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Wednesday, October 25, 2000
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In Prague, Nobel laureates the Dalai Lama, Soyinka and de Klerk worry about the delicate future of global peace, while intellectuals like France's Rupnik and Polish politician Suchocka express concern over the rampant growth of Central European corruption Jacques Rupnik and Hanna Suchocka By Jeffrey Donovan
But Rupnik, who spent his childhood in the Czech capital, is not in the stargazing business. Widely regarded as one of the sharpest foreign observers of the Czech Republic, he talks instead about the "billions and billions of crowns" reportedly siphoned off over the last decade in shady privatizations that continue to plague Prague's economic transition from communism.
Rupnik was among several experts on Central Europe who recently attended Forum 2000, a global conference that brought together illustrious thinkers from around the world for four days of highbrow talks hosted at the Castle by President Vaclav Havel. In separate interviews, Rupnik and former Polish Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka agreed that rampant graft, legal and agricultural reform and the need to educate the public in new ways of thinking remained among the key challenges facing the region as it seeks to join the European Union. "For many people, this new [democratic] society is a complete disaster that totally changed their lives, and in which they are completely unprepared to live," said Suchocka, Poland's justice minister until last July. Added Rupnik, a fluent Czech speaker who is director of studies at the Center for International Affairs in Paris: "We're all aware now that the transition that [former Czech Prime Minister Vaclav] Klaus declared over in 1997, is far from over." Czech anomalies Rupnik muted his criticism of the "opposition agreement," the two-year-old power-sharing pact by which Klaus' opposition Civic Democrats (ODS) keep the minority Social Democrats (CSSD) in power. He admitted, for example, the pact had provided "the political consensus" needed to pass key laws to meet EU requirements. "This could be a mitigating circumstance for the opposition agreement," Rupnik said. Yet he still blamed the lack of a democratic change in national leadership for much that ails Czech efforts to transform the economy and join the EU. Take corruption. "The Social Democrats ran their election campaign on the idea of Operation Clean Hands -- 'we're going to do something about this,' " Rupnik said. "But we saw nothing. If you have an opposition agreement, you cannot allow the judiciary to go all the way and find the people responsible." He recalled the collapse in June of Investicni a postovni banka (IPB), where thousands of Czechs lined up to withdraw their cash until police finally intervened and the government sold off the loss-making institution. "You've got to find at least one person -- at least one!" said Rupnik. "Get one major symbolic conviction for corruption. But it hasn't happened, even if they were stealing [from IPB] a billion crowns every day." A Senate commission, acknowledging IPB was engaged in questionable practices, is investigating the largest failure in Czech banking history. It has yet to reach any conclusions. "This is fundamentally dangerous," Rupnik added. "So long as the judiciary has no capacity to act, people's trust in politics will be very low and the result is cynicism, apathy and populism." The return to prominence of the Czech Communist Party -- the only such unreformed force in Central Europe -- is also a result of the failure to ensure democratic power "alternations," according to Rupnik. "It's like what happened with [far right leader Jorg] Haider in Austria, where two parties share power for a long time and this opens the door to a third, extremist party," he said. "Such a party becomes the opposition not because people necessarily identify with its ideology, but because it's the only party in opposition." Suchocka had a different explanation for the popularity of the old left in Poland, where the one-time communist, Aleksander Kwasniewski, was recently re-elected president. "You can see this in other post-communist countries," said Suchocka, a member of the center-right Freedom Union party. "It's the typical tension between old and new values. It is nostalgia in our societies for the old system, nostalgia rooted in such values as full employment and housing for everybody. We were educated to live in this kind of system." Legal reforms Suchocka, who was prime minister in the early 1990s, said Poland has done much to reform its legal system -- an issue that is nagging Prague -- but the courts are still ill-equipped for many of the new problems brought by capitalism, such as corruption and organized crime. But both she and Rupnik agreed that the major hurdle facing Central European countries seeking to join the West is the need to instill new ways of thinking in the public, even if it is painful. A fifth of Poland's 38 million people are farmers, compared to an average of 4 percent in EU countries. Warsaw knows that the EU is hardly eager to subsidize Polish agriculture -- and that things will have to change. "It's going to be painful," Suchocka admitted, saying the hard part would be persuading people that change is necessary. "But even if farmers are very conservative, we will have to take hard steps if we want to join the EU." For Rupnik, Central Europeans must be better educated in what EU entry actually means. It's about more than abolishing tariffs and opening borders, he said, as it involves a whole new way of thinking about nationhood. "Unfortunately, I don't see any serious debate in the Czech Republic about what this all means," he said. "This is worrisome, because when you're ready to join and you hold a referendum, you might have a very perplexed public who doesn't fully understand what's at stake." His words may be portentous. In a poll released last week, only 51 percent of Czechs said they were in favor of EU entry. "If you don't have a serious discussion about what EU entry really means, you could have some bad surprises down the road," Rupnik concluded. Jeffrey Donovan's e-mail address is jdonovan@praguepost.cz
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The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
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