Vaclav Klaus

[on the accession of the Czech Republic to the rotating EU presidency in 2009]


Can Vaclav Klaus be dismissed as an embarassment? The answer, clearly, is yes: there can not have been a single serious newspaper in the EU which hasn't in the past months run an article expressing (at best) misgivings about the Czech' assumption of the presidency, particularly in light of the bellicose pronouncements made by Klaus upon filling the post. Although it is officially Czech PM Mirek Topolanek who will be president of the EU, Vaclav Klaus will be the most visible member of the Czech contingent; this is, in fact, partly what people object to. The facts are clear. President Klaus is an avowed eurosceptic (no matter if he prefers the term "eurorealist") who has been booed on several occasions in the European Parliament, most notably for comparing the EU to Soviet Russia. He resists the notion of the 'inevitability' of European expansion, and does not even consider it to be a democratic organisation. He has been accused, largely unfairly, of cosying up to Russia. Furthermore, he is one of the world's foremost climate-change deniers, and is appearing this week at a conference in New York to propagate a perspective on the issue which is diametrically opposed to that of the EU. Add to this the furore over the sculpture the Czechs installed at the entrance to the European Parliament on their arrival, and it is easy to see how commentators and eurocrats alike might want to take a sabbatical until a more reliable, more conventional - in a word, more normal - incumbent steps up.

Following the French and their brilliant, mercurial M. Sarkozy as was always going to be tricky. Sarkozy, the world's most prominent ADHD case, in many ways constitutes the definition of a European statesman: a Willy Brandt or Jaques Delores for the youtube generation. His involvement in global politics, if not always perfectly pitched, was generally well recieved and effective, and his charisma provided a useful focus during the early stages of the crisis. Crucially, he is young, fresh and more or less eurorthodox. Klaus, on the other hand, invites accusations of cantankerousness.

The opposition of Sarkozy and Klaus is, however, a false one. There is no one correct way to handle the presidency of the EU, not least because it is, of course, essentially an administrative role. Sarkozy was in fact overly fervent and frenetic, and had a Zapatero or a Brown followed him, they would clearly have been made to look inadequate, if not ridiculous, in trying to maintain his momentum. The cynical, eccentric, crypto-ascetic Czech is, as it turns out, one of the few current EU leaders who could have slipped into Sarkozy's loafers without seeming absurd.

This sequence of presidents reinforces a quintessentially European vision of inclusivity. The fact that Klaus, its putative leader, can rail against the lack of democracy and failure of representation in the EU, is a telling irony, and one that he probably relishes himself, even if he wouldn't admit it. As Pascal famously observed, even to reject philosophy outright constitutes a philosophical postion, and it is clearly a testament to the (ideological) strength of the EU that someone who has criticised central tenets of its structure and function can, without contradiction, assume a prominent role in its administration. Far more subversive has been the recent resurgence of protectionism, gestatated most notably by Sarkozy himself. Likewise, Gordon Brown's overt support for communitarianism, as a smokescreen for the backdoor imposition of individualist state control, is far more dangerous to the European project, and a far more likely impetus to the breakdown which both The Economist and Newsweek have heralded in the past fortnight.

This breakdown will not come to pass. A few striking parallels aside, we are not re-living the 1930s. Despite opinion page asseverations to the contrary, there is a coherent and effective response in the process of being forged, and a centralised European government has a uniquely important role to play. What is, perhaps, most different today, is that a character such as Vaclav Klaus can have a speaking part, and can, in his role of officially sanctioned dissident, reinforce and rectify the system. Indeed, by engaging with the terms of the dialectic, even from a relatively extreme position, one cannot help but reinforce its central premises. Far from being an embarassment, Vaclav Klaus is one of the EU's greatest assets.