niezavisimaya Gazeta (which the NYT, by the way, does not mention). We do definitely want to hear from this Riabkov now that the Polish-Czech anti-missile “shield” is back in the news, as he is the Russian negotiator with the Americans on that very issue. On the other hand, now that he is back in the spotlight, he talks some big smack. This new American administration, he declares, listens better to Moscow’s arguments than the old one did. And he magnanimously repeats Russia’s previous offer to partner with the Americans on anti-missile defense against Iranian weapons, based of course on a jointly-conducted threat-assessment. He proffers his own three-point assessment of the Obama administration’s viewpoint on the anti-missile shield, one that includes an emphasis on its “financial aspects” (and who knows, he might be right about that).

The point is, though, that the Russians in the person of Riabkov have now been given the opportunity to act as if they are buddy-buddy with the Americans when it comes to this anti-missile shield issue. And that must rankle with the Poles, after the solemn commitments they have made – mostly enshrined in the treaty with the Americans – to have it be built and deployed. They have had quite enough in their country’s past, thank you, of greater powers dealing over their head or not following-through on defense commitments once the balloon goes up and the armies start to march. And to think that it might now be the Americans about to do that, from the looks of things . . .

Poland is traditionally one of the most pro-American countries in the world, and one important reason for that is the support the Americans provided constantly throughout that dark Communist period. (The Reagan administration, for example, sent tremendous material and financial support to the Solidarity trade union as it confronted the “People’s Republic” authorities in the early 1980s.) You can bet that it was this attitude which figured heavily in the first place with the selection of Poland as the spot to base those missiles. So one can only hope, even as the Obama administration continues its foreign policy innovations – and possibly even goes so far as to scrap an anti-missile system that was no more than an expensive negotiating-pawn from the very beginning – that it will at the same time continue to work in full coordination with its Polish allies.

                          

The interview is with Prof. Jirí Trávnícek of Prague’s Charles Univerity, who was heavily involved with a recent survey about Czech reading habits carried out jointly by the (Czech) National Library and the Institute for Czech Literature of the (Czech) Academy of Sciences. And sure enough, that survey (termed the “most extensive so far” even as the good professor reveals towards the interview’s end that the sample was but 1,500 people) shows that the Czechs are among the top readers in the European Union, and indeed in the entire world.

Yes, among that survey’s results is the interesting nugget that a full 6% of Czechs (over the age of 15) read fifty books or more per year. But this is an interview, so MFDnes’ writer Ludek Navara quickly mounts a sneak ad hominem attack: So how many books do you read, Prof. Trávnícek? The good professor doesn’t seem to bat an eye: about 100 per year. That’s two per week, although he goes on to make clear that part of that haul is composed of poetry collections, of which he says it would be easy to read three in one day. Still, you wonder where he finds the time to sleep in view of all the activities ascribed to him by that insert over there on the left side: teacher, literary theorist, editor, critic, publisher.

By way of analogy, you could also be forgiven if you wondered how Czechs in general have time to sleep – or to read to the extent that they claim for themselves in the survey results – given all the competing media that have sprung up on the scene over the decades: radio, TV, Internet, video games, etc. But no, according to the Professor that has not turned out to be any problem for reading as an activity: “. . . one thing is sure: the reading culture is changing, we follow various media. Earlier it was said in a panic that television would steal time for reading. But it hasn’t turned out that way, instead we try to live with the book, Internet, television . . . So we seek the best way to live. The era of media ‘monogamy’ is long gone.” But this strikes me as language excessively of the “hand-waving” sort and leaves me unconvinced: surely the Czechs have to deal with the same fact of there being only 24 hours in a day along with the rest of us mortals? (By the way, for all that the Czechs are claimed to be able to accommodate their lives to new media, this survey also discloses that they remain loathe to actually order books over the Internet.)

