the new presence - pritomnost.cz · spring 2008 / the new presence [ ] ... back.to.1989 n david...

spring 2008 / the new presence [ � ]

e d i t o r ’ s n o t e s

Eva Munková.............................................................................................................................2

O p i n i o n s

No.Visas,.No.Friends n Jiří Pehe........................................................................................3European.Expansion.or.Putin.Expansion? n Krzystof Bobinski.......................................3Let.the.Economy.Cycle n Guy Sorman..............................................................................5

n e w s r o u n d u p

A.look.at.the.Czech.Republic.as.well.as.key.stories.from.Central..and.Eastern.Europe.from.the.last.few.months........................................................................6

p o i n t : c o u n t e r p o i n t

Should we pay flat fees for medical services? Exceptions.are.Ill-Advised n Martin Bojar........................................................................8Children.and.Senior.Citizens.Should.be.Exempt n Václav Krása.....................................9

c o m m e n t

Pitfalls,.Paradoxes,.and.Surprises.of.Presidential.Elections n Adam Černý..................10Election.Fallout n Erik Tabery.........................................................................................12The.Czech.EU.Presidency.–.A.Missed.Opportunity? n Jiří Pehe....................................15

F r a n c e

A.Sad.Lesson n Zdeněk Müller........................................................................................18

th e c z e c h r e p u b l i c

Showdown.in.Plzeň n Aisha Gawad and Karen Yi...........................................................19Here.Come.the.Neo.Nazis n Eva Munková......................................................................22.Why.Are.They.Still.Here? n Aisha Gawad, Karen Yi, Eva Munková................................26.

e u r o p e a n d t h e wo r l d

Running.Reform.off.the.Road n William Cohn..............................................................29Biofuel.Backlash n William Cohn....................................................................................34Circus.in.China n Simona Ely..........................................................................................35

I n t e r v i e w

Back.to.1989 n David Svoboda.........................................................................................38

s p e c i a l F e a t u r e

Prisons:.They.Were.Supposed.to.be.Humane n Ivan Štern.............................................42

e c o n o m y

Corruption.as.a.National.Trait n Libuše Bautzová..........................................................44

L i t e r a t u r e

Through.American.Eyes n Jiří Musil...............................................................................47

p s y c h o l o g y

Spare.the.Rod.and.Spoil.the.Child? n Jan Černý.............................................................51

c u lt u r e

Blobbies.and.Architecture n Tereza Regnerová...............................................................53The.National.Library.Is’nt.Just.a.‘Big.Building’ n Eva Novotná......................................54The.Prague.Writers’.Festival n Václav Kovář...................................................................56

th e n a n d n o w

Castles.Built.on.Sand n A Přítomnost article from 1938..................................................57

L e t t e r F r o m …

Lisbon n Libuše Koubská.................................................................................................58

p a r t i n g s h o t s

Martin.Jan.Stránský................................................................................................................60

Cover photo by Lubomír Zmelík

the new presencespring 2008

The New Presence is the sister publication of the Czech magazine Přítomnost. Both magazines are published by Martin Jan Stránský, grandson of the original publisher of Přítomnost, which under renowned editor Ferdinand Peroutka became inter-war Czechoslovakia´s most widely respected periodical publication.

The New Presence is published on a quarterly basis. It features a mixture of original material and translated articles from our sister publication. Due to considerations of space and style, some articles may vary in style and/or length from the original.

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contents

editor´s notes

[ � ] the new presence / spring 2008

Dear readers,

“Dobro i zlo se vrací.” “Good and evil recur.”

-Czech Proverb

editor´s notes

As I write the first of what I hope will be many letters to you, I feel the eyes of a long line of editors-in-chief looking dubi-ously over my shoulder. Two are more severe than the rest. One is my immediate predecessor, Dominik Jůn, whose insight I can only hope to approach. The other is the first editor of this magazine, the Grand Old Man of Czech interwar journalism, Ferdinand Peroutka. I can only say that I hope he (and you) will not judge my first effort too harshly.

The Spring 2008 issue of TNP is dour and perhaps this has its reasons. March 12th was the 70th anniversary of the German annexation of Austria. Although I don’t believe that histo-ry must repeat itself, I do believe that events of the past send a warning tremor to the present.

In this light, the series on Neo Nazism is apt. I have been told that it lacks detachment, and I plead guilty as charged. Neo Nazis make my skin crawl. They scare me and, for reasons you will read in the is-sue, I think they should scare you too. Should they scare us enough to make us tamper with something as precious as our right to assemb-ly? I don’t know. You tell me when you’ve finished reading.

Adam Černý will give you a taste of things to expect from the new Putin/Medvedev duo in Russia and a forecast for the presidential elections in the United States. Then, in an analysis of why the Czech elections turned out the way they did, Erik Tabery will explain why we (the media) only have ourselves to blame. Jiří Pehe shows how the Czech government is throwing away yet another chance to make a constructive contribution to the European Union.

If that doesn’t cheer you up, then William Cohn’s reasons why environmental reforms in Europe and America are spin-ning their wheels won’t either. In a special feature on incarcer-ation, David Svoboda and Ivan Štern explain why our prisons are churning out more criminals than they take in.

One bright note in the issue is the upcoming Prague Wri-ters’ Festival. The theme this year is the Prague Spring and the way even a vicious kick in the teeth like the Warsaw Pact in-vasion can lead a nation to freedom. Finally, as a panacea after all the gloom, Libuše Koubská, photographer Igor Malijevský and the spirit of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa take you on a walk up and down the steep staircases and through the narrow streets of Lisbon.

So it’s not all bad news.Delve in, and drop me a note when you’re done.

eva Munková


opin ions

No Visas, No Friends

Czech diplomats are congratulating themselves on their unprecedented success in persuad-ing the Americans to abolish tourist visas for

Czechs. Unfortunately, this is a Pyrrhic victory.A closer look at the Czech-American memoran-

dum shows that the end-product will not be visa-free status, but rather visa-free-visa status. Those who will want to travel to the United States will first have to fill in an electronic questionnaire, which includes nine-teen items of personal information.

It’s not clear just what will happen if Americans don’t like the completed form. Will immigration of-ficials at the gate tell the applicants that they shouldn’t bother, or will they turn them back at the airport in the US after they spent no small amount for their trip? In view of this ambiguity, the present visa system, where the applicant finds out well in advance if he or she may go or not, seems much more transparent.

Chances are that this problem will be resolved. However, ridding the Czechs of their label as the troublemakers of Europe which they acquired in the process will be much more difficult.

Czech diplomats negotiated the cancellation of visas on their own initiative, without consulting the European Union. The resulting agreement gave the Americans the right to ask for more information from inbound travelers from the newest EU member coun-tries than from the fifteen original EU states. Though the older states, with the exception of Greece, already have visa-free status with the US, they are now afraid that the US will use its agreement with the Czechs as a precedent.

Czech politicians claim that they had to respect the fact that last year the US Congress approved a law de-manding that the American side get more data from all inbound travelers, even from the original fifteen EU states, than it currently demands. However, the EU must agree with the US demand, and this is not so certain, especially if the EU remains unified in its resistance.

At the same time, the Czechs claimed that the EU did not do enough to help the Czechs convince the US to cancel the visa requirements. This is mislead-ing, since the US was initially reluctant to cancel Czech visas due to the high number of rejected ap-plicants, which in turn had to do with the fact that a relatively high number of Czechs who traveled to the US overstayed their limits.

Czech Vice-Premier for the EU Alexandr Vondra claims that the EU Commission wanted to “put every-thing off, but we wanted to speed it up.” What he did

not say was that the EU is now justified in feeling that the Czechs are speeding things up with no regard for the positions of the other EU members. Former presi-dent Václav Havel called this behavior an unfavorable expression of traditional Czech egoism.

As a result, the Americans have realized that they can turn the egoistic Czech government into a Trojan horse to use against Europe. The Czechs didn’t hesi-tate to negotiate alone about canceling visas, and they also didn’t hesitate in not consulting the EU or NATO in negotiating (along with Poland) with the US re-garding the placement of a part of the American anti-missile defense system on Czech territory.

If Czech politicians think that they have secured the friendship of America, albeit at the cost of los-ing some friends in Europe, they should perhaps give a thought to the outcome of the American presiden-tial elections. Any government that is this accommo-dating in negotiating with the current Bush adminis-tration may not be very popular in Washington with the next one.

The Czechs just may end up not having any friends at all. Jiří pehe

European Expansion

or Putin Expansion?

WARSAW – One merit of the Berlin Wall was that it made obvious where Europe ended. But now the question of Europe’s borders

has become a staple of debate in the European Un-ion. Russian ruler Vladimir Putin’s recent threat to aim missiles at Ukraine highlights what is at stake in that debate’s outcome.

The Wall’s collapse in 1989 forced European Com-mission officials to dust off atlases to find places about which they knew little and cared less. Leon Brittan, then a commissioner and supporter of enlargement, recalls that some officials and countries even hoped that the pre-1989 line could be held. They felt that en-largement even to the Scandinavian and Alpine coun-tries was going too far. Only in 1993 did the EU of-ficially recognize that membership for all the former Soviet bloc countries could be a long-term goal.

Today, the debate about Europe’s frontiers is not confined to officials or think tanks. In mid-2005, vot-ers in France and the Netherlands rejected the EU’s


opin ions

draft constitutional treaty, partly motivated by fear that enlargement was going too fast and too far. “We don’t want the Romanians deciding on how we should order our lives,” a Dutch professor complained.

Many former Soviet Republics with EU aspira-tions have become victims of this loss of nerve, as have the Western Balkan countries. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which were annexed by the Soviet Un-ion in 1940, slipped in under the wire in 2004. But they were small and contiguous to the EU. Ukraine is big, and Georgia is far away in the Caucasus. Then there is Belarus, whose ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, clings to authoritarian rule.

Ukraine, a country of 47 million people, has seen itself as a prospective EU candidate since 2004, when the Orange Revolution forced the country’s rulers to respect election rules. Since then, another two free and fair national elections have been held.

In contrast to Russia, Ukrainian politicians like President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko have shown that they are keen to break with the communist past. Moreover, Ukraine’s business leaders, aware of the fate of Russia’s oligarchs under Putin, see EU membership as a way of legiti-mizing their wealth and fending off Russian rivals. Ukraine’s business barons want not only to develop their empires within the safety of a legitimate free-market framework, but also to invest in the EU.

But, while Ukraine’s political elites have mastered the art of getting democratically elected, effective governance eludes them. Russian influence remains strong, especially in eastern Ukraine, and the state apparatus is weak. Ukraine needs the discipline of the accession process – and thus the promise of EU membership – if reforms are to be implemented ef-fectively.

Belarus is different. Most of its 10 million people are still so scared of the free market that they are ready to ignore democratic opposition to Lukashenko. That will hold true as long as cheap energy from Russia acts as a de facto economic subsidy. But that time is ending, with energy prices rising and the Belarusian economy facing shocks that could provoke unrest and pose a threat to Lukashenko.

Lukashenko, sensing the danger, has been mak-ing overtures to the EU to counter what he sees as a growing rift with the Kremlin. And Belarus’s gov-ernment has been exploring the possibility of secur-ing oil through Ukraine should Russia cut off sup-plies. But Lukashenko has given no sign that he is willing to democratize his regime, let alone release political prisoners.

If the EU decides to leave in abeyance the possi-bility that Ukraine and Belarus might one day join, both will enter a political limbo that could threaten security on the EU’s eastern flank.

The EU’s failure to encourage Ukraine’s European aspirations risks creating disillusion with the West. That would strengthen Russia’s position in Ukraine, where the Kremlin constantly encourages a return to Slavic roots and warns against flirting with a West that doesn’t want it.

Should Lukashenko’s regime falter, the democratic opposition could be strengthened by the promise of EU support. Otherwise, it is just as likely that Russia would step in and use its proxies to install Putin-style authoritarianism.

Since the USSR’s collapse, a new generation has come of age throughout the region. Young people in the EU’s new members feel themselves to be citizens of a prosperous and secure continent. In Poland last autumn, younger voters helped to re-place a government whose incipient authoritarian-ism and xenophobic attitudes threatened to isolate their country.

Further east, their contemporaries have also grown up in a post-Soviet world. In Ukraine’s Or-ange Revolution, it was mostly young people who rejected a return to the past. But as hopes of inte-gration with the West wane, so a feeling of exclu-sion is growing. The danger is that this will fuel support among the young in Belarus and Ukraine for the authoritarian attitudes now ascendant in Putin’s Russia.

At stake in the debate about EU enlargement into the post-Soviet east is whether Western values will take root in those countries or whether they will drift into a gray zone from which they will sooner or later challenge the values and democratic ways of “Eu-rope.”

The Dutch professor who fears that Romanians may start to order his life might reflect that Romania itself is changing as a result of EU membership. Re-fusing to countenance a fresh eastward enlargement means that, at some point, those countries that are outside the EU will start to threaten the values that he holds dear.

Krzystof Bobinski

©: Project Syndicate: 2008


opin ions

Let the Economy Cycle

A market economy functions on the basis of creative destruction. Companies conceive vari-ous technical and financial innovations; some

succeed, others fail. In this perfectly natural and nec-essary purifying process, the market itself decides which financial products contribute to economic growth and which ones do not. This became painfully evident when the dot.com bubble burst in 2000.

The present panic on the financial markets, brought on by inappropriate meddling in mortgage loans in the United States and elsewhere, does not mean that venture capitalism is a bad thing. On the contrary, thanks to the growing complexity of the financial markets, investors can spread their risks, more companies can conceive more innovations, and the market itself can redress the balance. This cycle keeps growth on the right track.

Creative destruction causes some companies to fail and helps others to be born. This, in turn, means that some jobs disappear and others appear. For the little man it is a cruel cycle and no amount of explain-ing that this development – from a long-term, global point of view – is actually positive, is likely to cheer him up if he has lost his job.

Nonetheless, now is the time to defend the mar-ket economy. Rather than spreading panic about wild market fluctuations, journalists, politicians and financial experts should try to explain what is going on – and choose their words more carefully. The term “recession” is misleading when what we are seeing is actually just a slowdown of growth.

It’s also wrong to say that capitalism can function well without government. The state guarantees that the rules of the game will be followed and, in times of extreme crisis, it can even help. In Europe, for exam-ple, a strong social security system makes the transi-tion from one job to the next less painful. Without government, capitalism fails.

However, if the government starts to stand in the way of creative destruction, it becomes dangerous. All of the great economic crises of the 20th century – stagnation, inflation, and rampant unemployment – were caused by unstable and incoherent govern-ment policies.

Thus, although there can be no growth without government, government can smother economic de-velopment. Progress walks a very narrow path.

Guy sorman

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news roundup


1st January 2008 Czech patients start paying flat fees for

visits to doctors,prescriptionsandhospitalstays.Onthesameday,MaltaandCyprusreplace their national currencies with theEuro.

11th January 2008 sir edmund hillary, the firstmantoclimb

MountEverestdiesatage88.

16th January 2008 BBC broadcasts areport showing that

Czechchildren’shomesarestill using cage beds.

18th January 2008 Membersoftheczech Army General staff

are firedaftertheygetcaughtcommittingfraud,byusingaslushfundworth17mil-lionCzechcrowns(1.1millionUSD)tobuyluxurygiftsfortheircolleagues.

19th January 2008 neo naziswhowereoriginallyplanningto

attendamarchinPlzeň,whichwassubse-quentlybannedbycityauthorities,meetatPrague’sPalackýSquareinstead.

29th January 2008 Bioveta,aMoraviancompany,announcesit

hasjustcompleteddevelopmentofa vac-cine against the tick-borne Lyme disease,in cooperation with Palacký University inOlomouc.

3rd February 2008 Incumbent Serbian president Boris tadič

defeats challenger tomislav nikolič inpresidentialelections.

11th February 2008 The Prague Supreme Court rules that the

statuteoflimitationsonthejudicialmurderof Czech politician Milada Horáková hasrunoutandstops proceedings against her former prosecutor, Ludmila Brož-polednová,who had appealed an eight-year jail sen-tenceleviedagainstherbyalowercourt.

12th February 2008 Two US citizens who overstepped their

timeinthecountryapplyforasylumintheCzechRepublictoavoiddeportation.

incumbent president Vladimir Putin, offi-ciallywins the presidential electionswith70.28percentofthevote.

5th March 2008 EUmemberstatesfindajointpositionfor

negotiationswiththeUSregardingvisa re-quirements.TheCzechssaytheywillsup-portthisposition.

8th March 2008 serbian premier Vojislav Koštunica resigns,

citingdifferencesovertheindependenceofKosovoinsidethecoalitionasthereasonforhisdecision.Koštunicawanted tocutSer-bia’srelationswiththeEU,buthiscoalitionpartnersdidnot.FormerRussianPresidentVladimir Putin says his successor couldgrantamnestytoMichailChodorkovsky,theformerheadoftheRussianoilconglomerateJukos,jailedin2004fortaxevasion.

9th March 2008 europe’s first space ship, the ATV Jules

VerneislaunchedinFrenchGuyana.ItwillbeusedtoferrysuppliestotheISSspacestations.

11th March 2008 The Allegro restaurant in Prague’s Four

Seasonshotelisthefirst to win a starintheMichelinguidebook.“ACanadianhotelwithan Italian chefwonastar for Italiancuisine,”remarksHanaMichopuluofLidovénoviny.SerbianPresidentMilantadič dis-bands parliament and announces earlyelectionsinMay.

12th March 2008 Italian publisher Giuseppe Ciarrapico,

aself-proclaimed fascist, says he will run for office in the upcoming Italian parlia-mentary elections on the ticket of formerpremier Silvio Berlusconi, who welcomedthesupportofCiarrapico’snewspaper.AnexhibitionopensinBerlin,featuringascalemodelofhitler’s plans for the reconstruc-tion of that city.

13th March 2008 TheU.S.StateDepartmentReportonHu-

man Rights for 2007 slams the czech republic for corruption and human rights abuses.

15th February 2008 Václav Klaus defeats Michigan University

professor Jan Švejnar,andisreelectedtothepostofPresidentoftheCzechRepublicby one vote in the second round of par-liamentary elections. Endless debates onwhethertheballotshouldbesecretaswellasmutualaccusationsofvoterintimidationandcorruptionmartheelectionprocess.

17th February 2008 The parliament of Kosovo unilaterally de-

clares its autonomy from Serbia and pro-nounces the formerprovince tobeadem-ocratic, secular and multiethnic state. TheUnitedStatesandFrancerecognizeitimme-diately,buttheEuropeanUniondecidestoleavethedecisionuptoindividualmemberstates.CzechsopttoseewhattherestofEuropewilldo.TheresultingprotestsinSer-biabringaboutthefallofthegovernmentofSerbpremierVojislavKoštunicainMarch.

24 February 2008 Thecuban parliament elects raul castro

to replace his older brother Fidel as thecountry’snewpresident.

25th February 2008 Czech singer and songwriter Markéta Ir-

glová and Irish musician Glen hansard win the OscarfortheirsongFalling slowly,fromthelowbudgetfilmOnce.

27th February 2008 51.5percentofthecitizensofIcelandsaid

theysupporttheircountry’sentryintotheEU.Some1,100 Libyan illegal immigrantslandontheItalianislandofLampedusa.

28 February 2008 Czech Premier Mirek topolánek meets

Us president George Bush todiscusstheplacement ofradar on Czech territory. Hereaps criticism when he gives “personal”medals to Josef and Ctirad Mašin at theCzech Embassy in Washington. In 1953,thebrothers,alongwithMilanPaumer,shotsixpeopleintheirsuccessfulescapefromcommunistCzechoslovakia.

4th March 2008 Russian First Deputy Premier Dmitrij

Medvedev, thepreferredcandidateof the

A look at events in the Czech Republic as well as key stories from central Europe

news roundup


14th March 2008 Unrest breaks out in tibetandultimately

costs the lives for over 100 people afterChinasends inpeacekeeping forces.Sev-eral prominent Czech politicians say theywillnotattendtheOlympicGamesinBei-jinginOctoberinprotest.InKosovo,serbs occupy the Un court building in Mitrovice.InHungary,atrialbeginsoverthedisband-ing of members of aright-wing extremistgroup,the hungarian Guard.

19th March 2008 British science fiction writer Arthur c.

clarke dies on Sri Lanka at age 90. TheGerman government announces plans tobuildaCenterforMassForcedMigrationinPost-WarEuropeinBerlin.

20th March 2008 Asnowstorm causes the worst pileup in

czech history, involving 116 vehicles ontheD1highwayfromPraguetoBrno.Thirtypeopleareinjuredand22,000arestuckina30-kilometerlongtrafficjam.

22nd March 2008 Ninemonthsafterparliamentaryelections

Belgium’s parliament gives a vote of con-fidencetoFlemishPremierYvesLeterme’srainbowcoalition.

25th March 2008 Policebrutallybreakupapro eU demonstra-

tion of 2000 marchers in Minsk,thecapitalcityofBelarusandarrestdozensofdemon-strators.Austriagetsa“final”ultimatum(April6)fromAl-KaidaterroristswhocapturedtwoofitscitizensinTunisiainFebruary.

28th March 2008 The European Commission gives Czechs

adeadline, June 18, for presenting aplantodealwiththecountry’shigh noise levels,which can reach as high as 60 decibels –twicewhatisallowedbytheWorldHealthOr-ganization.Meanwhile, ahigh-rankingmem-beroftheEUParliamentForeignCommittee,MichaelGahler,callsslovakia’s proposed new press Lawanattackonpressfreedom.

29th March 2008 Onehundredand fifty right-wing extrem-

ists march through the town of Jihlava

their propertywouldbe seizedby theNa-zis inWorldWarTwo,moved itoutof thecountry.Nowtheydecidedtothinouttheirenormouscollection.Theitems,includingapaintingbytheDutchartistBreugel,willre-turntotheiroriginalhomes–thenowstate-runchateauxofValticeandLednice,aswellŠternberkCastleinMoravia.

3rd April 2008 At a NATO Summit in Bucharest, leaders

agree to fully endorse Washington’s mis-siledefenseplansoverRussia’sobjections.Aspartoftheplan,the czechs clinch a deal with the Us on the deployment of a radar base on czech soil.NegotiationsbetweenWashington and Poland on placing inter-ceptormissilesinPolandtoworkwiththeCzechradartrackingsystemcontinue.TheCzechparliament still has to approve themeasureandtheUSCongressmustagreetofundthesystem,whichhasstillnotbeenproventowork.Meanwhile,Czechcarandtruck maker tatra Kopřivnice announces plans to renew limited production of its tatra 603 and tatraplan 600 models,dueto enormous interest of car collectors allovertheworld.

