tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/czech-republic-2065/articlesCzech Republic – The Conversation2023-01-10T13:29:03Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1903932023-01-10T13:29:03Z2023-01-10T13:29:03Z30 years on, Czechoslovakia’s ‘velvet divorce’ is not a model for Scottish independence from the UK<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503322/original/file-20230105-20-vwaelx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C544%2C4641%2C2456&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Scottish independence has its supporters -- as did that of Slovakia.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/slovakia-fans-in-the-stands-before-the-2018-fifa-world-cup-news-photo/857936752?phrase=scotland%20slovak%20fans&adppopup=true">Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Had Scottish nationalists got their way, 2023 would have seen the country head to the polls in a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-top-court-rule-legality-new-scottish-independence-referendum-2022-11-23/">second referendum over independence</a> from the United Kingdom – and they might have won. Whereas the first attempt in 2014 resulted in 55% voting “no,” <a href="https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/22564415.scottish-independence-polling-polls-changed-2022/">polls suggest</a> that after Brexit, a majority of Scots might now favor secession.</p>
<p>But that plan for a fresh referendum was scuppered in November 2022, when the U.K. Supreme Court <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk-supreme-court-rules-scotland-cannot-call-a-second-independence-referendum-the-decision-explained-194877">decided</a> that Scotland could not hold such a vote without the consent of the Westminster Parliament. And that permission seems unlikely given that the governing Conservative Party <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-independence-scotland-cameron/cameron-says-scottish-independence-issue-settled-for-a-generation-idUKKBN0HE0IN20140919">believes the 2014 referendum</a> settled the debate “for a generation.” Even a change of government is unlikely to matter, with the opposition Labour Party indicating that it too is <a href="https://www.thenational.scot/news/20268570.scottish-independence-keir-starmer-confirms-labour-reject-section-30-call/">not inclined to allow a second vote</a>.</p>
<p>It seems that when it comes to disentangling nations with a shared government, breaking up can be hard to do.</p>
<p>Yet, some advocates of Scottish independence point to an event that took place 30 years ago as an example of how such a divorce can be amicably managed and beneficial for all concerned: In January 1993, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist, and the Czech Republic and Slovakia <a href="https://www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states/czechoslovakia#:%7E:text=Following%20the%20receipt%20of%20their,admitted%20to%20United%20Nations%20membership.">were welcomed into the United Nations</a> as separate states. </p>
<p>While it is tempting for some to look back to the Czech-Slovak split for <a href="https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/65544/">comforting lessons</a> <a href="https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2013/may/headline_278765_en.html">over the</a> <a href="https://www.economicsobservatory.com/scottish-independence-what-lessons-from-the-break-up-of-czechoslovakia">long-run consequences</a> of Scottish independence, as <a href="https://www.drake.edu/polsci/facultystaff/kieranwilliams/">a scholar who has studied the politics of Central Europe</a>, I’m mindful of two things: It wasn’t entirely smooth, and the circumstances were not all that comparable to Scotland’s situation today.</p>
<h2>Better apart?</h2>
<p>Combined at the end of the First World War, the two national identities that made up Czechoslovakia were papered over under Communist rule and burst into the open with the <a href="https://time.com/5730106/velvet-revolution-history/">return of democracy in 1989</a>. </p>
<p>This came to a head with <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/0967-067X(93)90004-B">elections in the summer of 1992</a>. The decision to terminate the union was rooted in an aversion among leaders of the largest Czech and Slovak parties to sharing power – and a vision of post-Communist economic reform – in a coalition government. The Czech side, which had been <a href="https://kdwilliams7.medium.com/the-czech-legislatures-secret-session-on-the-breakup-of-czechoslovakia-90a64e612899">secretly</a> thinking through what uncoupling would entail, had no appetite for Slovak proposals of a loose confederation and insisted on a cleaner break.</p>
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<img alt="A black and white photo show three women in a crowd clap hands and cheer." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503445/original/file-20230106-25-zrc6fu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503445/original/file-20230106-25-zrc6fu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503445/original/file-20230106-25-zrc6fu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503445/original/file-20230106-25-zrc6fu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503445/original/file-20230106-25-zrc6fu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503445/original/file-20230106-25-zrc6fu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503445/original/file-20230106-25-zrc6fu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Demonstrators in Prague on June 18, 1992, the day before negotiations between Czech and Slovak politicians over a proposed split.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CzechScotlandCzechoslovakiaBreakup/d1f4edd4954043f0a2f6e28f64fcddb4/photo?Query=slovakia%201993&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=5&currentItemNo=0">AP Photo/David Brauchli</a></span>
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<p>In the end, a chaotic vote in the federal parliament on Nov. 25, 1992, saw a slim majority <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1992/11/25/Federal-Parliament-votes-to-dissolve-Czechoslovakia/1607722667600/">in favor of dissolving the union</a> at the end of that year. But it was messy: The first two attempts failed, and the third attempt succeeded by just two or three votes (the votes cast and tallied did not add up). </p>
<p>Furthermore, the legislature did not have the expressed will of the people behind it – parties that months earlier had campaigned to preserve the union in some form acted without prior authorization or subsequent affirmation by a referendum. Thirty years later, <a href="https://ct24.ceskatelevize.cz/domaci/3554349-rozdeleni-ceskoslovenska-hodnoti-kladne-necela-polovina-cechu-mezi-slovaky-zastancu">polling</a> finds that very large majorities in both successor states wish a referendum had been held. Czechs still struggle to accept the end of federation, with a plurality of 48% regarding it negatively, while 62% of Slovaks say it was the right thing.</p>
<p>The lack of popular assent notwithstanding, the Czech-Slovak split is cited by <a href="https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18983787.independence-breaking-not-always-bitter/">advocates for Scottish independence</a> as a model that minimizes the risk of violence and economic disruption. </p>
<p>No doubt, the two new countries seem to have flourished. Both went on to become members of the European Union and the Schengen Area, which allows free movement across much of the continent. They also joined NATO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Czech Republic is routinely ranked among the <a href="https://www.socialprogress.org/index/global/results">safest countries in the world with high scores</a> for quality of life. Its adjusted <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=EU-CZ&most_recent_value_desc=true">per capita gross domestic product</a> is now ahead of those of older EU member states such as Spain, Portugal and Greece, and closing in on Italy’s.</p>
<p>Slovakia had to overcome greater political turmoil and structural challenges. But since joining the EU in 2004 and the eurozone in 2009, it has matched or outpaced the Czech Republic in annual economic growth. Indeed, Slovakia has attracted so much investment by foreign automakers that it is now the world’s largest producer of cars relative to population – which <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/slovakia-population/">at around 5.5 million</a> is <a href="https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/census-results/at-a-glance/population/">almost identical in size to Scotland’s</a>.</p>
<p>Even more so than the Czech Republic, Slovakia confirms that <a href="https://www.economicsobservatory.com/scottish-independence-how-do-other-small-economies-fare">small states</a> can find their way in the world.</p>
<p>As such, it is no wonder that <a href="https://www.thenational.scot/news/15200957.whas-like-us-former-partners-czech-republic-and-slovakia-are-flourishing-after-velvet-divorce/">some Scots conclude</a>, “If Slovakia can make a success of itself after the Velvet Divorce, surely Scotland can do so too.”</p>
<p>And Slovakia did so while remaining on cordial terms with the Czech Republic. Setbacks such as the recent Czech reimposition of <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/czech-border-controls-blocking-migrants-route-germany-frustrate-slovakia-2022-11-10/">controls</a> on the border with Slovakia are minor compared with what we see in nearby regions that also fractured in the early 1990s - raging conflicts in the former Soviet Union and simmering tension in the former Yugoslavia.</p>
<h2>The velvet divorce</h2>
<p>Where the utility of Czechoslovakia as a precedent ends, however, is with the actual process of splitting up.</p>
<p>The appeal of the story of Czechoslovakia’s dissolution is that it seemed to be quick and easy as well as peaceful. In reality, it took years to finalize some issues, such as arrangements for citizens of one state to attend a university in the other and to acquire dual citizenship. Final settlement of the central bank’s balance took until November 1999 to sort out. </p>
<p>Most of the work of dividing assets was governed by a simple 2-to-1 principle that reflected the relative sizes of the Czech and Slovak populations. Liabilities, in the way of external debt, were dispatched on the same basis, and Czechoslovakia had little of it anyway.</p>
<p>The new international border was not agreed officially until 1996 but needed only minor adjustments. Being landlocked, the new states had no maritime issues to resolve. </p>
<p>For several reasons, it is hard to imagine such an amicable and swift grant of independence to Scotland from the rest of the U.K.</p>
<p>For starters, Edinburgh and London might never agree that the time had come to start discussing terms of divorce, in the way that Czech and Slovak leaders did in the summer of 1992. </p>
<p>Scotland’s first minister has said that the next U.K. general election, due to be held before the end of 2024, will be <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-63742281">treated as a “de facto referendum</a>.”</p>
<p>The Scottish National Party might interpret a general election result as a mandate to leave, but unionist parties might see it otherwise and refuse to come to the table. Any push towards independence in the face of opposition from the U.K. government could lead to an impasse akin to that between <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/25/is-catalonia-still-dreaming-of-independence-from-spain">Catalonia</a> and the Spanish government.</p>
<p>Even if talks did somehow get underway, there is no simple rule to hand like the 2-to-1 ratio for Czechoslovakia’s partition. That applied to a process of ending a country, whereas the U.K. would seek to carry on with its remaining parts.</p>
<p>Instead, there would be hard bargaining on every major issue – trade, labor, pensions, currency and banking, debt, citizenship, defense, and borders – including claims to the dwindling tax receipts from <a href="https://www.herbertsmithfreehills.com/insight/scottish-independence-implications-for-the-north-sea-oil-and-gas-sector">North Sea oil and gas fields</a>.</p>
<p>In all likelihood, it would <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41293-022-00210-1">more closely resemble the United Kingdom’s choppy exit</a> from the European Union than Czechoslovakia’s division.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, Brexit itself presents another potential headache. Even if Scotland and the U.K. government were to reach agreement on the terms of any split, they might have to be reopened should an independent Scotland seek to join the E.U. – forcing it to choose between the single market of Europe and that of the rump U.K. </p>
<p>This is not to say that the separation of Scotland from the United Kingdom could not be arrived at. But harking back to events of 30 years ago may not serve anyone’s interests, least of all Scotland’s – especially if the path of the referendum-free “velvet divorce” leaves lingering doubts about the legitimacy of the process.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/190393/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kieran Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Despite hopes of a second referendum on independence being dashed, many Scottish nationalists look to Slovakia as an example of how a small nation can stand on its own.Kieran Williams, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Drake UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1914592022-11-14T18:29:21Z2022-11-14T18:29:21ZI visited nuclear shelters in Prague to see how cities could prepare for nuclear war<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495168/original/file-20221114-18-zz2vmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C4%2C1000%2C724&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bunker tourism in Prague with a display of children in gas masks inside of the Bezovka nuclear bunker.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(J. Rozdilsky)</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/i-visited-nuclear-shelters-in-prague-to-see-how-cities-could-prepare-for-nuclear-war" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>With the ongoing Ukraine war, tensions in Europe are on the rise. This is both due to an <a href="https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/09/29/while-ukrainian-refugees-accepted-new-fears-in-central-europe-over-middle-eastern-migrants">influx of war related-refugees</a> to Central European cities, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/world/europe/prague-protests-economy.html">discontent over the related rising cost of energy</a>. </p>
<p>As bombs fall on Ukraine, European nations are <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/08/europe-public-bunkers-nuclear-war-russia-ukraine-civil-defense/">waking up to the sorry state of their own civil defence</a>. Currently in Kyiv, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/world/europe/kyiv-ukraine-shelters-nuclear-attack.html">emergency workers are preparing 425 shelters for use during a nuclear war</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/would-putin-use-nuclear-weapons-an-arms-control-expert-explains-what-has-and-hasnt-changed-since-the-invasion-of-ukraine-178509">Would Putin use nuclear weapons? An arms control expert explains what has and hasn't changed since the invasion of Ukraine</a>
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<p>My research on civil defence for nuclear war led me to explore how central European cities are preparing. I recently returned from a faculty exchange in the Czech Republic, where I investigated the availability of nuclear fallout shelters in Prague.</p>
<p>Current events show that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/us/politics/biden-russia-ukraine-nuclear.html">Russia is searching for a pretext to unleash nuclear weapons</a>. The C.I.A. director met with his Russian counterpart on Monday to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/world/europe/cia-burns-ukraine-russia-nuclear.html">warn against the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine</a>. In Europe, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/12/world/europe/ukraine-europe-nuclear-war-anxiety.html">fears of bunking down for COVID-19 lockdowns are being replaced with fears of bunking down in shelters for nuclear attacks</a>. </p>
<p>In the Czech Republic, my findings from a case study of preparedness in the capitol city of Prague have shown that leftover Cold War-era bunkers are currently kept in a state of readiness to protect the population from nuclear war. </p>
<h2>Czech infrastructure</h2>
<p>Born out of the <a href="https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/resource/sport-in-the-cold-war/czechoslovakia-s-velvet-revolution">Velvet Revolution in 1989</a>, for much of the 20th century, what is now the Czech Republic existed as Czechoslovakia under the Soviet sphere of influence. </p>
<p>In the context of the Cold War, belief in the duty to defend against external enemies and ideologies of militarism resulted in massive civil works projects building underground bunkers. </p>
<p>The development of Czechoslovak civil defence included not only the building of bunkers, but also <a href="https://doi.org/10.5817/cphpj-2021-008">school education focused on topics of moral awareness, physical fitness and civil defence training</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2014/01/02/world/how-the-iron-curtain-collapsed">After the Iron Curtain fell</a>, citizens of the Czech Republic rejected communism in favour of parliamentary democracy. However, the leftover communist era physical infrastructure for civil defence remains mostly intact. </p>
<h2>Prague’s nuclear bunkers</h2>
<p>In 2019, it was estimated that there were <a href="https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/city-wants-to-decommission-cold-war-era-anti-nuclear-shelters-to-save-money">768 permanent shelters in Prague</a>, with a total capacity for about 150,000 people. </p>