Library Subversion

In any event, if you still are willing to accept the assertion that the Czechs are champion readers, the reasons Prof. Trávnícek gives for that are really quite interesting. The kernel of this superiority is supposedly in the Czechs’ private libraries – both their ubiquity and their extent. They had this bit of a drag called Communism to deal with for over forty years, see, and these private libraries fulfilled the vital function of substitute sources of information, even of education. “There you could find out what you could not find out elsewhere,” the good Professor explains, “and which in many cases one just did not talk about. What’s more, books were possessions that could not be nationalized.” Then again, the Czechs can ascribe their book-love not only to the ordeal of Communism but also even further back – back to the 19th century, when the very Czech language was struggling to come back to life and reassert itself (against the German that had been dominant in the Czech lands since the Thirty Years War). “We’re a nation rooted in language and books,” says Prof. Trávnícek. “Contemporary Czech was born thanks to writers, priests, teachers. Who were all people of the book.”

Cool. So is there any other European nation of greater book-lovers than the Czechs. Yes there is, says the Professor: in fact the various lands of Scandinavia are even more into books than are the Czechs. And what about the world? Then it would have to be the Canadians. (That’s among Western cultures, to which the interview is limited.) They’re the (Western) world’s greatest book-lovers because of their excellent network of libraries (presumably he means the public sort here), their easy access to books generally, and their cultural identification with their own national literature. (Funny, nothing comes to my mind with the phrase “Canadian literature” – as opposed to “Canadian musicians,” of course – but I’m probably just ignorant on that score. Canadian readers of this weblog are certainly invited to write in to enlighten me.) And by the way, one should not include here the Québécois – in fact, Prof. Trávnícek says, they rather pull down what is otherwise the excellent data on Canadian book-love.

See any common thread here: Scandinavia, Canada? That’s right, Prof. Trávnícek eventually gets around to making the logical point that the committed book-lovers are always more likely to be found the further one travels away from the equator. People who live where it’s warm all the time spend most of their lives outdoors, you see, while cold weather outside is just the thing to make a person look for something – or someone – interesting to curl up with in a blanket in front of the radiator.

Trash Reading

Then there’s the closely-related question of what it is that the Czechs are reading all the time – more precisely, of whether it’s of a nature to make the outside observer laud their reading habits or simply reject them with a dismissive wave of the hand. Yet another inserted column on the left side (the one headed Nejoblíbenejsí Kniha or “favorite book”) reveals what currently tops the Czech best-seller list. Books by Betty MacDonald dominate, both at #1 – The Egg and I, which, amazingly, was first published in 1945 – and #7 – What Life Gave and Took Away. Number two is a book about the Good Soldier Svejk, a beloved figure from Czech fable, while #3 is of course the latest Harry Potter. Then the Bible, then Grandmother by Bozena Nemcová, a timeless Czech classic that can be likened to, say, Gone with the Wind for Americans (not that I ever read it myself, or even owned it).

All in all, not a bad selection. And indeed, Navara and Prof. Trávnícek have an extended discussion (relative, at least, to the length of the interview) about brak, or “rubbish” in the reading-material sense. The Professor’s attitude here is simple: “What is rubbish?” In his view, as long as people are reading something – even the labels of the bottles of Old Rotgut from which they are guzzling, apparently – then that’s good, because then they get used to reading and might go on to do even more of it. Harry Potter, trashy sexploitation novels, and the like? No problem, all material is welcome. As he quotes his German colleagues, “The main thing is that they’re reading.” And the German case is in fact instructive in comparison: the Germans have a number of formal institutes to keep tabs on their reading habits and to promote them, while the Czechs at least lack the latter (i.e. formal organizations to promote reading). Nonetheless, the Czechs read more – again, if you want to believe this survey sponsored by the National Library and the Institute for Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences.

(Readers are advised that EuroSavant will now take a few days’ break from posting for the holidays. I’ll be curled up with a pile of books – no joke!)