Assembled by Ondřej Aust and eva Munková using Wikipedie, Lidové noviny,

and ČTK.

andlayawreathatamonumentforfallenGermansoldiersontheanniversaryofthedeathofAnežkaHrůzová, in1899,whichsparked awave of anti-Semitism afteraJewish man, Leopold Hilsner, was ac-cusedofhermurder.

2nd April 2008 Christian Democrat leader Jiří Čunek re-

turns to the government cabinet and isre-appointeddeputyprimeministerandre-gional development minister by PresidentVáclavKlaus. Čunek had to step down inNovember, after a corruption investiga-tion against himwas reopened, and sub-sequently stopped. His firing caused themost serious government crisis to datewhen Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzen-bergthreatenedtoresignifhecameback.Finally, Mr. Schwarzenberg said he wouldstayifanauditorofhischoosingcouldre-viewČunek’s private finances. In additiontoascandalovertakingbribesduringhistermasMayorofthetownofVsetín,Čunekmadeseveraldisparagingcommentsaboutthe Roma community, which earned himcriticismfromhumanrightswatchers,andhewasconvictedofsocialsecurityfraud.

Atanartauction inAmsterdam,czech art experts spend 10 million crowns (624,000 UsD) to buy back 28 of their country’s lost art treasures,whenChristie’sauctionhouseput over 400 items from the Lichtensteinfamilycollectionupforsale.Thefamily,afraid

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Volf

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A look at events in the Czech Republic as well as key stories from central Europe

Milan Paumer fled to Western Europe with the Mašín brothers in 1953.

point – counterpoint


In October 2007, Czech Health Minis-ter Tomáš Julínek’s healthcare reform package, which includes a requirement that patients pay fees for certain serv-ices, was signed into law. The Ministry said the provisions are necessary to keep Czech patients from “wasting” healthcare funds by visiting the doctor too often for minor ailments.

According to the Czech Statistical Office, on average, Czechs visit the doc-tor 13 times per year – twice as often as do patients in France, Austria and Germany. The Ministry claimed this practice drains the system financially and diminishes quality of care because it means doctors have less time to spend with individual patients. According to Julínek, the fee system will lower the length of hospital stays, reduce prescrip-tions and cut down on patients’ visits.

In December the opposition Social Democrats filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court on grounds that the flat fees for medical services were a violation of the law which guaran-tees equal access to every citizen. They argued that pensioners and socially disadvantaged patients would not be able to afford care.

The Christian Democrats, who are in the government coalition also do not like the idea that pensioners and children have to pay the fees. They have threatened not to support the rest of Julínek’s healthcare reform package later this year. On April 7, as a partial concession, Julínek said that children up to six years of age might not have to pay the fees. Under the fee system, now in place, patients pay 30 crowns (1.81 USD) for routine doctor’s visits and each drug prescription, 90 crowns (5.45 USD) for emergency room visits and 60 crowns (3.60 USD) per day for hospital stays. According to the Health Ministry, this could mean payments of up to 5,000 crowns (300 USD) for chronically ill patients.

There is no such thing as free health-care. Every human activity must be paid for, and healthcare is no

exception. In the Czech system, “free” care is

mostly covered by insurance, with about eighty percent of healthcare costs supple-mented from the national budget – just as in the rest of Europe.

As the Chairman for the Czech National Council for the Handicapped, I accept that fees for healthcare, prescrip-tions and visits to the doctor are needed to regulate the demand for superfluous services. However, these fees must be specified and carefully calculated to achieve the desired results. The present fee structure fails to do this, precisely because it is universal. Because the struc-ture is based on the erroneous notion that we all have the same health problems and

the same incomes, the fees keep many patients from getting needed care.

Moreover, many patients’ access is already restricted. Persons in senior citizens’ homes, for example, can only see a doctor once every one or two weeks. A small child’s access to the system is regulated by his parents, and I know of no family that likes to drag its children from one doctor’s office to the next.

In terms of patient behavior, flat fees could be counterproductive. Instead of going to a general physician who sends them on to a specialist, as they do now, patients will start going directly to the

specialist in order to pay only one fee. As a result, general practitioners’ waiting rooms will empty out, but the healthcare system will not save any money because visits to specialists are more expensive than visits to general practitioners.

We need to see the fee-for-service system for what it is: a tax to provide suf-ficient income to the healthcare system. It is not an attempt at reform. n

Václav Krása is the Chairman of the Czech National Council of Handicapped Persons.

Václav Krása

children and senior citizens should be exempt

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Should we pay flat feesfor medical services?

point – counterpoint


Healthcare in this country was never free. Prior to 1989, the state funded medical care from taxes and from

the proceeds of an extremely murky na-tional economy.

Even under socialism, access to health-care was not equal. High-ranking Com-munist Party members, the elite socialist class, and even members of the secret police got better care than the working masses.

Granted, all Czechoslovak citizens had open access to decent and ostensibly cost-free acute, long-term, and preven-tive care. It is also true that patients had the legal right to choose their doctors or hospitals if they underwent certain formalized administrative and medical procedures first.

However, so many good doctors left the country in the era of normaliza-

tion that the healthcare system suffered from mediocrity, lack of motivation and isolation.

What’s more, this oft-mourned “cost-less” healthcare system was not really free. Even in the 1980’s, patients had to pay for certain services and amenities, such as prescriptions, spa treatments, dental, and cosmetic procedures, out of pocket.

Because doctors and nurses were so grossly underpaid, they were helped by patients who played by the rules of the omnipresent “grey economy” via receiving “private initiatives” – tax-free

difficulties should be eligible for rapid compensation for the fees from their social security funds. n

Doc. MUDr. Martin Bojar is the Head Physician of the Neurological Clinic

at the Prague Faculty Hospital in Motol. From 1990 to 1992, he served

as Health Minister of the Czech Republic.

gratuities for “above-standard” services that were openly given and accepted. Ac-cording to a 1985 government study, billions of crowns flowed into this “free” healthcare system through such auxiliary channels.

As Minister of Health, I was involved in the reform of Czechoslovak health-care from 1990 to 1992. Our goal was to turn patients into rational and informed citizens with a right to make their own healthcare choices. Thus, we hoped to emancipate Czech healthcare from the absolute control of the Finance Minis-try.

As early as 1990, Czechoslovakia’s first Health Minister, Pavel Klener, (Klener served as Health Minister from 1989 to 1990. – Ed.) proposed that fees be charged for dispensing prescription drugs, house calls, emergency and am-

bulance services, and stays in hospital and long-term healthcare facilities. His proposal met with fierce resistance from all of the Ministries, and the Cabinet turned it down flat. The public was never informed of the measure.

The objections to fees for medical care raised in 1990 closely resemble the ones raised today. I continue to support fees, even for care covered by insurance. Any exceptions due to age or type of illness are ill-advised and are difficult to estimate or to monitor.

I concede, however, that patients with financial, psychological or social

Martin Bojar

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Pitfalls, Paradoxes and Surprises

Vladimir Putin publicly designated Dmitrij Medvedev as his successor well in advance of the March presi-

dential elections in Russia. However, this does not say anything about Moscow’s politics in the future.

what’s Ado in the Kremlin?Historically, governments with two rul-ers, no matter how well intentioned they were, tended to end with the defeat of one of them.

Before leaving the presidential office, Vladimir Putin indicated that the ru-mors that Medvedev’s liberal – in Russia read “weak” and “pro-west” – orientation are grossly overstated. For the next three years at least, while the Putin-Medvedev government lasts, the new president couldn’t depart from Vladimir Putin’s assertive style of foreign policy, even if he wanted to.

Nonetheless, those who want to guess what the new president’s intentions are have very little to go on. This dearth of information, added to the murky nature of the last presidential election, says something about the future style of the Kremlin.

Friendly politics are based on pre-dictability and a degree of openness. Politicians employ secrecy when plan-ning or expecting conflicts. It is second nature to the individuals who emerged from Russia’s security, intelligence

and military network and who have taken over most of the key positions at the Kremlin. Rulers whose policies stem from this kind of outlook tend to provoke a similar response from their foreign counterparts.

Fortunately there is something called the “Russian Paradox.” Vladimir Putin alluded to it in May 2002, when he said: “Russia was never as strong as she wanted to be, nor as weak as she was thought to be.”

Nowadays, Russia is once again a strong player on the international scene. She is Europe’s key supplier of strategic fuels and she still has a substantial atomic arsenal. Yet her per capita gross domestic product is equal to 40 percent of the gross national product of Portugal.

pitfalls of the Governing pairMoscow’s present policies are based on its renewed self-confidence and its over-flowing state coffers. However, a look at Russia’s bottom line tells us that her gold reserves, worth hundreds of billions of dollars (and the third largest in the world, after Japan and China), are more than offset by Russia’s internal debt, i.e., a decaying industrial and transport infrastructure. Herein lies the greatest challenge to the present Russian leaders, and it makes no difference which of them has the final say in how to solve it.

In the summer of 2007, the Russian government set itself a very ambitious goal. By 2020 it wants Russia to be among the five strongest economic pow-ers in the world. There have also been reports that Moscow wants to pump a trillion dollars into economic revival. However, these impressive numbers do not tell us who will administer this huge volume of investment cash and who will ensure that a big chunk of it does not end up falling through the cracks in the bureaucracy.

An even more perilous, non-economic pitfall awaits the Putin-Medvedev duo. Demographic statistics show that, be-tween 1995 and 2007, the Russian popu-

lation decreased by 6.5 million people, or 4.4 percent. This drop in numbers is equal to losses from great military con-flicts or mass emigration. It is true that Putin’s subsidies for newborn children have raised birth rates somewhat, but it is difficult to say if they will reverse a trend which indicates that Russia’s Muslim population is growing much more rapidly than is the mainstream one.

The country’s aging gas and oil tech-nologies present another trap. It will be difficult to upgrade them without west-ern equipment – and western investors.

Another pitfall is the nostalgic desire of Russia’s military leaders to return their country to its former superpower status at any cost. This could be why Vladimir Putin bet on Dmitrij Medvedev. If, in the present political environment, Putin

Presidential Elections in

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had chosen a president from among the security or military forces, he would have risked promoting someone who has the full force of the military behind him to a rank of power close to his own. This would have been awkward if, at some point, the newcomer wanted to defy the man who put him in the ruler’s chair.

And herein lies another Russian paradox: Dmitrij Medvedev fits nicely into his patron’s power calculations. Yet why shouldn’t those who were bypassed in the presidential selection process look for support precisely from the power structures which Vladimir Putin is try-ing to neutralize?

the American surpriseWhere is the greater danger? In Russia, which wants to look stronger than she is,

Senator Barack Obama fire one of his top foreign policy advisors for saying that the pullout of US forces in Iraq would take place no more than 16 months after the “bringer of change” stepped into the Oval Office? There may still be some interest in national security issues, but the situation in Iraq is not at the top of the list.

This is normal. Historically, as long as a military conflict is not happening next door, or is not in full swing, presidential elections are won on the basis of domes-tic policies – and not just in the US. Fur-thermore, American citizens may not yet feel the effects of the looming financial crisis, but they are starting to worry.

hope or security?If the current predictions regarding the US economic recession come true, American voters will stop demanding much-touted change, and will start calling for security. They will want po-litical leaders who can guarantee that the consequences of the recession will be as small as possible and that they will not hurt too much.

There is one paradox: historically, the favorite candidate in a pre-election cam-paign is rarely the one who ends up win-ning. This is because the platform which he or she started campaigning on is not the one which will ultimately decide the race. Hillary Clinton, who was the clear favorite until the end of last year, is no exception. Barack Obama’s “March of Hope” has brought her march to glory to a screeching halt. Now Obama is starting to look like the favorite.

It is impossible to say who will win the American presidential elections.

Instead, I wish to offer one last para-dox: if anyone thought that the US was getting a little too strong and a little too eager to show its strength in the last few years, they might get a rude shock if the successor of George W. Bush turns out to be a little too weak.

Adam Černý is a journalist and a publicist with Hospodářské noviny.

or in the United States which, at the end of eight years under George Bush, looks much weaker than it actually is?

Even the hollowed-out shell of Russia’s past glory, the Soviet Union, managed to end its failed conflicts, for example the one in Afghanistan, more than a quarter of a century ago. US power, however, is draining away, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

There were hopes that ending the war in Iraq would be a top theme in the up-coming US presidential elections. Alas, today we see entirely different issues coming to the fore. How else could New York Senator Hillary Clinton, in one of her television clips, ask voters who they would trust to pick up the telephone in the White House in the early morn-ing hours? And how else could Illinois

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Election Fallout

In its spring 2007 issue, Přítomnost wrote that Czech President Václav Klaus’s (honorary chairman of the

Civic Democrats – Ed.) re-election was practically a done deal: “Klaus is a re-nowned back-room dealer who can win votes across party lines. He is sure to get all the Civic Democrat (ODS) votes, even though many of them can’t forgive him for the way he behaved when they were trying to form a government. But that will be long-forgotten by then. Like [the wizard] Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, Václav Klaus knows how to speak with a honeyed voice and to smooth away unpleasant memories. He is also likely to win a big chunk of the Christian Demo-crat vote, though not all of it.”

And it all came true. But let us ana-lyze the consequences of last February’s presidential elections, rather than groan over their results.

The presidential elections in Febru-ary revealed a disturbing trend: political parties have started recruiting defectors from other parties. If this practice isn’t stopped, elections will become irrelevant,

Howpoliticaldefectors

re-elected apresident

onthewarpath

erik tabery

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because political parties will no longer need to appeal to voters. Parties will be able to secure a majority in Parliament by other means.

It all started with the 2006 parliamen-tary elections, when the center-right parties won an equal number of seats as the opposing Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) and extreme left. Despite this unfortunate outcome, the prospects for a more-or-less stable government seemed promising. Six months later, the political scene was still in a rut: Parlia-ment wasn’t convening, early elections were a distant prospect, and ČSSD Party Chief Jiří Paroubek was questioning the state of Czech democracy as a whole.

In January 2007, the Czech public greeted with relief Premier Mirek Topolánek’s announcement that he would form a coalition government with the Christian Democrats and the Greens, thanks to the support of two defecting ČSSD deputies, Miloš Melčák and Michal Pohanka.

Unfortunately, the media did not let loose its investigative reporters and im-portant questions were left unanswered. For example: How could Melčák support a right-wing government when he was among the most extreme-left deputies in the ČSSD? For example, under the government of Stanislav Gross (ČSSD, from 2004 to 2005), Melčák opposed the reformist Martin Jahn for the post of Industry Minister and instead had supported the man who symbolized left-wing policies, Miroslav Gregr. What was the reason for his change of heart?

stability Over principlesIn any case, the public accepted the out-come. After all, the new government was legitimate, and it had a decent program.

However, the defector issue remains. When the ODS pulled the ČSSD deputy from Náchod, Evžen Snítilý, over to its side in the presidential vote, all illusions disappeared. Nobody had ever heard of Snítilý until he managed to turn the en-tire political scene upside down. On the day of the second presidential vote, he suddenly announced that he was going to vote for Klaus. The media speculated that Interior Minster Ivan Langer was putting the screws on him, due to Snítilý’s pur-ported past cooperation with the Com-munist information service (StB).

the obstreperous Greens, pushes them out of the coalition, and puts a few defec-tors in their place?

It wouldn’t be against the law, but it wouldn’t be fair either – especially not to the voters. If votes are going to be won in this way, then the elections will lose their purpose.

Immediately after his re-election, Klaus indicated that, had he lost, indi-viduals who were not pleased with the development of freedom following the 1989 revolution would have come to power. He claimed that his opponent’s (Jan Švejnar) supporters were trying to reverse post-revolutionary trends. They were “against everything – everything that happened here after November 17, 1989. That was the goal of this coalition that keeps changing its name, but it is still with us today,” he told Mladá fronta Dnes in an interview. “The important thing is that once again we have managed to repel this attempt. And we did so thanks to massive public support,” he added.

What public support is he alluding to? Does he mean that of Parliament, where he won by a single vote? Or is he refer-ring to the public opinion polls, where only half of the Czechs wanted him re-elected, at best?

Master of DisinterpretationKlaus does not make such statements out of the blue. He is the first politician who understands the importance of interpret-ing events – and of being the first to do it. It doesn’t matter how far removed from reality his interpretation is, he still gets away with it.

Klaus used this tactic for the first time in 1996, after he won the parliamentary elections by a very close vote and could only put together a minority govern-ment. Although, according to his Deputy Party Chief Miroslav Macek, this came as a complete shock to Klaus, he quickly recovered enough to offer his version of the story. He claimed his ODS had won the elections by a nose, in spite of the op-position of the media, intelligentsia and the current president, Václav Havel.

In reality, prior to the elections, all of the daily and weekly papers, except Právo, had voiced their support for the governing parties, especially for the ODS. Even President Václav Havel had openly supported Klaus.

Rumors of Snítilý’s cooperation with the secret police had been circulating since 1997. That was the year when ČSSD Party Chief Miloš Zeman produced a now legendary suitcase full of secret documents, proving, he claimed, that “the Czech Republic was turning into a police state.” There was a file on Snítilý in the suitcase, which even revealed his cover name, “Roman.” Ultimately, the entire “Suitcase Affair” turned out to be a piece of propaganda staged by Zeman’s advisor Miroslav Šlouf.

Šlouf has since switched sides and, in February 2008, he was openly working on Klaus’s re-election. If he had possessed additional information about Snítilý’s StB activities, he could easily have brought it

to bear on the unfortunate deputy now. Klaus won thanks to Snítilý. Never

before had the deputy indicated that he wanted to vote for him, and he had never mentioned it to his colleagues. He had never gone against party line before, al-ways following orders. What happened?

(Editor’s note: Snítilý has since been expelled from the ČSSD Party. In a February 15 interview with the internet server Aktualne.cz, he “swore on the life of his children” that he was never offered, nor took money, to vote for Klaus.)

clouds of Doubt Defectors pose a wide-reaching threat. Czech party politicians are starting to acquire defecting politicians under circumstances so suspicious that they cannot be overlooked. Is this the start of a dangerous trend? In the future, could Jiří Paroubek “somehow” acquire a vote when he tries to put together a coalition government with the communists? Or what if the ODS loses its patience with

If votes continue to be gained thanks to defectors,

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In 1997, Klaus’s government fell, due to an ODS funding scandal. Since then, he hasn’t had a positive plan to offer. He continues to write fairy tales about how political events came to pass and raises specters of enemies that aim to put an end to freedom.

no challengers left Now Klaus is merely writing the next chapter. This is just his style and is to be expected.

What is bad is that nobody is willing to engage Klaus in a serious debate. It fails to happen in interviews because journalists are afraid of him. They also want him to like them so that he will grant them more interviews in the fu-ture. Then, when Klaus allows them to enter his hallowed circle, they start de-fending this privilege through harmless or even sycophantic questions. Thus, the interviews turn into more presidential speeches and the journalists turn into tape-recorder holders.

likes to play the martyr – he even put a caricature of himself at the stake in his book on global non-warming, A Blue – Not Green – Planet, but he is an ex-tremely privileged one. Frankly, his posi-tion today is far stronger than that of the country’s first president, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, not to mention Václav Havel.

There is no point in stressing that if Václav Klaus had lost the election, the country’s path to democracy would not have gone awry, but I will say it anyway: nothing bad would have happened. A commentary written in Přítomnost by its editor-in-chief, Ferdinand Peroutka, after the 1927 presidential election can serve us as inspiration: “What would have been lost if Masaryk hadn’t been re-elected president?” Peroutka wrote. “Naturally, we don’t think that we would be finished, or that it would be the begin-ning of the end. A nation never depends

If someone, such as Radiožurnál reporter Martin Veselovský, dares to step out of line, the President gets angry and astonished at his impudence. (Editor’s note: In his February 5 interview, Ves-elovský confronted Klaus with several awkward questions regarding presiden-tial powers and the elections.)

What’s more, Václav Klaus tries to bring these “rules of communication” to bear in the public forum. He is allowed to criticize and attack anybody, but the moment someone starts trying to scrutinize him, they are accused of attacking post-November 1989 developments, or, at best, of personally at-tacking him. Klaus

the president is nothing more

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on one man, and it would be a very bad thing if it did. What a weak, lazy and untalented nation it would be if it were lost without the help and leadership of a single man.”

The country doesn’t and shouldn’t de-pend on Václav Klaus, and neither should his purported critics. The president is nothing more than a player who knows how to use the means at his disposal and, by sleight-of-hand, prolong his time in the field. However, he can only do this if nobody’s watching.

This is why the president must con-stantly be subjected to thorough and ra-tional analysis – and this is sadly lacking at the moment.

Erik Tabery is the deputy editor-in-chief of the weekly Respekt.

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The Czech EU Presidency

– A Missed Opportunity?

For the first time in its history, in an unprecedented event, the Czech Re-public is going to hold the presiden-

cy of the European Union..From January to June of 2009, it will effectively preside over the 240 million inhabitants of Eu-rope. But if you ask the average citizen what they know about the important role the country is going to play, you probably get a shrug in response.

Preparing for the EU presidency is a far cry from organizing, for example, the World Hockey Championship. In the latter case, the public only cares about the final results – where the individual games will be played, and how to get tickets. The EU presidency affects the entire country. Not only agencies at the highest levels of state administration and the political elite play an important role, but the Czech public itself acts as host for the various high-level meetings and summits. However, neither the Czech people nor many of the country’s Euro-pean experts know much about the state of preparations.

Disharmony at home and in Brussels The Czechs began to prepare for the presidency several years ago. The first government-level discussions took place in 2005,. and in February of 2006 the cabinet named a Committee on European Affairs, whose job it was to co-ordinate the preparation and successful

conclusion of the country’s presidency. A work group composed of members of selected committees and institutions was also established.

However, in 2006, the Parliamentary elections substantially slowed the pace of these preparations, since the new government under Mirek Topolánek needed more than seven months to win a vote of confidence in parliament. Finally, in 2007, Topolánek’s govern-

ment began setting up a Secretariat of the Government Representative for the Presidency, which de-facto shattered the team created by the government of Jiří Paroubek one year earlier. Zdeněk Hrubý, who had held several high-level management positions, including the post of Deputy Finance Minister and of Government Commissioner at the World Bank International Monetary Fund Summit in Prague, became the

government’s representative on the committee.