<p>Municipal authorities are <a href="https://bezpecnost.praha.eu/clanky/ukryti">obliged by law to provide shelters</a>, and Prague’s <a href="https://bezpecnost.praha.eu/mapy/ukryti-a-sireny">nuclear bunkers</a> take on many forms. Blast and fallout shelters are built into hillsides, found in various tunnels, located in deep sections of the subway, and installed in reinforced basements of buildings. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493738/original/file-20221107-3659-ao0nsg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="graffiti-covered wall" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493738/original/file-20221107-3659-ao0nsg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493738/original/file-20221107-3659-ao0nsg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493738/original/file-20221107-3659-ao0nsg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493738/original/file-20221107-3659-ao0nsg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493738/original/file-20221107-3659-ao0nsg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493738/original/file-20221107-3659-ao0nsg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493738/original/file-20221107-3659-ao0nsg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Door to enter the Bezovka nuclear bunker which is built into a hill at Prague’s Parukářka Park.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(J. Rozdilsky)</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>I visited the <a href="https://europe-cities.com/2022/03/17/photo-gallery-take-a-look-at-the-largest-anti-nuclear-shelter-in-prague-company-news-prazska-drbna/">Bezovka Shelter</a> in Prague’s Žižkov district. To enter it, I had to enter through a graffiti covered reinforced steel door at <a href="https://www.prague.eu/en/object/places/2685/parukarka-park">Parukářka Park</a>.</p>
<p>The Bezovka shelter was built in the mid-1950s, and can hold more than 2,000 people. Currently, it is a site for commercial tourism and a venue for nightlife. Part of the shelter is open to the public for <a href="https://prague-nuclear-bunker.webnode.cz/">nuclear bunker tours</a> that highlight aspects of life during the Cold War — sights include life-size dioramas depicting stereotypical life in a bunker during nuclear Armageddon, complete with mannequins of children in rubber gas masks. </p>
<p>I also visited the <a href="https://krytfolimanka.cz/p/kryt-folimanka">Folimanka Bunker</a>, located in the Prague 2 district. This underground complex was an example of a public shelter designed for a neighbourhood. Corridors measuring 125 meters connected a labyrinth of underground rooms, totalling 1,332 square metres in area. </p>
<p>Completed in 1962, with its own power generator, running water and ventilation system, this bunker is still operational today for sheltering 1,300 people for a duration of 72 hours. The city agency for the <a href="https://www.sshmp.cz/ochrana-obyvatel/">Administration of Services of the Capital City of Prague</a> runs the shelter and opens it to the public on occasional weekends for a self-guided walk through. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493734/original/file-20221107-18-21928y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Picture inside a nuclear bunker" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493734/original/file-20221107-18-21928y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/493734/original/file-20221107-18-21928y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493734/original/file-20221107-18-21928y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493734/original/file-20221107-18-21928y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493734/original/file-20221107-18-21928y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493734/original/file-20221107-18-21928y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/493734/original/file-20221107-18-21928y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Shelter space inside of the Folimanka Nuclear Bunker in Prague.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(J. Rozdilsky)</span></span>
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<h2>Obsolete equipment</h2>
<p>The underground bunkers were a material embodiment of a <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Post-Communist-Aesthetics-Revolutions-capitalism-violence/Pusca/p/book/9780367597696">post-communist aesthetic</a>. Surrounded by obsolete equipment in decaying mazes of tunnels, I felt like I was in a dystopian subterranean wasteland. </p>
<p>Despite their appearance, however, the bunkers are not just relics of a past era. </p>
<p>Over the years, some of Prague’s nuclear bunkers have been adapted to new and creative reuses. Rather than abandonment, new uses have prevailed like <a href="https://prague-nuclear-bunker.webnode.cz/">museum spaces</a>, <a href="https://www.prague-communism-tour.com/">tourist attractions</a>, <a href="https://breakoutprague.com/en/">spots for escape room games</a>, <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/the-czech-republic-clubbing-in-a-nuclear-bunker-in-prague/a-2796745">places for nightlife and music</a>, <a href="https://elbedock.cz/en/events/vystava-v-bunkru/">creative arts spaces</a>, or storage sites.</p>
<p>I am not suggesting that having shelters available would reduce the overall horror of nuclear war. <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-putin-nuclear-weapons-russia-ukraine/">Should Putin risk using nuclear weapons</a>, no state or international body could <a href="https://www.icrc.org/en/document/humanitarian-impacts-and-risks-use-nuclear-weapons">adequately address the immediate humanitarian emergency</a>.</p>
<p>In Prague, at this very moment, tens of thousands of residents may have access to sheltering options available to them in case of a nuclear war. But if atomic weapons are used, only then will people worldwide fully realize that we have no reasonable way of protecting ourselves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191459/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jack L. Rozdilsky is a Professor at York University who receives external funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research as a co-investigator on a project supported under operating grant Canadian 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Rapid Research Funding.</span></em></p>Cold War-era bunkers in Prague have been repurposed as tourist sites and nightlife venues. With war in Ukraine bringing renewed nuclear threats, could these bunkers revert to their original purpose?Jack L. Rozdilsky, Associate Professor of Disaster and Emergency Management, York University, CanadaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1883882022-08-17T16:25:18Z2022-08-17T16:25:18ZUkraine war prompts Baltic states to remove Soviet memorials<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478061/original/file-20220808-3141-ph0zqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1599%2C998&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Soviet-era monument in Riga, Latvia, which was splashed with the colours of the Ukraine flag the day after Russia invaded in February 2022.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/janitors/51911428821/in/album-72177720297042353/">Kārlis Dambrāns/ Flickr.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Estonia is to remove all of its Soviet-era war monuments, the latest in a line of eastern European countries to go down this path. There are <a href="https://news.err.ee/1608667843/government-office-creating-communist-monuments-register">reportedly</a> 200 to 400 Soviet-era memorials or monuments still standing across Estonia. </p>
<p>The prime minister, Kaja Kallas, said these would now be relocated “<a href="https://news.err.ee/1608675571/kallas-soviet-monuments-will-be-moved-as-soon-as-possible">as quickly as possible</a>”, adding: “It is clear that Russian aggression in Ukraine has torn open the wounds in our society that these communist monuments remind us of and therefore their removal from public space is necessary to avoid additional tensions.” </p>
<p>The move is not without its controversy. The discussed removal of a T-34 tank monument outside the city of Narva near the border with Russia has met with some opposition from the local population, 90% of whom are <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793631381/Everyday-Belonging-in-the-Post-Soviet-Borderlands-Russian-Speakers-in-Estonia-and-Kazakhstan">Russian speakers</a>. </p>
<p>But Kallas <a href="https://news.err.ee/1608675571/kallas-soviet-monuments-will-be-moved-as-soon-as-possible">stressed that</a> it is not the “right place” for commemorating the dead: “A tank is a murder weapon, it is not a memorial, and these same tanks are killing people on the streets of Ukraine right now.” </p>
<p>Over the past few years, some former Soviet bloc countries have debated the future of their Soviet-era war monuments, many of which celebrate the part played by the Red Army in the second world war and, specifically, the battle against fascism. But – beyond a few notable instances of monuments being removed from countries making the transition from communism to a liberal market economy (<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-review/article/abs/persistent-legacies-of-communism-or-the-ongoing-purification-of-public-space-in-post1989-poland/FCF74311250B1A2C17BD7BFE0573519E">Poland springs to mind</a>) – not many war monuments have <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/iph-2018-0014/html?lang=en">actually been removed</a>.</p>
<p>Instead they have more often been <a href="https://www.politika.io/en/article/what-has-happened-to-soviet-war-memorials-since-198991-an-overview">neglected, defaced or otherwise altered</a>. But now the invasion of Ukraine appears to be prompting countries in eastern Europe and the Baltic states to consider getting rid of the remaining Soviet war monuments altogether.</p>
<p>In the early days and weeks of the invasion, Soviet war monuments made the news as activists and supporters of Ukraine painted some statues in the <a href="https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/soviet-war-memorials-take-a-hit-across-central-and-eastern-europe/">colours of the national flag</a> as an expression of solidarity – something they <a href="https://theconversation.com/soviet-war-memorials-in-eastern-europe-continue-to-strain-relations-with-russia-101687">have done</a> since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Memorial with freize of soldiers, one painted yellow and blue." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478506/original/file-20220810-20-tzkp3o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478506/original/file-20220810-20-tzkp3o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478506/original/file-20220810-20-tzkp3o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478506/original/file-20220810-20-tzkp3o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478506/original/file-20220810-20-tzkp3o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478506/original/file-20220810-20-tzkp3o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478506/original/file-20220810-20-tzkp3o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, Bulgaria, painted overnight on February 24 2014 by unknown activists in solidarity with anti-Russian protests in Ukraine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the war extended into the spring and summer months, campaigns to remove the Soviet monuments <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/8/latvia-leads-charge-to-fell-soviet-memorials-in-europe">resurfaced</a> in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. All three regained their independence in 1991 and later joined Nato and the EU.</p>
<p>In June, a law on the prohibition of promoting totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and their ideologies – dubbed the “<a href="https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1711669/new-desovietisation-law-takes-aim-at-lithuania-s-remaining-soviet-era-signs">deSovietisation” law</a> – was drafted by the Lithuanian parliament. At the same time, in neighbouring Latvia, the <a href="https://www.saeima.lv/en/news/saeima-news/31206-saeima-passes-a-law-to-dismantle-sites-glorifying-the-soviet-and-nazi-regimes">parliament adopted</a> its own similar law. Now Estonia is following suit. </p>
<p>Interestingly, while the focus is on second world war Red Army monuments, there is clear impetus for a debate on the history of the Soviet control of these countries.</p>
<h2>Liberation or occupation?</h2>
<p>Despite the title of Latvia’s recent law, you’d be hard put to find any kind of monument glorifying the Nazi regime, there or anywhere else in the Baltic states. The key thing here is the equivalence drawn between the Soviet and Nazi regimes as they are remembered.</p>
<p>From the perspective of east European states, the origins of the second world war can be traced back to the secret protocols of the <a href="https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/roger-moorhouse/the-devils-alliance/9780465030750/">Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact</a> in 1939 which divided Europe into spheres of influence between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. As a result, both are considered to bear responsibility for the war that turned much of eastern Europe into what historian Timothy Snyder has referred to as “<a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/396350/bloodlands-by-snyder-timothy/9780099551799">bloodlands</a>”.</p>
<p>In the recent discussion of the Soviet-era monuments, it is the associated interpretation of the aftermath of the second world war that is at stake. The Soviet war monuments are nothing if not ambiguous, “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01629770802461225">symbolising liberation, aggression and occupation</a>”. While these monuments refer to the liberation from the Nazi German occupations, the rescue simultaneously brought with it a long period of communist rule, accompanied by the presence of the Soviet Army across eastern Europe. </p>
<p>The removal in Prague of a <a href="https://www.cultures-of-history.uni-jena.de/debates/controversies-surrounding-the-removal-of-the-marshal-konev-statue">statue of Ivan Konev</a> in 2020 is a good example of this ambiguity. Konev led the liberation of Prague from the Nazis in 1945, but also contributed to the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Tank on a plinth of stones with bouquets on the ground in front" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478063/original/file-20220808-16-i6m16q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478063/original/file-20220808-16-i6m16q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478063/original/file-20220808-16-i6m16q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478063/original/file-20220808-16-i6m16q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478063/original/file-20220808-16-i6m16q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478063/original/file-20220808-16-i6m16q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478063/original/file-20220808-16-i6m16q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Angelina Ivanova/ Flickr.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>New meaning</h2>
<p>The war in Ukraine gave Estonia new impetus and “<a href="https://news.err.ee/1608669412/riina-solman-the-time-to-remove-symbols-of-occupation-is-now">the moral right to look at the wounds that have not yet healed</a>”, according to the minister of public administration. Soviet war monuments have become a proxy through which to seemingly achieve this task.</p>
<p>Memories of <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1750698018784116">Soviet occupation</a> also became a filter through which the partial occupation of Ukraine by Russian troops is understood. Soviet war monuments are now seen by many as “<a href="https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1670910/pending-state-decision-on-cultural-heritage-lithuania-s-raseiniai-hides-soviet-monuments">glorifying Soviet imperialism</a>”, something that now extends to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. They are “<a href="https://www.saeima.lv/en/news/saeima-news/31027-saeima-suspends-bilateral-agreement-between-latvia-and-russia-on-memorial-buildings-and-monuments">Soviet occupation monuments</a>” that now equally stand for what Russia is doing to its neighbouring country.</p>
<p>The linking of Soviet and Nazi regimes in the Latvia’s law is also not accidental. Rather, the removal and relocation of Soviet war monuments is framed within the Baltic and <a href="https://eng.lsm.lv/article/culture/history/baltic-states-poland-romania-urge-eu-to-counter-russian-falsification-of-history.a466447/">more broadly east European memory</a> of the second world war and that of the 20th century. It appears to be a step towards making this position <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0967010614552549">secure</a> in the background of Vladimir Putin’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-russias-fixation-on-the-second-world-war-helps-explain-its-ukraine-invasion-181296">misuse of history</a> to justify the war in Ukraine.</p>
<p>While public opinion in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia is far from uniform, one thing seems to be clear. Against the backdrop of Russian aggression in Ukraine, the removal and relocation of these statues and monuments is not just an expression of solidarity with Ukraine. It’s a way of settling how the history of the Soviet era is to be remembered.</p>
<p>The question is whether these processes will facilitate the healing of the wounds left by the complex 20th-century history of former Soviet bloc countries. Or if they are just as likely to entrench the existing memory fault lines.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188388/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dmitrijs Andrejevs was in receipt of funding from the University of Manchester (Post-Submission Career Development Award) at the time this article was written. </span></em></p>In much of eastern Europe historical memory of communist rule has been brought into sharp focus by the war in Ukraine.Dmitrijs Andrejevs, PhD candidate in Russian and East European Studies, University of ManchesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1825022022-05-20T15:47:14Z2022-05-20T15:47:14ZEurope is determined to cut fossil fuel ties with Russia, even though getting Hungary on board won’t be easy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464324/original/file-20220519-12-spl9ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4495%2C2999&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An oil tank at Hungary's Duna Refinery, which receives Russian crude oil through the Druzhba pipeline. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/worker-takes-the-stairs-outside-a-giant-tank-at-the-duna-news-photo/1240503355">Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced Europe to rethink its energy policy – especially its deep dependence on Russia for about one-third of its fossil fuel imports. The European Union is negotiating among its members over a plan to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/10/hopes-raised-for-eu-oil-ban-on-russia-despite-hungary-comparing-plan-to-nuclear-bomb">ban imports of Russian oil</a>, although questions remain about issues such as the timing of an embargo and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-09/eu-drops-plan-to-stop-tankers-moving-russian-oil-to-other-buyers">what kinds of transactions it will cover</a>. The EU makes decisions by consensus, so all members must agree for the plan to be adopted.</p>