                          

From the very beginning of the European Union (i.e. from 1958; it was then known as the European Economic Community) the member-states have taken turns, at six-month intervals, at assuming the “EU presidency,” although the role is more-accurately described as the presidency/chairmanship of the Council of the European Union, which is the legislative forum for the member-states and usually the most-powerful of the EU’s component institutions. Naturally, the queue of countries waiting to serve their turn as president includes all EU member-states, and it was in the first half of this year that the first country from the great 10-country EU enlargement of May, 2004, had its turn as president, namely Slovenia.

The thing is, the second half of 2008 has proved to be far-from-normal times. First there was the diplomatic crisis over the conflict between Russia and Georgia, and now we have the international system of finance seriously in need of some restructuring. France is now EU President, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy has by all accounts done a credible job in responding to the worldwide financial panic. (His intervention in the Russian-Georgian conflict to secure the cease-fire was subject to rather more mixed reviews.) The comfort the EU has had with Sarkozy as point-man on that crisis may have much to do with the French president’s own personal qualities, but it also stems from France’s status as one of the EU’s major powers and its deep and capable governmental machinery. What if one or more of these grave problems had arisen during the Slovenian presidency: could President Danilo Turk and the Slovenian government have effectively handled the task of leading the EU response?

Of even more urgency is the question is “Will Václav Klaus (president), Mirek Topolánek (premier) and the rest of the Czech government be able to handle taking over the EU presidency as scheduled on January 1, 2009?” It will be the first time that country has ever had that responsibility, of course. In addition to sheer inexperience, the Czech Republic is a relatively small member-state anyway (10 million population); more serious is the fact that it does not use the euro (and probably won’t qualify to do so for at least a couple more years), so that Czech representatives routinely have found themselves not invited to the vital meetings of the Euro-zone that have take place over the past few weeks.

That is why the idea has surfaced – probably from French sources, admittedly – to keep Sarkozy and France on as EU president well into next year, until the beginning of the following year in fact, at least when it comes to financial/economic matters and, as Bos reported at his press conference, discussion about this is ongoing within EU circles. This would be quite a break from 50-year-old EU procedure, of course. As for one country handling financial/economic matters and another handling the rest, how does that work? Where is the boundary-line? Already Germany, the UK, and Luxembourg have indicated that they are not interested in any such thing, the NRC article (with no by-line) reports. The Netherlands, though, if Bos’ remarks are any indication, could find something like that acceptable – provided, however, that the continued independence of the European Central Bank from political influence is guaranteed, something that Sarkozy has tried to undermine in the past.

That any such measure would amount to something of an insult towards the Czech Republic (“Sorry guys: we don’t think you can handle the job!”) is one aspect to which none of the EU leaders who are discussing this plan seem to be devoting much thought. But all of that becomes understandable once again when you remember that the Czech president is still Václav Klaus, who is way down the list of the EU’s favorite national leaders. Long-term readers of this blog will recall that Klaus was rather alarmingly stand-offish about the EU even back just previous to the Czech Republic’s accession referendum in June, 2004. (OK, so maybe in the €S context “long-term reader” is more of a theoretical concept – well, except: Hi Mom! Anyway, if you want to check out my past treatment of Václav Klaus’ rather strained attitude towards the EU, you could start here.) He has adopted the same idea towards the Lisbon Treaty, which he plainly is opposed to: after the “No” in the June Irish referendum, he straight-out declared it to be null-and-void, which is something you’re just not supposed to say in polite EU society.