Hrubý wanted his post to have ministerial rank, because part of the preparation for EU presidency involves coordinating the work of several govern-ment offices. However, only a few days after Hrubý was named, Topolánek’s first government ended and his second coali-tion government came into being. When the new government created the post of Deputy Chairman for European Affairs and gave it to Alexandr Vondra, Hrubý resigned. This slowed the preparations for presidency even more.

By virtue of his new post, Vondra be-came the guarantor for the preparations for the presidency. Although Hrubý’s team hadn’t been entirely dissolved, it nonethe-less took several months to fill in the ranks with new personnel. Considering the fact that some states give themselves more than three years to prepare for the presidency, in 2007 the Czech Republic was already almost two years behind.

Today, a special government com-mittee, run by a Central Organization Group of government and regional of-ficials, is responsible for coordinating the preparations.

Ideological spats between the gov-ernment and the opposition served as the main reason behind the constant rebuilding of the preparatory teams. In more mature democracies, where the state administration is de-politicized,

Atime lag, ideological spats and politically motivated

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the original team would have continued.its work, despite changes in the political constellation of the government. How-ever, Topolánek’s rather euro-skeptical government launched politically moti-vated purges at all levels.

The personnel changes also affected the Czech Representatives in European Union headquarters, headed by the ex-perienced diplomat Jan Kohout. The strongest government faction, the Civic Democrat Party, went over the head of Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, and replaced Kohout with Milena Vice-nová, the former Agriculture Minister in Topolánek’s first cabinet.

In his years in Brussels, Kohout had succeeded in building a large network of contacts. The new Ambassador – a pol-itician without substantial diplomatic experience – had to start from scratch. Because the post of the EU Ambassa-dor is one of the nerve centers of every country’s presidency, this ideologically motivated step further complicated the preparations for the presidency.

one and a half years to go The Czech Republic finally took up the preparations for EU presidency with all seriousness just a year and half before stepping into this important but ex-tremely complex function.

The Czech government has initiated dialogues with France and Sweden on a joint program the three countries should follow in a sort of 18-month team presidency. Of course, for now this is in the realm of theory.

Vondra constantly assures us that the time lag should not negatively affect the Czech presidency. The preparations pur-portedly are proceeding according to plan and, despite the long-lasting government crisis, he says, there are no delays.

In 2007, the cabinet set aside money for the presidency and established methods of coordination along with a draft proposal of priorities. The overall expenses for the presidency should be about 3.3 billion crowns, with 400 mil-lion appropriated for 2007.

From an organizational point of view, the government has favored the so-called combined form of preparations. This means that the various competencies.will be left to the individual ministries, with strong central coordination of activities planned as well.

what agenda?The motto of the Czech presidency is supposed to be “Europe without barriers.” Czech politicians and diplomats want to put the main emphasis on strengthening competitiveness, deregulation, liberal

From an organizational point of view, this consists not only of coordinating high-profile events, such as the European Summit, but also of organizing smaller ones in the member countries. This too is the responsibility of the presiding country, which takes over the informal leadership of the various countries’ dip-lomatic corps for six months.

No less important is the work at home. The government alone does not realize the national agenda, but does so with the help of the individual ministries and other institutions. These have to be able to act at least somewhat independently in establishing a resort-wide, pan-Euro-pean agenda and in organizing summits and conferences. It goes without saying that they cannot do this without sub-stantial augmentation of professionally and linguistically qualified personnel. It isn’t entirely clear how, in view of the time lag, the government wants to ac-complish this task.

Key diplomatic missions, especially the Czech representation in Brussels, will have to hire new personnel as well. Czech diplomats in Paris and Stockholm will also play an important role because the Czech presidency follows the French one, and Sweden will follow the Czechs. This calls for substantial coordination between the three countries.

Are the Czechs sleeping through their chance to

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trade policies and the four fundamental freedoms of the Union: freedom of movement of persons, services, capital and goods.

During the Czech presidency, nego-tiations about the EU budget, along with discussions on agricultural policy reform, are bound to take place. Union-wide ne-gotiations on the Croatian membership will also be on the program. Meanwhile, the tenure of the European Parliament and the European Commission will be coming to a close.

In this context, how realistic is the Czech agenda? The Czech Republic is relatively small and, moreover, is a new-comer to the EU. If Czech diplomats succeed in coordinating their efforts at reforming European agricultural policy – an area that has been fraught with dif-ficulties, especially as far as Sweden and France are concerned – a certain degree of success is possible. Any. progress on this issue will depend on the old EU members, especially those who signifi-cantly contribute to the Union budget. For the Czechs, a realistic goal could be to maintain discussion about this issue in the event that the French presidency brings it up first. It is. unrealistic to ex-pect that the Czechs, with their relatively small political clout, will be able to launch fundamental reforms in this area.

the premier comes secondThe policies of Topolánek’s government vis á vis the European Union pose an-other fundamental problem. At the start of 2007, when Topolánek’s second gov-ernment was being formed, the Czech Republic had marginalized itself on the European political scene. It joined forces with Poland’s ruling twins, President Lech Kaczinsky and Premier Jaroslaw Kaczin-sky, who had earned the label of trouble-makers in the EU. Granted, Topolánek’s government eventually eased off its criti-cism and was relatively helpful in passing the new EU Reform Treaty. However, in Europe, together with Poland and Great Britain, the Czech Republic is seen as a country that needlessly throws sand into the works of European integration. Yet, unlike Poland and Great Britain, the Czech Republic is a small country, whose metaphorical pounding of the European table necessarily ends with compromise on the part of the Czechs..

Instability at homeAnother problem with the Czech EU presidential agenda stems from the unstable situation at home. Topolánek’s government depends on a tiny majority and is plagued by problems. Moreover, at present, all of the governing parties have internal conflicts.

The government’s program is ideo-logical. Its motto, “Europe without bar-riers,” is the expression of its right-liberal orientation, especially in terms of de-regulation and liberal trade policy. If the government fell before the start of the presidency and a more left-oriented gov-ernment took its place, it is hardly likely that the new government would agree with the aforementioned priorities.

Even if Topolánek’s government does survive, the balance of powers between it and the opposition could have a det-rimental effect on the Czech’s ability to achieve their agenda, because so far there has not been any apparent effort to seek fundamental support throughout the political spectrum.

Another important factor that could influence the Czech presidency is the current Czech president, Václav Klaus. Known for his euro-skeptical views, Klaus has a substantial influence on government policy. Now that he has been elected to his second and final term, Klaus has a free hand. Will Topolánek be able to neutralize some of Klaus’s more extreme attitudes?

In view of the occasional conflicts about the division of powers between the president and the government, Klaus could well try to take advantage of his post to assert his own attitudes toward the EU – in spite of the government. This would have markedly detrimental effects for the Czech presidency.

All told, the current state of the preparations for the Czech EU presi-dency is such that we will be lucky if we succeed in avoiding any large-scale organizational calamities. And as far as achieving our so-called Czech priorities is concerned, this will only be possible if France and Sweden adopt some our points as their own.

Jiří Pehe is the Director of New York Universi-ty in Prague, and is the former chief political

advisor to former president Václav Havel.

If the Czechs don’t succeed in changing their image by the start of 2009, it will. hurt the effectiveness of their presidency, because the other EU countries could have reservations about the leadership role of a country that has willingly placed itself on the periphery of European affairs. At the same time, the return of the Czech Republic to the mainstream of European affairs is questionable.

The new EU Reform Treaty, which replaced the rejected European constitu-tion, is due to be ratified by the member countries in 2008. In typical fashion, due to its opposition to EU integration, the political leadership of the ruling Czech Civic Democrats (ODS) decided to remit the treaty to the Constitutional Court, claiming that it wants to make certain that it is in accordance with the Czech Constitution. At the same time, some ODS politicians have indicated that the

Czech Republic should not proceed too hastily with ratification. They reason that, if the agreement were ratified by all of the countries before the start of the Czech presidency, a new president, whose job would be to adopt the agenda relating to the EU’s rotating presidency, would take his place at the head of the EU. This, they said, could weaken the Czech presidency.

Needless to say, deliberate postpone-ment of ratification would weaken the Czech Republic to the same degree as the creation of the post of EU president during the Czech presidency. One thing is certain: if a country, which is even now seen by the EU as problematic, wished to deliberately delay the ratification of the Reform Treaty, it would affect its authority as a country temporarily and the helm of the EU.

the czech republic is seen as a country that needlessly

throws sand into the works of european

integration


A Sad Lesson

French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s plan to raise the morale of young French students by reviving the

memory of a young member of the French Resistance, who was martyred by the Nazis during the war, is generat-ing dismay rather than approval. What’s it all about?

The Presidential Office and a bulletin from the French Education Ministry calls for teachers in all high schools to “decorously and with dignity” read a farewell letter written by 17-year-old Guy Moquet on the night before his execution. The bulletin notes that the reading is mandatory, but those who refuse to do so will not be punished.

the Birth of a LegendA poll by the French newspaper Le Figaro showed that only 41 percent of its readers approved the action. The reason why readers are split is both simple and complicated. Moquet was a communist activist and he was defending communist ideology when he landed in jail in the fall of 1940.

At the time, the communists were claiming that the war was caused by Imperialists and they supported the German-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact. The brochures that Guy Moquet was distributing did not call for national resistance. They pointed to “industrial tycoons, Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Freemasons who, from a hate of the working classes, betrayed the nation and surrendered it to foreign

occupation,” as the real enemy. True to this Stalinist line, the communists held themselves aloof from the anti-Nazi Re-sistance and continued to agitate against the war until July 1941, when German at-tacks on the Russian front brought about a change in their strategy.

The story of a boy taken in by this Bolshevik artifice ended abruptly on October 20, 1941, when a high-ranking German officer named Karl Hotz was assassinated in Nantes. The Nazis called it terrorism and called for the execution of no less than 50 French citizens. A total of 48 were executed in the end, among them 27 communists on October 22, including young Guy.

The Germans wanted to show the subjugated nation that their primary enemies were the communists. The bul-let that killed young Guy Moquet created a legend. His farewell letter is not about politics but about the life of a young man. He wants to live so much, and he can’t. With well-nigh superhuman courage, he

accepts his fate, and says, very simply, that life, no matter what the circumstances, should be lived with dignity.

the effect of the LetterFrench historians wonder if reviving the memory of Guy Moquet can also revive a sense of national pride among young people, as the President and his advisors hope. Did Sarkozy know the truth be-hind the legend? There is a whole series of similar letters from members of the French Resistance, so why was this one chosen? Historical reality is different

from memory, and the reading of Mo-quet’s letter distorts memory. Without putting it in its true historical context, all that will be left is sadness, and the memory of the collaborating forces that bent the back of Petain’s France will be forgotten.

Some of the critics of Sarkozy’s plan also noted that the letter could be psy-chologically dangerous. It could drive some troubled young people to suicide, which is not rare among French school-children today.

Despite all of the reservations, over 95 percent of schools eventually read the letter. The effects of the reading cannot be measured, but history teachers say that it was a chance to show people who are coming of age in France that history is tragic and the truth is more compli-cated than memory. It also helps them understand that freedom can come at a very high price, and that it takes cour-age to defend it.

In today’s France, when many feel victimized, oppressed and dis-criminated against, Moquet’s letter also bears another message. Even though the author knew that he had been caught in the wheels of a horrible fate, and that he was the victim of cruel injustice, he did not resort to hate and blame. This makes him different from all fanatics and fundamentalists, who, for their own beliefs, are willing to let thousands of innocent people die.

Is it possible to comprehend and resolve today’s problems by looking back at history? Some French men and women still believe that there is sense in looking back. They want to impart to the genera-tions of the 21st century, who know noth-ing of war and freely enjoy the advantages their predecessors fought long and hard for, some understanding of the past and present values, and to create a feeling of national pride and unity among them.

Zdeněk Müller is a writer and publicist. He lives and works in France.

Zdeněk Müller

French high school teach-

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Showdown in Plzeň

On March 1, 2008, two hundred Neo Nazis marched through the center of Plzeň. Using the pretext of free-

dom of speech, they came to prepare the ground for future marches in the Czech Republic. It was the biggest test of Czech democracy to date – and they passed it with flying colors.

A Late startThe sky was shrouded in clouds and an icy wind blew violently through the city. A light rain dampened the roads soon to be trodden by thick combat boots.

The march didn’t begin at 2 p.m. as had been planned, because Hurricane Ema stranded most of the marchers on a train halfway between Prague and Plzeň. Their buddies stood around in groups, smok-ing, chatting amiably, stomping their combat boots and trying to keep from shivering.

Finally, more than an hour late, the bulk of the marchers arrived, and a round of incendiary speeches resounded on Emil Škoda Square. “They say there are going to be some Neo Nazis here!” declaimed Václav Bureš, the organizer of the march. “They make us the butts of verbal and physical violence, but we are the only ones who can rescue this country from the political and moral morass it finds itself in! Only we can restore it to dignity.”

More speeches continued in the same seditious vein. Tomáš Vandas of the Workers Party derided the govern-ment, especially Human Rights Minister Džamila Stehliková, and Foreign Minis-ter Karel Schwarzenberg, for his German accent. Vandas exhorted the assembled marchers to try to get into local politics.

“That’s where we can gradually imple-ment our ideals, that’s where we can build our base, so that one day soon we can

march into Parliament through the front door!” he blared into the loudspeaker.

Finally, the marchers, their shaved heads tucked in the hoods of their black sweatshirts, their faces hidden behind scarves or ski masks, lined up behind four large skinheads bearing huge black flags. Bureš, waving a bullhorn, took his place at the front of the column and started warming up the crowd with catchy chants.

Once they were safely encased by four ranks of police, supplemented by dozens more on horseback, all dressed in full riot gear, including the horses, the pro-cession began to move toward the center of town.

Meanwhile, near the town’s main synagogue, hundreds of angry citizens, along with young anarchists, were filling the streets. Many had a yellow Star of David pinned to their sweatshirts.

At 3 p.m., there was still calm. Cars continued to speed down the street and the anarchists sat around, smoking joints and passing around liquor. Even the po-lice huddled together with no particular purpose.

Then, on cue from the police, emer-gency vehicles rushed in to block the road. Water cannons and armored trucks rolled into position, insulating the sides

of the street. The noise level began to rise; police dogs barked and the crowd stirred. Joints were extinguished and conversations were abandoned as people geared up for the coming fight.

“The totalitarian state will not let us sleep!” (Totalitní stát nenechá nás spát!) Chanting their favorite slogan, the Neo Nazis came into view.

Actually, they were barely visible. Only the bobbing tops of a few bald heads and an occasional middle finger shooting out of the black cloud of police could be seen.

The crowd exploded into whistles and jeers.

“Shame!” yelled the citizens in front of the synagogue.

“We’re here legally!” the Neo Nazis yelled back.

The anarchists rushed the police bar-ricades. The armored ranks shuddered, then held. A green apple and an empty bottle of Pilsner Urquell were thrown.

In less than five minutes, it was all over. The Neo Nazis marched on to the main square, and the police closed in a solid barrier around the anarchists, to prevent them from giving chase.

One of manyThe scene in Plzeň is not an isolated event.

More and more, all over Europe, Neo Nazis are taking to the streets. The elite of the movement are becoming bolder and smarter. Organizing their still relatively small numbers, they are forcing them-selves into the public consciousness as a serious political force, ostensibly fight-ing for law and order.

And they are doing it legally. In November of last year, Bureš, who

is known for his affiliation with the Neo

BehindthescenesofthemostrecentNeoNazismarch Aisha Gawad and Karen Yi

More and more, all over europe, neo nazis are taking to the

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Nazi cause, duly notified town hall of-ficials in Plzeň’s Third District that he was planning a march to support freedom of speech. By sheer coincidence, as he would claim later, the date of the march, January 19, was also the anniversary of the day when thousands of Plzeň’s Jews had been deported to concentration camps.

The municipal authorities saw no reason to oppose the march. Plzeň Mayor Pavel Rödl found out about the demonstration five days before it was scheduled to take place, and his internet research revealed that participants were being told to come armed.

Given contradicting advice from his lawyers, Rödl banned the march on January 17th. “When two lawyers are telling you ‘yes’ and two are telling you ‘no,’ the moral decision prevails,” he said. “When you realize there are going to be right wing radicals on one side and left wing radicals on the other and a religious group in the middle… Yes, I could have looked the other way, but I realized that someone could get crippled because I didn’t act,” he told TNP.

the event. Another problem with the way the law is written now is that, if you find out an event is going to be a catastrophe after the time limit runs out, you can’t intervene. That’s bad,” he says.

Just a peaceable Demonstration Admittedly, the Neo Nazis demonstrated peacefully enough. The lack of raucous behavior supported their claim that they were simply marching for freedom of speech. But appearances are deceiving. This is all just part of their new image, says Neo-Nazi expert Miroslav Mareš.

“They are trying to proceed in a much more sophisticated and well-thought-out manner, consulting their own legal advi-sors to find ways to go right up against le-gal boundaries without actually commit-ting a crime,” he said. “Since propagating outright Nazi ideology is against Czech law, they cloak their marches as protests against state oppression of rights”.

“The movement is more emboldened now in terms of coming out in public for demonstrations and arguing for freedom

The Plzeň Administrative Court didn’t see it his way. It declared Rödl’s decision illegal, on the grounds that it violated the law of assembly, which states that a dem-onstration can only be banned within three days calendar days after it is announced. The court ruled that Rödl would have to let Bureš reschedule the march.

Rödl then appealed the decision to the Supreme Administrative Court in Brno, which backed up the lower court. Bureš re-scheduled the event for March 1st and sued Rödl for abuse of authority.

“He had to sue me,” said Rödl. “If he didn’t, other towns would immediately take the same steps that Plzeň had. He had to prevent that.”

Rödl, who could face a jail sentence for abuse of authority, has appealed the higher Court’s decision to the Constitutional Court, asking for a change in the law.

“At the least the time limit needs to be changed to three work days. Now, if they announce a march before a long week-end, the officials, even with the best of will, simply can’t get the information they need to put together a legal case to stop

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of speech,” said human rights advocate Gwendolyn Alberts, the author of the 2006 ENAR (European Network Against Racism) report on the Czech Republic.

“They are selecting dates for marches that are of extreme significance to the Holocaust with no other intention but to offend, but without actually breaking the law.”

Adolescent extremists The fact that most of the demonstrators were under 25 is telling. Youth, like the Hitler Jugend, have always been crucial to radical movements. In Eastern Eu-rope, Neo Nazis are counting on youth to infiltrate the political scene.

In the past few years, using white power music concerts and public dem-onstrations, the Neo Nazis have started generating mass appeal among the youth.

To this end, they have even started changing their “look” to imitate the Black Bloc, an extremely violent anar-chist organization. “Black Bloc fashion is in: black hooded sweatshirts, sunglasses, scarves covering the lower halves of their faces – a lot of times you can’t tell them

Nazis and the skinhead movement. Yet, while skinheads are recruited to gain political momentum for the movement, the aggressive teens often prove to be an embarrassment to their newer, slicker leaders – at their own peril.

On March 22, a graphic video of two Neo Nazis viciously beating up a third briefly appeared on the Internet server You Tube. The victim was caught acting drunk and rowdy by television cameras at the first cancelled march on January 19. At the time, the participants of sev-eral Neo Nazi chat rooms said he had to be punished for embarrassing the move-ment.

Nowadays, the elite are trying to get away from associations with the rowdy skinheads, while showing they are ruth-less enough to even attack their own.

“Let us get away from people who give us a bad image!” Bureš told the crowd at the pre-march rally. Sporting a tie, leather blazer and slacks, he looked somewhat effete next to the hefty skin-heads. But nobody was laughing at him, because they know he is the Neo Nazi of the future.

Some young people may see the to-talitarian state he offers as a comfortable alternative to the chaos of a modern, open society. But the Neo Nazis don’t much want to play up that part of their plan yet. At the moment, they want to at-tract sympathy by appearing to be meek, law-abiding victims, fighting for their rights against a totalitarian state.

The performance they gave in Plzeň was flawless.

After the demonstration, the police did not let the marchers disperse to the local pubs, but kept them in a huddle in the old town square. In due time, half of the marchers were herded onto busses and driven to the train station, while the other half, still under police escort, sul-lenly marched back the way they came. Gone were the anarchists, and gone were the silly slogans. The only sound to be heard was the clop-clop of horses’ hooves on cobblestones.

Aisha Gawad and Karen Yi are students at the New York University Prague.

Eva Munková contributed to this report.

apart from the anarchists – it’s all meant to attract a younger crowd,” Mareš said.

Neo Nazis even have their favored fashion brands, such as Grassel, Thor Steinar and Lonsdale – they like the latter, due to the “NSDA” letter combination in the name, reminiscent of the “NSDAP” acronym of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.

“They have to get into the conscious-ness of the public, especially the young people,” said Mareš. “Then, the moment there is a social crisis, they could rapidly form a political party.”

Awkward AlliesHistorical development has led to a strong connection between the Neo

In eastern europe, neo nazis are

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policemen prepare for the march

The National Socialist Workers Par-ty—the Nazis – came to power in 1933 with a platform opposing Ger-

many’s supposed moral and racial decay. A year later, Adolf Hitler suspended the constitution, abolished the presidency, and declared himself Führer.

“Divisive” democratic institutions were replaced by an authoritarian state, the Third Reich. Driven by a myth of military greatness, pseudo-scientific theories of race and dreams of uniting all ethnic Germans into a vast empire free of racial enemies, the Nazis turned the globe into a battlefield.

Their ideology run amuck brought forth a monstrous administrative. ma-chine that murdered six million Jews,

Roma, homosexuals, disabled people, and anyone else they deemed “impure.”

It took the combined forces of the Soviet Union, Britain, the United States and the Russian winter to stop them. Hitler killed himself in April 1945, and the Nazis surrendered to the Allies the following month.

The discord they sowed split the globe for fifty years and irreversibly placed mankind on the brink of mutually as-sured destruction.

And now, they are back These are not the descendants of Hit-ler’s own officers who escaped to South America, the United States, Canada and the Middle East. Discredited by the hor-rors of World War II and with Nazi hunt-ers like Simon Wiesenthal on the prowl, the old Nazis who thus fled were happy enough to keep their heads down.

