Time to decide
EU membership is either progressive or preposterous
By Benjamin Kuras
The Prague Post
(June 12, 2003)
Why Czech politicians want to join the European Union is obvious: They all hope to get into the European bureaucracy, with sixfold salary increases, goose liver on truffles in the Euro-Parliament canteen and subsidized Viagra.
Why the rest of the Czechs should join, however, has not been clarified so far, and it is unlikely that it will ever be. The only question that remains is which brand of expensive booze did the government drown its 200 million Kc ($7.7 million) pro-EU promotion budget in.
Many Czechs want to join not because they understand what the EU is about but because it is what the Communists are against. That's like giving up eating vegetables because Hitler was a vegetarian.
Another group of Czechs will vote for the EU out of conviction that not joining would make them fall back into Russia's former grip. So off they go under the Moscow-Berlin-Paris umbrella that is transforming the EU into an enemy of NATO.
Others want to join in the hope that they will be welcomed throughout the EU as equal-opportunity employees. They will have their expectations frustrated by an inconspicuous clause in the accession treaty that their politicians didn't bother to read on their behalf and that promises that "member states will in their internal legal regulations attempt to offer Czech citizens a more open access to the labor market." Which, of course, is as good as an upturned nose.
Others can't wait to be living more richly and joyfully, just like their German neighbors -- who, thanks to their Euro-Bureau economic policies, have been losing jobs at a high rate.
These are the policies, with all their complex directives and unpredictable consequences, that Czech politicians contractually agreed to adopt, notwithstanding that not one of them will ever be able to read the hundreds of thousands of arcane details that will become Czech law overnight and that no Czech citizen understands. Nevertheless, Czech politicians have agreed to penalize those who fail to follow these new rules with as-yet-unspecified sanctions, to be decided by Brussels bureaucrats. It's a heyday for those who have been crying out for the rule of law.
And then there is, as there always has been, a class of Czechs convinced that to govern themselves in their own country is against the national character, traditions and temperament and that they are always better off when someone else does the governing for them. Which is why in the past half-millennium, they have had a little more than 33 years of home rule: 20 between the world wars and 13 since the 1989 revolution.
"Eurorealists" (as distinct from "euroskeptics") are convinced that the EU must be joined simply because it's there and that there is no alternative and we are, after all, "in the space where we are." This, of course, is true, except that the Czechs were in the same space with no alternatives while in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Third Reich and the Soviet Empire.
A eurorealist, by the way, is a special Czech breed of euroskeptic modified by the conviction that it is safer to back something that you do not believe in, lest it win and treat us unkindly.
At the same time, it allows one to retain a clear conscience by making one's backing of membership appear reluctant, lest it be proven one day, after all, that the other side was right, and one had always said so.
This is a political skill at which Czechs have become true masters -- as witnessed lately in the Iraqi war.
But the most sensible reason for joining the EU was told to me by one highly intelligent and resourceful lady. She said she will vote for EU membership simply because most of the euroskeptics she has met are such obnoxious patriarchal chauvinists. Now there's something to take your hat off to.
-- The writer is the Anglo-Czech author of Czechs and Balances and As Golems Go and is a founding member of Euroskeptik.
|
Purchase online
BOL Online
