One excellent window onto this controversy is the main Czech business newspaper, Hospodářské noviny, which now has an article on the latest development: Bratislava is in a rage: Budapest to contribute to countrymen in Slovakia towards fines for Hungarian. Put simply: the Hungarian government is raising a fund of money – mainly from its own resources, although private contributions are also encouraged – to pay the fines and legal costs for Hungarian-nationals in Slovakia that run afoul of that Language Law. Even though those that do so will by definition be Slovak citizens, although of Hungarian ethnic nationality. The Slovak Minister of Culture Jozef Bednár has issued a statement condemning Hungary for “intervening in the internal affairs of the Slovak Republic.” That does seem to be an accurate accusation, as far as it goes, although on the other hand it was also the standard line trotted out by the Soviet Union and its satellites whenever the West chose to complain about human rights violations and the like in those countries while the Cold War was still raging

Indeed, you could think that a bit of “interference in internal affairs” is quite in order here to stifle this childish and embarrassing brouhaha – intervention not from Hungary, but the European Union. Yet it seems that neither the doctrine concerning relations between EU institutions and member-states nor the sheer willingness of EU top officials to actually do anything has evolved sufficiently for that to happen.

Things really get interesting towards the end of the HN article when the author (the piece is attributed only to the Czech press agency CTK) introduces secondary information – like only entities registered as organizations or businesses are liable to the fine, not physical persons. Or the fact that no entity has actually been fined yet! If that’s really true, you can safely guess that the Language Law was really intended to be little more than a Slovak political gesture. Unfortunately, that gesture is kicking up more than a bit of trouble with the neighbors.

                          

So, the Slovak and the Irish Republics: not two countries one would normally associate with one another. Now the latter is rather cross at the former, and since one side to the dispute does use English as an official language, you can read about all the details in the Irish Independent, among other places.

Executive Summary: Slovak police decided they needed to conduct an exercise to test airport screening personnel, so they inserted actual explosives into the luggage of eight unwitting passengers. Unfortunately, one of them managed to make it through security without being detected, and so actually flew to Dublin while carrying one-tenth of a kilogram of explosives in his suitcase. The hapless explosives-mule, 49-year-old electrician Stefan Gonda, according to the Independent article actually lives smack-dab in central Dublin – which was where a multi-block area was sealed off earlier today and five buildings evacuated, as an explosives team from the Irish Army arrived to greet Mr. Gonda and secure the stash.

Apologies are now flowing profusely to the Irish from Slovak government officials. Following on the heels of the “underwear bomber” above Detroit on Christmas Day, this is really rather abysmal timing for such a similar incident. Too few people in the world – excluding also certain US Senators, as in one “McCain, John” – are even aware of Slovakia’s existence, preferring to utter “Czechoslovakia,” but this is not really the ideal way for that country to make itself better known. And in keeping with that general obscurity, this further article from Sme (“Police: We informed the Irish today”) makes it clear that the incident happened at the “international airport” in Poprad*, and not at the Bratislava airport as the Independent article would have it. On that same page you can relish no fewer than two videos featuring embarrassed Slovak officials mouthing their excuses to the press – respectively the Poprad police chief and the spokeswoman for Poprad-Tatry Airport – but of course those excuses are mouthed in Slovak.

* OK, maybe you don’t know that Poprad is over in the eastern part of the country, while Bratislava is way over in the western part, but you surely heard of the city before, back when it was a candidate to host the 2006 Winter Olympics! Seriously, though, those looking for a cheap-but-good skiing vacation – particularly European residents – should check the place out.

                          

Will stay at the Škoda production facilities, that is, most of which are located in the area of Mladá Boleslav in the Czech Republic. Here it is instructive to bring up the main cause to which the Lidové noviny article (credited to the Czech ČTK press-agency) attributes this sales success. Has Škoda come up with a revolutionary new car? Maybe an irresistible ad campaign? None of the above: it’s the incentive plan recently passed by the German government that rewards with €2,500 those who scrap their older car and buy a new one. It just so happens that it’s particularly the Škoda Fabia (together with the VW Golf – and note that Škoda is wholly-owned by VW) that fits the bill of being the sort of practical, economical car that most Germans currently in the market of taking advantage of that bonus for getting a new car are looking for.

So in effect, the German government is giving away public money to ensure continued five-days-a-week pay for auto-workers in the northeastern Czech Republic, right?

Apparently yes. While it is unlikely German officials behind this scheme figured out specifically how Czech workers would benefit from it, they must have realized that much of the benefit from the increased auto-sales it was designed to create would accrue to auto-manufacturers outside of Germany. If anything, they probably figured that Slovakia would reap most of the benefits; even more than the Czech Republic, Slovakia over the past decade has truly turned itself into “Europe’s Detroit,” hosting myriad auto-plants owned by a number of foreign firms and their associated suppliers.

Maybe Škoda’s government-sponsored success is sweetened somewhat for German officials by the fact that the resulting profits accrue to VW. (And VW chalked up record profits last year. Remember also that another aim of the €2,500 bonus program was environmental, i.e. replacing older, dirtier-running cars with newer, cleaner ones.) Also, Škoda has supplied a helping hand of the traditional sort: it has been offering its own “bye-bye-bonus” – as in “bye-bye!” to your old car – of a further 8% discount on its models. (Eating directly into VW profits – what do the Germans think of that?) In general, though, to me this entire phenomenon can be viewed as the counter-example to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who you might recall proposed offering state financial assistance to ailing French auto companies, but only on condition that they maintain production within France, not at their plants in the Czech Republic. The German government has refrained here from any similar sort of heavy-handed measures, and correctly: if any important world government official still really believes, in his heart-of-hearts, in the virtues of free trade and the evils of protectionism, he knows that it’s best to let people to buy freely from the lowest-cost manufacturers, wherever they may be located. For that’s when economic resources are most-efficiently employed to provide the goods and services people want – and, in turn, those most-efficient workers can turn around and purchase goods and services for which their customers’ countries hold a comparative advantage, and everyone is better-off.

There’s a second lesson here, as well, namely that government initiatives can actually achieve their intended beneficial consequences, even in the midst of this worldwide economic crisis. This would seem particularly relevant in light of a similar “cash-for-clunkers” plan recently proposed in the US by Congresswoman Betty Sutton (D-Ohio). Indeed, the German plan is even a victim of its own success: the Škoda “bye-bye-bonus webpage urges readers “Don’t hesitate too long!” because, as the Lidové noviny article notes, the German bonus fund will likely be exhausted by the beginning of April, having spent €1.5 billion to assist in the purchase of 600,000 new cars.