At the same time, the new Neo Nazis have little to do with the sedate European

National Socialists, whose handful of members are content to run and lose local elections. Nor do the Neo Nazis resemble the far-flung hierarchies of the American Nazi Party (now the NSWPP), or the huge National Socialist Movement, whose members parade about in faux Nazi brown shirts and whose children attend the Viking Youth camp where they are taught the basics of white supremacy, along with the straight-arm salute.

The new East European Neo Nazi is young, single and vicious. Most likely, he (or she) comes from the ranks of the skinheads. Along with the predictable bashing of minorities and anarchists, the Neo Nazi of today has a perhaps surpris-ing penchant for the Internet, brand-name clothing, and white power music.

Neo Nazis are organized into secret, semi-autonomous “cells,” which work along the principles of “leaderless resist-ance.” Each cell supports its own com-mon ideology. Their exact numbers are

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hard to estimate, but experts know that the cells can organize quite quickly, be it for a march or a power grab.

Today, every European country has a Neo Nazi movement. This is ironic considering that, less than 20 years ago, thanks to the abovementioned anti-Nazi laws, it looked as if Europe’s stick-in-the-mud Neo Nazi parties would soon die an anemic death.

But help came from another quarter.

skinheads It’s hard to say just when the cult of hefty, bald, young men in baggy trousers, bomber jackets and combat boots ended up in the Neo Nazi camp, but today, the merger is homogeneous. The skinheads started as “disenfranchised” workers from the London docks who, with their penchant for alcohol, fighting and foot-ball hooliganism, started by attacking immigrants that they claimed were tak-ing British jobs. From there it was just a short step to racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia.

In 1987, Ian Stuart Donaldson put the above phenomenon to music. As lead singer of the band Skrewdriver, he founded a white power music brokerage called Blood and Honor (BH), after the motto of the Hitler Youth. Its militant arm, Combat 18, was responsible for many violent attacks on immigrants, minorities and its left-wing opponents. Today, BH has branches in every European country, Russia, South America and Canada.

White power concerts with the B&H logo have spread like a rash in Central Europe, disseminating Neo Nazi ideol-ogy and giving its adherents a place to “network,” along with the opportunity to raise money. These concerts bring in the bulk of the funding from the Neo-Nazi movement, with enough left over to line the organizers’ pockets.

the Fall of communismThe second factor, which gave Neo Nazis much-needed lebensraum, was the loos-ening of restraints in Eastern Europe,

Before 1989, authoritarian govern-ments suppressed the skinheads, and this, paradoxically, gave them some legitimacy. After 1989, the fledgling governments of Eastern Europe enacted generous laws of assembly, and extremist groups imme-diately started pushing the limits. Soon,

difficult to estimate, according to Interior Ministry statistics, the Czech Republic has about 1,500 “core” Neo Nazis and another 4,000 adherents to the cause.

The report goes on to state that “One of the basic principles is leaderless resistance, meaning that Neo Nazi organizations don’t use a hierarchical structure or lead-ership on a national level. On the contrary, activities of individuals and small groups acting on their own initiative are typical. These autonomous groups communicate through their leaders and local activists via natural authority. The autonomous model is most apparent in the leading Czech Neo Nazi organization, Národni odpor (National Resistance), which consists of independent regional branches. The groups generally carry out activities on a local level and only attend mass actions on a national level a few times per year.”

According to the country’s foremost expert on right-wing extremism, Dr. Miroslav Mareš of the Masaryk University in Brno, the Czechs adopted their organi-zation from the kameradschaften model, which worked so well in Germany. “A strict hierarchical organization is easy to break up,” he told TNP. “A network of loosely joined cells without a central leadership, all adhering to the same ideology, is better.”

Mareš notes that such a network is able to mobilize quite fast – for example to attend a demonstration or concert – or to launch itself into politics. According to Interior Ministry statistics, the number of such public events increased in 2007, as did the number of hostile verbal attacks against minorities.

political successThe Neo Nazis are led by a sophisticated, soft-spoken and “reasonable” political elite that has learned to dance nimbly through the legal minefields of their respective countries, which is not always easy, con-sidering Europe’s strict anti-Nazi laws.

Leaders like Udo Voight of the blatantly Neo Nazi Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland (National Democratic Party of Germany, NPD) know the value of or-ganization and public support. They have a political agenda that seems to be work-ing. In German Saxony and Pomerania, voter support for the NPD jumped from 1.4 percent in 2000 to 7.3 percent in 2006. This translated into six seats in the State Parliament in Pomerania.

skinheads with a Neo Nazi twist were marching through the streets.

high-tech The third factor that bolstered the Neo Nazi movement is the Internet.

Cheap, universal, and instantaneous interaction through the Internet has al-lowed Nazi ideology to span the globe. And it is virtually untraceable.

By processing their communications through servers registered in the US, North Korea or any other state not bound to divulge information about internet us-ers, Neo-Nazis distance their propaganda from police monitoring.

The Internet has also given a huge boost to the pseudo-scholarly industry of holocaust denial. This illogical line of reasoning, which actually refutes the rai-son d’etre of the Third Reich, is a favorite theme on bogus informational websites. One such site is Metapedia (www.me-tapeida.org) a pseudo dictionary which offers “an interpretation different from the mainstream,” and has versions in ten European languages.

When it comes to on-the-ground com-munication, cell phones are the preferred mode, because they are much less detect-able. Text messages from stolen phones are invaluable for communication among group leaders or in organizing clandes-tine concerts.

Leaderless resistance“The neo Nazi movement in the Czech republic is decentralized and functions on the basis of autonomous nationalism, characteristic for the activities of Neo Nazi movements in several European coun-tries,” the Czech Counter-intelligence Service (BIS) wrote in its most recent report, Extremism in the Czech Republic in 2006. Although precise numbers are

In any political system, there will always be

those who want to change things

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In 2006 in Poland, the extremely violent National Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny, ONR) succeeded in uniting the splintered neo-fascist and skinhead movements, and now has es-tablished local organizations in Warsaw, Katowice, Gdansk, and Krackow.

To the south, the Austrian Kärntner Heimatdienst, with a long tradition of aggressive xenophobic and anti-Semitic policies, and a membership of 25,000, regularly throws its weight around the political scene.

czech Maneuvers“We must get our people into municipal, district and regional government bod-ies. Only after they are in place will we succeed in marching into [parliament] through the front door!” Tomáš Vandas, head of the Workers Party, told Neo Nazis in a speech before a demonstration in Plzeň on March 1.

Though attempts to gain a foothold in the 2002 elections fell apart, there has been success at the local level. For exam-ple, Václav Bureš, a known organizer of Neo Nazi demonstrations, managed to join a Plzeň branch of the ODS. Only when the media exposed his affiliations was he expelled from the party.

“At the communal level you can find registered parties like the Worker’s Party or Právo a Spravedlnost (Truth and Right-eousness), who have people from the Neo-Nazi milieu on their tickets,” Major David Janda, Head of Prague’s Anti Extremist Unit (OOZOK) says, adding that the probability is high that the party leaders know of their members’ affiliations.

According to Mareš, the recent flurry of Neo Nazi marches is another sign that they are ready to start addressing voters. “The leaders of the Czech Neo Nazi move-ment are copying the ‘fight for the streets’

proves their doctrine has not changed. They’re just getting smarter. Legal and peaceful marches, held under the baleful gaze of the police, who often have to protect them from irate left-wing extremists, feed the image of Neo Nazis as harmless victims – not the perpetrators of violence. “They’re smarter and more aware of the impression they’re making,” says Janda. “They want the public to stop seeing them as bald-headed thugs in bomber jackets.” But their basic tenets haven’t changed, he adds.

“The hate, which springs from Na-tional Socialism, is still the same,” he says. “I’d even say that their rhetoric against ethnic minorities, Roma and Jews, is get-ting more acute … and the media aren’t helping by giving them negative publicity because they’ve learned to use it to their advantage.”

Meanwhile, a bigger fight is going on at a higher level.

the Law of AssemblyWith the help of astute lawyers, Neo Nazis are learning to use the law to their advantage – and the Courts are support-ing them.

At issue is Czech Law 84/1990, on the Right to Assembly. It was written on March 27, 1990, in the afterglow of fallen communism, and no one has dared to touch it since. Due to Chapter 11 of the law, which states that officials have only three calendar days to stop a march after it is announced, municipalities say that they don’t have a fighting chance to defend themselves from Neo Nazi marches.

“The three-calendar-day limit is absurd,” says Karel Sedláček of ICEJ, an international Christian organization, which promotes active resistance against anti-Semitism. “It just doesn’t give mu-nicipal authorities time to put together a well-founded argument against the march, which will stand up in court.”

All over the country, municipalities have been trying to circumvent, or openly oppose the regulation. The first of many showdowns came in May 2007, in Brno, when police dispersed a Neo Nazi parade organized by Národni Odpor because certain individuals had shouted racist slogans. The courts upheld the decision on grounds that an event can be stopped if illegal activities take place.

On November 10 of last year, the 69th Anniversary of Kristallnacht, Neo Nazis

strategy of the NPD, which held marches in small towns in East Germany and went on to win seats in the regional elections. Here, they are using marches to prepare the ground and get themselves into the public consciousness as the ones who can organize big, orderly demonstrations.”

Nonetheless, Mareš says, the leaders of the Czech movement know the time is not yet ripe to take the leap into party politics. “They know they don’t have a chance right now,” Mareš says. “But they’re wait-ing, getting into the public consciousness, influencing young people so that when a social crisis does happen, they could create a party structure quite fast.”

change of strategy“Although interest [among the Neo

Nazis] in private events continued, the number of public events with a political context increased,” notes the most recent Interior Ministry Report on Extremism in the Czech Republic in 2006.

The report also notes a tendency among the Neo Nazis to hitch their wagon to the Nationalist movements through a new group calling itself Národni Kon-zervatismus (National conservatism) (NK), which is based on the Italian con-cept of fascism from the 1930’s. Though NK publicly eschews the Neo Nazis, the report notes that there are many personal links between the two, and that NK has profiled itself as a de facto bridge between the movements.

The report notes that the Internet rhetoric of the Neo Nazi elite is changing as well. They have been distancing them-selves from skinhead excesses, and are urging members to behave with decorum in public. There have been fewer concerts, as well as more peaceful marches.

This does not mean that the Neo Nazis are getting nicer – a look at their websites

neo nazis in numbers

Number of core Neo Nazis in the Czech Republic: 1,500

Number of Neo Nazi supporters in the Czech Republic: 4,000

*Neo Nazi Parties in the Czech Republic: 1

*Neo Nazi Parties in the United Kingdom: 7

*Neo Nazi Parties in Europe: 20

*Neo Nazi Parties in Russia: 7

* Registered Neo Nazi Parties in US: 9*does not include Fascist or National Socialist Parties

(Assembled using Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fascist_movements_by_country)

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were kept from marching through Prague’s Jewish Quarter after the Prague City Court upheld the Magistrate’s decision to stop the event on a technicality. When the demon-strators came to Old Town anyway, their route was blocked by thousands of angry citizens, police and left-wing radicals. The clashes went on well into the night and the police were praised.

The biggest showdown to-date oc-curred on January 17 of this year, when Lord Mayor of Plzeň Pavel Rödl unilat-erally banned a march that had been approved by a lower authority a month earlier – and got his fingers smacked. The Plzeň District Court ruled that Rödl had violated the three-day limit and ordered

him to allow a “make-up” march. The Su-preme Administrative Court upheld the verdict. Rödl, who could face criminal charges, has appealed the decision to the Constitutional Court, asking for a repeal of the three-calendar-day rule.

“At the least they need to be extended to work days,” he says. “Now, if Neo Nazis announce a march before a long weekend, officials simply can’t put together a legal case for stopping the event.”

A solutionThe obvious solution, say many, is to modify the Law of Assembly to give municipal authorities at least a fighting chance to stop marches. “At least a week is needed for them to get information and figure out what’s going on,” says Eva Štixová, the Chairman of the Plzeň Jewish Community.

Communities also need to learn to protect themselves while using the exist-

a guitar, because he could just as well start singing ‘Hari Krishna’.”

“As for demonstrations, it’s true that the moment you see the assembly wants to suppress human rights, as a public official or policeman, it’s your duty to stop the march. But I just don’t think it’s realistic. There is so much going on at the scene that I don’t think it’s in the power of the officials or the police or the experts to judge it accurately.”

There’s also another factor. “It’s not easy to break up a march of 500 to 1,000 people,” he says. “The smallest mistake can turn an organized gathering into an out-of-control mob.” The vision of hun-dreds of thwarted Neo Nazis wandering through the streets of one’s town isn’t appealing either.

“The moment you break up a dem-onstration, you’ll never put those people back on a train or bus again,” Rödl says. As the situation now stands, it is up to the Constitutional Court to decide whether to strike the three-day-rule from the Law of Assembly altogether, or at least to provide a clearer explanation of how the law is to be interpreted. If the Constitutional Court will not change the law, Rödl says he will appeal to the parliament. “I want to finish this. Either the courts have to tell me, ‘No, you really can’t do it like this,” and then the parliament has to tell me, ‘We’re not going to submit this because we hold the right of assembly above all others’ or else, ‘Yes that’s what’s in the constitution, but it can’t be used to crush the rights of others.’

Changing a single clause in a single law may complicate things for the Neo Nazis for a while – but can it help us get rid of them?

“In any political system, there will al-ways be those who want to change things using force,” Janda says. “It’s simply the tax we pay for democracy.” What can help is a better understanding of the laws that exist – and public involvement.

“The laws against anti-Semitism and racism are very strict here – more so than elsewhere in Europe, but there isn’t a will to define them,” Mareš says. “Nonetheless, people can’t give up because something didn’t turn out the way they had hoped. They need to keep getting involved. Civic resistance is a very strong weapon.”

Eva Munková is editor of TNP.

ing laws, says Sedláček. To this end, his organization is putting together a sort of “cook book” for city officials to use to take action the moment a march is an-nounced. On the whole, however, he feels the recent marches, or rather the public outrage that they have caused, are a step in the right direction.

“Three or four thousand people showed up in Prague Old Town…If it hadn’t been for the march, no one would have thought twice about the anniver-sary of Kristallnacht. Instead, several parliament deputies and even the Prague mayor showed up to voice their protest. This prepares the ground for a change in the law,” he said.

But others, like Mareš, say it’s the courts and not the law that needs to change. “I don’t think that much needs to change here – we just need to define the terms of the law,” he argues. “The standing laws need to be upheld. We have relatively strict laws here [against anti Semitism] that the government refuses to uphold. That is one of the primary complaints of the Jewish Community, which says: if it weren’t in the law we wouldn’t feel so of-fended. We’re protected on paper but not in reality.”

Mareš also points out that even the Law on Assembly gives authorities the right to stop the event the moment some-thing illegal happens, as they did in Brno in May 2007.

There’s only one catch. “You have to prove intent,” Janda says. “You can’t break up an event until someone breaks the law. You can’t break up a concert based on the fact that a Neo Nazi shows up with

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Why Are TheyStill Here?

More than 60 years have passed since the fall of Nazi Germany. While swastikas, straight-arm salutes,

and the Third Reich eagle have been out-lawed, the Neo Nazi movement has not lost its grip on Europe. On the contrary, the movement still holds a weird fascina-tion – especially for the young.

What is it that sustains the Neo Nazi movement decades after the fall of fas-cism? What unites its followers? Why does this ideology of hate and racism still appeal here in the Czech Republic, which suffered so much humiliation at their hands?

Some experts say Neo Nazism feeds on racism and xenophobia in main-stream society. Others say anxiety over globalization and loss of national identity are contributing factors. There are those who blame insufficient education about the Holocaust, and still others who say the young are drawn to the regimented and hierarchical structure of the Neo Nazi movement because they lack a strong “moral force” to latch onto.

Indwelling racism A disturbing report appeared on the website of the Control Risks Group (CRG, www.control-risks.com), an in-ternational consultancy which provides risk related advice to companies, govern-ments and international organizations that regularly send employees abroad.

The report, dated February 26, 2008, noted:

Right-wing extremism remains a concern in the Czech Republic. Although neo-Nazi groups are illegal, several ‘skinhead’ groups are known to be active in urban areas, and extremist groups attempted to stage gather-ings in Prague in November 2007. Targeted attacks are rare and extremist groups are best known for holding rallies. Most of their past actions have targeted Jews or members of the local Roma gypsy community. [Re-cent incidents serve] to highlight that such groups remain active and may occasionally target other ethnicities.

Czech xenophobia is mostly directed at the Roma minority. On March 11, 2008 the US State Depart-ment Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2007 wrote this about the Czech Republic: “Random violence, rallies, and vandal-ism by neo-Nazis and skinhead groups against Roma occurred throughout the year. Societal discrimination against mi-norities, especially Roma, continued, and a lack of equitable education, housing, and employment opportunities for Roma persisted.“

On February 1, 2008, the European Parliament a call on the Czechs to tear down a pig farm built on the site of a World War Two concentration camp for Roma near the South Bohemian town of Lety was ignored.

According to a poll conducted by the Open Group Society of sociologist Ivan Gabal in 2007, two-thirds of Czechs say they find it hard to live with the Roma,

and often characterize them as criminals or welfare cheats.

According to a Ministry of the Interior report, in 2006, the majority of 248 racist crimes “were committed by members of the majority society and these formed both verbal and physical attacks which were directed towards Roma.”

Worse, the racism seems to be sys-temic.

As the aforementioned State Depart-ment Report points out, from first grade onward, Roma children are consistently sidelined in “special schools” and are thus deprived of a normal education.

Perpetrators of attacks against Roma often receive light sentences, even though for so-called hate crimes the opposite should be the case.

In 2007, for example, a regional court in Jeseník gave three youths found guilty of a brutal racist attack against a Romany couple a three year suspended sentence. The government’s human rights commis-sioner Jan Jařab condemned the verdict, but conceded that there was not much to be done about it.

“I think it is correct to call it an out-rage, but it wouldn’t be correct to call it a surprise,” Jařab told Český Rozhlas (Czech Radio). “In the last fourteen years, we have seen a number of such verdicts. It seems that it is the rule, not the exception, that people who commit such attacks – very brutal violent attacks against the Roma – and the offenders are themselves mostly members of Neo-Nazi organizations – are treated very lightly, as

More than60yearshave passed since the fall ofAdolf

Hitler,andyethisfollowersstillplagueEurope.

Aisha Gawad, Karen Yi, and eva Munková

the czech republ ic


if they were just young hooligans who had just drunk a little bit more than usual… It seems that a crime against a person, particularly if that person happens to be a member of a minority, is treated far more lightly [than property crimes] and that is wrong.”

And yet, he added, there is nothing the government can do about it.

“We cannot influence the courts, which are independent, on any particular case,” he said. “It seems that the independence of the judiciary in such cases is strikingly similar to the independence of the judi-ciary in the American south a hundred years ago, where you also didn’t go to jail for lynching a black person because an independent court would never sentence a white person for lynching.“

The incident in Jeseník was only one of a series of barely-punished attacks on the Roma, human rights advocate Gwen-dolyn Alberts told TNP. She is the author of the 2006 European Network Against Racism (ENAR) report on racism in the Czech Republic.

“There is a record here of racial vio-lence going unpunished, so people come here from all over Europe to hold Neo Nazi meetings because they know they can,” Alberts says.

She says that part of the problem lies in racist statements openly made by public officials. Former Deputy Prime Minister and Christian Democrat Party leader Jiří Čunek, for instance, made a derogatory remark in response to how people could receive subsidies similar to those awarded to the Roma: “For this they would have to get sun burnt (refer-ring to Roma skin color), raise a ruckus with their family and build fires on town squares. Only then some politi-cians would say – they are really needy people.”

The fact that Čunek’s statements were tolerated – he never apologized – sends a message to the rest of the Czech popu-lation.

“We are accepting people in gov-ernment who are clearly racist,” says Alberts.

“There were an incredible number of assaults on Roma people by skinheads in the 1990’s, and the court system failed the victims completely,” she said.

Although police statistics show that racially motivated violence has been declining since 2004, when 473 racist crimes were recorded, Alberts says the violence of the past decade has already set a precedent.

prejudice against minority and immigrant communities is common in the czech republic

and seems to be systemic.

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A Question of Identity The changes in the Neo Nazi movement are not a uniquely Czech phenomenon. Other European countries, such as Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary and Poland – not to mention former East Germany – are experiencing similar develop-ments.

Part of the problem is the fear of glo-balization, says Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an interna-tional organization aimed at confront-ing anti-Semitism, hate and terrorism. “With globalization, there is a loss of national identity. Traditional life is threatened and everything is becoming homogenized,” he told TNP.

Amidst a flood of external influences, such as the transition to a market econ-omy (which is now open to competition from all over Europe), a surge in tour-ism and foreign investment, and a not-so-welcome inclusion in the European Union, Czechs are trying to forge a new national identity to sustain them in this rapidly changing world.

Neo Nazis as well as extreme national-ist groups are exploiting the Czech strug-gle to develop a collective identity in the midst of overwhelming global forces, Weitzman said.

“After fifty years of communism, without any mention of ethnic conflicts because the communists liked to pretend they didn’t exist, the Czechs are being thrown into a multicultural environ-ment,” says Alberts. “We are facing a new era without coming to terms with the past.”

President Václav Klaus once said he feared the Czech Republic would disap-pear into Europe like a spoon of sugar into coffee. This frightening image feeds the Czech’s fear of losing whatever makes the nation uniquely theirs, and the ex-treme right wing movements including the Neo Nazis, who are extremely anti-EU, are capitalizing on this fear.

A Gap in the textbooks Many insiders say that a lack of education on the Holocaust and on minority issues in schools gives the Neo Nazi movement a way in to society.

“I think that most of the Neo Nazi marchers have no idea what went on,” says Eva Štixová, Chairman of the Plzeň Jewish Community. “If they can say that

older Neo Nazis who tell them, ‘Look, you’re nothing, but if you join us, the elite of the white race, then you’ll be elite too – you don’t even have to be all that clever. All you need to do is read our brochures.’… The movement offers the young members a new reality – and they adopt its program as their own, and start believing they have to ‘fight’ for it.”

Sedláček adds that a lack of strong values in society makes youth easy prey for extremist groups.

“The absence of fundamental values makes young people search for a source of strength to give them a sense of im-portance and a goal. They are looking for orientation, they want to be part of a group, and they want order, a leader, a direction and an enemy.”