<p>Russia exports large quantities of natural gas, coal, oil and fuel for nuclear reactors, but oil provides the most revenue. That income is financing Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine. Energy analysts estimate that every day Russia receives <a href="https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/stop-financing-putins-war-with-energy-imports-ukrainian-ngo-pleads/">about 600 million euros (US$635 million) in income</a> from its oil exports to western European countries.</p>
<p>I have <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=feqeIB4AAAAJ&hl=en">studied post-Soviet energy</a> for over 20 years. For my recent book, “<a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/russian-energy-chains/9780231197496">Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union</a>,” I traced the journey of single molecules of crude oil, natural gas and coal from production in Siberia to their final use in Germany. </p>
<p>With the May 18, 2022 release of its <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_3131">RePowerEU plan</a> for quickly reducing dependence on Russian fossil fuels, the EU has shown that it is determined to move forward. Yet from my research in oil trade in the region I know that important technical issues will affect Europe’s ability to quickly implement an embargo on Russian oil. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eQGXrBYSKlk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Russia’s oil network is focused on exports to Europe, so an EU embargo is a serious threat to its energy revenues.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Not all oil is interchangeable</h2>
<p>EU member states have been negotiating intensely over a proposed embargo for several months. Initially, Germany – the largest economy in the EU – opposed a ban. However, Germany <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-drops-opposition-to-russian-oil-embargo-11651155915">dropped its objections in late April</a>, and now says <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-15/germany-to-stop-russian-oil-imports-regardless-of-eu-sanctions?sref=Hjm5biAW">it will stop buying Russian oil</a> by the end of 2022 even if the EU is unable to agree on a wider embargo.</p>
<p>Germany’s agreement left <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/04/business/eu-russia-oil-ban/index.html">Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic</a> as the main holdouts. Some of this division reflects politics. </p>
<p>Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has long criticized what he sees as <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/viktor-orban-hungary-will-stick-by-eu-budget-veto-threat/a-55819430">excessive EU intervention</a> in his country’s domestic politics. Orban has used good relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin <a href="https://hungarytoday.hu/szijjarto-orban-putin-meeting-hungary-russia-cooperation-paks-sputnik/">as a counterweight</a> to the EU, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/01/hungary-election-ukraine-a-key-issue-viktor-orban">has refused to support Ukraine in any real way</a> as it defends itself against Russian aggression.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464329/original/file-20220519-13937-gzvk0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in a suit, carrying briefing books, steps out of a car as a uniformed guard holds the door open." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464329/original/file-20220519-13937-gzvk0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464329/original/file-20220519-13937-gzvk0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464329/original/file-20220519-13937-gzvk0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464329/original/file-20220519-13937-gzvk0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464329/original/file-20220519-13937-gzvk0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464329/original/file-20220519-13937-gzvk0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464329/original/file-20220519-13937-gzvk0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban arrives at an EU summit at Versailles, France, March 11, 2022. Hungary has complied with EU sanctions on Russia, but has remained neutral in Russia’s war on Ukraine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CORRECTIONRussiaUkraineWarEUSummit/e870f2708c454372b9dae2f4012e954a/photo">AP Photo/Michel Euler</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic also have legitimate <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-10/europe-drafts-205-billion-plan-to-wean-itself-off-russian-fuels">energy and infrastructure concerns</a>. Since the Soviet Union started exporting large quantities of crude oil to EU member states in the 1980s, oil has created a close and highly dependent relationship between Europe and Russia, particularly the former Soviet bloc countries.</p>
<p>Oil is not a generic product. Some types are sour, meaning that they have a high sulfur content, or <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sourcrude.asp">sweet, meaning low in sulfur</a>. Oil is also graded as light, which flows easily because it’s thinner and has less wax content, or dark, which <a href="https://www2.southeastern.edu/orgs/oilspill/basics.html">contains more wax and is denser</a>.</p>
<p>Sulfur is undesirable in gasoline and diesel fuel because it <a href="https://www.epa.gov/gasoline-standards/gasoline-sulfur">increases air pollution</a> and makes vehicles’ catalytic converters less effective, so it needs to be removed during refining. Lighter oil with a low sulfur content, such as <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052615/what-difference-between-brent-crude-and-west-texas-intermediate.asp">Brent crude oil from the North Sea</a>, is easier to refine and thus commands higher prices. </p>
<p>Refineries are usually designed to process a particular type of oil. Russia exports mainly Urals oil, also known as <a href="https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/glossary/russian-export-blend-crude-oil">Russian Export Blend Crude Oil or REBCO</a>, a medium-sulfur oil blend. Refineries built during the Cold War in Soviet-bloc countries were designed to use it as a feedstock. And these countries, especially Hungary, have voiced the <a href="https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/05/09/hungary-slovakia-czech-republic-and-bulgaria-still-resisting-eu-ban-on-russian-oil">strongest concerns about a blanket Russian oil ban</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1526977916675956736"}"></div></p>
<h2>Cold War legacies</h2>
<p>Energy transportation networks in these countries, as well as the former East Germany, also were put in place during the Cold War. Each country was set up to receive crude oil exclusively from Russia via the <a href="https://www.iaot.eu/en/oil-transport/druzhba-pipeline">Druzhba pipeline</a>, which began operating in 1964.</p>
<p>When the Soviet bloc broke apart in 1989 and 1990, former communist bloc countries – especially the land-locked Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary – were slow to develop infrastructure for importing oil via tanker because pipeline supplies from Russia were significantly cheaper. Moreover, it would have been difficult to retrofit their refineries to handle different types of oil from sources such as Saudi Arabia or the U.S. </p>
<p>These nations’ industrial and transportation sectors rely on gasoline and diesel produced in local refineries from Russian oil. And without ports, they have no ready way to receive oil shipments from elsewhere. </p>
<p>Given these challenges, it’s not surprising that Slovakia and the Czech Republic are <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-05/slovakia-backs-eu-ban-on-russian-oil-but-needs-until-end-of-2025?sref=Hjm5biAW">seeking extra time</a> beyond the end of 2022, the EU’s proposed deadline, for phasing out Russian oil imports. Bulgaria, citing similar refinery concerns, is also <a href="https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/05/09/hungary-slovakia-czech-republic-and-bulgaria-still-resisting-eu-ban-on-russian-oil">asking for an extension</a>. And Hungary has demanded 15 billion to 18 billion euros ($16 billion to $19 billion) from the EU in <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-price-what-will-it-take-to-get-hungary-to-ban-russian-oil/">economic compensation</a> to retool its oil infrastructure – a figure that EU officials say is inflated.</p>
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<h2>Losing their energy chains</h2>
<p>European dependence on Russian oil still runs deep. And even if EU countries agree on a ban, Russia will have other willing takers for this oil – notably India, the <a href="https://www.worldstopexports.com/crude-oil-imports-by-country/">world’s third largest oil importer</a>, which is already <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60783874">stocking up on Russian oil</a> at significant discount prices relative to other oil types.</p>
<p>But the debate over a Russian oil embargo also has shown that the EU is not hostage to Russia. EU members have identified conventional and renewable energy sources that they can use to <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_3131">replace fossil fuels from Russia</a>, at a projected cost of 210 billion euros ($220 billion) over the next five years.</p>
<p>And the EU has also shown that it can devise and reach basic consensus on new policies in record time. Its RePowerEU blueprint was developed in less than three months, and in a recent survey conducted in all EU member states, 85% of respondents <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_2784">supported reducing reliance on Russian fossil fuels</a>. While it may be expensive to bring former Soviet bloc countries along, I expect this investment to pay off in the long term – not only in terms of increased independence from Russian fossil fuels, but, even more importantly, in terms of moving away from fossil fuels as a whole.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/182502/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Margarita Balmaceda has received funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the European Consortium of Institutes of Advanced Studies and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She chairs the Academic Advisory Board of the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin and the Board of the Schevchenko Scientific Society of the USA.</span></em></p>Former Soviet bloc nations have reason to worry about an embargo on Russian oil, but Europeans are finally recognizing the true costs of their longstanding energy dependence on Russia.Margarita Balmaceda, Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1696722021-10-11T16:16:34Z2021-10-11T16:16:34ZCzech election: an oligarch defeated and a president in hospital – what on earth happened?<p>A dramatic general election in the Czech Republic seems to have ended the rule of the populist oligarch Andrej Babiš. </p>
<p>Babiš’s movement ANO (the Association of Dissatisfied Citizens) has been a part of the coalition government in the Czech Republic since 2013, and Babiš himself has been prime minister since 2017, having campaigned on an anti-corruption ticket. However, Babiš is an oligarch whose Agrofert conglomerate benefits from significant support from European Union funding and has faced <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/agenda/briefing/2020-01-13/9/conflict-of-interest-investigations-of-czech-pm-babis-meps-to-ask-for-update">investigation</a> by the EU for potential conflict of interest. </p>
<h2>A prime minister mired in controversy</h2>
<p>A few days prior the election, Babiš was named in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/pandora-papers-how-revelations-about-czech-pm-could-push-country-further-from-eu-169188">Pandora Papers</a> leak that brought to light the questionable financial activities of multiple world leaders. Before then he had appeared to be strengthening his grip on the nation. </p>
<p>Similarly to some other East European oligarchs, Babiš controls two major daily newspapers which of course supported him in the election campaign. Aligning himself with Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian ruler of Hungary, Babiš ran a nationalistic campaign, criticising the European Union and constructing an artificial campaign agaist “waves of refugees” allegedly threatening the Czech Republic.</p>
<p>Although the Pandora Papers accusations may have dented his support base a little, Babiš’s ANO party still came away with 27.34% of the vote and 72 seats in parliament. This was largely thanks to his support base of older voters and the more deprived regions of northern and western Bohemia and northern Moravia. </p>
<p>It is not quite clear why Babiš has actually lost. Some commentators argue that his mendacious pre-election propaganda may have been counterproductive. Perhaps it was not a good idea to invite Orbán for a visit to Babiš’s constituency shortly before the election. Perhaps that served to help people realise that they really do not want the Czech Republic to turn into Hungary. </p>
<p>This may have mobilised some younger voters who often do not turn up on election day. There is a generational conflict in the Czech Republic and not many younger voters support Babiš. His pre-election campaign excesses may have energised them. </p>
<h2>A complex coalition</h2>
<p>With these losses, the next Czech government is therefore likely to be made up of a partnership between two different right-of-centre coalitions. The Spolu (Together) coalition, which brings together three traditional, right-of-centre political parties, squeaked past ANO with 27.56% of the vote to secure 71 seats in the parliament. Within this coalition, the strong electoral support for the Civic Democratic Party was particularly surprising, given its association with the corrupt politics of the 1990s and the fact it was brought down by scandals as Babiš rose. </p>
<p>The other coalition, that of the Pirate Party and an association of local mayors, seems more liberal. It gained 15.43% of the vote and 37 parliamentary seats. However, here the election brought another surprise. </p>
<p>As an individual entity, the recently created liberal Pirate Party, primarily made up of middle-class professionals, flopped. It had 22 MPs in the parliament before this election and now has just four. Nevertheless, the huge success of the mayors mean that the Pirates, as a coalition partner, are expected to be rewarded with two ministerial posts. </p>
<p>It should also be noted that while the Pirate Party is perhaps the most liberal part of the five winning political groups, it still cannot be really regarded as left wing.</p>
<h2>A president in intensive care</h2>
<p>Given the narrowness of the race between the ANO and Spolu, Babiš had appeared to be holding out hope that he would still be appointed prime minister by populist president Miloš Zeman. Babiš is technically the leader of the largest party because Spolu is an alliance of multiple parties. But if Zeman did appoint his close ally Babiš, as he appeared to promise ahead of the vote, it would be hard to imagine that the prime minister could win the parliamentary vote of confidence needed to secure the position.</p>
<p>However, an even bigger question mark now hangs over the whole political process itself since Zeman, already in <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/czech-republic-president-milos-zemans-health-stable-hospital/">serious ill health</a>, collapsed as the results came in and had to be rushed to hospital. He was sent to intensive care, and it’s now unclear what the future holds for either him or the parties relying on his word as kingmaker in this tight race.</p>
<p>Is the Czech Republic firmly back on the road to liberalism and western democratic values? There are several serious reasons to doubt it. The disappointing result of the Pirate Party means that most of the actors in the new Czech parliament sit on the right of the political spectrum, with the Civic Democratic Party in a relatively strong position. These right-wing parties have, in the past, pushed through social welfare cuts.</p>
<p>On the other side of the political spectrum, the Czech Social Democrats failed to meet the 5% vote-share threshold to win any seats in parliament, because most of the original social democratic voters voted for Babiš. As a result of this, there is a large constituency of Czech voters who will not be represented in parliament. </p>
<p>Populist and nativist parties are supported by up to 30% of Czech voters. If the right-of-centre parties which are now en route to power are not sensible and do not listen to these disenfranchised voters, populism will return with a vengeance at the next general election.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169672/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jan Culik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The race was tighter than expected but the signs are not good for incumbent Andrej Babiš, especially with his ally in intensive care.Jan Culik, Senior Lecturer in Czech Studies, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1691882021-10-06T11:57:19Z2021-10-06T11:57:19ZPandora papers: how revelations about Czech PM could push country further from EU<p>With just days to go before a national election, the name of the Czech prime minister, Andrej Babiš, appeared in the Pandora papers, a massive leak of documents exposing the secret financial transactions of multiple world leaders, among others. The papers <a href="https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/czech-prime-minister-andrej-babis-french-property/">reportedly show</a> that Babiš purchased a mansion in France worth £13 million via secret loans through offshore companies before he entered politics.</p>
