The Czech Republic's relation to the "New Europe,"
Kohák, Erazim
There is no more Czechoslovakia, nor is there likely to be one in the foreseeable future. The governments of the two rump states, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, do not like to be...
...Perhaps that is why our current politicians never mention it.Yet we would find it hard to live in a Czech Republic that builds on the tradition of travail, famille, patrie and the period after Munich...
...Simply because the "Masaryk Republic" is for Central Europe what the Great Revolution is for France or 1848 for Germany, an embodiment of our hopes for freedom, democracy, social responsibility...
...At the time of the Velvet Revolution, we dared reach for a life in freedom...
...For Europe has both the glow of freedom and the vertigo to which it gives rise...
...The German version may be the security of the strong deutsche mark and the infallibility of the Bundesbank...
...His reflections on France were telling: There are two main currents in French society...
...The aristocracy was largely German, threatened by Czech aspirations...
...A great many Czechs, like a great many French, would like to attribute to their nation nothing but a pure love for freedom, democracy, and social responsibility, writing off the other tradition as a German trait...
...In the ex-communist lands, we would be likely to say, it replaces the infallibility of the Communist party...
...The other was conservative, aristocratic, authoritarian...
...the more conservative strata sympathized with the second...
...Those who did not subscribe to those ideals were quickly marginalized...
...q SPRING • 1996 • 17...
...Liberty was displaced by civic virtues—by diligence and piety, family values, ethnicity, and respect for one's betters, much as in more recent rightist rhetoric...
...It was German social democracy that gave European democracy its modern form...
...Yet that won't do...
...Certainly, most of the German-speaking lands did not undergo either forcible transformation, like the Czechs after the Hapsburg conquest in 1620, or a radical revolution like the French in 1789...
...Europe...
...It was not a German military regime...
...They did not experience a far-reaching collapse of traditional social structures or the atomization of society...
...With the rise of Czechoslovakia on the ruins of the Hapsburg monarchy in 1918, the contradictions stood out sharply...
...Let me quote Emmanuel Todd once more: The people think they are still living in the France of 1789—liberte, egalite, fraternite—and the elite thinks it's entering a new world where power comes from on high, and the infallibility of the central banks has replaced the infallibility of the Pope...
...It's not anchored in traditions of egalitarianism, but in those classes and regions that are much more authoritarian, areas where the Catholic Church remained very strong, and which stood against the France that was secular, republican, atheist . . . in this century, the France that came to power at the moment of the Vichy regime was this Catholic, authoritarian France...
...Austrian rule obscured the difference...
...Until 1944, unoccupied France continued to be ruled from Vichy by the rightist regime of Marshal Main, under German patronage but also with the support of a significant number of the French...
...For eight months their rule reflected that attitude of the other Czech (and Slovak) nation...
...We're on our way to Europe, so why revive old memories...
...Recently, in an interview with Newsweek (January 29, 1996), he spoke of the Europe that the Czech government is so eager to join...
...The powerful and the privileged are joining one Europe, and the opinion makers among them are unambiguous in their support...
...Europe's heart, though, is Liberté, egalité, fraternit...
...Six years later, the largest bloc of voters clearly longs for the reassurance of a strong hand, be it that of the Thatcherite Klaus in the Czech Republic, the populist Meciar in Slovakia, or ex-Communist politicians elsewhere...
...It was, after all, Adolf Hitler who claimed, "Germany fights for Europe...
...One was liberal, open, democratic...
...They came into their own only after Munich...
...A similar double current flows through Czech society...
...It is a tradition of democratic idealism, of freedom and openness, with a strong sense of justice and social responsibility, represented most clearly by Czechoslovakia's first president, the philosopher T.G...
...We have just emerged from a period when our rulers insisted on authoritarian values while masking them with revolutionary slogans...
...The question really is a European one...
...Masaryk and his allies identified Czechoslovakia wholly with the ideals of the national revival...
...The dialectic of the longing for freedom and the fear of freedom embodied by the two mottos on French coins is universally European...
...As Germany goes, so will Europe—and if Germany chooses the more conservative way, most smaller countries are likely to conclude that the Norwegians were right and opt out...