According to 87-year-old Oldřich Stránský, a Jew who saw the inside of con-centration camps in Terezin, Birkenau, Schwarzheide and Sachsenhausen, it is precisely the feeling of strength through discipline which attracts members to Neo Nazi movements.

“Many young people actually like to belong to disciplined groups. That’s why they like summer camps, or Sokol, or the Boy Scouts,” he told TNP. “But it is also very easy for power hungry individuals to misuse their idealism for their own purposes.”

Aisha Gawad and Karen Yi are students at the New York University in Prague.

there was no Holocaust, it means they are terribly uninformed. Most Holocaust survivors are quite old and they don’t pass on their experience to the young people.”

Karel Sedláček, spokesman for the In-ternational Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ), an organization dedicated to re-sisting anti-Semitism in the world, points out that teaching about the Holocaust is not part of the mandatory curriculum in schools. Therefore, his organization is training a network of volunteers to give blocks of instruction about the Holocaust to students. Often, they are accompanied by Holocaust survivors.

“Nothing is more convincing than seeing someone who lived through the Holocaust sitting in front of you and hearing him talk about it,” Sedláček says.

Alberts adds that young people are not receiving clear messages against racism from the government or from the education system, and the cultures of ethnic communities like the Roma are largely misunderstood.

empty Goals There are those who think youth are attracted to the Neo Nazi cause because it gives them a sense of importance at a time of life when self-esteem tends to run low. “Young people find fulfillment in the movement at a time when they can’t get it anywhere else,” says the Czech Republic’s foremost expert on right-wing extremism Miroslav Mareš. “At the age of 13 or 14, they come into contact with

europe and the world


Running ReformOff the Road

In recent years, politicians, spurred on by public pressure, have been putting forth proposals that call for ecologi-

cally responsible business models. None have been as successful at blocking these reforms as the automobile industry.

After it killed the electric car, and frustrated government efforts to man-date greater fuel efficiency, the American car industry embraced the development of engines running on hydrogen and biofuels -- the new “silver bullet” against global warming. Critics say they are sim-ply trying to divert pressure for change.

Meanwhile in Europe, powerful lob-bies in Brussels are attempting to block, or at least water down, any shred of clean air legislation that comes down the pike.

we Like Our carsA car that gets 20 mpg when it is new will release more than 24,255 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere after it is

driven 100,000 miles. Every gallon of gas-

oline that is consumed produces about 5 pounds of carbon. This means that

a SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle) releases about a dozen pounds of carbon into the air in a 40 mile commute.

Carbon in all of its forms is bad for the environment and for people too.

“Carbon dioxide is a persistent gas [which] lasts for about a century. Thus, while it is possible to increase CO2 con-centrations relatively quickly, the opposite is not the case,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert in her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change.

According to the French Agency for Health and Environmental Safety, in France alone, auto emissions kill almost 10,000 people a year. A World Health Organization report covering Austria, Switzerland and France found that some 40,000 people die every year in these countries as a result of auto emissions.

In Europe, where CO2 emissions from road transport increased by 26 percent between 1990 and 2004, the German Council for Environmental Questions reported that auto particulate matter is “the most important health problem linked with air pollution.”

And yet we live in a world that idol-izes the car.

In 2007 the British department store chain Tesco commissioned Dr.

Christian Brand of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University to analyze its employees’ carbon emissions over a year. Brand found that car and air travel accounted for more than 75 and as much as 90 percent of personal emis-sions for most, especially younger and higher income, people.

“Car travel is the dominant factor,” Brand concluded.

Yet another study by the British environmental agency Defra found that 75 percent of people were prepared to change their behavior to limit climate change, but “only 5 percent of car driv-ers said they had driven less because of environmental concerns.”

Killing the electric carIn February 2008, at a private luncheon, Bob Lutz, General Motors Vice-Chair-man, told a group of reporters that global warming was a “total crock of shit.” The 40-year auto industry veteran and long-time campaigner against higher fuel effi-ciency standards claimed that forcing the auto industry to sell smaller cars would be “like trying to end the obesity problem in this country by forcing clothing manufac-turers to sell smaller, tighter sizes.” (“GM Exec stands by calling global warming a ‘crock’,” Reuters, February 22, 2008.)

Nonetheless, 18 years earlier, this out-look had not stopped America’s largest car maker from spending over a billion US dol-lars to develop and market a clean hybrid.

william cohn How the auto industry thwarts environ-

mentalreforms.

This was mainly due to the Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate, requiring that 10 percent of automakers’ new California cars and light duty trucks be ZEVs by 2003, which the California Air Resources Board passed in 1990. The mandate also allowed manufacturers to claim partial tax credit for the development of hybrid vehicles.

In an award-winning 2006 documen-tary film, Who Killed the Electric Car, director Chris Paine tracks the birth and premature death of GM’s battery electric vehicle, the EV1, showing how automo-bile manufacturers, the oil industry, and the US government brought development of this technology to a screeching halt.

Through interviews with GM’s auto-motive designers, environmental activ-ists, pro-auto lobbyists, and government officials, Paine shows how GM developed an electric car, the EV1, which could go up to 150 miles between recharging, reached a speed of 183 miles per hour (in modified form) and emitted no exhaust fumes or carbon emissions. GM never offered the 1,117 vehicles it made for sale – only for lease, at 299 to 594 USD per month. Despite the relatively high cost, waiting lists were full.

Sadly, in 2001 the California Air Re-sources Board caved in to fierce lobbying from automobile manufacturers (includ-ing GM), the oil industry, and the George W. Bush Administration and rolled back the ZEV Mandate. Thus, GM effectively signed the death warrant for its own car. (“Who did Kill the Electric Car?” Kim Weir, The Beat, October 13, 2006)

Paine’s film shows how, in 2003, despite howls of protest from its clients, GM forcibly recalled nearly all of the vehicles it had made, and crushed them. The company said lack of profitability was the reason for the carnage, claiming that it would be more profitable to sue California for rolling back the ZEV man-date than to go on making the cars.

In his film Paine also points to another reason why the EV1 had to die: marketing electric cars as “clean” transport would mean admitting that GM’s core product was dirty. Furthermore, carlords feared that electric cars, which run on a battery rather than a combustion engine, would eat into profits from maintaining and replacing internal combustion engines.

During an interview with CBS News, Paine said he was making a sequel

called Who Saved the Electric Car?, but he later had to scrap the idea for lack of evidence.

Government Gets InvolvedThe untimely demise of the EV1 was just one example of the failure of the Partner-ship for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), established by the administra-tion of Bill Clinton in 1993. Under the PNGV arrangement, the US government agreed to subsidize US carmakers to build prototype sedans capable of getting 80 mpg by 2003.

Other vehicles that emerged from the PNGV deal suffered similar fates as the EV1.

The GM Precept (with 2 electric mo-tors), the aluminum bodied Ford Prod-igy, and the largely plastic Dodge ESX3 were wheeled out with much fanfare at the 2000 North American Auto Show in



Detroit – and then were wheeled away, never to be seen again.

In 2002, after more than a billion dol-lars of federal money had been spent, the Bush administration scrapped the PNGV project in favor of research on hydrogen powered vehicles.

Zero-emissions cars running on hydrogen fuel cells have been touted by General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, and lawmakers since 1990, but over the past five years, less than 200 of the cars have been built.

Critics say the shift to hydrogen power is just another way for the American car industry to deflect attention from the real issue of higher fuel efficiency.

Until Dec. 2007, US fuel efficiency standards had not changed for 30 years.

The oldest, and perhaps most sinister, example of the car industry’s indiffer-



europeIn a report dated March 31, 2008, and titled “Europe’s Worst Double Talkers,” Newsweek looks at the close relation-ship between industry and government in Germany, and at the revolving door which exists between government and the auto industry.

“In Germany, unlike in other coun-tries, the German government defends German private companies, rather than the common interest.” European Member of Parliament from Luxembourg, Claude Turmes, told Newsweek.

“The result is a sharp divide between Berlin’s rhetoric and policymaking, both in Berlin and in Brussels,” Newsweek concludes. “This divide is most evident in political leaders’ stance on the envi-ronment.”

Germany, however, is not the only culprit.

In 2007, the European Parliament sought to establish binding targets for new passenger cars marketed in the EU.

The German car industry countered with scaremongering tactics. Daimler-Chrysler Deputy Chairman and Board Member Erich Klemm told reporters that if the EU Commission proposal were approved, factories would close, costing 65,000 workers their jobs. In a country where every seventh working adult is employed by the automobile industry, statements like these are bound to cause a ripple.

Meanwhile, German Member of the EU Parliament (MEP) Jorgo Chatzimar-kakis, a prominent member of the Forum for the Automobile and Society, refused to get excited. “We will not completely dismantle this proposal, but we will shape it in such a way that it will protect both the climate and the car industry,” he said.

knowing the health risks stemming from lead-poisoning, launched a PR campaign pushing leaded gas. The government took a hands-off approach and leaded gas became the standard at US filling stations.

It took more than seven decades for the government to bar leaded gas in the 1996 Clean Air Act. By then seven mil-lion tons of lead had been released into the air from auto exhaust pipes.

the cAFe FightIn 1975, in the wake of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, Congress enacted fed-eral regulations to raise the average fuel economy of cars, light trucks, and sport utility vehicles sold in the US. It imple-mented the Corporate Average Fuel Ef-ficiency (CAFE) standard, which called on carmakers to produce cars and trucks with a fuel consumption of 27.5 and 22.5 miles per gallon, respectively. Those who did not were taxed.

The car industry has been kicking up a ruckus over CAFE ever since, throw-ing every possible objection, from job loss to lower car safety, in its path. The fact that there was no rise in US fuel ef-ficiency standards in the 30 years prior to December 2007 indicates that this tactic was successful.

However, in 2007, in an amendment to the Energy Bill (H.R.6), the Senate started trying to hike the CAFE standard for both cars and trucks up to 35 mpg by 2020, with a 4 percent annual increase thereafter. Carmakers started howling in earnest.

In the end, carmakers jumped at an-other, “more reasonable version,” which raised the CAFE fuel economy standards to 36 mpg by 2022 for cars and 30 mpg by 2025 for trucks, with no mention of further improvements in fuel efficiency.

In a group email to his employees, Chrysler Group President and Chief Ex-ecutive Officer Tom LaSorda wrote that the legislation “constitutes an acceptable approach because...[it] respects the chal-lenge of developing affordable technologies and recognizes that there are inherent differences between cars and trucks.”

“The impact of the proposed energy bill (H.R. 6) without the amendment would cripple our business,” he added.

Paradoxically, the more stringent fuel standards have driven car manufacturers to take another look at hybrids…

we have to come to terms with the fact that there is no silver bullet

for the ecological harm caused by

our car addiction.

ence to air pollution and public health is its long-standing affinity for leaded gas.

In his book, Auto Mania, author Tom McCarthy uses archival records to docu-ment how, for more than half a century, carmakers managed to convince the pub-lic that there was no alternative to leaded fuel.

For at least a century, McCarthy wrote, it has been known that lead is dangerous, especially for children. High blood-levels of lead can result in physical and mental ailments including brain damage, anemia, liver and kidney damage and even death.

The earliest cars were made to run on ordinary unleaded gasoline but they had a problem: engine knocking. In 1921, a team of GM researchers discovered that adding small amounts of lead to the fuel supply could solve the problem.

GM and Standard Oil formed a joint venture to manufacture leaded gas and,

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Last December, the 33 carmaker lob-byists accredited to the EU Parliament helped water down another European Commission proposal for curbing global warming pollution generated by new cars. The final version was much weaker than the original proposal, both in terms of carbon limits and penalties for offend-ing carmakers.

Commenting on the outcome, the environmental NGO Greenpeace wrote: “Last week in Bali, the European Union stood up like a lion for the world’s climate – this week, the Union’s executive arm is going down like a lamb and putting carmakers’ short-term profits before our common survival. Car manufacturers are in the driver’s seat at the European Commission . . . [which] has come up with a pathetic legislative proposal that fails to demand any significant changes from the road transport sector, whose carbon dioxide emissions are continuing to rise.”

they Drove in From the eastCar ownership in China and India is extremely low relative to US standards. In China there are nine personal vehicles per thousand eligible drivers, and in India there are eleven. Compare this to 1,148 vehicles per one thousand in the US – yes, more than one car per driver.

However, rapid income growth in China and India means that millions more of their inhabitants will soon be able to buy cars.

To make it even easier for them, in January 2008, Tata Motors of India un-

Bribing for OilPassenger vehicles in the US now ac-count for 40 percent of its oil use and 10 percent of global oil use. This could be one reason why US energy policy has even overridden America’s own Foreign Corrupt Policies Act, which prohibits American businessmen from bribing foreign officials.

According to Peter Maas, in his exposé, “The Fuel Fixers” (New York Times Maga-zine, December 23, 2007), British and US officials called off bribery investigations in Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia in defer-ence to a need for scarce oil. Citing the case of purported CIA operative James Giffen, who was indicted in 2003 for giv-ing over 78 million US dollars in bribes to senior Kazakh officials, Maas asks:

“In an era of scarce oil, can America afford to punish anyone who cuts corners to win deals for American firms? In 2003, when oil sold for less than $30 a barrel, it was possible to believe we could have our anti-corruption statutes and our cheap gasoline. Four years later, with oil going for $95 a barrel, it’s not so clear.”

Maas cites China’s implicit economic and political support of Sudan, despite the atrocities going on in Darfur prov-ince, in exchange for access to its oil, and writes: “The choice is simple. Make painful but necessary changes to reduce our addiction to oil, or sink deeper into our moral sludge.”

The reality, as the IHT opined on March 26th, is that “the era of cheap oil is truly over,” and “short-sighted policies [make us] far too dependent on oil that is both ruinously expensive and ruinous for the environment.”

Fossil FoolsA 2002 report by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the health risks from automobile emissions bore the words “don’t cite, don’t quote” on each page. In 2002, the EPA got smacked down hard by an auto industry lawsuit, and subsequently had to relent from its call for strict limits on emissions in 1997. It has since become a willing accomplice of the industry’s efforts to thwart emis-sion controls.

Even now, it is playing a key role in the Bush administration’s drive to keep individual states from setting their own emissions limits.

veiled the world’s cheapest car, the Nano. Dubbed the “people’s car,” it is made of plastic and glue rather than welded steel and, at 100,000 rupees (2,500 USD), it promises to get a lot of Indians into a car.

The Nano is also expected to force other automakers to cut prices and to develop cheap cars. This will bring more drivers onto the roads and out of the more ecologically friendly mass transit. “This car promises to be an environmen-tal disaster of substantial proportions,” said Yale environmental expert Daniel Esty.

“Just consider the scale of the poten-tial problem – for instance, the effects on global warming of 750 million more cars in India and China, belching carbon dioxide,” wrote Vijay Vaitheeswaran and, the authors of Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future. This book traces the history of the link between oil and the automobile industry – which the authors call the “industry of industries” – and how the two have shaped the in-ternational landscape.

Marketing electric cars as “clean” transport would mean admitting that GM’s core

product was dirty

the eV1 electric car before california rolled back the ZeV mandate.

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Emissions limits are in the purview of federal, not state, authority. However, individual states can request a waiver ac-cording to the 1974 Clean Air Act. Cali-fornia has even had a waiver approved by Congress since 1967.

But in late December 2007, the EPA told 17 states, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California, that they could not set their own more strin-gent tailpipe standards for emissions lim-its from cars and trucks. These standards, to be phased in by 2016, would have cut emissions by 30 percent in these states.

The EPA backed the federal govern-ment’s right to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles and overrode an April 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which ruled that the states could act.

EPA staff later told reporters that the agency’s leadership had ignored their

conclusions and instructed them to pro-vide the legal rationale for this decision.

In January 2008, California sued the US government, asserting that it was “ig-noring the will of millions of people who want their government to take action in the fight against global warming.”

In an editorial titled “Arrogance and Warming,” from December 21, 2007, the New York Times wrote, “The Bush administration’s decision to deny Cali-fornia permission to regulate and reduce global warming emissions from cars and trucks is an indefensible act of executive arrogance that can only be explained as the product of ideological blindness and as a political payoff to the automobile industry.”

conclusionWe are in a vicious cycle whereby our love for our cars makes us resort to des-

the eV1 electric car after california rolled back the ZeV mandate.

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perate measures to secure the oil needed to run them. The convoluted solutions of the oil and auto industries are not aimed at reducing the consumption of transport fuel.

We have to come to terms with the fact that there is no silver bullet for the ecological harm caused by our car addic-tion. The best car of the future could be no car at all.



Biofuel Backlash

The production of biofuels has been found to generate more greenhouse gas emissions than the direct use

of conventional fuels. Worse, according to the United Nations’ World Food Pro-gram, biofuels are starting to cause food shortages.

In March 2007, EU leaders pledged to raise the share of biofuels in transport from 2 percent to 10 percent by 2020. Even carmakers like DaimlerChrysler have pro-moted clean, green biofuels as a response to environmental pressure groups.

Not to be outdone, General Motors and other carmakers in the United States, where some 200 government biofuel sub-sidies cost taxpayers 7 billion USD per year, also started promoting biofuels.

Brazil, China, and India also made biofuel production part of their national policy.

Then, in January 2008, the EU Com- mission’s in-house scientific unit pub-lished a study stating that the environ-mental costs of the EU biofuels promo-tion policy far outweigh its potential benefits.

Another study, published in February 2008 in the US journal Science, con-cluded that almost all the biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emis-sions than conventional fuels when the methods of their production are taken into account.

The study found that biofuels pro-motion in the US and Europe is having a devastating follow-on effect on natural habitats.

In other words, Brazilian farmers are now deforesting the Amazon to produce soya beans for US consumers whose farmers have shifted to producing corn-based ethanol.

“The land-use problem is not just a secondary effect,” wrote Timothy

Searchinger, a Yale professor and co-au-thor of the study. “It is major.”

hungry for changeResearch done by the Earth Policy Insti-tute (EPI), a Washington think tank, in 2007 showed that biofuel production in America is causing a shortage of wheat and many other related foods and could exacerbate world hunger, wrote Youmna Sakr in, “The Fight between Fuel and Food,” (Risk Management Magazine, April 2007).

“Thanks to the rapid rise in govern-ment-fueled ethanol production, ethanol plants could use as much as half of Amer-ica’s corn crop next year,” Sakr wrote. “The increased demand for corn is likely to drive up the cost for food in the long run, as the higher corn prices have made it more expensive for ranchers to use feed corn for cows, chickens and pigs.”

Citing the EPI report, and taking into account that American wheat makes up 70 percent of world exports, Sakr noted that, “Increasing corn prices could lead to a reduction in US exports to low income

grain-importing countries, which could in turn lead to food shortages in poor coun-tries around the world. This in turn could lead to political instability, food riots and even greater anti-Western sentiment.”

On March 6, 2008, less than a year after Sakr’s article came out, executive director of the UN World Food Program Josette Sheeran told EU policymakers that the world economy “has now en-tered into a perfect storm for the world’s hungry.”

She warned that along with climate change, high food and oil prices, and low food stocks, increased demand for biofuels was a policy that was “leading to a new face of hunger in the world.”

Biofuels may yet help to reduce green house gas emissions, but the present poli-cies are clearly ill-conceived. The global impact of biofuels promotion must be carefully considered in order for it to be a helpful part of our arsenal in combat-ting global warming.

Eva Munková edited this article.

Thereisadevelopingconsensusthatbiofuelsarecausing

greaterenvironmentalharmthangood.

william cohn

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Circus in China

Beijing won the privilege of host-ing the 2008 Olympic Games on July 13, 2001. China’s promises

and ambitious plans were a key factor in the International Olympic Commission’s decision. Even then, it was obvious that the smog-shrouded and traffic-jammed Beijing, the capital of a country that does not support human rights and sup-presses basic freedoms, had a lot of work ahead of it.

Through the Olympics, Chinese au-thorities want to prove that their country is a world power and to divest commu-nist China of its image as a country that has been battling poverty and political injustice for decades.

the Green Grass of BeijingTo prepare for the 29th Olympic Games, which will open on August 8, 2008, Beijing undertook to build 14 new sports facilities, including a huge main stadium called the Bird’s Nest, and to reconstruct 23 more – and it looks like it will keep its promise. Even a new network of roads, railways and metro lines, as well as Olympic housing and service facilities, should be finished well in advance.

“We are in the final stretch and we are meeting our plan, ” the Beijing Olympics Commission said in 2007, with a year to go to the start of the games.

China’s preparations for the games, and for the incoming flood of more than two million spectators, are a true medley of large-scale organizational talent and attention to the finest details.

In 2006, China spared no expense to send 200 “experts” along with 74 athletes to the Italian Winter Olympics in Turin to learn as much as possible from the Italians.

China also spared no expense in spray-painting Beijing’s lawns a perfect green color when the International Olympic Commission came to inspect the city in 2001. They plan to do the same for the duration of the Games this summer.

Even places that have essentially noth-ing to do with the Olympics are getting a “new coat.” For example, the city of Hohhot, which lies over 400 kilometers away from Beijing and is not hosting any Olympic event, is building a new 70-mil-lion-dollar airport, as well as a highway to the capital city, just in case airplanes can’t land at the Beijing airport due to bad weather. Naturally, the Beijing air-port is also getting a facelift in the form of a new billion-dollar glass and steel terminal building.

clouds and pigs Made to OrderIt seems that the Chinese are ready for all eventualities – even the unforeseeable ones.

For example, what if, before the beach volleyball competition, it rains and the sand in the court turns to mud? Not to worry. The Chinese combed the country until, on the distant tropical island of Hainan, they found a unique kind of sand with outstanding drainage abilities, and brought 17 tons of it to Beijing.

In terms of weather control, officials from the Beijing Weather Modification Institute claim that the problem of rain during the Olympics has been taken care of. Chinese scientists have been

testing a method of cloud dispersion, which entails shooting certain types of chemical mixtures into the atmosphere. Ostensibly, these can drain the clouds of water before they get above the Olympic action.