UPDATE: Sure enough, this article from Die Welt confirms that, after 600,000 new cars have been financed with the new-car bonus fund, that will be it. It’s all very mathematical (as the Germans like to be): €1.5 billion was budgeted, for handing out in €2,500 doses to those who qualify – well, that comes out to 600,000 potential bonus-awards, and that is all that there will be. That’s the news coming out of Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel’s office, and it was put out despite what you can understand have already been pleas from various state government officials and other politicians to keep the bonus-program going after that. But the answer is “no,” and the Die Welt article further reports that, as of the date of this posting (Thurs., 19 March 09), 287,000 applications were already in at the relevant office (that’s the Federal Office for Economics and Foreign-Trade Control, German abbreviation BAFA).

                          

Gee, why did the Slovaks go and close that reactor in the first place a few weeks ago? Namely because doing so, and doing so permanently by the end of 2008, was a provision in the accession agreement by which the country became a EU member-state back in 2004 in the first place. With the Jaslovské Bohunice reactor we’re talking in fact about the very first nuclear reactor in the former Czechoslovakia, whose construction began back in 1958 although it first went into operation only in 1972. Naturally, then, it’s a reactor built in the Soviet style, which in the light of such incidents as Chernobyl raised safety concerns to such a degree that the EU insisted that Slovakia eventually shut it down.

But now it’s powered up again, because otherwise (according to Slovak Economics Minister Lubomir Jahnatek) over the weekend Slovakia already stood on the brink of a full energy “blackout.” “I am aware,” Premier Fico declared at that press conference, “that with this we are violating the EU accession treaty, and take full political responsibility.” It’s true that actual permission would have been virtually impossible to get. Such treaties can be modified only by unanimous consent of all member-states, so that it not only would it have taken a lot of time and trouble to ask all the others to do so, but you can be sure that at least one of them would have vetoed the move, namely Austria, which has been upset since the old Communist times over both Jaslovske Bohunicé and the one Soviet-era reactor in what is now the Czech Republic at Temelín. The Austrians are namely downwind of them both, you see.

So one of the newer member-states now stands in clear violation of its accession treaty. Not necessarily because it wanted to be, you understand, but because it felt it had to be. And this the EU’s favorite East European pupil we’re talking about, Slovakia, which just adopted the euro.

No Common EU Energy Strategy

We’ll see what happens next, but in the meantime this article by Thomas Urban in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (“Atom power instead of dependence”) gives a valuable overview of the Eastern European energy situation even as it omits mention of Slovakia’s latest move. Basically, those Eastern European EU member-states (plus Ukraine) are getting increasingly alarmed at their continued dependence on the Russians for energy and have determined that atomic reactors provide an answer. Not old reactors (provided by the Russians in the first place) though, to be sure, but rather new reactors, as expensive as they are to build. The leading example is the new one paid for (and so currently being built to be used by) Poland and the three Baltic states, located next to an existing reactor at Ignalina in Latvia – that one is an old Soviet-type reactor, by the way, that Latvia has agreed to shut down by the end of 2009.

I find two additional incidental details in Urban’s article to be interesting. In his discussion of Slovakia he mentions that Jaslovské Bohunice is by no means that country’s only atomic reactor, it in fact has six others in operation – which casts Minister Jahnatek’s statement about an impending “blackout” in an interesting light. More alarmingly, Urban asserts that “up to now the EU has developed no common energy strategy” – this after we all witnessed a similar Russia-Ukraine pipeline spat at the beginning of 2006 that similarly put EU supplies of natural gas at risk? The EU commissioner in charge of energy is Andris Piebalgs, and that he comes from Latvia should really be no particular source of comfort. Rather, the energy portfolio’s chair being filled by a Baltic state official unfortunately demonstrates what an unimportant position it is regarded as being and at least partly explains that lack of a common EU-wide energy strategy.

                          

Against this background, it’s amusing to take a look at comments from the Czech press. Probably unavoidably, you have there your “sour grapes”-type pieces, like the article in Právo entitled “After many years the Slovaks are standing in lines again for the euro.” (I don’t give the link to that because apparently Právo puts its articles behind a subscription-wall around one day after their initial open-to-all-readers appearance on the website. That’s an annoying problem, and in this case I’m particularly disappointed that I could not read more of that article’s actual text – I know of its existence and headline simply from my RSS reader. For you see, in the past and with the name Rudé Právo this was the official organ of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, so it’s rather rich to see it invoking the endless standing-in-line which was a leading feature of life under the Communist regime – as if the euro is taking the Slovaks back to Communism!) Or a similar article in Lidové noviny (which you can see in its entirety), entitled Euro-coins are lacking, Slovaks despair. Yeah right, “despair” (zoufají si); like this isn’t something that will just solve itself in a few days, and in the meantime (in fact, up through15 January) the old Slovak koruna is still legal tender, so it’s not like there’s some sort of money-shortage.

Then there is the Prague opinion-weekly Respekt, which you can almost always rely upon for some pretty spot-on commentary – but which, on the other hand, likes to make most of its content subscription-only. Here we’re in luck, as it turns out that we are all allowed access to a quite palatable commentary on the new Slovak euro from Luboš Palata: The euro to the East.

As Palata tastefully points out, at the inception of the Slovak koruna back at the beginning of 1993 you could have gotten some steep odds for any betting proposition that the Slovaks would end up besting the Czechs by any economic or financial measure. Back then the Czech and the Slovak korunas emerged from the common Czechslovak koruna at a one-to-one ratio. Indeed, that was an unavoidable consequence of the mechanism used to split the currencies, which was namely putting a sticker on each Czechoslovak koruna banknote to denote whether from here on out it was to be construed in Czech or a Slovak korunas. But that did not mean that there was any sort of requirement that they stay that way, and in fact the Slovak koruna in short order fell below parity to the Czech crown and has stayed that way up to the present day, when the Czech crown commands around a 15% premium to the euro compared to the Slovak crown. (Palata claims that there was a brief period at the end of 1996/beginning of 1997 when the Slovak crown in fact was worth more than the Czech crown. I had just moved out of Prague by then and so was no longer directly on-the-scene, but I still maintain that I don’t remember that happening. It’s actually something that’s hard to believe, but he says it did occur.)

