Santa Klaus
John Laughland talks to the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus — Thatcherite, Eurosceptic and much loved by the people
0 n the night of 1 May, a grand party was organised in central Prague to celebrate the accession of the Czech Republic to the European Union. All the political Prominenz were present, and self-congratulation flowed as freely as the champagne. But the President of the Republic sent his apologies. Vaclav Klaus announced that he would be spending the evening with a few friends at Blanik in the hills outside the capital, a gesture which was widely understood as a polite and historically resonant way of telling the Euro-elite where to go. For, as every Czech child knows, Blanik is where Good King Wenceslas — Klaus's namesake and the patron saint of Bohemia — gathered with his knights to protect the nation in times of peril.
The man who has dominated Czech politics for more than a decade is not usually associated with symbolic, still less mystical gestures. A neo-liberal former professor of economics in the Hayekian tradition, and a one-time president of the Mont Pelerin society, Klaus's name evokes money supply more than mediaeval mythology. And yet it is precisely his skills at statecraft, and in particular his deep belief in the political value of nationhood, which form the real bedrock of his political identity. As Czechoslovak finance minister and then prime minister in the early 1990s, he laid the groundwork for the Czech Republic's successful economic transition (far more successful, incidentally, than that of most of the country's neighbours). But he was also the architect of the very existence of the state of which he is now head, engineering the Czech Republic's historic split with Slovakia in 1993. As President, elected in February 2003, Klaus is now the only European head of state who cussedly refuses to bend the knee to the nostrums of Europhilia, and who likes nothing more than to rain on a Brussels parade.
As I walk into his office in Prague Castle, he approaches me exuberantly, arms waving at the boxes of books which lie all over the floor, still unpacked, and for which he apologises. Enormous oils stand propped against the walls, waiting to be hung. Klaus has evidently had to spend some time getting rid of the modernist daubs which defaced the walls during the tenure of his predecessor and rival, Vaclav Havel, and he has returned the magnificent presidential offices to their former dignity. Tanned and sporty, he is in an exceptionally good mood. This may be because he enjoys a level of popularity which the Czechs always denied to Havel: although the last Czech president was lauded in the West, the man on the Ostrava tram regarded the strange playwright who was thrust upon the then Czechoslovakia in the heady days of 1989 as a bore and a pseud. Klaus, by contrast, has a freshness of speech and thought shared by few other European politicians, if any.
I ask him about the European constitution, and about membership of the EU generally. On the eve of accession, he had made a somewhat p0-faced television address, in which he warned against 'lofty speeches about Europe' and 'poetry about Europeanism'. His statement that the Czech Republic would lose some of its sovereignty by joining the EU had provoked squeals of disapproval from the Czech commissars of political correctness, and this rose to a shriek when he delivered the archconservative statement, 'We are obliged by our predecessors to preserve Czech statehood.' In the strange, perverted value-system of post-communist politics, Klaus's talk of national interest and his rejection of the ideology of deracinated individualism are as anathema to the bureaucratic construetivists of Brussels as they are to the libertarian New World Order groupies whose moral lodestar is America.
'I am convinced that the European constitution is not necessary,' he tells me uncompromisingly. 'It will not help Europe in any way, it will not simplify issues, it will not make Europe more functional. It is just another attempt to increase the deepening of the EU. The authors are using this document as an instrument' — he repeats the word 'instrument' for effect, perhaps to imply a crowbar or a hammer — 'to make the EU more unified.' He tells me that he wishes the Czechs had not voted so heavily in favour of joining the EU — he would have preferred a 'petit our of 51 per cent to the thumping 77 per cent they actually delivered — because he says that the high score makes them a pushover now. His view is that the socialist Czech government will sign whatever text comes
out of the latest round of negotiations, even though he says there has recently been a change of mood. 'Even the greatest Euro-naivists,' he says, 'have been coming to me and telling me I was right to say that nothing will happen if the constitution is not signed.'
Klaus has always refused to say which way he cast his own vote in the referendum on ELT accession. Although his Christmas cards seven years ago rather improbably showed Bohemia and Moravia as a floating island being punted back towards the European mainland, he pointedly refused to advise the Czechs to vote Yes last year, in stark contrast to the heads of state of the other nine accession countries. A friend of Margaret Thatcher and a habitué of Tory Eurosceptic circles, he is happy to say that he cannot see how the EU's structures can be satisfactorily reformed. 'I doubt that there can ever be a democratic government of the whole continent,' he says. 'I doubt it basically, and I have not seen a mechanism which could replace the nation-state as a natural constituency of people. I have doubts about the possibility of solving the so-called democratic deficit, regardless of the share of competences between the individual countries and the centre. That issue is permanent.'
Unlike his British Tory friends, however. Klaus has enough sense not to fall into the equal and opposite sin of thinking that
America is the universal panacea. The man who was ousted as prime minister of the Czech Republic in 1997 because he started to talk about national interest rather than frenetic privatisation is no slavish follower of the latest faddish dictates from Washington. This is in stark contrast, for instance, to the President of neighbouring Poland, who seems to spend more time in the White House than in Warsaw. Before becoming President, Klaus published articles questioning both the Kosovo and Iraq wars — 'And I was right in both cases,' he tells me proudly — and as President, he struck a Gaullist note when he said that he did not want US military bases on Czech soil, because Czechs had had enough experience of foreign soldiers on their territory in the past.
The Americans on the one hand,' Klaus explains, 'play visibly a card of national defence. They speak about the nation. We do not, because it is politically incorrect. At the same time, they speak about exporting ideas. So for me there is a contradiction in their position. They export more ideas than national defence. That's a problem for me. We know something in this country about the export of ideas and ideology. I have recently engaged in a debate on the difference between human rights and citizens' rights: I always advocate citizens' rights, because mankind is not an entity which could potentially guarantee your rights,
whereas the nation is an entity where it is possible.' It takes guts to say you are against human rights, and indeed Klaus insists to me that he opposes the idea of using military force to promote ideas rather than to defend territory. 'The military defence of human rights is a political agenda and an ideological standpoint.' It is also precisely that for which Nato now stands, to which the Czech Republic has belonged since 1999.
As if the field were not already strewn with slaughtered sacred cows, Klaus also likes to puncture the hubris of those 'dissidents', his predecessor in the first place, who present themselves as heroes for having defeated communism. He is convinced that, instead, communism collapsed of its own accord. It is, paradoxically, his leftwing enemies whom he denounces for their professional anti-communism today. He caused a stir last week when he told a meeting of former political prisoners under communism that there are plenty of new isms to be afraid of today, 'such as Europeanism and internationalism', and yet these are of course precisely the new conformisms that have supplanted the old left-wing orthodoxies to which so many subscribed before, especially the so-called dissidents themselves. In other words, if there is one true dissident in today's EuroAmerican internationalist morass, it is none other than Vaclav Klaus himself.
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