<p>But this new scandal is unlikely to dent Babiš’ grip on power. It is as yet unclear whether the prime minister did anything illegal. And his involvement in a number of other scandals has not put off his support base. The key question remaining is not whether his career will be hurt by these accusations, but whether their fallout will further fuel the Czech Republic’s drift towards illiberalism like Hungary and Poland.</p>
<p>An informant of the political police (STB) under communism, Babiš is now the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/">fifth</a> richest Czech, worth an estimated US$3.5 billion (£2.6 billion). Through a trust fund, he owns Agrofert, a large conglomerate of 300 companies said to be the main Czech beneficiary of the European Union’s (EU) agricultural subsidies. This represents a major <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20210517IPR04145/conflict-of-interest-and-misuse-of-eu-funds-the-case-of-czech-pm-babis">conflict of interest</a> since Babiš and his ministers take part in decision-making over the European budget and the rules through which subsidies are allocated. In response, the European Commission has <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-czech-eu-babis-idUSKBN2FV0SW">suspended some of the payments</a> destined for Czech companies until the conflict of interest is resolved.</p>
<p>At home, Babiš faces allegations that he illegally obtained a €2-million EU subsidy to build a resort in the so-called <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/czech-prosecutor-reopens-andrej-babis-subsidy-fraud-case/">Stork’s Nest affair</a>, fraudulent use of advertisement for <a href="https://english.radio.cz/police-investigate-possible-tax-evasion-pms-storks-nest-farm-8136909">tax evasion</a>, and involvement in the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46194329">kidnapping of his own son</a> to Crimea. He has denied any wrongdoing in these cases.</p>
<p>In addition, the ruling coalition of Babiš’ party ANO and the Social Democrats (ČSSD) <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54639351">mismanaged the pandemic</a>, the Czech Republic having one of the worst COVID-related death tolls in the world.</p>
<p>While any one of these matters would once have ended the career of a Czech prime minister, Babiš can count on the unconditional support of his Berlusconi-style party, which is built around his personal brand and largely made up of his employees. And, helpfully, Babiš’ conglomerate controls about <a href="https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/babis-stale-ovlada-media-tvrdi-evropska-novinarska-federace/r%7Ed63de26cf16a11e9ac60ac1f6b220ee8/">one-third</a> of the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1c523a02-af8e-4441-9981-3bd9549a1c58">Czech private media</a>.</p>
<p>What’s more, the government’s extravagant expenditure, contributing to the second-fastest debt growth rate in the EU, has made ANO a favourite among pensioners, the nation’s most reliable voters.</p>
<h2>High stakes</h2>
<p>The October 8-9 election is arguably the most important legislative contest since the Czech Republic’s independence in 1993. Never before has there been an incumbent with so many incentives to win as Babiš, nor anyone with quite so much power to change the long-term democratic and pro-western trajectory of the Czech political system. </p>
<p>It was notable to see Babiš invite the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungarys-orban-hits-czech-campaign-trail-back-pm-babis-2021-09-29/">on the Czech campaign trail</a>. Walking in the illiberal footsteps of Hungary and Poland’s ruling parties may be appealing to Babiš in light of looming conflict with European institutions. </p>
<p>As things stand, he is on course for a nearly unsolvable standoff with the EU. His options appear to be to get rid of Agrofert, which looks extremely unlikely, or to resign and hand over the premiership to a trusted person from his party – potentially attempting to run for president in the next presidential election scheduled for January 2023. This is, however, a risky strategy. Babiš may not win, the trusted person may prove less reliable than expected and, in the meantime, Babiš would be more vulnerable to police investigations. </p>
<p>Babiš thus may consider another more radical scenario: extricating the country from its EU membership. Domestically, such a move would please the current president, Miloš Zeman, and several political parties who have been <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/czech-far-right-sets-czexit-referendum-law-price-post-vote-talks-2021-09-22/">calling for “Czexit”</a>. Abroad, Babiš can team up with Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński of Poland, whose autocratic ambitions are also increasingly constrained by the pressure of European institutions.</p>
<p>Moreover, the Czech Republic’s economic growth means that the country will gradually benefit less from the EU’s budget, becoming a net contributor by 2030. This will gradually transform one of the most popular arguments for membership into a reason for quitting.</p>
<p>Reassuringly, there will be several obstacles to illiberal developments, including the Czech senate. The upper house is controlled by the opposition, without whose support any constitutional reform is impossible. The extreme scenario of leaving the EU is also made even more daunting by the frightening precedent set by the UK’s messy departure. But it may nonetheless emerge as the only path for Babiš to stay in power, avoid being jailed and keep his businesses afloat. </p>
<p>Many variables remain unknown, including the potential for post-election party bargaining and the fragile health of Zeman, not to mention his <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-milos-zeman-the-czech-republics-answer-to-donald-trump-52036">unpredictable behaviour</a>. The importance of this election cannot be overstated. It may well decide whether the Czech Republic will maintain reasonable democratic standards or sets off on a path towards an illiberal future – one that may lie outside the EU.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169188/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Filip Kostelka does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The ‘illiberal democracy’ model being followed in Hungary may appear all the more appealing following a very important election.Filip Kostelka, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Government, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1634452021-06-25T15:50:39Z2021-06-25T15:50:39Z#Romalivesmatter: death at police hands raises questions about racism faced by Czechia’s Roma citizens<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408406/original/file-20210625-19-z0cqni.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C594%2C330&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Footage showing Stanislav Tomáš being restrained by three policemen in Teplice, Czech Republic.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">YouTube/ROMEA TV</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Video footage from Teplice in the Czech Republic which appears to show a police officer kneeling on the neck of a man who subsequently died has been widely shared on social media. The man, who has been named – mainly by international media – as Stanislav Tomáš, has been identified as a member of the Czech Republic’s Roma minority. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtUffFxfeuY">clip appears to show three police officers</a> restraining Tomáš, who is in clear distress, on the pavement. One officer holds Tomáš’s feet, another appears to kneel on his neck, and a third tries to handcuff him. The numerical superiority of police officers and the seemingly disproportionate use of force have led to inevitable parallels with the death of George Floyd, the black American man murdered in 2020 by former police officer Derek Chauvin who kneeled on his neck for several minutes in Minneapolis.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/george-floyds-death-reflects-the-racist-roots-of-american-policing-139805">George Floyd's death reflects the racist roots of American policing</a>
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<p>According to <a href="https://www.policie.cz/clanek/aktualizace-vyjadreni-k-sobotnimu-zakroku.aspx">Daniel Vítek</a>, spokesman for the Czech police, the procedure of kneeling on the neck was necessary to immobilise a violent man and prevent further damage to private property. To deflect focus onto their victim, the police published images of the same man hitting his head twice against a parked car. </p>
<p>Consequently, using their official Twitter account, the Czech police stated that this case is not a “<a href="https://twitter.com/PolicieCZ/status/1406984812288749575">Czech George Floyd</a>” but a death resulting from a drug overdose. Czech prime minister, Andrej Babiš, said <a href="https://www.facebook.com/AndrejBabis/posts/2274041069399191">through his Facebook account</a>: “Thank you, Teplice policemen, for your work, they did not have it easy.” The interior minister, Jan Hamáček, meanwhile <a href="https://twitter.com/jhamacek/status/1407080987243298822">stated on Twitter</a>: “The policemen who intervened have my full support.”</p>
<p>But members of the Government Council for Roma Minority Affairs criticised Babiš’s and Hamáček’s statements for undermining confidence and impartiality and demanded an <a href="https://www.vlada.cz/cz/ppov/zalezitosti-romske-komunity/clenove/">independent investigation</a>. </p>
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<p>The international community has also joined in the criticism, as Amnesty International and the Council of Europe are <a href="https://ct24.ceskatelevize.cz/domaci/3331118-rada-evropy-vyzvala-k-nezavislemu-vysetrovani-smrti-roma-po-policejnim-zakroku">questioning the police actions</a> and calling for a thorough and transparent investigation into the events.</p>
<h2>Limited outrage</h2>
<p>This is not the first time that a Roma citizen of the Czech Republic has died in such circumstances. In 2016, Miroslav Demeter died in the city of Žatec, about 50km from Teplice, after a fight led to the intervention of local police officers. As in Tomáš’s case, a video was recorded showing a local patrol officer kneeling over Demeter while he was immobilised on a restaurant floor. In 2017 <a href="http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/czech-state-prosecutor-rejects-complaint-from-family-of-romani-man-who-died-in-presence-of-police">the police closed the investigation</a>, stating that Demeter had died as a result of a <a href="http://www.errc.org/news/outrage-grows-following-the-death-of-the-romani-george-floyd-in-the-czech-republic">drug overdose</a>.</p>
<p>Despite the gravity of these circumstances, the death has sparked limited outrage in the Czech Republic or elsewhere, beyond the Roma community. </p>
<p>Two main factors need to be addressed to challenge this indifference: structural racism within the country’s institutions and the lack of Roma integration in society. The latter issue is often treated by politicians as a one-directional problem of self-exclusion and blamed on Roma people themselves.</p>
<h2>Structural racism</h2>
<p>Roma have lived in the Czech Republic for centuries, but relations with the majority Czech population have always been strained. Because of the deeply rooted racist stigmatisation of Roma as <a href="http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/czech-president-shakes-his-fist-during-christmas-speech-references-inadaptables-rejects-early-elections">socially “unadaptable”</a>, many Roma have <a href="https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2018/01/26/anti-roma-stigma-czech-president-milos-zeman-threatens-progress-romani-rights/">hidden their identity</a> in an attempt to protect themselves from exclusion. </p>
<p>Roma organisations <a href="http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/romani-organizations-launch-campaign-about-the-census-that-features-czech-president-zeman">launched a campaign</a> in 2021 encouraging people to declare their Roma identity in the national census. It is generally accepted that they currently number 300,000 people approximately (around 3% of the country’s total population) – although <a href="https://www.czso.cz/csu/sldb/preliminary_results_of_the_2011_population_and_housing_census">official estimates are lower</a>.</p>
<p>As the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights <a href="https://fra.europa.eu/en">has reported</a>, the extent to which anti-Roma racism pervades education, employment, housing and – as potentially suggested by the death of Stanislav Tomáš – policing, is as striking as it is normalised by the majority non-Roma society. This is a clear manifestation of how systemic racism operates in the country. It’s a system in which public policies and institutional practices are combined to create disadvantages against non-white minority groups.</p>
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<img alt="A Roma family outside a slum building." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408405/original/file-20210625-22-1rp88yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408405/original/file-20210625-22-1rp88yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408405/original/file-20210625-22-1rp88yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408405/original/file-20210625-22-1rp88yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408405/original/file-20210625-22-1rp88yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408405/original/file-20210625-22-1rp88yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408405/original/file-20210625-22-1rp88yq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The Czech Republic’s Roma citizens often find it hard to rent housing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tomas Vynikal via Shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>Czech Roma have been singled out as unwanted neighbours, with <a href="http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/czech-republic-landlord-recorded-refusing-to-rent-apartment-to-roma">landlords refusing to rent them apartments</a> resulting in their “ghettoisation” in low-standard housing. Similarly, Roma are discriminated against in the <a href="https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra-2014-roma-survey-employment_en.pdf">labour market</a> and face high unemployment rates. <a href="http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/romani-children-in-the-czech-republic-still-frequently-assessed-as-mentally-disabled-and-educated-separately">School education</a> of Roma children is based on a modified curriculum that targets impaired children. Meanwhile, hundreds of Roma women were <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/czech-bill-compensate-forcibly-sterilized-roma-passes-78081970?ref=upstract.com&curator=upstract.com&utm_source=upstract.com">sterilised without their informed consent</a> between 1966 and 2012. </p>
<p>One of the most common expressions of the normalisation of structural racism is its denial and attribution to other social causes. Some may think there are echoes of this in Babiš’s and Hamáček’s statements concerning Tomáš’s death.</p>
<h2>Social exclusion</h2>
<p>In collaboration with the European Union, the Czech government has been trying to integrate Roma through a series of social projects channelled through civil society organisations. But the government’s expectation for social integration continues to be raised as a one-directional effort, which puts responsibility for integration entirely on the Roma community. Consequently, the idea that Roma are the problem to social adaptation continues to be maintained.</p>
<p>As the initial results of my collaborative <a href="https://wiserd.ac.uk/research/research-projects/borders-boundary-mechanisms-and-migration-0">WISERD and Bangor University project</a> reveal, most government policies continue to aim for integration of Roma within the mainstream educational, labour and cultural system. But this is without taking into consideration the need for plurality and a society that, at present, acts to marginalise Roma people and put their health, safety and way of life in jeopardy. As a Roma interviewee told me recently: “You are not fully integrated into society if the wider community does not celebrate you.”</p>
<p>Racism is so ingrained in the country’s institutions, especially in law enforcement, that only a long-term government commitment can improve the situation beyond temporary cosmetic measures. One of the first steps to fight against structural racism and advance towards a multi-ethnic society is to recognise and name the real problem. It is not self-exclusion that is the problem, but anti-Roma structural racism.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163445/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dana Brablec does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The death of Stanislav Tomáš in the Czech Republic has been compared to the murder of George Floyd.Dana Brablec, Postdoctoral Research Officer | WISERD - Bangor University, Bangor UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1504302020-12-01T13:27:31Z2020-12-01T13:27:31ZCoronavirus: why is eastern Europe’s second wave so much worse than its first?<p>Eastern Europe was praised for being exceptional during the first wave of the pandemic. By introducing very strict <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f9850a8d-7323-4de5-93ed-9ecda7f6de1c">prevention measures</a> early on, countries in the region had <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/05/why-has-eastern-europe-suffered-less-from-coronavirus-than-the-west">significantly fewer</a> COVID-related deaths than their western European counterparts.</p>
<p>Some argued that this was because of <a href="https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/05/28/eastern-europes-covid-19-recession-could-match-its-post-communist-one">economics</a>: that eastern European countries locked down early because they feared their economies would not be able to handle many people getting sick. Others suggested this eastern European exceptionalism could be explained by <a href="https://kafkadesk.org/2020/09/18/what-people-got-wrong-about-the-covid-19-pandemic-in-central-and-eastern-europe/">culture</a>, with success in limiting the first wave being down to a mentality of fear and readiness to follow harsh rules stemming from the communist era.</p>