Economics Counts, Not Politics

The thing is, it’s not the currencies that are “worth more” that are allowed by the ECB and the European Commission’s Monetary Directorate to fold themselves into the euro. After all, Italy was allowed into the euro-zone from the very beginning at a fixed lira-to-euro exchange rate of around 1,936. Rather, accession to the euro-zone is gained (or is supposed to be gained – but enough of that) only by satisfying certain economic criteria that attest to a national economy’s stability: inflation below a certain level, government budget deficit at or below 3% of GDP, total government debt at or below 60% of GDP, long-term interest rates below a certain level (full criteria here).

Slovakia, obviously, has satisfied those criteria and so now has the euro, while the Czechs have not. But the intriguing point in Palata’s article is how lucky those Slovaks-in-the-know feel that the criteria are purely economic and financial, and not political. Because in that latter case Slovakia’s acceptance for the euro would have become considerably more doubtful. The current Slovak premier is a certain Robert Fico (that last name is properly pronounced [fee'-tso], by the way), head of a political party he formed as his own political vehicle (called Smer, or “direction”), who is probably best described as a populist. It’s more the company he keeps, in the political coalition that enables him to form a government, that raises eyebrows, namely the SNS, or Slovak National Party, which is noted for its hostility to fellow citizens who are not Slovaks by nationality (namely Hungarians and the gypsies), and the HZDS (“Movement for a Democratic Slovakia”) of Vladimir Meciar, who up through 1998 seemed to be working hard to bring a one-man dictatorship to the country. You can see, then, that to eyes across the border, the make-up of the current Slovak government is somewhat ugly – but again, that doesn’t count towards the decision of whether to award the euro or not.

(For that matter, it’s clear that a EU member-state’s internal political situation does not really affect its eligibility to take up the EU presidency. This weblog has already discussed how the Czech president Václav Klaus makes many in the EU uncomfortable, and the Czech government of Mirek Topolánek is also liable to fall at any moment. Nevertheless, the official EU calendar of which country becomes president when simply marches on with its iron logic. Of course, the presidency is just a six-month thing, whereas euro-zone membership presumably is a bit more permanent.)

“Wait,” you might now say, “you mean that these Slovak politicians, as disreputable as they seem to be, still managed to get the economics right to bring their country into the euro-zone?” No, not really; the credit for that rather goes to the Slovak Democratic Coalition (in Slovak the SDK), and specifically to its leader, Mikuláš Dzurinda. It was during his time as Slovak premier (namely from 1998 through 2006) that the country enacted the economic reforms whose payoff now is euro-adoption. More broadly, of course, the “payoff” was the inspiration of Slovak economic performance that truly does shine when compared to that of neighboring countries. Slovakia actually has a “flat” income tax, and the Dzurinda government put through a number of other reforms particularly with a view towards attracting foreign investment. One result of this is that Slovakia has so many auto factories and related businesses that it is sort of the European Detroit – the Detroit of the good old days, that is, like the 1950s (although that may not be the best position to be in to make it through 2009 and beyond). Taxes and inflation are low, economic growth is high: 8.9% in 2006, for example.

No Credit to Mickey in the End

Of course, these sorts of economic reforms naturally caused quite a bit of short-term pain, which in the end was enough to get Dzurinda and his government voted out of office in 2006 and replaced by Fico and his rather disreputable coalition. Wisely, Fico more-or-less just kept the economic reforms in place, and so is now positioned to get his almost entirely-undeserved reward of the euro. That’s one really sour aspect to this underdog’s tale: the politician who did the yeoman work to bring the euro to Slovakia gets none of the credit; indeed, as Palata reports, the speech of Slovakia’s central bank governor on New Year’s Day inaugurating the euro contained absolutely no mention of Dzurinda. Another is that this accomplishment justifiably allows the Slovaks to get a little “in your face” to its neighbors, particularly to the Czechs and the Hungarians, neither of which is at all close to the euro, and with both of which it has rather traumatic histories (each traumatic in its own way) – and Fico and his fellow top Slovak politicians are precisely the sort of fellows who would be inclined to get all loud and boastful in this way. What is more, for any upcoming deterioration in Slovak economic conditions (which seems inevitable for the Slovaks in 2009, as it does for us all), the euro enables politicians to point to it and the qualification requirements to get it as an excuse, rather than to their mistaken policies which might really be to blame – and, again, Fico is the sort of politician who is particularly inclined to take advantage of this.

Let me add here in passing that I am really aching to finally get my hands on some authentic Slovak euro-coins. Nice, eh? – particularly the two- and one-euro pieces, with the Slovak national emblem, the double-cross. (No cheap jokes allowed.) I might be in Prague again soon, am wondering whether it would be worth it to take a quick trip to Bratislava to gather some Slovak change. I estimate that it will be a while before I come across these “naturally” in Amsterdam – maybe only next summer at the soonest, since last summer I seemed to come across Slovaks all the time paying a visit here. What would be the analog-country, for comparison purposes, within the 2002 time-frame when the euro-coins were first introduced in the original 12 euro-zone states? Maybe Finland, in terms of both distance from Amsterdam and size of population; and it’s still rather rare here, in my experience, to come across Finnish euro-coins.

                          

The article then tries to plumb why it would be Slovakia, of all places, that could be in the terrorists’ sights. Oh yes, that would be because the Slovaks, obedient recent-inductees into NATO, sent forty of their soldiers to Afghanistan and about a hundred to Iraq, where they’re down south, at Hilla.

Somehow . . . I don’t think so. Slovakia’s a rather new country, you see – dates only from 1 January, 1993. It got its seat at the UN early-on, and by now it even has its seats at the EU and NATO. But, after those achievements, the Slovaks might better be advised to slow down a bit: some attributes of being a true international “player” you really don’t want. Personally, Slovakia is on my list of places to get away from all the terror and security hokum, to Bratislava or even to the picturesque Tatra mountains that form the country’s spine both in its geography and in its identity.

(But maybe not in the winter. Also from LN: Czech Tourist Dies in the Tatras, caught in winter storms. He was the eleventh Czech to die in those mountains this year. And, sensibly, looking at some Slovak papers – Sme and Pravda – they’re much more interested in the missing tourist in the Tatras than any alleged terrorist threats.)

                          

Most historians, and many Slovaks (not “Slovakians,” President Bush) maintain that it did not, that the two peoples had a history of living together in one state for many decades (since 1918) and neither side particularly wanted to split from the other. Under this view, the split was simply caused by the curious coincidence that, in the early nineties just after Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution,” politicians came to power in both the Czech/Moravian part of the country and in Slovakia who viewed making a split happen as a good move towards furthering their own ends. In Czech/Moravia, that was premier Václav Klaus (now Czech president), who liked the idea of splitting off the country’s economically under-performing half to take it out of the way of the particular vision of capitalism and privatization that he intended to install in his own part of the country. And, for Slovakia, that was Vladimír Meciar, who of course saw as the best guarantee of the consolidation of his political power the sort of rabid Slovak nationalism that demanded nothing less than complete separation and the formation of a new, independent Slovak state.

