The Eagles, in “Hotel California”, made a whole song and dance about how you can “Check out, but you can never leave” some nightmarish hotel. We beg to differ. You can Czech out AND leave the EU, an equally freaky place, in fact we can all do so and end this whole EU charade, if the Czechs and other New Europeans have their way. The current crisis helps. Read on…
In 1618, a bunch of Protestant grandees gathered in Prague Castle to try two representatives of Holy Roman Emperor. At the time, Bohemia (Czech Republic of today, more or less) was part of the sprawling Hapsburg Empire. The Protestants were worried that the Catholic Emperor was going to take away their religious freedom rights. It was the little guys standing up to the big bully of a super-state under which they had been enduring one ridiculous demand after another. If this sounds familiar, read on. The Imperial representatives were found guilty and summarily thrown out of the windows of the Bohemian Chancellery. This famous event became known as the Defenestration of Prague and led to the Thirty Years war. This eventually led to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which triggered a long series of events that led, eventually, to the breakdown of the Holy Roman Empire, an early and rather more primitive form of the European Union. The idea of a super-state would enter a steady decline until the Treaty of Rome of 1957 which would revive it give birth, eventually, to the European Union.
It is standard EU policy that EU officials never meet alone with Czech officials in rooms with windows that can be opened from either the inside or the outside. The 1618 events, above, may well be the cause, but this has never been confirmed.
Fast forward to January 2009. When President Vaclav Klaus ended up being in charge of the EU rotating presidency on 1st January 2009, all he could do was growl. In doing so, he was actually following an age old tradition of big unwieldy empires coming to a sticky end in Prague due to its unruly (and Sarkozy would even call them ungrateful) denizens.
It's Central Europe, but it's becoming Central to the End of Europe, according the Brussels Bible
You see, Vaclav hates the EU. And rightly so. It is a huge, doctrinaire, undemocratic, demagogic, and totally superannuated organisation that will stifle all free expression. That didn’t stop the Czechs begging, crawling and promising to do triple somersaults backward to be allowed into it. But then, after being for so long in the deep embrace of the Big Soviet collective, they saw in the EU a saviour. They would have joined the African Union if it meant it got rid of their Soviet past in one fell swoop. In effect, their reasons for coming into the EU were self-serving and selfish. Which was very honest of them, and the best part of it all, is that they never stopped being honest. The Czechs never deluded themselves with the EU’s Utopian carrot. They see it for what it is. Their choice of an art piece commissioned to celebrate their arrival to the top job said it all. It was an installation that represented most of the EU members with 3D representations of an honest caricature nature.
This for example below was what they thought of Bulgaria:
I thought these squat toilets were a French idea...In any case, impressive plumbing, I thought it was a gas pipeline
That was Bulgaria as a toilet, in case you were wondering. Other countries didn’t fare much better.
Now, they are in charge of it, they are making sure they are not cooperating except to do the minimum to get by. The financial crisis has forced them to adopt a more involved attitude, but the Czechs’ heart is not really in it. If the Czechs manage to infect more EU countries with their scepticism, it is safe to say that it would be CZECH MATE for the EU! Hurrah!
Here are a few reasons why central and eastern Europe (oh, and the Baltics too) can bring down the entire sorry excuse for a super state that is the EU
· Economically
They large part of them rushed their entry procedures, often fudging their EU entrance requirements to satisfy zealous Brussels demagogues intending on placing everything west of the Urals in the EU before noon, so they can go have a long subsidised lunch. Attracted by the prospect of big budgets for all sorts of development programs, a whole bunch of deficit-creating flaws were papered over in the name of European harmony. Expecting a happy ending (because the EU always goes one way, towards more integration, except for the odd hiccup, irrespective of the people’s view), these countries expected their economies and currencies to converge happily with the Euro area. So countries like Hungary started offering mortgages in Euros and Swiss Francs which had lower rates. Then came the financial crisis and the local currencies all plummeted. Suddenly all these foreign loans looked so expensive to service that some central European countries had to be saved by the IMF from bankruptcy.
These clever East and Central Europeans had managed to convince Austrian, French, German and Italian banks to provide them with a ready-made banking sector. Now if their economies go down, they take down West European economies down with them by wiping out their banks…
· Politically
Central and Eastern European countries have always been part of enforced political clubs like the Soviet Union and the Hapsburg Empire. Their attraction to the EU has always been the better economics and quality of life, not the political integration as only they know only too well how it all ends in tears. It’s like a person who has a history of repeated bad marriages, getting divorced and now just wanting to enjoy the going out and sleeping around without the marriage.
Old Europe fell asleep, dejected. New Europa was only offering him wild sex, several times a night, but no chance of ever accepting his marriage proposals...And to think he had thought Britannia a cold bitch...