<p>But if these factors were at play in the first wave, they haven’t had the same effect in the second. Eastern Europe’s pandemic experience has been dramatically different this autumn. All countries in the region have seen significant increases in <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=SVN%7EHUN%7EHRV%7ESRB%7EBGR%7ECZE%7EROU%7EPOL%7ELVA%7EEST%7ELTU%7ESVK&region=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&pickerSort=desc">cases</a> and <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=SVN%7EHUN%7EHRV%7ESRB%7EBGR%7ECZE%7EROU%7EPOL%7ELVA%7EEST%7ELTU%7ESVK&region=World&deathsMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&pickerSort=desc">deaths</a>. Here, we take a look at why this has happened.</p>
<h2>A head start in the first wave</h2>
<p>One thing is clear: eastern Europe exited the first wave at the end of June in much better shape than western Europe. Adjusting for population size, both cases and deaths were substantially lower in the east, as shown in this comparison of the COVID-19 death rate in the two regions. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371763/original/file-20201127-19-1ym7gaf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Graph showing that during March-June 2020, COVID-19 deaths per head of population spiked in western Europe but remained low in eastern Europe." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371763/original/file-20201127-19-1ym7gaf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371763/original/file-20201127-19-1ym7gaf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=269&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371763/original/file-20201127-19-1ym7gaf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=269&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371763/original/file-20201127-19-1ym7gaf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=269&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371763/original/file-20201127-19-1ym7gaf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371763/original/file-20201127-19-1ym7gaf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371763/original/file-20201127-19-1ym7gaf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Daily new COVID-19 deaths per million inhabitants, eastern and western Europe.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Our World in Data COVID-19 Dataset. Authors’ compilation.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We can also compare how restrictive the two regions’ disease-prevention measures were during the first wave using the <a href="https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus-government-response-tracker">Oxford COVID-19 government response tracker</a> (OxCGRT). This tool measures the stringency of efforts to control the virus on a scale of 0-100, with 100 being the most restrictive. We can see from the next graph that, at the same time in the spring, the two regions introduced measures that were similarly strict. </p>
<p>However, if we look back at the death rates of the two regions in the graph above, it’s clear that eastern European countries introduced restrictions when experiencing far fewer cases and deaths. Therefore, the simplest explanation for why eastern Europe initially fared much better is that it had a head start. Countries in the region imposed strict measures while being relatively mildly affected, whereas western countries waited until things got bad. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371764/original/file-20201127-17-1v0ue6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Graph showing how eastern Europe's COVID-19 control measures were initially as stringent as western Europe's, but since the summer have been more relaxed." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371764/original/file-20201127-17-1v0ue6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371764/original/file-20201127-17-1v0ue6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=257&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371764/original/file-20201127-17-1v0ue6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=257&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371764/original/file-20201127-17-1v0ue6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=257&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371764/original/file-20201127-17-1v0ue6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=323&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371764/original/file-20201127-17-1v0ue6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=323&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371764/original/file-20201127-17-1v0ue6h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=323&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stringency of COVID-19 control measures in eastern and western Europe.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">OxCGRT. Authors’ compilation.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This shows that eastern European countries took the opportunity to act quickly.</p>
<h2>Squandering the spring gains</h2>
<p>When we turn to the second wave (starting around September and ongoing), we’re faced with the opposite question: why did eastern European countries not act in spite of rapidly rising infections and deaths?</p>
<p>Eastern European death rates overtook those in the west in early October, but restrictions in the region – which had eased after the first wave – still lagged behind controls reintroduced in the west. Look again at the second graph above. It shows that in between the two waves, the east relaxed its measures further than the west, and was then less eager in reimposing them. Eastern Europe squandered its spring gains and then repeated the mistakes made by the west in spring: waiting until cases and deaths are out of control before imposing controls.</p>
<p>What explains this reluctance to reintroduce restrictions? One explanation might be that these countries are victims of their own success. Eastern Europe contained the virus so successfully in spring, it didn’t experience the <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m1065">horrific hospital scenes</a> seen in northern Italy, for example. This may have produced <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/as-infections-grow-in-romania-so-does-corona-scepticism/">scepticism</a> about the severity of the pandemic. <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54417547">Pandemic fatigue</a> is present across the entire continent, and may be especially present in the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-pandemics-bucharest-romania-archive-2998096f7aa9161099d8e0e42c018177">east</a>, where some people may have felt that they went into a lockdown for nothing.</p>
<h2>Not all in the same boat</h2>
<p>Importantly, however, there have been major differences within eastern Europe too. Up until the beginning of November, the spike in the death rate was largely driven by the Czech Republic. Cases and deaths have not been spread evenly across the region.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371765/original/file-20201127-13-yjtbs4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Graph showing COVID deaths per head of population in eastern European countries from September 15 to November 1, with the Czech Republic faring significantly worse than others." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371765/original/file-20201127-13-yjtbs4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371765/original/file-20201127-13-yjtbs4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=259&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371765/original/file-20201127-13-yjtbs4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=259&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371765/original/file-20201127-13-yjtbs4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=259&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371765/original/file-20201127-13-yjtbs4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371765/original/file-20201127-13-yjtbs4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371765/original/file-20201127-13-yjtbs4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Daily new COVID-19 deaths per million inhabitants, second wave, eastern Europe.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Our World in Data COVID-19 Dataset. Authors’ compilation.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If we look at the stringency of control measures, we can also see that not all countries acted in the same way. The Czech Republic acted very late, for example, imposing stricter measures at the end of October, even though cases and deaths had been soaring upwards during the month. Neighbouring Slovakia, on the other hand, imposed stricter measures despite having far fewer cases and deaths. It seems that at least some countries in the region have learned their lessons.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371766/original/file-20201127-24-14r6rz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Graph showing how the stringency of some eastern European countries' COVID-19 control measures increased between September 15 and November 1." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371766/original/file-20201127-24-14r6rz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371766/original/file-20201127-24-14r6rz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371766/original/file-20201127-24-14r6rz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371766/original/file-20201127-24-14r6rz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371766/original/file-20201127-24-14r6rz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=328&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371766/original/file-20201127-24-14r6rz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=328&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371766/original/file-20201127-24-14r6rz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=328&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stringency of COVID-19 restrictions, second wave, eastern Europe.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">OxCGRT. Authors’ compilation.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Understanding why eastern European countries chose to respond differently during the second wave is complicated, though. </p>
<p>For example, differences in economic strength could explain why the relatively richer Czech Republic waited to reintroduce restrictions (thinking it could bear the brunt of a high number of infections), but this doesn’t account for the relatively poorer Romania’s decision to do the same. </p>
<p>Politics might provide a hint: the <a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-what-went-wrong-in-the-czech-republic-149505">Czech Republic</a> held regional elections in October, while Romania voted in local elections in September and is about to vote in <a href="https://www.romania-insider.com/general-elections-campaign-romania-2020">national elections</a> in December. Electoral politics could explain the reluctance of the two countries to enter another lockdown – with politicians seeing it as an unpopular measure that would also delay elections.</p>
<p>But one explanation that can probably be ditched is the culture argument mentioned previously. Even in countries where governments reintroduced relatively strong restrictions in October, such as Slovenia and Lithuania, infections and deaths have <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=SVN%7ELTU&region=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&pickerSort=desc">remained high</a> throughout November – suggesting low compliance with the rules.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150430/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tamara Popic and Alexandru D Moise are collaborators on the project "Responding to COVID-19: Government Action, Government Rhetoric, and Public Trust", which is funded by the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tamara Popic and Alexandru D Moise do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointments.</span></em></p>Eastern European countries are making the same mistakes now as western European countries did in the spring.Tamara Popic, Max Weber Fellow in Social and Political Sciences, European University InstituteAlexandru D Moise, Max Weber Fellow in Social and Political Sciences, European University InstituteLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1495052020-11-09T13:11:08Z2020-11-09T13:11:08ZCoronavirus: what went wrong in the Czech Republic?<p>The Czech Republic, which had been <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f9850a8d-7323-4de5-93ed-9ecda7f6de1c">praised for its swift response</a> to COVID-19 in the spring, is now topping global charts of new coronavirus infections and deaths per population. Authorities have failed to control new infections since cases started to increase in the summer. Despite almost three weeks of a near-lockdown, the rate of new cases is declining only slowly. The proportion of tests that are positive remains dangerously high, <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=GBR%7ECZE%7EBEL%7EFRA%7EESP&region=World&positiveTestRate=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&pickerSort=asc">around 30%</a>.</p>
<p>As infections surge across Europe, the Czech Republic isn’t unique in facing a worrying second wave. It stands out, however, by the delayed response of its government – especially given how fast the new coronavirus spread in the country. On September 18, the chief medical statistician <a href="https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/ladislav-dusek-uzis-koronavirus-covid-19-nakazeni-hospitalizovani-statistiky-opatreni.A200917_134321_domaci_vlc">suggested</a> that implementing public health measures on October 1, as opposed to a week earlier, would lead to hundreds of thousands of new cases (and therefore thousands of additional deaths). Yet the government waited for another three full weeks before introducing meaningful restrictions. </p>
<h2>Calculated or inadvertent?</h2>
<p>Political scientists have recently come up with a useful typology of <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11077-019-09362-2">policy inaction</a> that can help us understand the Czech government’s non-response. It notably distinguishes “calculated inaction” (a product of conscious decisions) and “inadvertent inaction” (a product of blind spots or wishful thinking).</p>
<p>The Czech government <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/2020/04/07/the-czech-republics-response-to-the-coronavirus-pandemic/">hasn’t been forthcoming</a> with explaining its policy choices, making any answers to this question speculative. Both cases will surely be argued in future internal, parliamentary and criminal inquiries, all of which have already been floated.</p>
<p>Some evidence points to the “inadvertent” camp. An important part of a country’s capacity to design and implement effective policies is how well its administration <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=sYgTwHQbNAAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=Evans,+Peter+B.,+Dietrich+Rueschemeyer,+and+Theda+Skocpol,+eds.+1985.+Bringing+the+State+Back+In.+New+York:+Cambridge+University+Press.&ots=JDhaqptOf9&sig=qNP8ycV8risovzOAWpoJqwsnW14#v=onepage&q&f=false">works with experts</a>. The early months of the pandemic showed just how variable the relationship between experts and the government has been in the Czech Republic. </p>
<p>For example, it wasn’t the Central Epidemiological Committee or the Institute of Health Information and Statistics that convinced the government to declare lockdown in March, but a businessman with no formal ties to the government who created a simple model of COVID-19’s likely spread in the Czech Republic. Alarmed, he secured a meeting with government officials. That was the first time the government had seen <a href="https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/tajemny-muz-ktery-na-jare-zachranil-cesko-exreditel-ceske-pojistovny-124767">any epidemiological predictions</a>. This is perhaps less surprising than it sounds: sociologists have suggested that resource-poor countries, such as the Czech Republic, that have been subject to privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation that hollow out the state have <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701703?af=R&mobileUi=0&">less capable bureaucracies</a>.</p>
<p>The Czech prime minister, Andrej Babiš, was not immediately convinced of the model’s conclusions but compared daily infection numbers with a printout of the model, and declared lockdown within a matter of days. This version of events was corroborated by Babiš himself at a press conference in two somewhat cryptic sentences: “In March, someone came with a mathematical model and in August someone, the same person, came again… And those who were supposed to come, didn’t.”</p>
<iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=GBR~CZE~BEL~FRA~ESP&region=World&deathsMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&pickerSort=desc" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>“Those who were supposed to come” is widely thought to refer to the Institute of Health Information and Statistics, which denied that the government had been kept in the dark. It insisted that the government had received <a href="https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/koronavirus-v-cesku-ladislav-dusek-uzis-data-k-druhe-vlne-srpen-premier-andrej-babis.A201021_095623_domaci_chtl">daily briefings</a>. In parallel, however, the head of the institute consistently <a href="https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/koronaviru-dochazi-v-cesku-dech-snad-mu-to-vydrzi-i-na-podzi/r%7Ed828b1b6e79f11ea842f0cc47ab5f122/">minimised the threat</a> of COVID-19 in the media, despite external experts sounding <a href="https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/cesky-vedec-z-oxfordu-ted-mohlo-byt-mene-nakazenych-a-v-rijnu-mene-mrtvych-120611">alarm bells</a>.</p>
<h2>Who pays, who benefits?</h2>
<p>Those in the “calculated inaction” camp will say the government was given plenty of warning. The first reports that the contact-tracing system was <a href="https://www.irozhlas.cz/zpravy-domov/mestska-policie-praha-koronavirus-covid-19-testovani-kritika-vlady_2008011806_kro">overwhelmed</a> came in late July. The country’s contact-tracing app, developed in collaboration with private sector volunteers, had minimal uptake. Contact tracing was delegated to regional public health authorities. They were <a href="https://www.irozhlas.cz/zpravy-domov/zdravotnictvi-hygienicke-stanice-lekari-personalni-krize-koronavirus_2006110714_ada">understaffed and under-resourced</a> and lacked adequate working processes and infrastructure, including <a href="https://www.irozhlas.cz/zpravy-domov/krajska-hygienicka-stanice-technicke-vybaveni_2009130659_onz">computers and internet</a> connections. </p>