Sure, there were obvious long-standing cultural differences between Czechs and Slovaks – that’s why, ethnologically speaking, “Czech” is not merely a synonym for “Slovak” nor vice-versa. Language was one: Slovak is certainly a different language from Czech, although closely-related. (I would call the differences narrower than those between German and Dutch, perhaps closer to the differences between Danish and Swedish.) And these nations have had very different enemies to contend with through the ages: for the Czechs, it has been the Germans, for the Slovaks the Hungarians, although their experiences are also similar here in that both these antagonists came close at certain points to largely wiping out Czech resp. Slovak culture. But were these cultural differences really so gaping back in 1992 (when the decision was made) or since then to even require a separation of Czechoslovakia into those two component nations? Perhaps Ivan Strpka’s structured essay on Slovakia in Trouw, part of the Zelfportret Europa series which we are about to review, especially in comparison with the earlier entry for the Czech Republic can help you judge for yourself on that question.

Yes, our guide today through Slovak culture is the Slovak poet Ivan Strpka. (The Czech and Slovak languages share, among many other characteristics, their both regarding both the letters “r” and “l” as allowable vowels; “wolf” in Czech, for example, is simply “vlk”.) That shadowy shape you see behind him in his picture is Bratislava castle, by the way, quite appropriate as that ranks up with Tatra mountainscapes as canonic images of Slovakia, as the windmill is to the Netherlands. He made his debut as a poet just as Stalinism was descending again on Czechoslovakia, i.e. after the invasion in 1969, and is also a pop musician. He belongs to a fraction of Slovak poets, called the “Lone Runners,” whose main common characteristic is that all of them refuse to belong to any fraction; he was also active in the “Velvet Revolution” as it played out in 1989 in Slovakia. Here are his Zelfportret Europa choices for his native land.

• Painting: “Tatra Ballade,” by Vladimír Popovic, a work in papier-maché and wood. Bad start: First of all, if it’s a “painting” at all, it doesn’t rely too much on actual paint for what it tries to convey. Second of all, it’s otherwise definitely what you could call “avant-garde”; in the accompanying caption Strpka claims it depicts, against a snow-white background of the Tatra mountains, “a knight, his princess, and the white dame,” in a way that alludes to a number of “struggles”: “between nature and culture, between pure survival and making history, between idea and reality, between emptiness and room for Man.” Well beyond my ken; is Strpka trying to maintain that Slovakia is itself an “avant-garde” country. I don’t believe that (apart from certain elements of economic and tax policy, but that’s not what we’re talking about here).
  

• 
  Photograph: Bratislava, 21 August 1968, by Ladislav Bielik. (© Ladislav Bielik, taken in Bratislava, Slovakia on the 21st of August, 1968, by kind permission of the O.K.O. Agency, Slovakia. I’ve enlarged this photo deliberately, as it doesn’t come from Trouw but rather directly from Ladislav Bielik’s son, Peter.)

  That’s much better; here we have the photo, that was quite famous for its time, of a worker in a Bratislava square (at Comenius University, as it happens) baring his breast in despair to an invading Soviet tank. Just as we saw in the entry for the Czech Republic, Slovak culture was also deeply influenced by life under the Communist dictatorship from 1948 to 1989 – although notice, in the Czech cultural portrait, that only indirect aspects of the 1968 “Prague Spring” period of liberalization and Soviet invasion of that August are presented (Jan Palach; rejoicing over the 1969 hockey victory over the Soviet team), and not something directly from that invasion, as here.
  

• 
  Person: Milan Rastislav Stefánik. General Stefánik was a World War I hero, who worked as a diplomat for France but also had a major hand in the creation of the “Czech Legion” of Czech-Slovaks taken prisoner by the Russian army, who re-organized into a military unit in Russia and fought the Bolsheviks all the way across Siberia, as they struggled to reach the port of Vladivostok for evacuation back home. Then, at the end of the war, he was largely responsible together with the Czech Tomas Masaryk for the creation of the new Czechoslovak state – and he certainly was mainly responsible for the Slovaks going along with that rather than trying to create their very own state at that time. Stefánik’s icon status was assured when he died in the crash of an airplane he was flying himself in 1919 to return to Slovakia for the first time after his long exile. Now Bratislava’s airport bears his name – although most international air traffic to that region still goes through Vienna’s Schwechat airport.

  Stefánik is a fine choice for Slovakia’s archetypical person, but there another, darker choice was also available, namely Monsignor Josef Tiso. He was the Roman Catholic priest who was also head of the Slovak puppet-state during World War II under the Nazis. Yes, whereas Hitler insisted on occupying Bohemia and Moravia (i.e. the rest of Czechoslovakia) and making it a “protectorate” – essentially incorporating it into the Greater Reich – he was willing to allow an independent state under Tiso, as long as it followed his orders, including those involving rounding up the Jews for deportation (and, although this was kept quiet, extermination). Why would Tiso also qualify as the archetypical Slovak? One, he embodies the country’s Catholic heritage – Slovaks have been and remain much more religious than the Czechs – and, two, he of course embodied a desire to have an independent Slovak state, an independent Slovak destiny, no matter what.

  Of course, that destiny was hardly very “independent” under the Nazi’s – and you can also say that modern Slovakia’s existence is really not so “independent” considering its membership of the European Union. And when it was “independent” – i.e. from the “Velvet Divorce” at the beginning of 1993 to its entry into the EU on May 1, 2004 – Slovakia had a hard time of it, narrowly escaping ostracism from most of the rest of Europe (not to mention descent into dictatorship) due to the thuggish antics as premier of the very same Vladimír Meciar who had been instrumental in gaining that independence. And there’s a further irony to add to Slovakia’s history during World War II: From gladly assisting the Nazi’s by rounding up their Jews, the Slovaks turned around in the summer of 1944 and launched a massive uprising against the Nazis and the German army, which although it was eventually crushed substantially impeded that army’s ability to oppose the advancing Red Army. Monsignor Tiso, still head of state as the rebellion broke out, was glad to grant permission to German army units to move in to try to snuff it out. This so-called Slovak National Uprising stands in stark contrast to resistance efforts against the Germans by the Czechs which (other than the famous assassination of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich in 1942) basically amounted to an uprising in Prague in during the very last days of Nazi Germany’s existence.