Topolánek in Danger of Toppling

But it’s not just Václav Klaus, or the fact that the Czech Republic is not in the Euro-zone that has the idea of an upcoming Czech EU presidency making people queasy. In the Czech Republic the president fulfills a mostly ceremonial role as head-of-state (similar to Germany, say, or the UK’s Queen Elizabeth) anyway, and it’s the actual functioning government of premier Mirek Topolánek that is looking shaky, according to a new analysis by Kilian Kirchgessner in the Frankfurter Rundschau (Everyone Vexes Topolánek). Regional elections held last weekend resulted in serious losses for his ODS party, and defections of ODS members of the national legislature from personal loyalty to Topolánek are increasing, to the point that there is a serious risk he will be replaced as party leader. A no-confidence motion against his government in the Czech parliament earlier this week turned out to be premature, but nonetheless Topolánek has even cancelled a visit he was supposed to make to the White House and George W. Bush next week to stay home and try to save his political skin. Maybe there was another, hidden reason for the cancellation, though – and I don’t mean Bush’s increasing lame-duck irrelevance; most friendly world leaders like to visit the White House and get that presidential photo-op no matter what. As Kirchgessner reports in his FR piece, Topolánek, having signed on 8 July the treaty to establish a US-run missile-defense radar site in the Czech Republic, may now be in danger of failing to gain the necessary ratification of that pact from the Czech parliament. Polls show that two-thirds of the Czech population disapproves of the deal; Topolánek’s ODS government went ahead and signed the treaty anyway, but a big part of the success of the opposition parties last weekend stemmed from the public’s unhappiness.

It fell earlier this year to little Slovenia to demonstrate that the EU’s new and small members could still be competent to run the Union’s affairs effectively as President of the Council, and by all accounts they did a good job. (Of course, they had few demands placed on them; and remember that Cyprus will take over the presidency in the second half of 2012! How are we feeling about that?) The Czechs, in contrast, look seriously in danger of dropping the ball for their fellow new member-states. Maybe Sarkozy would be preferable after all.

                          

In the meantime, the countries of the NATO alliance struggle to come to terms with the new ruthless military face Russia has shown in this crisis. Germany now stands central in that military alliance, in the same way it has stood central for some time now within the European Union, again because of its sheer weight of population and economic power (and, who knows, maybe also its reputation for military ability in the past), which makes German commentary on these recent developments particularly interesting.

A very good contribution comes from Jochen Bittner, who writes a weblog, called Planet in Progress, that is carried off the Die Zeit webserver. For his essay entitled Good bye [sic], Putin, he takes as his starting-point that old saw about NATO’s purpose (attributed to the Alliance’s first Secretary-General, the 1st Baron Ismay, that it is “to keep the Americans in, the Soviets out and the Germans down.” But things have changed since back in those days, especially since the break-up of the Soviet Eastern European empire in 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union itself two years after that. For one thing, there has been no further need to keep the Germans “down” – the EU has itself done quite a sufficient job of anchoring German interests within those of Europe generally – and indeed the impulse in recent years has rather been the opposite, i.e. to motivate greater German involvement and influence within NATO – in the interest of gaining the additional German troops and money such greater involvement would necessarily bring with it, you understand.

Russians Still Out?

So no more “Germans down.” That’s fine, but an even more remarkable turn-around in Baron Ismay’s aphoristic formulation involved “Russians out”: no more were they to be kept out, they were rather to be invited in! Yes, NATO policy towards Russia during the Yeltsin years (especially as espoused by the Americans, as Bittner point out) was actually one of the “Open Door.” This did not extend so far as actually offering NATO membership (although I can remember how that option was certainly discussed, as incredible as that may seem today), but did still mean considerable cooperation and co-involvement – as long as Russia started behaving itself in politically-acceptable ways, of course. At the bare minimum this meant peaceful conflict-resolution in accordance with the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 (together with various subsequent accords which reinforced the same point).

Now, with their actions in Georgia, the Russians have grossly violated that expected standard of behavior. And quite naturally the existing mechanisms of NATO-Russian cooperation were put on hold yesterday as a result at the Ministerial session of NATO’s North Atlantic Council, as the NATO collective statement made clear to Russia that “we cannot continue with business as usual.” Have things turned around so complely that it is time to return to the old days of having NATO focus on keeping “Russians out”?