...Is that, though, a Czech and French peculiarity...
...Masaryk SPRING • 1996 • 15 Politics Abroad stood clearly for the first...
...Modern Czech identity grew out of that tradition...
...If it is true," to quote Todd once more, "that you cannot govern against the will of the people, it's also true you can't govern against the elites...
...Most thoughtful observers on Europe's fringes cannot avoid the question: which Europe are we joining...
...It is hard to avoid the unhappy impression that the Maastricht Europe is a Europe of travail, famille, patrie...
...Masaryk...
...Unfortunately, even America seems rather short of FDRs these days, and Europe has never abounded in them...
...The French would find it hard to live in a France that invoked the tradition of Vichy, Germans in the Germany of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm—or the easy-going modern Austrians in the Hapsburg monarchy...
...The governments of the two rump states, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, do not like to be reminded that there ever was a Czechoslovakia...
...There is one tradition that I have always accepted as the core of my national identity...
...Europe as a cultural unity was born of the decision for a life of freedom and responsibility...
...Viclav Klaus, the prime minister, voices his misgivings, but only because he considers even a Vichy Europe too leftist...
...Franklin Roosevelt managed to govern with the will of both...
...Yet Germany, too, passed through a Reformation and an Enlightenment...
...This tradition can claim roots in a revolution, the fifteenth-century Hussite revolt of common people against the rule of the lords and the church...
...It evoked the traditions of diligence and piety, family values, respect for privilege and authority...
...It was a strange France...
...Indirectly, the guru of the Paris National Institute for Demographic Research, Emmanuel Todd, has offered an answer...
...Yet a Europe of the privileged elites is simply not viable in the long run—and each new move in Brussels reinforces the impression that a united Europe would be just that...
...If Vaclav Havel, the lone survivor of the glory days of the Velvet Revolution, has any misgivings, he is keeping them to himself...
...The driving force of the national revival was a quest for an ethnic cultural rebirth...
...It was not yet under German military rule: though France was defeated in 1940, the Wehrmacht occupied only its Atlantic coast, much as at first it occupied only the fortified border regions of Czechoslovakia...
...Which Europe...
...Newt Gingrich would have loved it...
...German nationalism also grew out of liberal roots and not only had its version of travail, famille, patrie but also its clear echo of liberte, egalite, fraternite...
...One is the well-known one, advertised around the world: the republican obsession with equality...
...It may not be strictly accurate historically, but our symbolism does run parallel to that of the French...
...But there is another France that makes its appearance during some of the uglier moments of French history...
...The nation was mostly Catholic, but the Catholic church in Austro-Hungary was the ideological arm of the monarchy and therefore unavailable for cultural appropriation...
...Its future may well depend on whether it can find one now...
...To Czech activists it seemed that the supporters of the second nation were really not Czech at all, and that all true Czechs were devoted to liberte, egalite, fraternite in native dress, as freedom, democracy, and social conscience...
...The words that embodied my boyhood ideal of France, Liberte, egalite, fraternite!, disappeared from French coins, replaced by the slogan of the other France: Travail, famille, patrie...
...It was Czech, through representing those dark aspects of the Czech psyche that Masaryk's democrats had never confronted...
...It is a crucially important question—not only for the French and for the Czech, but also for German democracy—on which foundation it will build...
...Let the prince rule ever so badly, as long as he rules firmly...
...Each new military adventure and social upheaval in the former Soviet Union brings home the desperate urgency of building a unified Europe, capable of defending itself—and the urgent need this time to be on the Western side of the great divide...
...Our symbols are all out of joint...
...It refused to base its identity on a "natural" or a traditional, time-honored order, as other societies the world over had done...
...Ten years ago, he made his reputation by predicting with clinical precision that the Soviet Union would soon disintegrate...
...This audacious choice understandably provoked a sense of vertigo and with it the temptation to return to tradition and authority...
...The result is gridlock...
...The men and women of the revival naturally turned to French models and based their program on democracy, with a strong populist strain...
...The answer is both, though not equally...
...16 • DISSENT Politics Abroad Then why hark back to Masaryk and to Czechoslovakia...
...A historian could speak of two nations...
Vol. 43 • April 1996 • No. 2