Continuing with the analogy, the relationship between East Europe (or New Europe) and Western Europe (or Old Europe) is one of clashing ambitions. Old Europe has been single for far too long and wants to settle down and have kids to compete with China and the US, and New Europe has just escaped from a long dysfunctional and often violent marriage to a certain Mr Boris Soviet and now just wants to be courted by us, have us buy her flowers and chocolates, even sleep with us, but forget marriage.
· Culturally
My experience of Central and East European people is that they are a no-nonsense hardworking people with a strong family ethic.
They are often portrayed as racists. That is no more true than Western Europe being racist. They are not politically correct, that is far truer and why should they be? Political correctness towards other races as we exemplify in the West, is really nothing more than a form of condescension and hypocrisy based on some vague sentiment of colonial guilt, often of the synthetic variety. In so far as I know, the Slovaks, Czechs and the Poles never had African Empires.
Nobody would ever sue Mr Topolanek or his daughter in their home town for racial incitement. So the EU Courts took up the case and sent them to the Hague for not insulting a sinple person in Prague. Rather, this being the EU, they are now serving time in prison for a upsetting a couple of white people in the UK who felt "emotionally distressed at their actions". Non PC World was fined for selling the most popular Patrice Lumumba punchbag in its history.
If anything, they had always been forced into other people’s empires. First, it was the Hapsburgs, under the Austrian yoke, then after a short breather, under the Soviets. Then, in an enforced experiment of camaraderie with the unwashed and the oppressed, they were forced to feel spontaneous solidarity with such places as the Congo, Mozambique and Angola, hence the unusually high preponderance of universities called Patrice Lumumba.
But when the Soviets left, so also did enforced marriages with other races. Not for the central and East Europeans our often guilt-based multicultural sensibilities. In any case, each one of these countries had at least one minority problem of its own, before worrying about more exotic minorities whom they had to love, or at least pretend to love, when the EU knocked on their doors with a whole bunch of demands.
But you can just imagine the Poles and the Czechs and the Hungarians laughing all the way to the bank when they were told by, by of all people the French and, wait for it, the Austrians, their old slave masters, that they had to be kinder to such people as gypsies, blacks and Arabs (that may include me, when I’m not feeling English, British, Egyptian or Pharaonic), Indians, Inuits and Bengalis in order to get their hands on billions in EU cohesion funds. The Soviets had forced them to fraternise with far worse and even forced them to pay for it.
Let’s now go back to the events of Defenestration of Prague of 1618. The two Imperial representatives were unceremoniously thrown out of the window and landed in a pile of manure. With a little bit of luck, Prague can manage to get another super state in deep shit.
Long live the Czech Republic!
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12724780
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/bruno_waterfield/blog/2009/01/14/no_to_an_eu_ban_on_czech_art_exhibit
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13209335
© Sameh El-Shahat 2009
One Response
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Let me just touch on a few points.
The CEE region has been between a rock and a hard place for over a millennia. A succession of aggressive expansionist peoples came from the east to subjugate Europe as a whole. Invariably the “Old” European powers used the CEE region as a buffer zone to ensure that no real harm came to them. It is uncanny how the Mongols, Turks and the Russians (we don’t like to call them the Soviets, since that was just an earlier wave of Russian expansion) all ground to a halt somewhere in CEE.
In my opinion with history like that it is hardly surprising that countries that have seldom had a taste of true nationhood for more than a couple of consecutive decades during the last five centuries all of a sudden have issues with who they are and where they belong. Maybe looking at CEE in this light may explain why on the whole we love to belong and absolutely abhor any semblance of outside authority (not to say we would know what to do if we had any ourselvs).
My second point concerns the banking system. On the whole most CEE countries have banking systems that are foreign owned. Savings rates in these countries did simply not provide the banking system with the assets that they needed to supply the massive and retrospectively unwarranted thirst for capital. Since local funding was scarce, these banks went to Mommy and asked for foreign currency loans. They didn’t come home empty handed. Flush with Euros they proceeded to swap that to Swiss Francs (probably to make Mommy some more money) and then provided mortgages and working capital etc to CEE borrowers at what you would deem ridiculously high rates. They could do this since local currency funding was mostly substantially higher and a prolonged period of currency stability had misled the borrowers to assume that this was in fact a free lunch.
When alarm bells began to ring, and the local Financial Authorities tried to persuade borrowers to desists with this practice the banks just smiled and continued along the well trodden path.
Now that the day of reckoning has arrived, everyone seems to forget that CEE banks on the whole had as much autonomy as the local branch of HSBC in Inverness. I am pretty sure that there where no raging hordes of local home buyers outside the offices of these banks demanding an immediate Swiss Franc loan. It was shoved down there throats.
Why Old Europe wanted this mess in their garden rather than on the other side of the fence is beyond me.
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