<p>The gravity of the situation was at least partially recognised by the Ministry of Health, which made face masks mandatory indoors, including in schools, in late August. Days later, Babiš <a href="https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/babis-vojtech-schuzka-rousky-vlada-ministerstvo-zdravotnictvi.A200820_093125_domaci_kop">overruled</a> this decision. He later explained the lack of restrictions throughout the summer by referring to “<a href="https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/premier-andrej-babis-rousky-koronavirus-vojtech-jermanova.A200821_200443_domaci_aug">the economic perspective</a>” and “<a href="https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/babis-rychle-rozvolneni-byla-mozna-chyba-vsichni-to-ale-chteli-40336217">societal demand</a>”. </p>
<iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=GBR~CZE~BEL~FRA~ESP&region=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=new_cases_per_million&pickerSort=desc" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>The economy plays a key role for decision-makers all around the world but societal demand for normality was perhaps especially understandable in the Czech population, which was relatively untouched by the disease in the first wave. <a href="https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/lide-by-se-meli-prestat-strasit-koronavirem-rekl-babis/r%7E92e7e350f75411ea80e60cc47ab5f122/">Politicians</a> also downplayed the threat all summer, supported by vocal clinicians without a background in public health – mostly notably <a href="https://www.irozhlas.cz/zpravy-domov/koronavirus-pirk-smucler-honzak-roman-prymula-cesko-v-cesku-cr-lekari-prvni_2010061757_ako">a prominent dentist</a>.</p>
<h2>Blame it on elections?</h2>
<p>By September, though, even sceptical advisers considered new restrictions necessary. But here comes the biggest argument being made by the calculated camp: regional and senate elections took place on October 2 and 3, and a widespread hypothesis suggests the Czech government consciously chose to wait until these were over before renewing restrictions, expecting the measures to be unpopular with its core electorate. </p>
<p>The fact remains that a state of emergency was approved by parliament on September 30 but the first restrictions only came into force on October 9 – and, even then, these were only quite moderate, such as earlier closing hours for pubs.</p>
<p>Whether the government’s decisions came from a place of cynical cost-benefit calculations or overly optimistic wishful thinking, the fallout will be enormous – in human, economic, and for the government, perhaps also <a href="https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/volebni-model-median-rijen-2020-oslabeni-hnuti-ano.A201106_092413_domaci_kop">electoral</a>, terms.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149505/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Olga Löblová does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Lauded as a success story during the first wave, the country is now struggling with an explosion of cases.Olga Löblová, Research Associate, Department of Sociology, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1445912020-08-18T11:52:52Z2020-08-18T11:52:52ZDark tourism in eastern Europe: the struggle between money and memory<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353189/original/file-20200817-20-3sr5sy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3494%2C2326&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Decaying monument to the 'people's uprising against fascism' at Petrova Gora in Croatia.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ilija Ascic via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Many tourists – especially people who come from western democracies – are fascinated with the communist pasts of central and eastern European countries. Their desire to gaze upon, consume and experience the remnants of life behind the Iron Curtain contrasts with the desire of many local people to distance and forget their traumatic pasts. </p>
<p>As a result, many of the places associated with the communist regimes have been long abandoned and even destroyed. Meanwhile the horrors of 20th-century history are commemorated by <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P6-TA-2009-0213+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN">Black Ribbon Day</a> on August 23 – officially known as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.</p>
<p>In many eastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechia and Poland the locals’ desire to forget their collective traumatic past is paradoxically interwoven with the need for economic profit derived from commercialising remnants of the communist heritage. Communist sites are in different states of repair. Some are dilapidated, such as the Monument House of the Communist Party in Buzludzha, Bulgaria, which commemorates the founding of the party there in 1891. Others are in good condition, for example the shipyard in Gdansk, Poland where Lech Wałęsa worked before he became the country’s first democratically elected president in 1990. </p>
<p>There are different ways of remembering the communist era. Some are associated with death and suffering: for example, communist forced labour camps such as the <a href="http://www.dark-tourism.com/index.php/czech-republic/15-countries/individual-chapters/173-vojna-memorial">Vojna Memorial in Czechia</a> or the preserved <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03071022.2011.651581">Bulgarian labour camp in the town of Belene</a>. There are also memorials of anti-fascist struggles during the second world war – such as the <a href="https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/petrova-gora">Petrova Gora (Peter’s Hill) monument in Croatia</a>. The <a href="https://nationalgallery.bg/visiting/museum-of-socialist-art/">Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia</a>, meanwhile, commemorates communist ideology with art and propaganda artefacts.</p>
<p>Complicating this puzzle even further is the disillusionment with which people in some countries view the transition to democracy – which many believe has brought few benefits and which has prompted some to nurse nostalgic feelings about the communist period. In Romania, for example, some people visit the grave of the former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu every year on Christmas Day – the day he was shot dead in 1989. These nostalgic feelings seem to be more common in places such as eastern Germany, Romania and Bulgaria than in other former Soviet Bloc countries such as Poland, Hungary and Czechia. There is yet to be any substantial research to explain the way people in different post-communist countries feel about the communist era.</p>
<p>Rose-tinted perceptions of life under communist regimes compete with memories of the harsh realities of life in the Soviet bloc where state surveillance and security measures, corruption, paranoia, widespread censorship, lack of basic necessities and long queues at the shops were common. So, it is no surprise that in many eastern European countries some communist sites remain in ruins, while some become national attractions.
There is no consensus on what should be done with sites, monuments and buildings associated with the communist regimes, and many have been left to deteriorate.</p>
<p>In Hungary, the ambivalent relationship between the country’s communist past and its contemporary politics is illustrated in Budapest’s <a href="https://www.mementopark.hu/">Statue Park (also known as Memento Park)</a> – an open-air museum of 42 communist statues and monuments collected from the streets of Budapest after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The choice of monuments reflects the conflicting and unresolved features of Hungarian national identity and politics.</p>
<p>A recent trend in the former eastern block countries is the proliferation of communist heritage tours as “entertainment”. <a href="https://www.crazyguides.com/">Crazy Guides Kraków Communism Tours</a>, for example, offers visitors the chance to shoot a Kalashnikov rifle or dance at a communist disco. In Sofia you can drive a Trabant car or <a href="https://redflatsofia.com/">visit a “red flat”</a>.</p>
<p>Museums dedicated to life under communism, such as the <a href="https://www.ddr-museum.de/en">DDR museum in Berlin</a> and the Museum of Communism in Czechia, offer a more educational and balanced perspective. Their aim is to show people’s everyday life, as well as the oppressive aspects of the communist regimes. The Open Society Archive (OSA) at Central European University in Budapest has organised an <a href="http://w3.osaarchivum.org/gulag/index.html">online exhibition on forced labour camps</a> in the eastern European bloc to provide a safer museum experience during the global COVID-19 pandemic.</p>
<h2>Money, trauma and nostalgia</h2>
<p>Communist heritage and its place in tourism remains controversial and presents us with a paradoxical puzzle. In <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2020.103000">our recent research</a> we propose the notion of the rhizome to untangle the struggle between economic profit, traumatic memories and nostalgia. As a botanical term, rhizomes refer to continuously growing horizontal stems which put out lateral shoots and randomly formed roots. It is an idea the French philosophers <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/a-creative-multiplicity-the-philosophy-of-deleuze-and-guattari">Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari</a> borrowed from botany to encourage lateral and creative thinking to make sense of contradictory ideas. </p>
<p>The concept of the rhizome allows for paradoxical and even opposing attitudes about communist heritage to coexist. Being able to manage such contradictions is important for tourism industries and planners. </p>
<p>Communist heritage sites need to reflect the realities of the past and provide interpretations that weave together the stories of the everyday lives with the repressive and often violent aspects of the regimes. One-sided presentations risk alienating locals and increasing resistance to such tourism developments, or creating a sanitised and commercialised version of the history of the communist period.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144591/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dorina-Maria Buda receives funding from the Dutch Research Council/Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Milka Ivanova does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For many in former Soviet Bloc countries the desire to forget the communist past conflicts with the need to make money from dark tourism sites.Milka Ivanova, Senior Lecturer in Tourism and Hospitality, Leeds Beckett UniversityDorina-Maria Buda, Professor of Marketing and Tourism, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1173312019-05-23T19:14:37Z2019-05-23T19:14:37ZEU elections: Six countries seen by six experts<p><em>In advance of the 2019 elections for the European Parliament, The Conversation France asked experts from six European countries to weigh in: The Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden, as well as Norway, home to a large number of EU citizens and also a member European Economic Area. They look at how the EU is perceived by their citizens and residents, issues of concern and also perspectives for the election.</em></p>
<hr>
<h2>Czech Republic: Eurosceptic, yet in no rush to leave</h2>
<p><em>Vít Hloušek, Masaryk University, Brno.</em></p>
<p>When it entered the EU in 2004, the Czech Republic was then one of the most eurosceptic members and it remains so today. In an April survey, only <a href="https://cvvm.soc.cas.cz/en/press-releases/political/international-relations/4621-public-opinion-on-the-czech-republic-s-membership-in-the-european-union-april-2018">36% of the respondents were satisfied with EU membership</a>, only 32% tend to <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/ResultDoc/download/DocumentKy/84930">trust the EU</a> and of voters, only <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/Chart/getChart/chartType/gridChart/themeKy/9/groupKy/23/savFile/661">38% tend to trust to the Parliament</a>. Yet despite the doubt, a full 62% of respondents stated that country should remain a member of the EU. </p>
<p>There is a <a href="https://shop.budrich-academic.de/produkt/europeanised-defiance-%c2%96-czech-euroscepticism-since-2004/?v=928568b84963">long tradition eurosceptic parties</a>, creating <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301637130_Narratives_of_European_Politics_in_the_Czech_Republic_A_Big_Gap_between_Politicians_and_Experts">dominant narratives</a> in the debate. In the parliament’s lower house, the hard eurosceptic party Freedom and Direct Democracy controls 11% of the seats, soft eurosceptic parties (Civic Democrats, Communists, ANO) hold 59% and pro-EU parties only 30%. Another typical feature is <a href="https://www.kas.de/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=d3b13d4c-81ad-5926-f2eb-d41cbc81f95b&groupId=252038">extremely low voter turnout</a> – just 18.2% in 2014.</p>
<p>The real campaign started only some three weeks before the poll. The dominant issue is the sought after reform of the EU presented nevertheless typically in an unclear way. The manifestos have “Europeanised” since 2004, yet the parties fail to grasp the real stakes of the EP or ignore them, so debates are more likely to deal with national issues than EU policies. Eurosceptic parties are likely to misuse voter concerns about <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/ResultDoc/download/DocumentKy/84930">immigration and terrorism</a>. So far, only parties represented already in the Czech House of Deputies <a href="https://www.politico.eu/2019-european-elections/czech-republic/">are expected to win any seats</a> “in the Brussels”.</p>
<p><br></p>
<h2>Germany: Europhile and holding tight</h2>
<p><em>Kai Arzheimer, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.</em></p>
<p>In 2019, Germany remains one of the most europhile members of the EU. Only the radical right-wing <a href="https://theconversation.com/germanys-afd-how-to-understand-the-rise-of-the-right-wing-populists-84541">“Alternative for Germany”</a> (AfD) qualifies as eurosceptic, but barely – their manifesto lists a host of tests that the EU would have to fail before the AfD would demand a “Dexit”. More importantly, the leadership even changed their position on Germany’s EU membership from “negative” to “neutral” in the semi-official voting advice application <a href="http://wahl-o-mat.de/">“Wahl-o-mat.de”</a> a few days after the application went online.</p>
<p>At the other end of the spectrum, the Greens are running a high-profile pro-EU campaign spearheaded by two prominent MEPs. The other parties’ campaigns are more low-key and shaped by their general ideological positions. Everyone agrees that EU is a good thing; the parties repeat their usual core messages, be it more redistribution, more market liberalism, or just more of the same – without many specifics. To raise turnout and awareness, 10 of Germany’s 16 states hold local elections on the same day as the EP elections. Judging from the content of the election posters, these local elections may well eclipse the European contest.</p>
<p>If <a href="https://europeelects.eu/european-union/germany/">polls</a> are to be trusted, EP voting will be very much in line with recent subnational elections and the political mood: the CDU/CSU can expect around 30% of the vote, the Greens and the SPD can count on 15-20% each, and the FDP and the <a href="https://en.die-linke.de/welcome/">Die Linke</a> are polling about 7% apiece. Importantly, support for the AfD has been stable between 10% and 14% for months. As far as Germany is concerned, news of a large-scale, far-right rebellion against the EU seem exaggerated.</p>
<p><br></p>
<h2>Italy: From founder to fragmented</h2>
<p><em>Gioacchino Garofoli, Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Varese.</em></p>
<p>In 1957, Italy was one of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_Six">“inner six”</a> members of the European Economic Community, which would later become the European Union. In the early years Italians were more Europhile than other EU states – for example, in 1998, 73% expressed support. The 2007-8 economic crisis pushed citizens toward more of a Eurosceptic stance, however, with only 36% being in favour of Europe in 2018. The major concerns of Italian citizens today are immigration (66%), youth unemployment (60%) and the country’s economic situation (57%).</p>
<p>In February the two leading parties/movements against Europe, the League and the Five Star Movement (M5S), <a href="https://theconversation.com/italy-the-far-right-is-in-charge-these-election-results-prove-it-112343">took power</a>, but they are mainly sovereignist rather than anti-Europe. In particular, leaving the Eurozone or the union aren’t on the agenda. <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/italy-m5s-could-be-headed-for-political-disaster-after-regional-collapse.html">Support for M5S has also collapsed</a>, leading to an internal political crisis. Nicola Zingaretti, head of the center-left <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/03/italy-heads-to-the-polls-to-elect-new-leader-for-democratic-party">Democratic party</a>, is more pro-European but has struggled to find wide support.</p>
<p>Outside the political parties, societal and cultural movements are working to mobilise Italian citizens and build a new conception of a social Europe, more federalist and cohesive, that would reduce inequalities and guarantee fundamental rights. All this should give the opportunity for a big push to close up the EU’s “democratic deficit” through networks, negotiation and coherent decision-making, from cities and regions to European Union itself.</p>
<p><br></p>
<h2>Netherlands: Once critical, now more positive</h2>
<p><em>Jacques Paulus Koenis, Maastricht University.</em></p>
<p>The Netherlands is still struggling through the comet-like rise of <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/thierry-baudet-forum-for-democracy-netherlands-5-things-to-know-about-dutch-far-rights-new-figurehead/">Thierry Baudet and his Forum for Democracy</a> (FvD), the latest addition to the tribe of Dutch populists. The party was the largest in the March provincial elections, coming in ahead of the VVD of <a href="https://www.government.nl/government/members-of-cabinet/mark-rutte">prime minister Mark Rutte</a>. The FvD overshadows even Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), and will probably also do well.</p>