  So I think Father Tiso would have been a better choice for illuminating the many wrenching contradictions in Slovak history, and that just within the twentieth century.
  

• Object: The walking-stick. OK – but then what about that implied allegation of “Slovakia as avant-garde” from the choice of the archetypical painting? Still, the walking-stick is OK, as much of the territory of the country consists of steep mountains.
  
• Text: The last words of many Slovak fairy-tales, namely “and they lived happily ever after.” This is an interesting choice; and Strpka even backs that up to include more of the typical text, like “and he [i.e. the hero] was rewarded with the hand of the princess and half of the kingdom. There was a magnificent wedding and they had many children.” Writes Strpka: “This is Slovak existentialism and a Slovak scenario in a nutshell.”
  
• Song: “Riddle,” by Dezo Ursiny (a very Hungarian name, rather than Slovak proper, by the way). The lyrics, translated into Dutch, are given in full in the entry; the song has to do with how love is a mysterious riddle (“I cut an apple in two, yet it remains whole”). Ursiny comes from the Slovak pop-music scene into which Strpke himself has dipped.
  
• Poem: “My Song,” by Janko Král (a proper Slovak name, here; his last name means “king”). This time, the text is left in Slovak, which is probably good since there is a lot of repetition in it, as in a children’s song. The point of this choice is that Král was one of those 19th-century Slovak literary figures who re-awoke the Slovak national consciousness and literally saved the language from extinction at the hands of the dominant Hungarian culture. “Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, my little dove” runs the song, and the allusion to the suppressed Slovak culture is obvious.
  
• 
  Food-dish: Bryndzové halusky. Yes indeed – potato-dumplings in sheep’s cheese. In his caption Strpka agonizes over whether he should have picked these or maybe some other food instead – Slovak bacon? Apple-pancakes? – but no worries there, he has chosen very well. There’s no need for any literary or historical explanation, either; rather, please simply write down the name – that’s “bryndzové halusky” or alternatively “halusky s bryndzou,” and don’t forget the little upside-down hook over the “s” that I’m not able to reproduce for you here – and go look for a true Slovak restaurant in which to order it. (Sadly, probably only during your next trip to Slovakia; is there even a Slovak restaurant in New York City, for instance, or London? Well, there’s always Google.)
  
• 
  Place: Mount Sitno (1009m high). Of course. “Place” in a Slovak context has got to mean the Tatras. (Asserting that it has got to mean “Bratislava” would be to make the same sort of mistake we accused Ivan Klima of making in the Czech Republic entry, namely mistaking the capital/dominant city as representing the country as a whole.) Mount Sitno is all-the-more appropriate as a choice by virtue of the many ancient castles Strpka reports are in the vicinity – castles of ancient Hungarian princes, by the way. Just because Strpka also spent many of his own childhood hours wandering around the mountain by no means disqualifies it as the perfect representative Slovak place.
  
• Event: The present time. How do you like that – is that “thinking outside the box,” or what? Sure, Strpka concedes, he could have chosen the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 (and so the first political recognition of the Slovak nation); or indeed the official establishment of a written Slovak language in 1843 by Ludovit Stur (and so the first codification of the Slovak language), or of course the “Velvet Revolution” in 1989. But in his view the most important Slovak “history” is happening in the present-day, as the proper conditions for the emergence of a truly free Slovak culture, within Europe, are finally in place.
  

                          

Today’s subject is one I mentioned in passing in this weblog’s last post, namely the seemingly unstoppable ascent of Vladimir Meciar to the presidency of the Slovak Republic. I took a closer look myself, and while the crisp, succinct, bottom-line summary of what’s going on that I’ve just given you is bad enough, in fact the situation viewed more broadly is even worse – not that there aren’t plenty of comic elements that can’t be extracted to put a little sugar on the bitter pill. Or at least that’s for those of you who are not Slovak and so will not have to live through the next few years with the results of what is about to happen. We’ll do our best to do this in the following, so get yourself in tune for some bittersweet humor.

(Linguistic note: I took a closer look at what was happening via the Czech press, which on the whole is close enough and knowledgeable enough about what is going on among their Slovak brothers next-door to be well worth consultation. It would have been even better, of course, at least theoretically (but see below), if I had used the Slovak press. Believe it or not, I could have: I don’t advertise it, but I’ve had enough past experience with Slovak to also be quite capable of getting a grip on what is being written in that country’s press at any given time. But I didn’t do that here because 1) It would have been slow; yes, I can handle Slovak, but that doesn’t mean I can handle it fast. My Czech is much faster. And 2) Surveying what the Slovak press had to say about the remarkable goings-on happening in its own country would paradoxically have been much too deep. Just from the brief looks I took at some of the on-line Slovak dailies (try Sme, or Pravda if you want to try this at home yourself, or if you think I’m bluffing about knowing a little something about the Slovak press), there’s a whole lot for Slovaks to say on this subject. A proper treatment really requires someone’s PhD. thesis, and not just some weblog entry on EuroSavant. The Czech approach – with an Always Look on the Bright Side of Life emphasis on finding humor wherever we may – should do quite well for our own purposes.)

STOP WITH THE REFERENDA, ALREADY!

Last Saturday Slovaks were called out to the polls to vote on two questions: 1) Who should become their next state president, and 2) Whether early general elections should be held for the legislature, elections which would overwhelmingly-likely change the composition of that legislature prior to its previously-determined end-date in 2006. Note that I wrote “were called out to the polls,” not that they actually went. While it’s true that #1 above was an ordinary election, #2 two was properly a referendum, and Slovaks have a bad record with referenda; they’ve staged a bunch of them during their short going-on-11-years existence as an independent country, but the only one such that actually had enough people vote in it (whether “Yes” or “No” doesn’t matter) to count – by Slovak law, that has to be at least 50% – was the one last year that approved EU accession.

(Psephological note (Oh please, do click that link to find out what that adjective refers to, if you don’t already know): On the other hand, maybe it’s good that Slovaks seem to have extraordinary trouble getting themselves out of bed on mornings when they’re supposed to go out and vote in a referendum, since a number of those past referenda were what you could frankly call “BS referenda” – and you know what “BS” stands for, no need here for a dictionary link – called by the government of the day to try to steamroller the electorate into giving ill-considered approval to that government’s nefarious designs. Yes, the electorate always duly gave its ill-considered approval – but not enough of that electorate voted to make that approval count! This goes back to a theme EuroSavant has dealt with before – but a rather long time ago – of government manipulation via referenda, and just what good are referenda anyway? Now, that “government of the day” of whose “nefarious designs” I speak was headed by Vladimir Meciar – and so we come full circle and back to the subject of this entry.)

