For somebody from a relatively small European country like the Czech Republic,
taking part in world politics is like playing major league basketball when you
are only five feet six inches tall. It would be cocky to pretend to be a top player,
but by developing special skills like speed and tricky tackling, you might become
a valuable addition to the team. In the Czech case, former President Vaclav Havel,
who left office in February, has managed to become a respected authority on the
international stage. Mr. Havel, who first won fame as a playwright, has consistently
argued that politics and good morals are not necessarily incompatible.
Such an attitude might be useful these days. Coming from a Czech, it reßects lessons
learned from our recent history. We have traditionally been sandwiched between
great powers such as Germany and Russia, and looked for help and protection to
Britain and France. In 1938 both countries traded us in with Mr. Hitler for an
imaginary promise of peace. As Winston Churchill put it: “In 1938 we had
the choice between war and shame. We chose shame and we got war.”
After six long years of Nazi occupation, we were rescued by the United States
and the Soviet Union in 1945. We greeted both as liberators, but we trusted only
the Americans. We were right to do so – unfortunately the fate of our country
had been decided long before. Instead of taking part in building a united Europe
and a Transatlantic partnership with the United States, we spent four decades
on a painful experiment of building a “communist paradise.” It never
materialized, but instead depleted our human, material and natural resources.
With such an experience, and without the toolbox of a superpower, it is only natural
to look for ways to resolve conßicts by compromise instead of coercion. One tends
to think about the hidden cost of the use of hard power. An example of this might
be the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, which was dubbed the “Velvet
Divorce” – a reference to the peaceful fall of communism in the “Velvet
Revolution” of 1989.
The fact that one does not have the option of relying on one’s own superior
military or economic strength provides the opportunity to explore alternative,
less costly ways to achieve one’s objectives. It also serves as a lesson
on how to practice passive resistance when mighty forces are at work. But in a
time of crisis it also allows one to take a step back and think about right and
wrong in a broader context.
All of this will be part of the historical experience that the Czech Republic
will contribute, as a new member, to the debate about common policy-making in
the enlarged European Union. Apart from its relevance in EU “domestic”
politics, the Czech experience may prove useful in the Transatlantic dialogue
with the United States, our “favorite” superpower. Our admiration
for a decisive United States stems, among many other reasons, from the fact that
it understood more than others our desire to become members of NATO once we were
able to make the choice of our own free will.
Shortly before leaving office, in the hope that our American allies might be interested
in listening to Czech views, Mr. Havel signaled to the Bush administration that
we supported the decision to disarm a dictator who developed chemical and biological
weapons in secret. Having recently emerged from a totalitarian communist dictatorship
ourselves, we find it emotionally very difficult to oppose an effort to take action
against a totalitarian regime. This gave rise to the new label for us: “New
Europe.” Even though it is, of course, an overstatement, many people in
this part of the world embrace such a label joyfully – after all, “New
Europe” has a much better sound to it than “Eastern Europe.”
Nevertheless, despite a generally favorable attitude toward the United States,
this “New Europe” will be neither a simple-minded American groupie,
nor an easy bedfellow. This is largely because, with its go-it-alone decision
to attack Iraq, the U.S. administration is sending messages that sound to many
of us “New Europeans” much like the attitudes of the former Soviet
Union, which understood its superpower status as a free ticket to use military
force as it liked. Moscow coerced smaller countries into line, on the grounds
that “he who is not with us is against us” – a doctrine similar
to that espoused by President George Bush after the terrorist attacks of September
11.
The Czechoslovak experience of the Prague Spring of 1968 showed us that, while
we thought that we had held genuine consultations with the Soviets about our ideas
of “socialism with a human face,” in reality the power-conscious Soviets
came only to talk, not to listen. The lesson learned then was that Czechoslovak
opposition was theoretically possible, but at the cost of our supposedly friendly
“brother nation” sending tanks to bring our country back in line with
the will of the masters in Moscow. In order to cope with such realities, Central
and Eastern Europeans developed a special sort of humor. But there is little humor
around today about Iraq.
The prevailing impression is that there was a lack of consultation and consensus
about the objectives of war in Iraq, or about the need for military action. That
makes Iraq quite unlike such previous examples of joint military action as the
Gulf War, the NATO air war against the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic or
the attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The decision to go to war against Iraq seems to have been made long before any
substantive debate took place with friends and allies. Once the superpower made
up its mind, it could not be stopped by any means, not even by an appeal to international
law. For many Czechs and other citizens of Central Europe, it is difficult to follow
such logic.
After all it was the efforts of the international community at the Helsinki Conference
in 1975 that made the Soviet Union sign an accord obliging it to respect basic
civil rights. This document of international law gave legitimacy to civil rights
movements such as Charter 77 and Solidarity, which allowed the rise of moral leaders
like Lech Walesa and Mr. Havel, who eventually became presidents of their newly
democratic countries. Emotionally, it is difficult to discard the belief in the
value of international consensus on fundamental civic values.
Moreover, when considering the Bush administration’s justification of Operation
Iraqi Freedom, we are reminded of our mood back in the 1980s. Living under an
oppressive communist regime, we felt that the West could and should be doing more
to help us get rid of totalitarian autocracy.
Nevertheless, with the benefit of hindsight, one wonders what kind of society we
would be living in today if the United States had launched a military operation
to free us. It is painful to imagine the United States invading our country, bombing
our cities and defeating our army in battle as a precondition for the removal
of the communist regime, let alone reinstalling democracy by appointing some American
of Czech origin, like, say, Madeleine Albright, as our president.
The likely response to such a hypothetical supposition in the Czech Republic these
days is that actually we were probably better off waiting for the time when the
historical opportunity arose to get rid of our communist regime ourselves. For
the time being, however, it seems that in the case of Iraq we have to live with
a U.S. government that claims its own right of sovereign action.
As Czechs who recently joined NATO, we tend to picture ourselves as a pretty girl
who married a multimillionaire and was led to believe that he would invest his
wealth to make the marriage work and take time for a beautiful vacation. Instead,
he drives off with his friends in his new luxurious convertible roadster without
leaving a note as to when he might be back. Of course, once he pulls up the driveway
again, he expects to be loved and served dinner.
What will we do? Most likely play his game for the time being, but also join a
powerful girls’ club called the European Union and share our frustrations
with the other members. As real life shows, even the toughest guy has a hard time
when faced with a determined group of self-confident women. Maybe the American
policy analyst Robert Kagan is right when he claims that Americans are from Mars
and Europeans from Venus, but he might have underestimated the powers that enraged
Venuses can potentially unleash.
Pavel Cÿernoch teaches at the Jean Monnet Centre for European Studies at Charles University in Prague, and is a lecturer on European integration and EU enlargement at the Diplomatic Academy of Prague. He is a founding member of the Czech think tank, European Policy Forum. He was a policy fellow at the Open Society Institute in Budapest in 2001-02. www.policy.hu/cernoch
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