The Chinese are also raising special Olympic pigs for the athletes, the Wall Street Journal wrote in October 2007. These pigs are located in ten select loca-tions where the air, water, and soil are of the highest quality. Due to “terrorist threats” the exact location of the farms is kept secret. The company responsible for raising the pigs, the Qianxihe Food Group, or Lucky Crane, as the company brands itself in English, at a press confer-ence in Beijing in August 2007, said the pigs only eat natural products, cultivated with no added hormones or antibiotics. Only Chinese natural medicines are added to the feed. The pigs exercise for two hours per day. The objective of this

enterprise is to give the athletes the purest meat possible, with no added substances that would cause problems in drug tests.

spending Money to Make Money“Beijing’s promises are almost too grandiose, ” Greg Groggel, an expert on the Olympics who studies the effects of preparations in various cities, told the Wall Street Journal. Although neither the

Here come theChineseOlym-

pics, with special pigs, dirty

air, absorbing sand, spray-

paintedgrassandbirdsnestsand

other grandiose preparations, all

intheshadowofhumanrights

abusesandChinese“non-inter-

vention”

simona ely

As far as practical preparations go, Beijing is in the home stretch, but there has been no great progress in the

democratization of the country.



total amount the city invested in 2007 nor the interim economic gains have been published yet, the Olympic prepa-rations certainly have helped the Beijing economy bloom.

The 40 million dollars that the city in-vested in 2005 raised its GDP by 20 per-cent and its annual per capital income by 6, 200 USD (for the sake of comparison, annual per capita income in China rose by 2, 000 USD in the same period). In the last five years, 620, 000 new jobs have been created, mostly in the construction and service industries.

In 2001, the Beijing Olympic Com-mission guaranteed the commercial success of the games. At that time, it es-timated income from sponsorships and licenses would reach 330 million USD. Now, income is expected to exceed these expectations. According to the Octagon consulting company, commercially speaking, the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will be the most successful in history. Sponsors are expected to spend 1.5 bil-lion USD, which is roughly three times the amount they spent on the Athens Olympics and twice what they spent in Sydney.

Unclean Air However, nothing is as perfect as it looks. Beijing’s polluted environment, which the city officially pledged to improve, remains a problem. Even though over the past decade it has already paid out over 13 billion dollars to boost the use of greener energy, plant some 30 million trees and move factories, Beijing is still shrouded in smog. Last June, meteorologists meas-ured the worst pollution in the last seven years. The amount of nitrous oxide in the air is also alarming. In the fall of 2007 it exceeded the limit allowed by the World Health Organization by 78 percent.

Because it is obvious that the city will not be able to sufficiently improve air quality, officials are planning to imple-ment several radical short-term scenarios during the games. For example, they plan to cut automobile transportation by two thirds, and to partially or completely shut down Beijing’s factories.

Alas, these measures are not likely to help. In a test-run in August 2007, the metropolis closed its roads to more than a third of its automobiles for four days. The move had a tangible effect on the

press China to improve its human rights record ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olym-pic Games.

China has promised to give “complete reporting freedom” to the international media. Yet all it has done to this end was to temporarily allow foreign media to enter the country between January 2007 and October 2008. This essentially means that foreign correspondents no longer need work permits from local authorities.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry press release, issued at the end of 2006, said freer reporting rules should apply to more than just Olympic themes, and should also cover Chinese politics, technology, culture, and economy. None-theless, according to research done by the Chinese Foreign Correspondents Association in August 2007, 95 percent of the world’s journalists who write about China feel that the journalistic condi-tions in the country do not correspond to international standards and 68 percent said that China will not make good on its Olympic promise. Forty percent of the respondents said they encountered intervention by Chinese authorities in their work. This included intimidation of sources, tracking and arrests of journal-ists, and even physical violence against the reporters or their sources.

Some people still hope that China will come through. They point to South Ko-rea, which was a military dictatorship in 1981, the year it won the right to hold the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. Not only did the games cause an economic miracle in Korea, the preparations brought about the country’s first free presidential elec-tions in 1987.

As far as practical preparations go, Beijing is in the home stretch, but there has been no great progress in the de-mocratization of the country. Amnesty International continues to point to the high number of executions, torture, the suppression of religious and press free-dom and to harsh intervention against Internet users. Western newspapers also warn about slave and child labor.

non-intervention politics?China’s apathy towards human rights at home is not the only source of criticism. Its international activities, too, are gener-ating calls for a boycott of the Olympics.

traffic jams, but little effect on air quality. The reason is that external sources are re-sponsible for about 34 percent of the dust in the air and 35 to 60 percent of its ozone level. Therefore, regulating only the city’s emitters is simply not good enough.

Beijing’s polluted air poses a great threat to athletes. High levels of carbon

dioxide could cause runners to have respiratory problems and high levels of sulfur dioxide could inflame the eyes of archers. Competing countries are already taking these far-from-perfect conditions into account. The American Olympic Team, for example, will bring along res-piratory masks as well as massive doses of ibuprofen and asthma medication.

The International Olympics Commis-sion has said the health of the athletes is the highest priority. In August 2007, President Jacques Rogge told CNN that if the dispersion conditions are too bad, some Olympic competitions will simply have to be postponed. This would be a huge embarrassment for Beijing. There have been changes in the Olympic sched-ule in the past, but the cause was always poor weather and not air quality.

human rights on the back burner Beijing’s greatest embarrassment, how-ever, is its failure to keep its promises in regard to human rights.

Beijing’s mayor, Liu Jigmin, an-nounced that, by way of the Olympics, China wishes not only to uplift the capital city, but also to support democracy and human rights.

In 2006, Reuters reported that more than 180 Chinese dissidents and human rights activists signed a letter urging the International Olympic Committee to

even the most ostentatious

Olympic Games of all time

cannot mask the conduct of china’s

politicians.



The 2008 Games have even been dubbed the “Genocidal Olympics.” Amnesty International, among others, has blamed China for collusion in the extermination of the non-Arab popula-tion of the Darfur province in the west of Sudan, where government-supported Arab-Islamic paramilitaries have brutally murdered over 200,000 people and driven 2.5 million others from their homes.

The Chinese regime is Sudan’s greatest investor, having put at least five billion dollars into the country’s oil fields. Natu-rally, in return, Sudanese oil flows into China, which gets sullied twice by this black gold. The Sudanese government uses up to 70 percent of its proceeds from oil to buy the weapons used to commit atrocities in Darfur.

Even worse, not only has oil-hungry China refused to join an embargo on Su-danese oil, but as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, it has repeatedly used its veto to prevent the US and Great Britain from sending peacekeeping forces into Darfur. Only in 2007 did China bow to intensive international pressure, and at long last allowed UN forces into the area.

Officially, China calls its international politics “non-interventionist.” However, this non-intervention, with no regard to the regime of a given country, has earned it criticism (Association for Asian Research, China’s Darfur Policy, January 5, 2007), and not only because of Darfur. Many countries want China to take a hard stand against Iran, which, according to all indications, is trying to develop an atomic bomb. Even the UN has started calling for dramatic sanctions against Iran. However, until now, China (together with Russia) has taken firm stands against their implementation.

Last September China also blocked the approval of sanctions against the military junta in Burma, for its bloody suppression of protests by Buddhist monks. China went so far as to support the governing regime, and there too prevented the international community from intervening. Like in Sudan, China’s position in Burma is a result of its own economic and strategic interests.

China’s recent intervention in Tibet, which has resulted in the deaths of over 110 demonstrators, has generated more

calls for a boycott of the Olympic Games. Former Czech President Václav Havel advised Czech leaders to at least boycott the opening ceremonies.

China hopes the 2008 Olympic Games will improve its image abroad. Yet even the most ostentatious Olympic Games of all time, or the image of the Olympic flame being borne over Mount Everest, cannot mask the conduct of its politi-cians.

However unlikely, it would be good if western democracies would answer China’s “non-intervention” in kind. They would not carry their flags through the Bird’s Nest, they would not play beach volleyball in the well-draining sand and they would not dine on specially bred pork.

They would simply decide not to “in-tervene” in Beijing.

Simona Ely is a correspondent for Přítomnost.

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Back to 1989

Our interview with the former First Deputy of the National Correctional Board Milan Hulík

looks at reforms, shortcomings, and widespread misconceptions regarding the Czech prison

system.

David svoboda

interv iew


For six months before I took up my post as the Deputy General Director, I was the Chairman of the Central Vetting Com-mission. My group vetted members of the administration, prison directors, and their successors. Ordinary guards were scrutinized by local commissions. Some 200 people retired voluntarily before the process started. Those who thought they could pass stayed. About 500 guards didn’t pass. Of course we had to retain enough personnel to keep the system from collapsing. We expected there to be second or third wave of firings. But the lists of names of people who didn’t pass the vetting got lost, and even Jiří Novak, the Justice Minister at the time,

claimed he never saw them. Nonetheless, I’m convinced that the prison system underwent the most thorough purging of all the security forces.

In your work, An Attempt to Analyze the Prison System, published in April 2006 on the electronic cs-magazine, you noted that most of these positive changes later came to naught. Not long before the Social Democrats came to power, the reforms stopped, both in the prison system and elsewhere. In the mid 1990’s the old cadres who hadn’t gone into business or retired started coming back to their own prisons. In the meantime, military habits, such as salut-ing and awarding of ranks, had returned. Suddenly, nobody cared that someone hadn’t passed the vetting. The members of our commission were viewed as some sort of fanatics. Our prison system is now back to where it was in 1989.

how does that manifest itself on the in-side?Sexual violence against newcomers is a big problem. That happens because the social workers go home at night and only prison guards stay on, and they don’t care what goes on. If a prisoner was dy-ing of fever and the others were kicking

Our prison system is now back to where

it was in 1989.

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when would you say that the czech prison system was at its best?. As a lawyer, I have been associated with the prison system since the 1970’s. I even used to visit my dad in jail in the 1950’s. The justice and prison system in the First Republic (Czechoslovakia in the inter-war period – Ed.) was modeled on Austria and it was much better than after 1948 when the Communists took it over. The only extracurricular activity prison-ers had, for example, was reading.

I think that the prison system was at its best in the first half of the 1990’s, when my team attempted to humanize it according to European standards. This was right after the entire prison work-force had been investigated for wrongdo-ing, and all of the members who weren’t fired were too afraid try to maltreat the prisoners. Change was in the air. Even the problem of finding things to occupy the prisoners’ time wasn’t as catastrophic as it is today.

how would you characterize the prison system before november 1989?A prime example was the designation of a so-called Corrective Education Team. Tough this seemed to designate some sort of educational body, in fact, it was an organization responsible for the most brutal tortures. Sadistic individuals were given a lot of freedom.

what form did the post-1989 reforms take?After the revolution, the first priority was to civilize the system. Prisons were rebuilt to be more hygienic, Turkish toilets were replaced by Western flush-ing ones; the cells were no longer over-crowded; the food got better. Contact with relatives improved, and there was even an opportunity for conjugal visits in separate rooms. The internal network of informers was disbanded – by the way, it was recently renewed. It was also crucial to demilitarize the prison system, so that it was only the guards who had military status. The other personnel and educa-tors working inside directly with the prisoners are now civilians.

Just how thorough were the personnel changes? Jiří Volf, a former political pris-oner, saw an infamous guard still in uni-form at the end of the 1990’s.

the doors in, they won’t lift a finger. The only improvement is that nobody delib-erately tortures prisoners anymore. As opposed to the past, there’s no political motive for it. They leave that up to the prisoners themselves. And then there’s the horrible corruption. Whoever can pay gets left alone.

One often hears that the improvements may have been such that the prisoners are now kicking back at our expense.In the first place, there are certain Eu-ropean regulations that must be upheld. In the second place, laymen think that a criminal needs be fettered to an iron ball in order to be redeemed. However, psychological and sociological studies show that imprisonment can not consist only of punishment – there must also be an effort to re-educate the person.

The biggest problem is that every prison has limited space which is packed with criminally disturbed individuals. Given the limited funds the prison sys-tem has, there is practically no chance of building a system that keeps apart vari-ous types of criminals. On the contrary, they are able to exchange information, plan future crimes and organize criminal groups. You can compare prisons to a closed, overheated pressure cooker, where people just walk around, smoke, and drink bad tea. Inmates are generally not intellectuals, and don’t kill time with books or newspapers. It’s absolutely es-sential to occupy them somehow: with television – no action movies of course – or a weight room. Those aren’t luxury items. They are ways to lower tension. The common call for a tougher prison system would have the opposite effect.

what do you feel is the role of a prison, and what form should actual punishment take?In the Middle Ages, prisons were holding places, either before release or execution. There were no means to support people with long-term sentences. Today, peo-ple have to spend extended periods in prisons and that can only be done under civilized conditions. This is where many inmates learn basic hygiene and get reg-ular meals, which isn’t their case on the outside.

The greatest punishment is the restric-tion of freedom. I don’t agree with the

interv iew


interv iew


Milan.Hulík was born in 1946 to a small businessman and a city clerk. He grew up in Kolín and became a bricklayer. His father was imprisoned for political reasons for ten years in the 50’s and 60’s, so he couldn’t start studying law until after 1968. From 1974 to 1976, he worked as the in-house lawyer for the state Road and Rail-way Construction Company. Even before he passed his bar exam in 1979, he was providing legal help to dissidents. He defended members of the rock group Plastic People of the Universe, Petr Cibulka, Petr Uhl, and others who signed the Charter 77, an informal civic initiative which criticized the Communist government for fail-ing to uphold basic human rights. In the 1980’s he secretly worked with Radio Free Europe. After the revolution in 1989, he served as Chairman of the Vetting Com-mission in the Correctional Services Corps (SNV, now Prison Services), and as First Deputy to the SNV General Director and advisor to the Attorney General. Since 1995, he has been working as a private lawyer. He works with the French organiza-tion ACAT (Action de Chrétien pour Abolition de la Torture) in support of human rights.

death penalty, because a life sentence in and of itself is a kind of social death. Peo-ple don’t realize that watching the world from behind bars and knowing you will never see it again is much worse than a moment of fear before your execution.

what about the conditions regarding de-taining the accused before trial?The conditions of detention in the Czech Republic are medieval. Detention here is actually an even more severe form of punishment, although the presumption of innocence should apply. Prisoners often share a cell with quite primitive individuals. What are they supposed to talk about? Why should they get the same food as the convicted criminals? Why the atrocious hygienic conditions, where you can’t even take a shower and where you stay in the same rags all week? Vladimír Hučín (a former dissident and later member of the Security Information Service who was accused, and later found innocent of illegal possession of firearms, panic-mongering, and misuse of public authority –Ed.) remained in detention a full year. They used to take him to court in a “bear”-- a kind of belt used to escort dangerous prisoners. His hands were bound to his body by a chain which the guard kept tugging to make it hurt. After five years of investigation, they cleared him of all charges. The system compen-sates you for lost income during deten-tion, but they can’t compensate you for the fact that you couldn’t live a normal life – and nobody even apologizes to you.

how do we compare to other european countries when it comes to prisons?When I was in Switzerland at the begin-ning of the 1990’s to observe their legal system, I was astounded by the high quality of their facilities. They looked more like hospitals. On the other hand, Viktor Kožený (a Czech-American en-trepreneur wanted in this country and the United States for illegal asset strip-ping and swindles, who has taken advan-tage of Bahama’s non-extradition status –Ed.) was held in the Bahamas, a part of British Territory, under horrifying conditions. One can always debate how luxurious or repressive a prison should be. Nonetheless, the prison system is one of the criteria used to judge the level of civilization of a country.

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Here, whenever I go to a prison, I have to present my power of attorney. If I forget it, they will turn me back, even if it’s mid-night. They always ask if I have alcohol or drugs and they always use a metal detec-tor. In the last two years, I was in Bratislava three times, and I was amazed. On the first visit, they enter you in their computer, so the next time you come, all you have to do is tell them that you are so-and-so’s defense attorney. Here, when I go to court, I go through a security gate several times a day. They aren’t capable of making a list of lawyers and giving them a simple pass. While they are busy frisking me, a 60-year old man and a young steno typist run through without even showing their pass. Those are small but telling details.

Do you see any chance of improvement?Everything is related. As long as society doesn’t try to improve its police or justice

people don’t realize that

watching the world from behind bars and knowing

you will never see it again is

much worse than a moment of

fear before your execution.

system, and the behavior of Czech poli-ticians, who set the standards, doesn’t change, then the prison system can’t start to improve.

But isn’t a liberal prison system the privi-lege of states with an extremely low crime rate, like scandinavia or holland? I agree that we aren’t ready for it yet. The prison system can’t be better than the jus-tice system, and that can’t be better than the society as a whole. Given the state of our political culture, it’s just not possible. It looks like we are going to bear the con-sequences of communism much longer than we thought we would following the revolution. And that does not only apply to the prison system.

David Svoboda is an assistant editor of Přítomnost.

spec ial feature


In 1613, on the Wednesday after St. Katherine’s Day, Václav Rovenský was being stretched on the rack in the dun-

geon of the Pardubice courthouse. His interrogators wanted him to admit that he had been poaching in a nearby fish-pond and to tell them who his accom-plices were. Only after “he swore on his life that what he had said was true, ” did the judges pass a verdict. “You stole, you committed a deadly crime, and so you will go to the gallows, ” they told him.

Imagine his surprise if they had sent him to prison for a few months instead. He would probably have thought that the world had gone crazy and so had he.

the Decline and Fall of the torture chamberPrisons existed long before the time of our unfortunate poacher. However, they were not used to punish criminals by depriving them of freedom. Back then, with the exception of debtors’ prisons, such punishments were simply unknown. Granted, some high-ranking individuals were imprisoned for long stretches of time, but that was for political and not criminal reasons. Otherwise, prisons served only for the purpose of detention

until the judge passed a sentence, which usually pointed to the gallows. The only thing that varied according to the type of crime – and of course the social standing of the perpetrator – was the way he or she left this world.

Incarceration replaced death and torture as a form of punishment thanks to the humanizing trends of the 18th century. Enlightened philosophers and rulers started to recollect fundamental Christian values that the secular powers as well as the Church had thoroughly eradicated from public life. One of those, the inviolability of human dignity, was the subject of the works of the Court Councilor of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, Josef von Sonnenfels. In 1775,

this converted Jew, whose real name was Josef Perlin, published his essay on “How to Eliminate Torture.” One year later, Maria Theresa prohibited the use of torture as an interrogation method.

Austria thus became the first European country to make torture illegal. Prussia was the second.

Prussian King Friedrich the Great wrote an essay against torture and for the mitigation of punishments. Helping him in this endeavor was his Justice Minister,

Samuel von Cocceji. His written penal code helped the Prussian king create the first legal state in Europe, which he char-acterized thus: “In court, the law must speak and the ruler must be silent.”

From convents to prisonsThe son of Maria Theresa, Josef II, took radical humanism even further. Josef II abolished the death penalty and replaced it with prison sentences, whose length depended on the gravity of the crime committed. Whether the criminal ended up in a military prison, a penitentiary or in the municipal jail also depended on how dangerous he or she was considered to be.

Prison sentences also started replac-ing the death penalty for economic

reasons. The development of large collec-tive farms, along with mass production, and the budding Industrial Revolution turned human beings into units of pro-duction. An executed criminal would have represented a substantial economic loss to his masters.

As incarceration grew in popularity as a punishment, corresponding “housing facilities” had to be built for the convicts. Josef II’s decision to abolish convents and monasteries all over the Austrian Empire was partially motivated by the fact that these buildings were ideal for use as pris-ons. There was sufficient space for group housing, dining and work facilities. Work was considered to be the convict’s principal activity, as well as his path to redemption.

In Bohemia, two convents were turned into prisons. One was built in Valdice in 1857, near the town of Jičín in the former Carthusian convent, and the other one, Svatováclavská (St. Wenceslas) was in a former Cistercian monastery in Prague. At the end of the 19th century a new prison in Pankrác took its place.

Based on his work with convicts at the Svatováclavská prison, the famous Czech prison reformer, Father František

even though mass facilities make prisoners

become part of the criminal subculture, our prison system continues this

tradition.

Have modern prisons

turnedintoschoolsfor

criminals?

Ivan Štern

They Were Supposed to be Humane

spec ial feature


Josef Řezáč, was able to analyze the important role work played in the social redemption of the prisoners. He built several workshops for carpenters, lock-smiths, tailors and weavers in the prison. He also came up with the notion that, from a psychological and social point of view, it was very important for pris-oners to wear clothing they had made themselves. Prisoners wove their own cloth on hand-powered looms and used it to make everything from bed sheets to uniforms.

the Danger of Open DormitoriesThe open dormitories in the erstwhile convents, where convicts worked, ate and slept in common areas, had one

the workshops during the day, but it is even more important that every prisoner be isolated at night…”

In the lecture, Lány further stressed that, “It is crucial to awaken some hu-man and civic self-respect …as well as a healthy and correct outlook on life in the convict…” However, this is all for naught if the individual living in group facilities is exposed to the incorrigible prison rabble which dominates every prison in the world, he said.

Yet, most Czech prisons are former communist concentration camps, built in the early 1950’s for the purpose of liquidating political prisoners, precisely through the use of mass facilities.

In 1950, the communists turned the Benedictine monastery in Broumov into a prison. Nuns from all corners of the country were crowded into it. Many died of hunger or cold, in other words, of “natural causes.” They were buried in mass graves and have not even been added to the list of communist atroci-ties.

All of these facilities operated on a system of self-government by the pris-oners. They were deliberately dominated by the most heinous of criminals, who had a free hand, especially when it came to political prisoners.

Germany has completely abandoned the tradition of mass facilities. In Germany, talk of overcrowded prisons means that occasionally two people have to be put into a single cell. In this country, prison overcrowding means that there is not enough floor space for the prisoners in the open dormitories. Often, there are as many as three bunks stacked on top of each other in these spaces.

Modern experts call open dormitories the worst of all evils, and warn that they lead convicts to identify with the crimi-nal subculture. Nonetheless, our prison system still functions on the basis of this tradition and doesn’t seem to be too keen on changing it.

Ivan Štern is a reporter with Český Rozhlas 6.

great drawback: they were a good place to learn about crime.

In 1931, Dr. Emil Lány, the Chief of the Czechoslovak Prison System, described the situation in the country’s prisons.

“Every year, in their annual state-ments, our prisons, warn us that the prevailing and outdated system of open dormitories, is turning prisons into schools for criminals, ” he said in a lec-ture in 1931. “Even the prisoners them-selves see this. One long-term prisoner, in his memoirs, writes that at night, in open dormitories, prisoners talk about their crimes, critique them and plan new ones. Every spark of a good intention among them is cynically extinguished … Prisoners must be kept occupied in

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economy

Corruption as a National Trait When it comes to economic crime and corruption,

Czechsholdtheirown.

Libuše Bautzová


economy


Corruption as a National Trait

A government official asked me not to mention his name when I was interviewing him on a completely

non-controversial subject. When asked why not, he replied “I used to be a busi-nessman, and you know how it is when you’re in business. Your conscience is never completely clean.” It seemed that he was confirming what most Czechs believe: a businessman is equivalent to a crook.