<p>Despite the results of the March elections, Dutch public opinion on the EU is more positive than five years ago. There now seems to be more willingness to look at the EU for solutions to problems such as international migration, climate change and security. It is striking that the call for a “Nexit” is now heard far less often than in the previous EU elections. Even Baudet, a populist, hardly makes a point of it, while his climate-change denialism attracts more attention. Centrist parties such as the VVD and CDA (Christian Democrats) are also more positive about the EU. In international speeches, prime minister Mark Rutte asserts pride in being a European, but in Dutch parliament he says that he considers the EU election to be <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-pm-mark-rutte-chides-white-wine-sipping-elites-for-us-president-donald-trump-bashing/">“not so relevant”</a>, probably so as not to give in too much to the populists.</p>
<p>Rutte’s VVD is expected to get the most votes in the coming elections, while Baudet’s FvD will be a good second, before <a href="https://verkiezingen.groenlinks.nl/bas-eickhout">GroenLinks with Bas Eickhout</a>, who together with Ska Keller is <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/manfred-weber-spitzenkandidat-system-unconcerned/"><em>Spitzenkandidat</em></a> (lead candidate) for the European Greens. Frans Timmermans, the <em>Spitzenkandidat</em> for the European social democrats, will not get many votes in the Netherlands because his Labour Party is severely weakened, but may hope to gather votes through the <a href="https://www.pes.eu/en/">Party of European Socialists</a> (PES).</p>
<p><br></p>
<h2>Sweden: The environment above all</h2>
<p><em>Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, Lund University.</em></p>
<p>In the run-up to 2019 European Parliament elections, environment protection and climate change are at the top of the agenda for Swedish voters, according to the <a href="https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/samhalle/a/8mPqj1/klimat-och-miljo-i-topp-infor-eu-valet">latest opinion poll</a>. The topic has been brought to the fore by the internationally known Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, and by last year’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/europe/heat-wave-sweden-fires.html">extensive wildfires</a>. Interest in the environment is a longstanding tradition, however, both in national politics and previous EP elections, where it was among the top five concerns. In terms of issues that Swedes would like to see the EU tackle, refugees and the fight against terrorism and crime come in the second and third place. </p>
<p>According to the <a href="https://www.kantarsifo.se/rapporter-undersokningar/valjarbarometern-eu">latest poll</a>, a third of the Swedes have yet to decide for whom to vote. Turnout will be higher this time (around 58%) compared to 2014 (51%), in part driven by the climate question, a central issue for youth who will likely exercise their voting right in higher numbers now compared to 2019. According to a Novus poll, 66% of the 18-29 segment trust the EU, more than the population as a whole (59% according to <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinionmobile/index.cfm/Survey/getSurveyDetail/surveyKy/2215">Eurobarometer</a>.</p>
<p>Even though the Greens own the environmental issue, the party seems to be on a <a href="https://www.kantarsifo.se/rapporter-undersokningar/valjarbarometern-eu">downhill course</a>, with just 11% support, down 4% compared to 2014. However, the “biggest loss” prize goes to the Liberals, polling at 3,6%, below the 4% threshold. This risks to be the first election since 1999 in which the categorically pro-EU party will not send any representatives to the European Parliament. At the other end of the political spectrum, the anti-immigration eurosceptic Sweden Democrats are polling at 16.9%, up 7% compared to 2014, when they obtained nearly 10% of the vote and two EP seats.</p>
<p><br></p>
<h2>Norway: Linked to the EU, yet disconnected</h2>
<p><em>John Erik Fossum, University of Oslo.</em></p>
<p>Norway is not a member of the European Union and thus does not elect representatives to the parliament, but two factors that make the upcoming elections important for the country. First, more than 7% of the country’s residents are citizens of EU countries and are thus entitled to vote. Second, as a member of the European Economic Area, Norway is subject to roughly 75% of EU legal provisions.</p>
<p>A survey of the mainstream media shows a number of references to the EP elections, and some of the actors and issues that figure prominently on the European political scene are front and centre in Norway – Emmanuel Macron in France, Angela Merkel and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/07/annegret-kramp-karrenbauer-elected-merkels-successor-as-christian-democrat-leader">Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer</a> in Germany, and Victor Orban in Hungary. However, the main focus is on political leaders not parliamentarians. Other than Manfred Weber of the German European People’s Party, there are basically no other references to other MEPs.</p>
<p>The lack of direct EP representation affects engagement and debate. The Norwegian political parties are not in election mode which affects attention and media reporting. That becomes patchy because it is disconnected from the EP election cycle. The absence of opinion polls further amplifies this, leaving Norwegian citizens disconnected. They cannot understand themselves as participants empowered to send representatives to Brussels, and so are reduced to spectators who watch the unfolding events that will bear on them significantly.</p>
<p><br></p>
<hr>
<h2>European Parliament seat projection</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/275149/original/file-20190517-69182-jlhegf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/275149/original/file-20190517-69182-jlhegf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/275149/original/file-20190517-69182-jlhegf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/275149/original/file-20190517-69182-jlhegf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/275149/original/file-20190517-69182-jlhegf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/275149/original/file-20190517-69182-jlhegf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/275149/original/file-20190517-69182-jlhegf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The European Parliament will be held May 23–26, 2019. An interactive version of this graphic is accessible on europeelects.eu/ep2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://europeelects.eu/ep2019/">Europe Elects</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/117331/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Erik Fossum receives funding as coordinator of the Eu3 H2020 project</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vít Hloušek receives funding from Czech Science Foundation. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, Gioacchino Garofoli, Jacques Paulus Koenis et Kai Arzheimer ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur poste universitaire.</span></em></p>Ahead of the 2019 EU elections, experts from the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway look at how the EU is perceived, key issues and perspectives for the election.Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, Senior Lecturer in European Studies, Lund UniversityGioacchino Garofoli, Professeur d’économie, Università degli Studi dell’InsubriaJacques Paulus Koenis, Professor of Social Philosophy, Maastricht UniversityJohn Erik Fossum, Professor, ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of OsloKai Arzheimer, Professor of Political Science, Johannes Gutenberg University of MainzVít Hloušek, Associate Professor of Political Science, Masaryk UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1073712018-11-23T10:24:09Z2018-11-23T10:24:09ZCaptive breeding has a dark side – as disturbing Czech discovery of trafficked tiger body parts highlights<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246828/original/file-20181122-182037-g6tveo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout Czech Customs Authority</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/19/gruesome-discovery-of-czech-tiger-farm-exposes-illegal-trade-in-heart-of-europe?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Othe">rotting remains</a> of a number of tigers, lions and cougars were recently discovered in a raid on a house in Prague. This disturbing find was the culmination of a five-year investigation that revealed an illegal trade in exotic wildlife blooming in the heart of Europe.</p>
<p>Czech authorities managed to identify the main figures behind an international crime ring who had been processing and selling wild cat parts as traditional Chinese medicine. Claws, teeth, bones, skin and extracts from their bodies known as “tiger wine” or “broth” were smuggled to Asia or used to supply the domestic demand in tiger products. The slaughtered tigers came from the country’s largest private breeding facility for lions and tigers – where, officially, these protected wildcats are bred for circuses, roadside attractions and petting zoos.</p>
<p>This story provides a stark reminder of the cruelty engendered by captive breeding. Even zoos heralded as the beacons of endangered species conservation play a controversial part in this story. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246829/original/file-20181122-182037-pykxvu.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246829/original/file-20181122-182037-pykxvu.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246829/original/file-20181122-182037-pykxvu.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246829/original/file-20181122-182037-pykxvu.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246829/original/file-20181122-182037-pykxvu.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246829/original/file-20181122-182037-pykxvu.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246829/original/file-20181122-182037-pykxvu.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A bath in the house raided by Czech authorities.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout Czech Customs Authority</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Captive tigers</h2>
<p>With only <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/world/asia/wild-tiger-numbers-are-rising-wildlife-groups-say.html">3,900</a> left in the wild, the tiger family (<em>Panthera tigris</em>) is the only big cat listed as <a href="https://www.iucn.org/resources/conservation-tools/iucn-red-list-threatened-species">endangered</a>, with two subspecies critically endangered. The captive population, meanwhile, is abundant. </p>
<p>In 2014, the <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/more-tigers-in-american-backyards-than-in-the-wild">WWF</a> alerted us to the alarming news that there are “more tigers living in American backyards than in the wild”. The organisation called on the US government to introduce a ban on private ownership of big cats. No such federal bill has been passed since, but <a href="https://bigcatrescue.org/state-laws-exotic-cats/">21 states</a> ban all dangerous exotic pets, while the rest allow certain species or require permits. Out of 5,000 captive tigers in the US alone, only 350 are held in zoos and other facilities accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. The <a href="http://www.stolenwildlife.org/druhy.html">estimated</a> number of tigers in the Czech Republic, meanwhile, is 390, only 39 of which are kept in zoos. </p>
<p>A growing number of cities around the world close their gates for <a href="https://bigcatrescue.org/big-cat-bans-enacted/">circuses</a> that use wild animals. According to <a href="http://www.eurogroupforanimals.org/wp-content/uploads/Eurogroup-for-Animals-Exotic-Pet-Report-FINAL.pdf">Czech law</a>, captive breeding of big cats requires special permits, while the environmental inspectorate records each tiger’s birth, sale or death. Following the discovery of the tiger slaughterhouse in Prague, the European Association of Zoos and Aquariums issued a <a href="https://www.eaza.net/assets/Uploads/EAZA-Documents-Other/2018-EAZA-Position-Statement-on-tiger-trade.pdf">statement</a> urging authorities to take immediate action in ensuring that all captive tigers serve noncommercial purposes such as research, education and conservation breeding.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246830/original/file-20181122-182071-vlbfr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246830/original/file-20181122-182071-vlbfr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246830/original/file-20181122-182071-vlbfr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246830/original/file-20181122-182071-vlbfr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246830/original/file-20181122-182071-vlbfr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246830/original/file-20181122-182071-vlbfr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246830/original/file-20181122-182071-vlbfr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bones discovered by Czech authorities.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout Czech Customs Authority</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Regal wildcats</h2>
<p>The idea of protecting endangered species through captive breeding in zoos is relatively new, but has a much longer and darker history. </p>
<p>Exotic animals first entered private collections in Europe as diplomatic gifts. Tigers were particularly highly priced in royal and aristocratic menageries as dangerous predators were seen to embody the political and physical prowess of their owners. Wild cats were also exhibited for popular audiences in circuses and other travelling shows. The intensive traffic in wildlife was largely facilitated by colonial expansion. That is why European port cities, as the centres for colonial commerce, were the first to open public zoos.</p>
<p>In the aftermath of decolonisation and the introduction of the <a href="https://www.cites.org/">Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species</a> in 1973, the lucrative business of capturing and trading exotic animals came to an end. Faced with the termination of a supply of specimens caught in the wild, zoological parks resorted to captive breeding. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246843/original/file-20181122-182065-c1rpfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246843/original/file-20181122-182065-c1rpfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246843/original/file-20181122-182065-c1rpfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246843/original/file-20181122-182065-c1rpfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246843/original/file-20181122-182065-c1rpfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246843/original/file-20181122-182065-c1rpfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246843/original/file-20181122-182065-c1rpfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hunting for tigers, Thomas Williamson & Samuel Howitt, 1808.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_hunting#/media/File:ElephantbackTigerHunt.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They did so, on the one hand to ensure they retained rare species in their collections and, on the other hand, to redirect their mission: from entertainment towards conservation. Devising so-called “Species Survival Plans”, accredited zoos have collaborated since 1981 to breed endangered species and manage all captive individuals of every species as one population to ensure genetic diversity. </p>
<p>But even after this period, research, education and conservation did not always drive captive breeding in zoos. Even non-commercial breeding does not always prioritise animal welfare. </p>
<h2>White tigers</h2>
<p>Many zoos, for example, are still devoted to breeding white tigers. Only two years ago the Czech <a href="https://www.zooliberec.cz/tygr-indicky-bila-forma.html">Liberec Zoo</a> celebrated the birth of two white cubs, that were transferred to Pont-Scorff Zoo in France in July this year. This rare variation of the Bengal tiger has distinctive white fur colouring with pale chocolate stripes and mesmerising blue eyes. The extraordinary coating results from a genetic mutation, which as a recessive trait is expressed only if both parents carry the mutation.</p>
<p>This inclined the zoos to practice inbreeding, often pairing off siblings in hope for a white-furred offspring. All 250 white tigers in captivity today <a href="https://zoostoriesblog.wordpress.com/2017/12/18/the-dynasty-of-enchanters-white-tigers-in-captivity/">are related</a>, having a common ancestor captured in 1951 – the wild-caught cub named Mohan that was the pride of Maharaja of Rewa, an Indian royalty who was determined to breed these rare wild cats. After several failed attempts, in 1957 the first white cubs were born in India from the union of Mohan and his daughter Radha. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246842/original/file-20181122-182047-1kgqd2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246842/original/file-20181122-182047-1kgqd2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246842/original/file-20181122-182047-1kgqd2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246842/original/file-20181122-182047-1kgqd2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246842/original/file-20181122-182047-1kgqd2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246842/original/file-20181122-182047-1kgqd2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246842/original/file-20181122-182047-1kgqd2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Captive tigers in the Czech Republic.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Handout Czech Customs Authority</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1960, the <a href="https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/where-have-all-white-tigers-gone">Smithsonian Institution</a> procured one of the female cubs for $10,000. Today she would be worth eight times more. While the royal ancestry of this exotic feline vividly stimulated the imagination of American zoogoers, her main task at the National Zoo was to produce more offspring of her kind. The demand for these extremely rare animals often justifies pairing off closely related tigers, even though inbred animals are prone to acquiring crippling defects including shortened legs, kidney problems and crossed eyes, as well as psychological issues. </p>