Yes, those Slovaks “were called out to the polls” last Saturday to vote on those two issues, and the very fact that they were called out to vote on two issues on the same day (as opposed to, say, being called out twice, i.e. at different dates, to vote on one issue and then later vote on the other) had not to do with any quest for efficiency (not really a Central European concept), but rather with politics. According to this article in the Czech business newspaper Hospodarske noviny, the scheduling of such elections is something up to the president, and the current president, Rudolf Schuster, did things this way deliberately, for two reasons: 1) He wanted to boost his popularity among Slovaks – he, too, was a candidate in the election to succeed himself as president, you see – by making such a popular, efficient move (so that Slovaks would only have to get themselves out of bed once, for two different elections), and 2) He doesn’t like the current governing coalition, and the governing coalition does not like (obviously) the “early elections” referendum. (The referendum question qualified for a national vote via a petition campaign). So Schuster scheduled the two votes together to boost the chance that the referendum would actually get the 50% participation rate it needed to be valid, meaning probably a “Yes” decision for early elections.

So here’s humor element number one: If those were Schuster’s motivations, then he’s batting 0-for-2. Schuster’s support in the presidential election was in the single-digits, and, true to form, only 35,86% of the electorate voted in the early elections referendum, so it failed. (Sure, of that 35,86% who voted, 86,78% voted for those early elections, but that’s neither here nor there at this point.)

KUKAN COCK-EYED

As for those presidential elections, 48% of the electorate voted in them. Yes, that’s below 50%, but hold your horses: this was an election, not a referendum, so there was no minimum level of voter participation required. (The sharper-eyed among you readers will now say “Now wait, it was essentially the same election, just with two different questions, yet the voter turn-out on those two questions was still so different?” Quite right, that is unusual, but it reflects that fact that the referendum for early elections was considered by so many to be illegitimate. Yes, it couldn’t have been truly “illegitimate” since those pushing it clearly followed the requirements that the Slovak constitution prescribes for the placing of a political question before the nation, but still many viewed it as an unfair attempt to cut short the term of office that the legislators currently making up the governing coalition thought that they had won in the last general election. So, rather than dignify the vote in the first place by actually participating in it, even with a “No” vote, better to ignore it and trust it to fail due to lack of participation, as of course did happen. Even as high a functionary as Eduard Kukan, current Slovak foreign minister and leading presidential candidate, when interviewed while going to the polls Saturday freely admitted that, while he was going to vote in the presidential election (no prizes for guessing for whom), he would ignore the referendum.)

Ah, but Eduard Kukan . . . well, prepare for humor element number two, and we get really bittersweet here. Eduard Kukan has been Slovak foreign minister for the last couple of years, and therefore deserves the lion’s share of credit for the two greatest Slovak Republic foreign policy achievements ever (although remember that it is still a young country; we expect even more of it in the years to come), both of which are coming to fruition right about now: Slovakia just joined the NATO alliance last week and will join the European Union on May 1. Eduard Kukan was also the favorite candidate of the current ruling coalition – not that he was endorsed explicitly by the political parties involved; that could have been counter-productive, as we will see – as the one politician who, as president, could be expected to continue their Western-friendly policies. And Eduard Kukan was the favorite candidate to win among most political observers who, while assuming that no one candidate would win the outright majority of votes in the first round of the presidential voting (i.e. that took place last Saturday) and that Vladimir Meciar would go through to the second round on 17 April, counted on Kukan to finally dispatch Meciar then and become president. Eduard Kukan was also the favorite candidate of Eduard Kukan, as this article from the Bratislava correspondent of Hospodarske noviny made clear. He, too, generously conceded that he might not gain the absolute majority of votes to prevail in the first round, but that he was confident of being elected in the second. He even let HN in on the secret that he was running a little betting-pool within his family on just what percentage of the vote he would receive in the first round; his own money was on 28%.

Well friends, in the actual presidential election last Saturday, it was Vladimir Meciar who came in first place, by far, with 32,7% of the votes, as recorded in Mladá fronta dnes in the article Slovak Shock: Meciar Wins. Kukan was somewhat behind with 22%. Unfortunately, a certain Ivan Gasparovic also got around 22% of the vote – to be very precise, 3.644 more votes than did Eduard Kukan. As the Slovak constitution prescribes things, in the second round there is no room for a “barely made it” third-place also-ran: Meciar and Gasparovic go through to the second round, and Eduard Kukan does not.

RIGHT-HAND MAN

About this Gasparovic: this is (bittersweet) humor element number three. For back in the “bad old days” of the mid-1990s, when Meciar’s regime was trying to hoodwink the Slovak people with referenda – as well as doing much worse than that, such as selling off state assets to his cronies, and having the then-president’s son kidnapped by the secret intelligence service and spirited across the border to Austria in the trunk of a car – Gasparovic was Meciar’s right-hand man! In fact, at one point in the past Meciar was chairman of the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) party, and Gasparovic was the deputy chairman! Yes, they have had a bit of a falling-out in the meantime, but it’s nonetheless clear that these presidential elections have left the Slovak electorate with little-to-nothing to choose between in the second round. It’s like having to choose between Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum – or, say, a US presidential election fought between George W. Bush and John Ashcroft. Or we can use that old stand-by Czech expression, to je prast’ jako uhod’ (that’s six of one, half-a-dozen of the other), as deputy editor Lubos Palata of the Slovak daily Pravda did in a guest editorial for the Czech daily Lidové noviny (A Meciar Relapse).

The main problem is that “six” or “half-a-dozen” is, in the first place, known to be opposed to the current governing coalition’s economic reform program, which has won so much praise from observers abroad but inflicted so much pain on ordinary Slovaks. In the second place, it is almost surely anti-EU and anti-NATO. Gasparovic has frequently expressed such opinions, and while Meciar these days sounds more mellow on these subjects, he was also the single man responsible, during the three times he occupied the premier’s office in the 1990s, for keeping Slovakia shunned by both organizations. And now he comes in first in presidential balloting just one week after Slovakia has in fact now joined NATO, and just four weeks before it joins the EU!

(What’s more, Hospodarske noviny reports in its article Meciar Is Close to the Presidential Seat that Meciar is refusing to step down as leader of the HZDS party even if he becomes president. Imagine, a country’s head of state insisting on staying right in the middle of partisan politics even during his term as president! And the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline reports that Meciar on 6 April “became the first Slovak lawmaker [ever] to be punished for repeated absenteeism,” as he was fined one month’s salary by current Slovak parliamentary speaker Pavol Hrusovsky. Now do you see the sort of problem Slovakia is facing?)