The term “business” has negative con- notations in the Czech Republic. Perhaps this is due to the fact that under the former regime, there was a category of crime called “unauthorized entrepre-neurship,” or perhaps it is due to a long line of scandals in the media involving persons who founded businesses with one goal in mind: to fleece their clients or the state at all costs.

The media has a great deal of influence on the way the public views entrepreneur-ship. The story of a convicted swindler-businessman is music to the ear of many a courageous citizen who is convinced that nobody deserves to earn more than he does. At the same time, when a story

about a man shot down by an unknown gunman while leaving a luxury hotel on Václavské náměstí (Wenceslas square), the largest square in Prague, hits the TV news, viewers remain tuned in until the reporter notes that it may have been a matter of settling business accounts. “That explains it – businessmen,” the viewer notes, accepting the event as a matter of natural course.

Are all Czech businessmen crooks? Is there honest money to be made here?

A deteriorating trendIn 2006, the last year for which data are available, 39,473 cases of economic crime were reported in the Czech Republic, of which 27,142 were resolved. That same year, 20,201 people were convicted of theft, embezzlement or fraud. The data included crimes committed by em-ployees as well as business owners. In comparison, in 1995 22,110 people were convicted of economic crimes, in 2003 the figure was 23,465.

World-wide, 43 percent of companies are afflicted by economic crime. Ac-cording to the PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Survey of Economic Crime 2006, in the past two years, some 61 percent of the companies in the Czech Republic were victims of economic crime. The direct losses arising from these crimes

equaled some 34 million crowns (2.1 million USD) per company. More than 33 percent of Czech companies suf-fered losses of over five million crowns (303, 000 USD) – up from 13 percent in 2005. The Czechs fared worse than other central and East European countries, where half of the companies suffered from economic crime.

The survey focused on all forms of economic crime: embezzlement, distor-tion of financial information, corruption,

bribery, money laundering, infringement of intellectual property rights, and more. As in previous studies, the most common form of economic crime is still embez-zlement and corruption.

Some 80 percent of Czech respond-ents told the CVVM polling agency (The Center of Public Opinion) that they were highly dissatisfied with the high level of corruption and economic crime. Czech polling agencies have been coming up with such results for years.

corruption and bribery as national traits At the start of the 1990’s, the government of Václav Klaus declared war on eco-nomic and financial crime. In 1998, the new premier Miloš Zeman did the same. The result? Between 1993 and 1999, the damages accruing from economic crime increased by almost 400 percent. The police attributed the increase to an “ava-lanche-like and uncontrolled” process of the establishment of new businesses, the lack of preparation of government tax of-fices, inconsistent oversight on the part of the Czech Central Bank, and the absence of a law to prevent the reinvestment of illegally gained funds into the economy – so-called money laundering.

Since then, several legislative norms to limit corruption were passed. The country’s entry into the European Un-ion, along with the obligatory adoption of laws and regulations applicable in the older member states, has helped some-what.

The number of economic crimes hasn’t decreased that dramatically, and neither has corruption. It seems to be thriving – as if both the bribe-giver and the bribe-taker have lost all fear of get-ting caught.

Bribery as a national trait In September 2005, Transparency Inter-national noted that the Czech Republic had one of the highest rates of corrup-tion in the European Union. A World Bank study placed the Czech Republic at the top of the list in the central and east Europe in terms of the rise in corrup-tion involved in the granting of public tenders.

Though Czechs consider corruption to be a great problem, paradoxically the surveys show that they are quite tolerant

the number of economic

crimes has not gone down, the

pattern has simply changed.

economy


panies are no exception. In December 2001, the energy conglomerate Enron, once the seventh largest corporation in the USA, went bankrupt due to far-ranging accounting fraud and hidden losses. Accounting fraud also forced the management of the Italian dairy and food corporation Parmalat to declare bankruptcy.

The temptation in companies with billions in turnover and tens of thou-sands of employees is simply high. One can look at companies like Volkswagen, Siemens and Societé Generale – all have been implicated. The most recent scan-dal appeared in February 2008 with the investigation of tax evasion of the now former director of Deutsche Post Klaus Zumwinkel, who used Lichtenstein as a tax haven.

One foot in the eastIn the Czech Republic, cases when fraud investigations go on for far too long and often evaporate into thin air are all too common. Politicians and government of-ficials at all levels are often involved. This is what the public sees and hence, what it imitates: “If those at the top can do it, so can we…”

The official I mentioned will probably continue to work in the administration according to the same rules he followed in his former company. He’s simply used to it. Both government and corporate employees have a greater tendency to commit crimes in places where clear ethical boundaries are not set and there is low loyalty to the employer or institution. A corruption hotline can reveal or mar some of the impending or ongoing misdeeds, but it doesn’t improve the atmosphere. A business environ-ment where adherence to clear rules is a matter of course is the only way to fight economic crime.

Though the Czech Republic can rank itself among the mature (western) coun-tries of Europe, in some ways, we still belong in the East, where the law may be understood, but not broadly respected. Eighteen years after the transformation, this is not good news.

Libuše Bautzová is a journalist and head of the economic section

of the Z1 television station.

of bribery. A study conducted by GfK, an international market research firm, in the fall of 2006, showed that 56 percent of Czechs consider bribes to be a normal part of life.

Half the citizens in the country have given bribes, be it a box of candy for the doctor, a 500 crown-note (30 USD) to a traffic policeman, several thousand crowns to an official at the municipal construction office, or a contribution to the bank account of an official who has the final say on a military tender. We have become used to the fact that even those transactions that are strictly governed by law have to be helped along.

The aforementioned Pricewaterhouse-Coopers study also showed that, in the last two years, over 30 percent of the companies surveyed found themselves in situations where they felt they were being asked for a bribe. Almost half felt that they had missed a business oppor-tunity because their competitor did pay a bribe.

Every post-1989 government has sworn to fight corruption. For example, after winning the 1998 elections, Pre-mier Miloš Zeman, in his “Clean Hands Campaign, ” promised to meticulously investigate all suspicions of corruption, to re-open closed investigations, and to toughen sanctions. But it all fizzled out. In 2000, the European Commission, in its Evaluation Report on the Czech Republic, called the campaign a failure and said that the war on corruption and economic crime in the country was un-satisfactory.

In the latest strategy for the years 2006 to 2011, Czech Premier Mirek Topolánek is betting on the notion that less govern-ment interference and control equals less corruption. He wants to minimize gov-ernment regulation, simplify legislation, lower the amount of funds portioned out by the state, and reduce the bureaucracy in the administration. The media is to play a key role in revealing and publicly denouncing corruption. But will that be enough?

the trouble with public tendersOf all types of corruption, public tenders offer the biggest opportunity. One only needs to recall the long line of dubious tenders that have plagued the Defense Ministry over the past 14 years. They have

ranged from scandals over electric and electronic equipment for the L-159 light combat airplanes, through the acquisi-tion of faulty parachutes, to the Army General Staff ’s financing of parties and luxury items from a 17 million crown (1.1 million USD) slush fund. Last year, suspicion of corruption emerged in the lease of the Grippen, Swedish supersonic aircraft when a Swedish television station revealed that Saab officials may have paid out bribes to Czech officials. The affair is still under investigation. (In 2001, four bidders pulled out of the Czech government’s plans to purchase 36 new supersonic jet fighters, claiming the tender was not transparent, leaving just one contender, the British-Swedish consortium of Saab/BAE Systems in the running – Ed.)

Mirek Topolánek’s government is now talking about making the tender process more transparent, and increas-ing oversight of public officials and their property during their time in office. There is also a promise to beef up penalties in the Criminal Code and in the Conflict of Interest Law.

More thorough internal oversight at the ministries and other government institutions where there is a threat of corrupt practices would certainly help. These problems have to be dealt with in the same way as in the corporate realm, since the causes of corrupt practices and financial scams are similar in all sectors.

Though Czech losses due to corrup-tion may seem high, a look at the rest of the world puts things into even sadder perspective. Even publicly traded com-

In the czech republic, cases

when fraud investigations

go on for far too long and often evaporate into

thin air are all too common.

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Through American Eyes

Two vastly different books about Eu-rope came out in the United States between 2003 and 2004. The varying

ways in which they portray the present and future role of Europe – or rather the European Union – in the world under-scores the schism regarding the way that the US views us today.

In the opening line of his book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, (2003) political commentator Robert Kagan succinctly defines the conflict between the two con-tinents. He writes that Americans and Europeans must stop pretending that they have the same world view or that they even live in the same world. Kagan writes that the US today sees the world as a place where true security and freedom still rely on the use of military force and not on international law and treaties. Europe, however, considers force to be outmoded and is striving for an orderly world, based on law and international agreements. As a result, Kagan writes, Americans nowadays seem to come from Mars and Europeans from Venus.

Kagan goes on to state that the early American ideal, more akin to Immanuel Kant’s ideal of “eternal peace, has since become a European motif. Kagan argues that the growing strength of America and the gradual weakening of Europe caused the change in outlook.

In The End of the American Era, (2005) Charles Kupchan, profesor of interna-tional relations at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that we are see-ing the end of the Pax Americana. This was nothing more than a transient period in history which will soon be replaced by a number of power-based groups, dominated by the European Union and

a rising China. The war in Iraq, the at-tempt to pacify Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, and growing anti-American as well as anti-European sentiments are just bringing this conflict to a head.

europe in DeclineThe way Americans see Europe varies. Some think the old continent is on its last legs, while others think it is experiencing a renaissance. According to the essays of the Roman Catholic theologian and Sen-

ior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, George Weigel, Europe is in deep decline. He argues that the source of Europe’s problems lies in the humanism and enlightenment of the Renaissance, when the individual became the focus of society. Because Europe has allowed atheistic humanism and secularism to force out Christian values, it now finds itself in a moral and spiritual crisis. This has led to such consequences as demo-graphic suicide. (Demographic trends in the 1990’s showed that more Europeans

were dying than were being born. – Ed.) “Europe is dying out, ” Weigel writes. Furthermore, he argues that Europe’s secularism has made her weak and is eroding her political influence in the world.

The theories of Senior Fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations Walter Russel Mead are some-what less ideological. In his 2005 essay, “American Integrity, ” he writes that it is the mission and the duty of the US to ensure world peace. He attributes this to Europe’s declining power, although he does concede that the creation of the EU has bolstered the old continent’s role in the world somewhat.

He writes that the decline of Europe began with the First World War and continued with the disintegration of her colonial empires following the second. Now, it is exacerbated by social and cultural changes. Europe has lost its reli-gious faith, and its will to wage war, Mead writes. This makes it less competitive in a world where the majority of inhabit-ants are not as secular, or pacifist, as it is. Mead writes that Europe has achieved the utopia described in John Lennon’s famous song, “Imagine”: “nothing to kill and die for and no religion too.” He claims Europe is too pure to be an effec-tive force in the world we live in.

On the economic front, Mead writes that Europe wants to lead the world in do-mesticating capitalism, whereas America wants to lead it by allowing capitalism to develop freely. Europe believes that it can lead the world by example of its success-ful social model. America believes, in a way Karl Marx would have applauded, that capitalism cannot be controlled and that societies that try to do so will always be weaker, less developed, less produc-

Jiří Musil

Aconcise review of the latest

AmericanbooksonEurope.

the Us will maintain its

leading position in the world, but it will not achieve the peace founded

on democracy it longs for, because

it will not be strong enough.

l iterature


tive and less dynamic than those which give it a free reign.

Nonetheless, Mead concludes that both views are incorrect. The 21st century will both fulfill and disappoint the hopes of Europe and the US. Europe’s aspiration to reverse the long-term decline of its position in the world will probably come to naught, despite its strong economic position and some progress in the area of political integration. The US will main-tain its leading position in the world, but it will not achieve the peace founded on democracy it longs for, because it will not be strong enough. Even a superpower of the magnitude of the US will not be able to control the complex and dynamic global society of the 21st century.

From the cited examples, we can see that Americans are already starting

to realize that the new century will be chaotic and uncontrollable. Europe, on the other hand, will not be able to stop its own long term loss of significance for three reasons: its economic growth will be slower than that of the rest of the world, its population will decline in numbers and will age more rapidly, and its military power will not increase because the political will to raise military expenditures will be lacking.

europe Ascending Tod Lindberg, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the editor of the book, Beyond Para-dise and Power: Europe, America, and the

premacy. (2004). He writes that Ameri-cans “slept through the revolution” and completely underestimated the changes taking place in Europe.

These authors attribute Europe’s re-covery to American help following World War II and to the creation of a European common market as well as the political framework of the EU. They also agree about the essential role of Europe’s com-mon currency, the Euro.

UCLA Professor Ivan T. Berend, in an essay titled, “The European Union: a Growing Economic Superpower,” noted that between 1900 and 2000, Western Eu-rope’s gross domestic product increased tenfold. “That has never happened in the history of the world, ” he wrote.

Most of these authors agree that Eu-rope’s defining characteristic is a strong social state based on high direct and indirect taxes. This high degree of reapportionment of wealth enables high-quality social services and numerous social payments to exist. These, in turn, help individuals overcome the loss of employment, illness, injury and other crises. As a result, there are fewer poor households in Europe than in the US. Even though the difference in incomes among individual social classes is grow-ing, it comes nowhere near the economic and social rift opening up in the US.

They write that Europe’s healthcare systems are made up of a multifarious network of public and private ele-ments, which, despite lower overall expenditures, produce better results. In 2002, the average life expectancy for men in Sweden was 77 years. In France, Germany and Great Britain it was 75. In the United States, it was 73 years. Yet, in Europe, healthcare expenditures equaled only 7 to 8 percent of the gross domestic product, compared to 13 per-cent in the United States. Americans also work longer hours than Europeans, but only have half the vacation time. Many more examples could be brought to bear, but the ones mentioned here show that European employees are better off than their American counterparts. According to American as well as European econo-mists, the EU pays for this in slower economic growth compared to the US.

In his book titled, The Next Superpow-er?: The Rise of Europe and Its Challenge to the United States (2005) Rockwell A.

Future of a Troubled Partnership (2004) asked the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama to comment on the relation-ship between America and Europe. Fukuyama took the middle road in an essay titled, “Does the West Still Exist?” He surmised that there are fundamental differences in the value systems of both sides. These are not only due to the events of the past five years; they stem from a long-standing disagreement on the le-gitimacy of democracy in what is known as western civilization. The US does not adhere to the notion that international organizations and treaties can safeguard world democracy, as most Europeans tend to believe. Fukuyama gives hope that the consequences arising from these differences could be mitigated if the United States would be less aggressive

in its “realistic” foreign policy, which he says, tends to equate American interests with those of the rest of humanity.

the pro europeansThe pro-European authors in America agree that Europe – meaning western Europe – has not only recovered from the catastrophic consequences of two world wars and the loss of its colonies, but that it has turned into a new economic superpower.

Washington Post editor and NPR commentator T. R. Reid openly shows his partiality to Europe in his book, The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Su-

GDp per capita, calculated in terms of purchasing power parity, and world ranking

Sweden US $36,900 (12th)

Denmark US $37,400 (7th)

United States US $46,000 (2nd)

France US $33,800 (16th)

Germany US $34,400 (19th)

Czech Republic US $24,400 (26th)

Slovakia US $19,800 (31st)

Hungary US $19,500 (28th)

Greece US $30,500 (23rd)

India US $1,004(132nd)

Russia US $14,600 (45th)

China US $5,300 (67th)(Assembled using Wikipedia based on IMF estimates published in October 2007.)

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Schnabel, the former US ambassador to the EU, notes that it is possible to combine dynamic economic growth with social solidarity. He points to Scan-dinavian countries, which are among the most liberal in the world in an economic sense, but also refuse to dismantle their social state. The availability of high-qual-ity social services which enable women to combine maternity with a high rate of employment is one of the reasons why the Scandinavian economy is so competitive. Of course, it comes with higher rates of taxation, which Scandinavia’s citizens accept.

Schnabel adds two disturbing ques-tions to his optimistic evaluation of Europe. First: will Europe be able to maintain a strong social state if it finds itself forced to raise expenditures for de-

fense? Second: will it be able to continue spending so much on the social state if immigration continues to increase?

Sociologists are well aware that citi-zens’ willingness to accept the reappor-tionment of wealth is higher in ethnically homogeneous societies. The growing social and ethnic differentiation in the European countries is therefore likely to lessen any possible eagerness to share the wealth.

To paraphrase Schnabel: there is no single path to success. Both Sweden, with its strong social state, and Hong Kong, with its low taxes and laissez faire economy, can prosper in one and the same world.

Jiří Musil is a sociologist.

europe’s aspiration to

reverse the long-term decline of its position in the world will

probably come to naught.

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Česká centraVáclavské náměstí 49110 00 Praha 1T: + 420 234 668 211E: [email protected]

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psychology


Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child?

In our culture, punishment, and its counterpart, reward, are considered to be the basic elements of child-rearing.

Prohibitions of any kind of violence di-rected against newborns and infants less than a year old are strictly prohibited. When discovered, they provoke public outrage and calls for severe punishments of the parents, who can lose custody of their child.

Children usually experience their first punishments around the age when they are expected to stop wearing diapers. Competitive parents, focused on success and accomplishment, unwisely try to prove to themselves and their friends that their clever offspring are developing faster than their peers. Somewhere between the second and third year, “normal” parents start using punishment to forestall unde-sirable behavior or to force the child to submit to their orders and requirements.

The eminent American anthropolo-gist, Margaret Mead, who described the cultural behavioral patterns of many pre-industrialized societies, devoted one of her studies to the types of punishments inflicted by immigrants to the United States. The comparison of Anglo-Saxon and Czech parents said much about the parents’ primary values. In a Czech fam-ily, where food is a key element in the parent-child relationship, the wooden spoon was (or still is?) a favored punitive instrument. On the other hand, Anglo-Saxon mothers tended to reach for hairbrushes – the same instruments they used not only to keep their children neat

and tidy, but also to show tenderness. Thus, for different children, the wooden spoon and the hairbrush are regarded as symbols of childhood punishment.

It is very important that children understand the link between the punish-ment (or reward) and the behavior that caused it. This is why necessary sanctions must come very quickly, if not immedi-ately after the deed.

This is why it is never good for a mother to “tell on” the children to their father when he comes home from work. Not to mention the fact that he will have

no desire to discipline the children, who have been looking forward to his home-coming. The result often is that the child will internalize a family pattern where the mother is dominant, strict and eter-nally disapproving and the father is kind, tolerant and rather meek. Psychologists who treat young delinquents agree that this model can have a much more dan-gerous effect on the future development of a child than the traditional pattern of a strict father and kind and caring mother. Even from a biological sense, the bigger, deeper-voiced father is better

ACzechpsychologistofferssomeprovocativeopinions Jan Černý

Lying is also an essential social

skill.

psychology


equipped for authoritarian behavior. This applies especially to the upbringing of boys, who are easily humiliated by their mothers’ despotic behavior, but find it quite easy to “forgive” their fathers for the same treatment.

Paradoxically, punishment is part of a safe family atmosphere, yet it must be administered with care. Parents often ask teachers, psychologists and pediatricians

to tell them how strict they should be with their child. They should tell such couples that one parent should always be stricter and the other one more forgiving. It does not matter if the parents often ex-change these roles. As a rule, the parents’ behavior, including the punishments they inflict, should be comprehensible to the child. This way, he or she can easily read and often foretell their positive or negative reactions.

LyingNot long ago, parallel studies in Prague and Brno were done to find out why mothers most frequently punish their 10-year-old sons. In both studies, truth occupied the highest rank in the value system, bolstered by the lofty parental, or rather maternal, statement, “I’ll forgive you for everything, just don’t lie to me.” Though the importance of truth in the child-rearing process is understandable, the age of the boys in the aforementioned study must also be taken into account. In

the prepubescent age, the bounda-ries of family are crossed and the natural bonds of trust between parents, siblings and other close relatives are challenged. Around this time, the soul develops the desire for freedom and the quest for independence begins. Insensi-tive punishments and prohibitions levied by parents and teachers who suddenly feel less secure can only warp this desire. Adolescents don’t only lie to avoid unpleasant consequences or to get undeserved rewards, but also because they are start-ing to set their own limits and they alone wish to decide who can cross them and when. Parents need to apply diplomacy and an ability to decide what to and what not to overlook.

Lying is also an essential social skill. Children start using lies deliberately very early in life, but they only learn to do it systematically at a certain point of social maturity, somewhere around the ninth year of age.

GuiltIn addition to punishments meted out by external agents, there are also internal punishments, known as guilt. People feel guilty for many reasons, often including those they can’t help, such as the breakup of the family.

It is hard for children to condemn their parents, because they are still too depend-ent on them internally. Instead, they turn the guilt against themselves. Doctors and psychologists know of children who have killed themselves in hopes that they would not cause their parents any more trouble. These are extreme examples, but even less dramatic situations prove that internalized punishments in the form of unalleviated guilt can bring children and adults to a desperate state from which they see no escape.

spankingIn our culture, people are constantly mulling the question whether parents may physically chastise their children – a pu-nishment prohibited by law in some countries. There are, however, forms of punishment that

can be even more painful. In modern times, physical pun-

ishments have been replaced by prohibitions, but if there are

too many of them, the adult will re-member his or her childhood as a prison. A child trapped in an ever-narrowing ring of prohibitions loses all positive motivation.

It is common knowledge that the cruelest form of punishment is denial of attention, the so-called “silent treatment,” which children especially experience as a very painful type of rejection.

We should keep in mind that pun-ishments are an expression of violence of the more powerful adult against the weaker child. The growing number of cases of child abuse attests to this fact. Experts estimate that there are some 40, 000 cases in the Czech Republic alone. Most abuse is not discovered and goes on throughout childhood.

When it comes to punishment, there is no universal guideline. We can only use our common sense and sensitivity. An old saying says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Jan Černý is a psychologist.

One parent should always be stricter and the other one

more forgiving.

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joined them. The result was chaotic and deconstructed buildings. At the start of the third millennium, when the environ-ment and our place in nature are the key issues, architects are striving to create corresponding complex organisms that live their own life.

Blobitechture got its start in 1995, when the American architect and sci-

ence fiction writer Greg Lynn started experimenting with “metaball graphic software.” Metaballs, also known as “blobbies, ” are the way computers por-tray three-dimensional curved objects on a screen. Soon, other designers began to experiment with “blobby” software.