To that Bittner says “yes,” but with good reason, namely the justification Moscow has used for its Georgia intervention: protecting Russian passport-holders outside of Russia’s own boundaries. This is revealed in an editorial the Russian ambassador to NATO, Dimitri Rogosin, wrote for the International Herald Tribune (Washington’s hypocrisy, in English), writing “As for the defense of our citizens outside the country, the use of force to defend one’s compatriots is traditionally regarded as a form of self-defense. Countries such as the United States, Britain, France and Israel have at numerous times resorted to the use of armed force to defend their citizens outside national borders,” going on to cite incidents such as the intervention of Belgian paratroopers in Zaire in 1965 and the US attack on Grenada in 1983.

Protecting One’s Own – Outside

But there is a problem here with Ambassador Rogosin’s reasoning, Bittner says: the intervetions he cites have involved the evacuation of a country’s citizens outside national borders, not the conquest of the territory in question. Yet it is that latter “right” that the Russians now claim – and, if you think about it, it’s quite a frightening “right” indeed, employable at their discretion to invade the Ukraine, the Baltics, and any number of the other states in Russia’s “near abroad” which in the past where subject to the authority of the USSR, and which Russia presumably would like to have back.

It’s this “right” that the world has seen before, namely in the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 to “protect” the ethnic Germans there, made possible by the capitulation of the Munich Agreement with Britain and France and which of course proved to be just the next step in the Nazi plan for the conquest of its neighbors in Central Europe. (This is an argument which we have seen before here when discussing the reactions to Georgia from the Czech press.) It’s simply ethno-imperialism, and it’s ramifications are just as frightening in 2008 as they turned out to be back then.

One country that has not been intimidated so far is Poland, and in fact it seems that the signing of the agreement with the US to set up the missile defense base there was speeded up in response to the Georgia crisis. That action is regarded approvingly by Nils Kreimeier of the Financial Times Deutschland, who writes in his commentary article A Shield at the Right Time about the curious contradiction lying behind the US-Polish arrangement. Ostensibly, that missile base (as well as the supporting radar installations in the Czech Republic) have nothing to do with Russia, since it’s ridiculous to think that it could have any effect on any nuclear attack Russia might want to launch against the US or any other enemy. But on the other hand, it’s quite apparent that they must indeed have something to do with Poland’s neighbor to the East, as the Poles have found itself on the receiving end of military and even nuclear threats from the Russian military of a sort that have not been brandished on this continent since the bad old days of the Cold War. More to the point, those basing agreements that the Polish and Czech governments have recently signed with the US mean valuable security reassurances for both countries in these times of increased uncertainty and threats. That can be seen in that aspect of the agreement with Poland that will have US anti-aircraft and anti-missile Patriot missiles, manned at first by US troops, stationed on Polish soil – a clear violation, by the way, of assurances made to the Russian government in connection with the admission of Eastern European states to NATO that there would never actually be US or Western European troops stationed in those countries. Nonetheless, that Poland and the Czech Republic have in this way contracted directly with Washington, rather than being satisfied that their NATO or EU memberships already protected them sufficiently, is also a very interesting aspect to this development.

Finally, Andreas Schwarzkopf in the Frankfurther Rundschau (Together Against Moscow) has a look at the galvanizing effect on NATO Alliance unity that the developments in Georgia has had. Going into yesterday’s North Atlantic Council meeting there had been worries expressed over the division in opinion among NATO members about how react, with the US together with Eastern European states wanting to take a hard line while the others, particularly France and Germany, seeking a softer diplomatic line. What finally emerged – in the form of the statement quoted in part above – he judges to be a decent-enough compromise, although there must be follow-up. In particular, an end must come to the disunity within European ranks that has greeted each attempt up to now by Vladimir Putin’s government to intimidate its neighbors, from the cyber-war unleashed against Estonia in the spring of last year to natural gas cut-offs to Lithuania and the Ukraine. In order to let Russia know without any doubt that violence or economic threats will no longer be tolerated behavior, the West itself must change, too. The Eastern European states must be put on a shorter leash, made to understand, as Schwarzkopf puts it, that “revenge is a poor counselor.” And the US must change its policies back to be willing to work with its allies in a multilateral framework.