OUTSIDE OPINON: GENERALLY HORRIFIED

Opinion on these election results from elsewhere in Europe has been predictably dire. In an article entitled Europe Dismayed by Meciar Victory, Hana Lesenarova quotes European Commission spokesman Diego Ojeda as saying “I hope that Slovakia will not deviate from the prescribed path determined by principles of EU law.” That’s the anodyne Commission line on events; but she also quotes Austrian member of the European Parliament Johannes Swoboda that “the election of Mr. Meciar will not be good for Slovakia,” and that Slovakia under Meciar could misbehave such as to (temporarily) lose its EU membership. Elsewhere, Mladá fronta dnes has another one of those articles that I like so much: a press-review, which means I don’t have to go looking too much any more among different newspapers myself, but can just tell you about everything all collected together in this one article. Germany: “Vladimir Meciar, terror of the West,” writes Die Welt; Austria: “neither of those two [i.e. Meciar or Gasparovic] in the presidential office is a very enticing prospect for the Slovak government”; Hungary: “Meciar ante portas” writes Népszabadság, thereby showing off the classical education of its writers, since ante portas (Latin for “before the gates”) was traditionally applied to Hannibal, as in “Hannibal the threat is already right at the gates!” Russia: An exception here. The Russian daily Vremja (which means “time” in Russian) looked forward to Meciar’s victory, and so to a “great friend of Russia” as Slovakia’s next president.

Finally, commentators closer to the action are also split in their opinions. Martin Ehl (in A Complicated Slovak Path) takes up what you could call the US “Ralph Nader” argument of the year 2000 election: Meciar is so bad that he’ll unite the opposition so it can ultimately get rid of him and go on to do great things together for the country. Admittedly, this is more-or-less how things happened in Slovakia in the late 1990s, but this “Nader argument” is still on trial back in the US, at least until we see what happens in the 2004 presidential elections. Anyway, Ehl is not Slovak himself (as far as I know), but simply a Czech commentator for Hospodarske noviny. For a true Slovak commentator, we have to return to Lubos Palata, writing in Lidové noviny. And in his opinion, Meciar coming back to power as Slovak president is nothing but an unmitigated evil for that country. Meciar claims to have changed his views, but in reality he has never changed. And the only thing he understands is force, not the niceties of the democratic process.

Whew! I feel like now just like I’ve in fact written a PhD. thesis! Don’t you feel like you’ve just read one?

                          

This is not the case in the Czech opinion-weekly Respekt, though, where in his cover-story commentary Before Terror Annihilates Us Teodor Marjanovic declares that “Europe today needs its own Winston Churchill” in response to the terrorist threat. Are Czech editorial writers merely lagging behind their counterparts further west? I’ll let you judge that in what follows; in any case, Marjanovic raises some good points ordinarily overlooked by many, and does so rather pungently.

APPEASEMENT AFTER ALL

Yes, what the Spanish voters demonstrated by voting after the terrorist attacks on the Madrid trains to oust a government that had been willing to send troops to Iraq, in favor of one that wants to withdraw them (under certain conditions), was appeasement, Marjanovic declares. The same goes for the reactions of some leading politicians in the wake of those attacks, particularly the already often-quoted observation by EU Commission President Romano Prodi that “it is clear that the use of force is not the answer to the question of how to resolve the conflict with terrorism.” No, what Europe needs is its own new Winston Churchill, to thunder “We will never surrender!” in the face of this new threat. But there’s no one out there now who even remotely fits this description; so instead Europe these days resembles, he writes, those huge ancient statues that used to stand in Afghanistan, until three years ago what he calls “hairy Taliban radicals” decided that they were inconsistent with Islamic tradition and blew them up.

Now that the terrorists have found that they can easily influence elections the way they want, which election is next? Marjanovic asks. Well, there’s a referendum coming up soon in Slovakia, next month, in which voters there will decide whether to have early general elections, i.e. to give themselves an early opportunity to dismiss the current government – which supported the War in Iraq and has also contributed troops to the occupation. Sure enough, the opposition there has explicit reservations about whether such support has been a good idea. Granted, Marjanovic hastens to add, an attack on Slovakia seems unlikely if only because of that country’s relative political and military insignificance, just as it seems unlikely to happen against certain other states who have also supported coalition actions in Iraq: Bulgaria, Latvia, Hungary. But nowadays you just never know; and that is Marjanovic’s point.

IRAQ DOES NOT EQUAL “FIASCO”

Now the new government in Spain will be of the Socialists, headed by José Luis Zapatero, who called the War in Iraq a “fiasco” and prescribed a healthy dose of self-criticism for its leading protagonists, George W. Bush and Tony Blair. But the War in Iraq has demonstrably not turned out to be a fiasco, Marjanovic points out, something that can be seen in a brace of public opinion polls carried out there by various Western news organizations, whose results were released just last week. These surveys are the largest-scale that have yet been carried out among Iraqis, 6,000 of whom were questioned, and 57% judged their lives to be better than under Saddam’s regime, with 70% professing themselves to be optimistic towards their future.

These are results to be proud of, Marjanovic makes clear, to stand behind – and not to disavow or simply abandon as Western societies come under attack. Sadly, though, European efforts to react – meaning especially continent-wide, EU efforts – are likely to remain insufficient. You see, top officials have met before in a crisis atmosphere to try to better coordination among separate, i.e. national law enforcement and intelligence agencies. That was after September 11, 2001; but, as Marjanovic writes, ultimately “nobody wanted to be coordinated.” The proposal for a European-wide arrest-warrant did originate there, which would enable the swift transferral of a suspect apprehended in one European state to another to answer for his alleged crimes there. This was supposed to take effect last year; but it remains a dead-letter, because some states have yet to write it into their law. (Marjanovic fingers here Britain, Italy, Austria, Luxembourg, Greece, and yes, the Netherlands. It hasn’t happened Italy for special reasons, involving the personal fears of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi; this is perhaps grist for a future weblog entry.) At a more prosaic level, turf-protecting and national secretiveness continue to hamstring European efforts to track the terrorists in our midst. Marjanovic mentions here that it has come to light that German police authorities held off on sharing with the Spaniards intelligence they possessed on the specific type of explosives the terrorists had used in the Madrid bombings – even as the Spanish police were trying to find out, as soon as possible (because, as we know, it had political implications) who was behind these crimes.