Some of the results are the Water Pavilion on the artificial island of Neeltje Jans in the Dutch province of Zeeland, which resembles a long, flat, gray fish, washed up on a rock; the Sage Gateshead concert hall on the Tyne River in Eng-land, which looks like three big, shiny, silver bubbles, joined; and the Eden Project, in Cornwall, England, a series of

golf-ball-like geodesic domes built over a reclaimed china pit.

Some prominent architects in the field are Czech-born Jan Kaplický, the archi-tect of the aforementioned Octopus; the Briton Norman Foster, who, among his other work, added a large dome to the German Reichstag building in Berlin; American/Canadian Frank Gehry, the

creator of Prague’s own Dancing House (the Fred and Ginger building, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain); and Dutch architect Lars Spuybroek.

Although he died in 1926, Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect whose build-ings have wavy walls, whose windows look like caves, and whose roofs resemble coral reefs, is considered to be an honor-ary member of the blobby movement.

Tereza Regnerová is a Czech freelance journalist specializing

in modern architecture and design. Eva Munková contributed to this article.

The term which has been used to de-scribe the proposed shape of the Na-tional Library building on Prague’s

Letná plain corresponds to a new world-wide trend, dubbed “blob architecture, ” “blobism, ” “blobitechture, ” “blobismus, ” or simply “blobby.”

Blobitechture is not very well known in the Czech lands. However, in the world around us, amoeba-shaped buildings are the latest rage in architectural design, and they would make our little “Octopus” feel right at home.

Blobitechts want to get away from the impersonal angles common in today’s buildings. Using the newest computer technology, they strive to create a natural, human setting, using curves rather than angles. The end products resemble living creatures, rather than buildings.

Inspired by natureArchitects have always found inspiration in nature. The ornamental Art Nouveau style covered symmetrical buildings with a wealth of natural décor.

The discovery of the double helix of DNA in 1953 gave modern designers the courage to experiment with even more daring shapes. In 1954, Le Cor-busier used the double helix as a basis for his chapel in Ronchamp. In 1957, Jorn Utzon designed the Sydney Opera House in the shape of a giant seashell. In 1962 Eero Sarinen made New York’s Kennedy Airport look like a bird taking off in flight.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, when sci-entists started toying with the chaos theory and particle physics, architects

Blobbies and Architecture

Will Czechs find aplace in their heartland for this new

trendinarchitecture?

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The heated debate about

“the blob” on Letna has

drowned out the down-to-

earth concerns of readers,

students, scientists and

librarians.

I can understand the enthusiasm of my young colleagues at the library for the kind of unconventional architecture

common to modern libraries. I also un-derstand their enthusiasm for the design of the future Czech National Library building, by Jan Kaplický, which won the international competition. Youth and intellectuals are always eager for innova-tions.

However, before wading into the es-thetics of the matter, let us ask ourselves a few very basic questions.

what is the national Library? The National Library is an institution obligated to safeguard over six million books and documents – many dating back to the Middle Ages – for all times.

And the number is growing.Two copies of every book and docu-

ment published in the Czech Republic make their way to the National Library’s archive, free of charge. This part of the collection was founded by Charles IV in the fourteenth century. Now it holds more than three million volumes, and more volumes are being added every year.

The other half of the collection, also originally founded by Charles IV, and also numbering over three million volumes, comprises foreign documents in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and other languages universally used by scholars through the centuries, such as French, German and English.

This part of the Klementinum’s trea- sure documents the international de-

velopment of social, humanist and natural sciences over the ages and still in-spires academics and scientists today. Sadly, the volumes in this section must be bought from library funds. As a result, this section is mainly distinguished from its counterparts in other countries by its poverty.

The collection is increasing every year. Although the number of book loans is dropping, there is a mounting call for research assistance by local and long-distance readers with the help of new information transfer and reproduction technologies.

some Mundane QuestionsIn view of these needs, it might behoove us to pose a few mundane questions before addressing the mere outward ap-pearance of a third library building.1. How much will operating costs of

a third library building on Letná, in addition to the standing buildings at Klementinum and the Central De-

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pository in Hostivař, increase overall expenses?

2. How many employees will be needed and how much will they cost?

3. If the present collection of books is split up, as is planned, and those written before the end of the 19th century stay in the Klementinum while the newer books go to Letná, what are researchers who need both current scientific and academic periodicals as well as histori-cal originals supposed to do? In other words, will the readers or the docu-ments circulate between the buildings, or will the new documents be acquired in duplicate for both libraries?

4. How much will the grossly insufficient amount of money for the purchase of foreign books, periodicals and access to full-text information sites increase?

5. How much will the funds for digitali-zation of the historical and national collection increase?

6. Which library services will be pre-served, which expanded and which new ones will be added?

7. How will the library deal with basic problems that continue to plague users: insufficient opening hours, the quality and speed of services offered to users outside of Prague. Not to mention the problem of reference services provided – i.e., the notion that librarians are there to find and recommend to the readers what the library has at its disposal, versus the current situation where the readers are expected to orient themselves in the library’s complicated information system. And finally…

Does the national Library really need More space?The library administration is continu-ally sounding the alarm that the National Library is running run out of space. It hearkens back to the dire situation at

the end of the 1980’s, when books were stacked on top of each other and locat-ing – let alone lending out – individual volumes was impossible.

Granted, no national library building in the world has ever been built that did not need depositories and buildings

added on eventually. Also granted, the library officials’ concern about sufficient, comfortable and easily accessible deposi-tories and well-equipped study rooms for library users is commendable.

But how do they coincide with the fact that study rooms in the Klementinum are disappearing? Or that the corridor between the ground and first floor of the so-called New College has been shut off to normal library business because it now houses the Klementinum Gallery? Why are the attics rented out to the Czech branch of the International P.E.N. Club?

In the 1990’s a generous grant from the American Mellon Foundation helped our failing library system gain world status. Through this grant, the Mellon Foundation also forced the government to finance the building of a modern depository in Hostivař, with an entire section devoted to the preservation and restoration of the collection.

Even at the time of the Hostivař opening, the National Library knew that

this depository wasn’t going to be big enough.

It could have found sufficient space to expand if it had taken advantage of all of the property the library owned in Prague: a house in Liliova street (it was sold off), or the wing of the Klementinum off Mariánské náměstí which houses the Technical Library. In fact, one of the government’s arguments for the ongoing construction of a new National Technical Library in Dejvice was the need to free up useable space in the Klementinum library. Continuing to build onto the Hostivař branch was another option.

Instead, the Director of the Na-tional Library Vlastimil Ježek is offering 4, 000 square meters of space in the Kle-mentinum to the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University. This latest move illustrates his nervous desire to surround himself with backers from all possible walks of life.

A Giant step BackwardIn the First Republic, under the reign of one of the best National Library directors, the poet Jaromír Borecký, two incredible projects were realized. The first was the restoration of the baroque Klementinum, making it a dignified seat for the library only. The second was Borecký’s success in getting all of the institutions which traditionally belonged to the Czech (and German) Philosophical Faculty of Charles University to leave the building.

With his plans to bring the Philosophi-cal Faculty back inside the Klementinum walls, the present director is taking a one-hundred-year step backwards.

Eva Novotná worked in the State – since 1990 “National” – Library in the Klementinum in

Prague from 1977 to 2004, first in the audiovisual center and later

in the public relations department. She founded the National Library Association, which contributed to the digitalization process.

The National Library Isn’t Just a “Big Building” eva novotná

Money should primarily be invested into

new technologies which can make the documents

readily accessible – if possible over long distances.

culture


Not many years in modern history were as full of dramatic events as 1968.

In Vietnam, the massive Tet Offensive against American forces, along with the My Lai massacre, when American sol-diers slaughtered hundreds of unarmed civilians, shook America’s commitment to the war and led to massive student riots against the war at American uni-versities. Singer Johnny Cash brought compassion to country western music with his album, Live at Fulsom Prison, and Miloš Forman’s anti-war musical Hair opened on Broadway. Students at the Paris Sorbonne brought France to

Talk of Laughter and Forgetting

ThePragueWriter’sfestival,underthedirectionofitsfound-

er Michael March, has risen to become one of the world’s

pre-eminentinternationalwriter’sfestivals,attractingfamous

namesaswellassponsorstoPrague.Thisyearthe festival

exploresthephenomenonofthe1968PragueSpringandthe

ensuinginvasionbyWarsawpactforces.

Václav Kovář

the brink of another revolution. Ameri-can Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the American presidential elections.

Yet what didn’t happen in that year is just as momentous as what did. Czecho-slovakia, a bastion of communism, tried to throw off the Soviet yoke in a peaceful revolution that became known as the Prague Spring, and failed. Like every revolution, the Prague Spring existed on hopes and convictions. Yet before the year was out, they all turned to ashes.

Forty years later, the year 1968 has be-come an icon, bearing a message that is still painful today. Prague Spring ended in ruins and left all of Czechoslovakia bit-terly shaken. It also led to massive forced emigration by Czech intellectuals. And yet, it brought forth Czechoslovak exile literature and the underground move-ment – hence all of Czechoslovakia’s entire alternative culture.

The theme of the 18th Annual Prague Writers’ Festival, (from June 1 to 5 at Prague’s Divadlo Minor) is “Laughter and Forgetting, ” an allusion to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by the Czech author Milan Kundera, says festival orga-nizer, Michael March. There are planned discussions with the direct initiators of the Prague Spring as well as those looking in from the outside. Authors who played key roles in the Prague Spring, such as Ludvík Vaculík, Ivan Klíma, Antonín J. Liehm, Arnošt Lustig and Petr Král, will reflect on 1968 and how it paved

the way to the 1990’s. Other celebrities, whose fates have been linked to the late 1960’s, will also attend. Names on the list include: San Francisco beatnik Michael McClure, the fellow-traveler of poets Al-len Ginsberg and Gary Snyder; Canadian author and activist Margaret Atwood; Paul Auster, whose books Leviathan, The New York Trilogy and The Book of Illu-sions have been translated into Czech; Russian poet Elena Schwarz; Mexican author Homero Aridjis; and Pakistani poet, pacifist and opponent to America’s policy in the Near East, Tariq Ali.

The Festival promises to be an inter-esting event, one that may help find com-mon ground as well as valuable lessons for solving the societal problems and divisions that remain to this today.

The author is a member of the Prague Writer’s Festival organizational team.

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then and now

Přítomnost, March 1938

From the March 16 1938 issue of Přítomnost, published four days after Adolf Hitler’s “annexation” of Austria:

Poker players know that the cards in your hand are not nearly as important as the look on your face. What matters is how high you are able to bid your hand, and how much you can intimidate your opponent. The history of poker, like the history of modern international politics, is full of players who held very good cards and had very good prospects, losing to opponents who were much worse off, but were better at hiding it.

The events of the last five years bear a marked resemblance to a poker game between one very good player and several bad ones. [England and France] don’t know what cards [Hitler] holds, but, because he always looks confident and determined, they keep waffling. After he took over North-Rhein West-phalia, Hitler openly admitted how much his political strategy at the time resembled poker: he said that he had held such bad cards that he would definitely have lost, if the other side had been as determined as he was. If France and England had intervened in full force, he said he would have had to pull back out of the Rhein-land because, at that time, Germany was still in the early stages of arma-ment. His opponents had infinitely better chances of winning, but they didn’t take advantage of them.

It seems that Hitler has taken over Austria using his old poker strategy… It is highly likely that Ger-many deliberately broadcast that its army was marching on Austria and waited for the world to react. Once it was evident that the world would accept the act as a fait accompli (the German Ambassador asked Prague twice if Czechoslovakia

was going to mobilize), the real order to march was given.

…Regarding our own position, since

Friday, some people have been acting as if we were already sitting aboard a barge bearing us to the netherworld. In their mind’s eye they see us, abandoned and getting silently smothered by a brutal force, as the world looks on in silence.

….This we know for certain: if the demo-

cratic world were to become craven, if France and England resigned themselves

to fate and stopped being that which they have been throughout all of modern history, it they accepted the fact that Germany would gain supremacy over the continent and they themselves would become second-rate powers, we would,

of course, be lost… Such resignation on the part of the great powers simply is not within the realm of possibility. Unless they are preparing for their own demise, they could never allow Germany to subjugate the entire continent before turning on them….

After France proclaimed that she would consider every attack on us to be a reason for war, it is high time for us to stop making hasty analogies between our position and that of Austria... There is no analogy. There will be no silent smothering. There could only be a world war. Skeptics at home also want England

to give us a statement in black and white. They act as if they didn’t know the most basic fact about international politics: that England must and will, in all circumstances, go with France… and that it will never, under any circumstances, whether they involve us or not, let France fight in a new war alone.

Thanks to the shock caused by Austria, these facts are now eminently clear and have made the war less rather than more likely. It is highly evident from the clearest and strongest assurances that Germany has given us in five years of its peaceful intentions. When the dust settles, we will see that we are on firmer ground than we were prior to the Austrian crisis. This posi-tion of confidence is based on very defi-nite statements, issued in certain places, regarding precisely what an attack upon us would mean. It is also based on the fact that the West, after much dawdling, is also beginning to see the value of de-termination.

Ferdinand Peroutka

ReprintedfromtheinterwarPřítomnost.

Castles Built on Sand

letter from. . .


In a lifetime of travel, I have found that there are certain places one should return to over and over again. This is

why I am writing to you from Lisbon. When I first visited this unique Eu-

ropean metropolis thirteen years ago, I came away impressed, or rather, en-chanted, by this melancholic, decadent princess.

Since then, thanks to funding from the European Union and investments into the 1998 World Expo, the princess has re-covered substantially from her decadent airs. The birch trees that used to grow out of the windows of the city’s decay-ing palaces have disappeared. Portugal’s former premier, the Marques de Pombal (1699–1782) would have approved. De Pombal, who did so much to renew and modernize the city after the catastrophic earthquake of 1755, would also be glad that the square that opens up onto the posh Avenida da Liberdade – Lisbon’s answer to the Champs Elysées – bears his name. There is also a metro station named after him, along with a rather pompous monument. That’s some satisfaction for the man who uplifted Portugal in all aspects in the 18th century. Unfortunately, all the thanks he got back then was a law-suit launched by his lifelong enemies, the conservative nobility and the Church. De Pombal must have been an extraordinary man – an intelligent, energetic, flexible and goal-oriented politician with an eye to the future.

Speaking of extraordinary men, let’s go pay a visit to another one over a cup of coffee at the Café a Brasileira. Fern-ando Pessoa (1888–1935), the author of The Book of Disquiet, is sitting serenely in the cafe garden, one leg thrown over the other, unfortunately only in bronze for-mat. Like all of Lisbon, he liked it here. “Fleeting black shadow of a city tree, quiet sound of water falling into a sad fountain, straight-edged green lawn in a public park at twilight, at this moment, you are my entire universe,” he wrote.

Not far from here, in the Rua do Ouro, or Golden Lane, lived Pessoa’s hetero-nym, or fictitious alter ego, the assistant accountant Bernardo Soares. Pessoa, who is often and rightly compared to Franz Kafka, wrote: “I live in the present, and know nothing of the future. I have no past. The future oppresses me in its infinite possibility, the past in its empty reality.”

The shy, reclusive, ironic and nostalgic author called writing “the most pleasant way of avoiding reality on the journey from one night to the next.” You can open The Book of Disquiet on any page and it will always pull you in, because every sentence speaks of life and death. And every sentence is sheer poetry.

By chance my friend, the writer and photographer Igor Malijevsky, also hap-pens to be in Lisbon. I instantly dubbed him the local court photographer for Přítomnost. We meet at the base of the

Elevador de Santa Justa, an elevator built in 1901, whose steel skeleton juts out in the middle of the Old Town. By using the word “juts,” I mean no disrespect. On the contrary, ever since I was a little girl, I have been enchanted by rivets and the elevator, which has a distinct Eiffel Tower air, fascinates me. Contrary to what some guidebooks like to claim, the elevator was not built by Alexandre Gus-tav Eiffel, but by his pupil Raoul Mesnier de Ponsard.

There is a gaggle of tourists in front of the elevator, so we opt to move on to the Alfama, Lisbon’s oldest quarter. The Czechs say this is the twin of the Lesser Quarter in Prague. Unfortunately, like its sister in Prague, even the romantic Al-fama has adjusted her distinctive attitude and started catering to the tourist trade. You can still find untouched places here though, like the ordinary buffet perched on the landing of a steep staircase where we have lunch. (Anywhere in Lisbon where there is no elevator or funicular, there is a never-ending staircase. The city is perched on seven steep hilltops and you have to get up and down them one way or another.) We eat bacalhau, or codfish, the most common Portuguese food, washed down with Messias Extra Seco port wine, which brings back very pleasant memories from my last visit.

“You should return to places you love!” I think again, elbow perched on the wax-cloth tablecloth.

Dear Friends,

Lisbon

letter from. . .


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In very good cheer, we decide to visit the Cemitério dos Prazeres, or the Cemetery of Pleasures, at the end of the Number 28 tram. This tram is one of the city’s main attractions because of its age (some of the cars are 70 years old). It putters along, ringing and rattling, through streets so narrow that their in-habitants can shake hands across them. The tram is said to be a paradise for pick-pockets who can easily steal the wallets of tourists madly snapping pictures. But neither one nor the other is to be seen on our No. 28 – there is just a crowd of old women in black with bouquets of yellow chrysanthemums. That proves we’re go-ing in the right direction.

The tombs at the Cemetery of Pleas-ures look like railway cars. Some are very cozy, with crocheted curtains, and chairs and tables in front. Others have long since been sidetracked: through half-opened doors, you can see half-opened

think he landed on Mars. After going five thousand miles, a traveler who has been around the world will not discover any-thing new, because everything he sees is new… a truly wise person can enjoy the whole theater of life and never leave his chair.”

Pessoa may be right, but I would still like to recommend one exception: Lisbon.

And now I’m going to go find a post office. It’s called Correios and bears a symbol of a red trumpeter on a horse. I hope this letter finds you in good health.

Adeus (goodbye)

Libuše Koubská

The author is the Editor in Chief of TNP’s sister publication Přítomnost

coffins inside. Why this place is named the Cemetery of Pleasures is beyond me. Pessoa, who wrote about the fragments of an “illusive life, gilded from afar by death and its all-knowing smile” might know, but we can’t ask him. He was buried here, but his remains were transferred to the Monastery of St. Hieronymus in the western suburb of Belém in 1985. It is only a short walk away from the renowned Padrao dos Descobrimentos, a monument to Portuguese discoverers.

Fernando Pessoa was also a discoverer, albeit of a different sort. He wrote, “Wise is he who leads a monotone life, because every tiny occurrence takes on the semblance of a miracle. For a hunter of lions, killing a third lion is no longer an adventure. But if someone who has never been outside of Lisbon takes a trip to Sintra (Editor’s note: a suburb of Lisbon, and the location of the ancient palace of the Portuguese Royal Family), he will

part ing shots


Allow me to speak to you today as a publisher. For the past few years, the sales of Přítomnost and this magazine

have been falling. Worse, almost all of our external support from grants has disap-peared – not because we failed to get them, but because the agencies which award them feel that democracy is firmly entrenched in the Czech Republic and that they need to shift their support to the states of the former Soviet Union. As a result, we have found ourselves in a difficult situation.

Our readers and supporters still feel that the magazines have a clear and well-deserved place here. They say we have be-come an institution. As the great grand-son of the founder of Lidové noviny, and the grandson of the first publisher of the original Přítomnost which came out in the interwar period of the First Republic, I cannot give up this tradition. As a re-sult I have cast my nets far and wide, and also asked people what they do and don’t like about the magazine. I have lowered the price, both on the stand and for sub-scriptions, and I have bolstered the sales and distribution network. Recent results show that these steps have at least stabi-lized the situation.

Nonetheless, I am convinced that fur-ther changes are needed. I consider the magazine’s present style and format to be good, but it needs to branch out. We will focus more on analysis of political events, both domestic and foreign. The articles will be more insightful and have more relevance. There will be more diversity in the subjects we cover. We will have core authors who will contribute regularly to the publication while cooperating closely with the editorial staff. The Czech and English editorial teams will combine into one; hence the number of English speak-ing authors will increase. We will publish a single, identical European magazine in Czech and English.

After ten years as Editor-in-Chief of Přítomnost, Libuše Koubská has decided to leave the magazine. A few sentences cannot convey the gratitude I feel toward Mrs. Koubská for her selfless and profes-sional work, as well as for the friendship and respect that continues to exist be-tween us. She has promised to continue working with the magazine. I would also like to thank the other members of the editorial team. I look forward to working with them in the future. The new editorial

team is nearly complete, but, as the defi-nite jobtitles have not been assigned yet, the Summer 2008 magazine will be a “transition issue.” I’m sure we have much to look forward to.

I wish to thank you, the readers. I ask you to remain faithful to our publication, and to be critical as well.

Finally, I would like to mention that, as a completely independent magazine, we are wholly dependent on our subscribers and on support from grants and advertise-ments. If each of you were to find one new subscriber, it would be a beautiful spring gift, not only for them, but for us as well.

Best regards,

Martin Jan stránský

Dear Readers,

Editor: Eva MunkováAssistant.Editor: Stephanie Tan TorresPřítomnost.Editor:.Libuše KoubskáEditorial.Board: Jeremy Hurewitz, John Caulkins, Charles BergenIllustrations: Ondřej CoufalAdministration: Veronika SchusterováGraphic.Design: Johana KratochvílováPrinter: VS ČR, Praha 4Publisher: Martin Jan StránskýPhoto: www.123rf.com (if it isn´t mentioned other way)Contacts: Národní 11, 110 00 Prague 1, Czech RepublicTel: +420 222 075 600Fax: +420 222 075 605e-mail: [email protected] internet site: www.new-presence.czISSN 1211-8303Distribution: The New Presence, Národní 11,110 00 Prague 1Rates: Czech Republic: 480 Kč/1 year (21 USD, 17 EUR)Other.countries.(airmail): 1300 Kč/1 year (56 USD, 46 EUR)Sponsored.by: The Prague Post, Radio Free Europe, The Czech Ministry of CultureThe New Presence offers you advertising at competitive rates.We also offer color advertisements.The magazine is distributed throughout the world.

The New Presence would like to acknowledge that the article “Surfing the Dragon” from our Spring issue was reprinted with the kind permission of Eurozine.com

tnp

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