The Old New European

What has the United States ever done to the Czech Republic?

The cat had been slumbering around the house for months, with only brief pauses for food, drink, and getting rubbed behind the ears. Three days ago he got up, stuck his nose out the door in the freezing rain, snorted disgustedly, and went back to sleep.

The talk of this year’s exhibition season in London is the British Museum’s Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind, which features some amazingly voluptuous, 30,000-year-old Moravian ladies. It shows that to have a modern mind, you first have to be cool. Global warming won’t help.

A specter is haunting Russia—the specter of a revolution. That much is clear. The tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people braving sub-zero temperatures in the street clearly attest to an unprecedented popular discontent and a clear wish for a more democratic and less corrupt country.

Because of the scope and force of the protest, the obituaries for Prime Minister (and once and future President) Vladimir Putin, and for “Putinism,” have started to crop up right and left. The argument is that even a “sovereign” democracy cannot survive if the majority wish for a change. It is, we hear, not a question of if—but only of when—Putin decides to pack up and go.

Irrespective of what one would like to see happen, this kind of reasoning seems to be premature at best. It is promoted by many of the same starry-eyed people who welcomed Putin in 2000 as the best thing since the invention of vodka, as an organizer and modernizer who would overcome the chaos of Yeltsin years and usher Russia into the 21st century.

We were friends, then we were great friends, then we were not so great friends, and we ended up as friends again. I suspect that this story of my relationship with Christopher Hitchens, a writer gifted and prodigal in equal measure who died last week, was not entirely unique. Few people who have met him were left untouched by the encounter or remained indifferent to his life and work. His talent to fascinate and charm people was equaled only by his gift to infuriate. He was one of the few writers who somehow managed to be totally absorbed in his own work and yet totally present to the world around him. To friends, he was always generous with his time, his table, his liquor, and, mostly, his loyalty. To enemies, he was a scourge, persistent and vengeful, taking no prisoners. Enemies he had aplenty, and he never tired of finding new ones. Friends he had many, though the inner circle remained small and largely constant.

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

…

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

— W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939)

The eurozone is going to the wire in its struggle to preserve the euro. Although some criticize it for taking too much time, it is encouraging to see that it seems to have finally found the will to defend itself against a looming economic disaster stemming from the potential collapse of its common currency.

That radical steps toward a fiscal union are needed if the euro is to be preserved few would deny. It is another question, though, whether such steps should be seen as strengthening the political unity of Europe. It seems obvious to some that the two march hand in hand, but what seems obvious is in itself no guarantee of truth. Some critical reasoning seems to be in order.

In our helpless fascination with the oncoming train of the eurozone crisis we tend to think in dichotomies. If a collapse or breakup of the euro can be averted, we will all sigh a huge cry of relief and go back to our business, in a more responsible and fiscally sounder way, of course. If, on the other hand, the euro fails in spite of our best efforts, there will be crisis without end, pestilence, war, famine, and death.

There is no underestimating the ill effects of the latter possibility. As in any complex, dynamic situation, there are too many variables and interactions between them to reliably predict what would happen. Indeed, one of the implications of the catastrophe theory is that with the sudden loss of equilibrium in a catastrophic event, it is impossible to predict ex ante what is going to happen ex post. But we all have a strong sense it would not be pleasant and we would all rather not find out.

The question of who will be the next Russian president has been near the top of my list of no-brainers for some time. Now it’s been answered. As Vladimir Putin told the congress of the ruling United Russia party, “It’s not really important, who will do what and which of us occupies which position. The important thing is how we work.” Indeed.

The important thing is thus what Dmitri Medvedev’s announcement—foreswearing his own ambitions to be elected for another term and recommending his predecessor and current prime minister to replace him as the next president, in exchange for replacing Putin as the next prime minister—says about the nature of the present and future Russian governments and how they work.

The quiet street in a leafy neighborhood on the outskirts of Prague where I have been living since I was born is an unlikely vantage point from which to watch history unfold, yet it is no stranger to epoch-making events. For some reason, they always take place on August 21st. It was in the dawn of that day 43 years ago when a friend woke us on the telephone with the news that the Soviet army had just invaded our country. For the next couple of hours, my sister and I stood hypnotized by the window watching a slow movie of four Antonov heavy transport aircraft making an approach across the horizon to the Prague airport a few miles to the north. There were always four—whenever the plane closest to the landing disappeared from view on the left, another one entered the picture on the right. It took a while to transport the half a million soldiers who made up the occupying army, and even the much smaller number that was airlifted in.

Amidst the flood of sobering news about markets, shares, currencies, and the future of Europe and the United States, a small but historic victory for the cause of human rights, tolerance, and understanding of all kinds was scored last week in Prague, where I am spending my summer holidays. The first LGBT Pride Parade marched through the streets of Prague as a part of a five-day festival of alternative music, art, and performance.

The arrival to Bohemia of this modern form of staking territory was neither unexpected nor unwelcome. The event was in the making for some time, the venues were booked, the route of the parade planned, and the Lord Mayor of Prague accepted the auspices over the whole thing. August is a quiet month here and the expected influx of a few thousand of LGBT visitors from all over the country and abroad was a nice contribution to the well-being of the tourist industry. This bleak and rainy summer needed a little color.

Seventy years after the crimes, any trial of former Nazis and their collaborators will be an imperfect exercise at best. The victims and most of the witnesses are dead, the perpetrators frail, and the chain of evidence hard to demonstrate. For all that, and because of that, whatever justice can still be done must be done.