NURTURING INTOLERANCE IN OUR MIDST

Better European efforts to track the terrorists in our midst are vital, not just in general, but also due to the key fact that Europe is where they have their bases – not in the Middle Eastern countries of these people’s origin. For example, those who carried out the September 11 attacks did so, we know now, from bases in Germany (Hamburg) and Spain. How could this be? In his final section (sub-headed “Tolerance and Hate”), Marjanovic cites a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal Europe from Prof. Bassam Tibi, Islam expert, university lecturer, and of course an Arab himself. Writes Prof. Tibi, “Under the pretense of being politically persecuted, Islamic asylum-seekers gain all the social benefits which Western European states are famous for granting. Islamists are masters in manipulation, and know well how to exploit European feelings of guilt over their past colonial sins.” In sum: “The Islamists build up, thanks to European tolerance, intolerance,” meaning for example those mosques and other religious institutions in Western Europe which preach hatred toward Western European society.

This “tolerance of intolerance” Marjanovic also equates with appeasement, and again calls for a Churchill figure, or at least “Churchill-like speech,” to bring attention to it so something can be done. Churchill – or perhaps Pim Fortuyn? The Western European welfare state, and the haven this part of the world has historically offered for the politically persecuted, used to be things about which people could be proud: no one would go sick, cold, or hungry here – or tortured. Must we give this up, as Marjanovic writes in his title, “before terror annihilates us”?

                          

Naturally, there were worries that too many people would stay away from the polls. For one thing, that essentially was what happened during the Hungarian referendum on EU accession back in mid-April (discussed in EuroSavant here), when there was a participation of only 45.62% of the electorate. But at least that woke up Slovak politicians to the danger of the same thing happening on the other side of the Danube. Le Monde’s coverage of the Slovak referendum results termed the Hungarian referendum a douche froide – a “cold shower” – for the Slovak political class. What resulted was epitomized by a very surprising photo appearing last Friday in the Dutch NRC Handelsblad (sorry, no link available to an on-line version): a tableau of present and past leading Slovak politicians, smiling and posing together in the courtyard of the presidential palace in Bratislava, all clutching EU flags and/or balloons. It was surprising because included in the scene was the unmistakable, bulky form of Vladimir Meciar, the former Slovak premier and strong-man whose quasi-dictatorial behavior and contempt towards Western Europe did the most to almost exclude Slovakia from participation in EU expansion (and which did exclude it from the first wave of NATO expansion, which saw sister-state the Czech Republic join). “Yes, of course I’m going to vote for the referendum,” the NRC quotes Meciar as saying. “My party and I have always been for European integration!”

In the same row of politicians was included current Slovak president Rudolph Schuster – of course, since he was after all the gathering’s host – but also Michal Kovac, who was Slovak president at the same time that Meciar was in power as premier. Their power struggle featured, among other things, the Slovak intelligence service kidnapping Kovac’s son, getting him drunk, packing him in the trunk of an automobile, and then driving him across the border onto Austrian territory. (There was an international warrant out for the younger Kovac to be questioned about some of his financial dealings, you see, and so he had preferred to avoid that by staying within Slovakia where he was safe from such questioning.) So the elder Kovac’s presence at the same photo opportunity as Meciar was itself remarkable, and almost as much a testament to the urgency which the Slovak political class felt to convince citizens to come out and vote as was Meciar’s own belief-conversion (whether he actually means it or not; anyway, Meciar’s vehicle-party, the HZDS has recently splintered, so its possible that he represents a declining political force, although with Meciar you can never be quite sure).

The second reason why there was nervousness about whether the 50% level of participation would be achieved is because many Slovaks felt that they had already made their approval for integration into Europe clear with the 1998 and 2002 electoral results. 1998 was when, almost miraculously and basically relying on the fact that there had to be legislative elections then – that’s when they had been scheduled – and that they could not be manipulated, no matter how much the current Meciar regime would have wanted to do so, because of the presence of outside observers, the Slovak electorate threw Meciar and his political coalition out of power. Then 2002 was when they kept in power the fragile progressive coalition (including the Slovak Hungarian party) which had resulted from those 1998 elections – despite the fact that in the intervening four years it had proved a big disappointment, and despite the demagogic allure of Meciar’s party waiting in the wings again. (Indeed, many polls just before those 2002 elections forecast that Meciar’s HZDS would come back into power.) So you see, Slovak voters had done the hard work back in those two previous elections, at least once completely confounding those who had presumed to predict what would be the results, so I guess it was logical that they wouldn’t take so kindly to being asked to return to the polls to express a collective opinion that they thought they had already made clear.

The third reason why there was nervousness about participation was the rather unfortunate history of referenda which Slovakia already boasts in its short existence as a state (since 1993). For all their good points, referenda are also political tools notorious for misuse by autocrats and dictators – going back to Louis Napoleon in France in the middle of the 19th century, not to overlook president/dictator Aleksandr Lukashenka of Belarus in 1995, but in general the history of referenda-abuse is rich and would require a book on its own to cover sufficiently. Meciar had tried this trick a couple of times himself, only to be stymied by insufficient participation from the electorate rendering these referenda null and void. Ironically, and confusingly, voter apathy can sometimes be a good thing, but then such lazy habits of political-gesture-by-omission are understandably hard to break.

OK, so they were nervous about the level of participation – and it showed. For one thing, ordinarily there is a ban on campaigning 48 hours before any Slovak national election. But the government decided that that provision could be scrapped this time, in view of the vital national importance of this vote. Or how about campaigning during an election? Even while the vote was taking place – when it still seemed touch-and-go whether the required participation would be attained – the top three national officials (president Schuster, premier Mikulas Dzurinda, and president of the legislature Pavol Hrusovsky) issued a statement: “We want to appeal to you to make use of these last minutes [of the referendum> and go to the polls to give your judgment on the next path our country is to follow.” (Translated from the French)

So everything came out alright in the end? After all, they got their 50% participation. Well, you don’t have to be too much of a spoilsport to think that rather more of a turn-out was called-for for such an important historical moment for Slovakia. One such is Grigory Meseznikov, head of the Bratislava-based think-tank IVO (Inštitút pre verejné otázky or Institute for Public Affairs). He blamed what he characterized as the “weak” level of participation (quoted in the French newspaper Libération) on the usual suspects: failure of politicians to mobilize the electorate and clearly explain the specific benefits of EU accession to their everyday lives, no matter what sum of state money they had allocated to trying to encourage turn-out and a “Yes” vote.