<h2>Tinder tigers</h2>
<p>The tigers slaughtered in the Czech Republic were not bred in zoos but in a private facility, yet their story should put captive breeding in general into question. </p>
<p>Today, tigers are bred outside of their natural habitats for a variety of reasons: for zoos, exhibitions, circuses performances or as pets. Tiger cubs are often displayed in petting zoos and subjected to the cruel practice of declawing. Adult tigers are drugged to pose in photos. People still see these extremely dangerous carnivores as proxies for luxury and sexiness.</p>
<p>But hopefully attitudes are changing. In 2017, <a href="https://blog.gotinder.com/take-down-the-tiger-selfies/">Tinder</a> launched a campaign to encourage its users to stop posting “tiger selfies”. And most recently, due to public pressure, China was <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-46190599">forced to reinstate</a> a <a href="http://english.gov.cn/policies/latest_releases/2018/10/29/content_281476367121088.htm">newly lifted ban</a> on using tiger bone and rhino horn in medicine.</p>
<p>Of course we need to pay attention to the conservation of today’s wild tigers threatened by habitat loss due to human activity, poaching, loss of prey and the swelling human-wildlife conflicts. But more attention should be paid to the plight of the enormous captive population of tigers across the world.</p>
<p><em>This article was updated on November 26 to correct the stated number of captive tigers in the US.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107371/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marianna Szczygielska does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The slaughtered tigers were not bred in zoos, yet their story should put captive breeding in general into question.Marianna Szczygielska, Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/998292018-07-18T18:46:38Z2018-07-18T18:46:38ZThe US is a whole lot richer because of trade with Europe, regardless of whether EU is friend or ‘foe’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228250/original/file-20180718-142428-1tmzpx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Trump and Merkel: Friends, foes or frenemies?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/APTOPIX-Trump-NATO-Summit/cef1edd9372b4fa695463faf2e375518/2/0">AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>President Donald Trump recently questioned the value of the long-standing United States-Europe alliance. When asked to identify his “biggest foe globally,” <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-interview-cbs-news-european-union-is-a-foe-ahead-of-putin-meeting-in-helsinki-jeff-glor/">he declared</a>: “I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade.”</p>
<p>This view is consistent with his recent <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-us-tariffs-will-affect-different-parts-of-the-eu-97651">turn against trade</a> with Europe but ignores the immense benefits that Americans have reaped due to the strong economic and military alliance between the U.S. and Europe – benefits that include nothing less than unprecedented <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20798962.pdf">peace</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/rules-based-trade-made-the-world-rich-trumps-policies-may-make-it-poorer-97896">prosperity</a>. </p>
<p>As such, Trump’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/trade-wars-50746">trade war</a> with Europe and his hostility toward broader Western alliances such as NATO portend a future of diminished standards of living – as a direct result of less trade – and greater global conflict – <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=L53fR-TusZAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&ots=Ey5rtq9LrE&sig=MKMMiEv_We3mXsRTdx-045JA_0A#v=onepage&q&f=false">indirectly due to</a> reduced economic integration. In the words of columnist Robert Kagan, “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/everything-will-not-be-okay/2018/07/12/c5900550-85e9-11e8-9e80-403a221946a7_story.html">things</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/opinion/trump-nato-european-union-history.html">will</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/07/16/putin-trump/">not be ok</a>.” </p>
<p>Some of <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fMoODlwAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">my research</a> focuses on the impact of increased international trade on U.S. standards of living, which <a href="http://gregcwright.weebly.com/uploads/8/2/7/5/8275912/rising-tide-weai.pdf">I show</a> are causally linked during the late 20th century. Most of the trade in this period occurred among rich nations and was dominated by the U.S.-Europe relationship. </p>
<p>By calling Europe a “foe,” Trump makes clear that he simply doesn’t understand why rich countries trade with one another, which, to be fair, is something that also puzzled economists for many years. </p>
<h2>Why rich countries trade</h2>
<p>Though in some ways it seems obvious why the U.S. and Europe trade with one another – some might enjoy Parmigiana from Italy, while others prefer Wisconsin cheddar – economists initially <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2009/12/basics.htm">had trouble</a> explaining exactly why there was so much trade among rich countries. Surely, they thought, the U.S. can produce good quality cheese at a cost that is similar to producers in Italy, and vice versa, so why would we need to go abroad to satisfy our palettes? </p>
<p>In 1979, economist Paul Krugman provided a clear answer that would eventually <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2008/press.html">win him</a> the Nobel Prize in economics. The first part of his answer was simple but important and boils down to the fact that consumers benefit from having a wide range of product varieties available to them, even if they are only small variations on the same item. </p>
<p>For instance, <a href="https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/europe/european-union">in 2016</a> the top U.S. exports to the EU were aircraft (US$38.5 billion), machinery ($29.4 billion) and pharmaceutical products ($26.4 billion). The top imports from the EU seem almost identical: machinery ($64.9 billion), pharmaceutical products ($55.2 billion) and vehicles ($54.6 billion). Although the product categories clearly overlap, there are important differences in the types of pharmaceuticals and machinery that are sold in each market. Consumers benefit from having all these options available to them. </p>
<p>The second part of Krugman’s answer was that, by producing for both markets, companies in Europe and the U.S. could reap greater economies of scale in production and lower their prices as a result. This has been found to indeed <a href="https://www.colorado.edu/Economics/courses/boileau/4309/Paper%203.pdf">be what happens</a> when countries trade. And more <a href="http://cid.econ.ucdavis.edu/Papers/Feenstra_Weinstein_jpe.pdf">recent research</a> has shown that increased foreign competition can also lower domestic prices. </p>
<p>These benefits have been quantified. For instance, the gains to the U.S. from new foreign product varieties and lower prices over the period 1992 to 2005 were equal to <a href="http://cid.econ.ucdavis.edu/Papers/Feenstra_Weinstein_jpe.pdf">about one percent of U.S. GDP</a> – or about $100 billion. </p>
<p>In short, Krugman’s answer emphasized the extent to which international trade between equals increases the overall size of the economic pie. And no pie has ever grown larger than the combined economies of the U.S. and Europe, which now <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/countries/united-states/">constitute</a> half of global GDP.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228276/original/file-20180718-142426-1jshe9l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228276/original/file-20180718-142426-1jshe9l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228276/original/file-20180718-142426-1jshe9l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228276/original/file-20180718-142426-1jshe9l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228276/original/file-20180718-142426-1jshe9l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228276/original/file-20180718-142426-1jshe9l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228276/original/file-20180718-142426-1jshe9l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pfizer Inc. is headquartered in New York. Both the U.S. and the EU import and export pharmaceuticals.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/On-the-Money-Cheaper-Viagra/a7eb4d8ad5b14563b3705646a0ca8107/4/0">AP Photo/Richard Drew</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Largest trading partner</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c0003.html">European Union</a> is the largest U.S. trading partner in terms of its total bilateral trade and has been for the past several decades.</p>
<p>Overall, the U.S. <a href="https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/europe/european-union">imported $592 billion</a> in goods and services from the EU in 2016 and exported $501 billion, which represents about 19 percent of total U.S. trade and also represents about 19 percent of American GDP. </p>
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<p>A key feature of this trade is that <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/countries/united-states/">almost a third of it</a> happens within individual companies. In other words, it reflects multinational companies shipping products to themselves in order to serve their local market, or as inputs into local production. This type of trade is critical as it serves as the backbone of a <a href="http://oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/4262/EU-US_trade_and_investment_talks:_Why_they_matter.html">vast network</a> of business investments on both sides of the Atlantic, <a href="https://www.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2017/12-December/1217-activities-of-us-multinational-enterprises.pdf">supporting</a> hundreds of thousands of jobs. </p>
<p>It is also a network that propels the global economy: the EU or U.S. serves as the primary trading partner for nearly every country on Earth.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228254/original/file-20180718-142414-1muxzy3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228254/original/file-20180718-142414-1muxzy3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228254/original/file-20180718-142414-1muxzy3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228254/original/file-20180718-142414-1muxzy3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228254/original/file-20180718-142414-1muxzy3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228254/original/file-20180718-142414-1muxzy3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228254/original/file-20180718-142414-1muxzy3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A ship to shore crane prepares to load a shipping container onto a container ship in Savannah, Ga.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/US-China-Tariffs/453b3c52caa348cab5bb628a37a19d3e/9/0">AP Photo/Stephen B. Morton</a></span>
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<h2>Shipping and new institutions</h2>
<p>The U.S.-Europe trade relationship also laid the groundwork for the modern system of international trade via two distinct innovations: new shipping technologies and new global institutions.</p>
<p>On the technological front, the <a href="http://www.worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/history-of-containerization">introduction of the standard shipping container</a> in the 1960s set off the so-called second wave of globalization. This under-appreciated technology was conceived by the U.S Army during the 1950s and was perfected over Atlantic shipping routes. In short, by simply standardizing the size and shape of shipping containers, and building port infrastructure and ships to move them, <a href="http://eprints.brighton.ac.uk/14568/1/JIE%20accepted%20manuscript%20online%20version%20%281%29.pdf">massive economies of scale</a> in shipping were realized. As a result, today container ships the size of small cities are routed via sophisticated logistics to huge deepwater ports around the world. </p>
<p>These routes eventually made it profitable for other countries to invest in the large-scale port infrastructure that could handle modern container ships. This laid the groundwork for the eventual growth of massive container terminals throughout Asia, which now <a href="https://maritimeintelligence.informa.com/content/top-100-success">serve as the hubs</a> of the modern global supply chain. </p>
<p>At the same time that these new technologies were reducing the physical costs of doing business around the world, the U.S. and Europe were also creating <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/anthologies/2011-12-14/archives-international-institutions">institutions</a> to define new international rules for trade and finance. Perhaps the most important one was the post-war General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, which eventually became the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-wto-99274">World Trade Organization</a>, creating the first rules-based multilateral trade regime. A large body of research shows that these agreements have <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/7362891.pdf">increased trade</a> and, more importantly, <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/joes.12087">raised incomes</a> around the world.</p>
<p>Overall, these advancements contributed to the <a href="http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/viewFile/36581/20566">subsequent enrichment</a> of hundreds of millions of workers in Asia, Latin America and Africa by helping to integrate them into the global economy.</p>
<p>And when the world gets richer, the U.S. also benefits for many of the same reasons noted above: demand for U.S. products increases as incomes rise around the world, as does the variety of products the U.S. can import, and the prices of these goods typically fall. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228252/original/file-20180718-142423-1tf5lke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228252/original/file-20180718-142423-1tf5lke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228252/original/file-20180718-142423-1tf5lke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228252/original/file-20180718-142423-1tf5lke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228252/original/file-20180718-142423-1tf5lke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228252/original/file-20180718-142423-1tf5lke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228252/original/file-20180718-142423-1tf5lke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A cartoon Trump blimp flies as a protesters speak out against Trump’s visit to London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/APTOPIX-Britain-Trump-Visit/66460331f9b84b1c8e573d985f6c9dbd/18/0">AP Photo/Matt Dunham</a></span>
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<h2>Taking the long view</h2>
<p>But it appears that President Trump sees the U.S. on the losing end of a failed relationship. </p>
<p>It is unsurprising that tensions with Europe have come to the forefront over perceived imbalances in trade, particularly for a president who is not afraid <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-go-it-alone-approach-to-china-trade-ignores-wtos-better-way-to-win-93918">to take long-time allies to task</a>. </p>
<p>This is because U.S. trade policy <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/normalizing-trade-relations-with-china-was-a-mistake/562403">has arguably been overly optimistic</a> in recent years, particularly with respect to China, whose accession to the WTO proved to be much more disruptive to labor markets around the world than was predicted. Previous U.S. administrations preferred patience over confrontation, leading to a perhaps inevitable backlash that has spilled into other relationships, such as the one with Europe. </p>
<p>However, the U.S. relationship with Europe is clearly different, primarily because it is longstanding and has been largely one of equals. But also because their shared values mean that there are many non-economic issues — such as the spread of liberal democracy and the promotion of human rights — that get advanced by the close economic ties. </p>
<p>It’s important to not underestimate what is at stake if the U.S.-Europe alliance is allowed to falter. Americans are likely in the midst of the <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/we-enjoy-the-most-peaceful-period-on-earth-ever_us_57ab4b34e4b08c46f0e47130">most peaceful era</a> in world history, and global economic integration, led from the beginning by the U.S. and Europe, <a href="https://voxeu.org/article/globalisation-promotes-peace">has been</a> a key contributing factor. Global extreme poverty is also <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty">at its lowest point</a> ever, again in large part due to globalization. </p>
<p>These are the byproducts and legacies of seven decades of expanding international trade and should not be taken for granted.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99829/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Greg Wright does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The president, who called the European Union a ‘foe’ following a series of meetings in Europe, may not realize just how much Americans have gained from their relationship with Europe.Greg Wright, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California, MercedLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/919622018-02-15T19:40:42Z2018-02-15T19:40:42ZWas Jeremy Corbyn a Communist spy? The evidence says no<p>Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn met a Soviet Bloc intelligence officer in the late-1980s, a report in The Sun newspaper <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5581166/jeremy-corbyn-communist-spy-cold-war-briefings/">revealed</a>. Based on documents found in Czech archives, the paper reported that Corbyn – then an outspoken Labour backbencher – was approached by Czech State Security (the Státní bezpečnost or StB). Corbyn is reported to have warned a Czech agent about British Security Service (MI5) surveillance. While it sounds like the stuff of spy novels, the reality is more mundane and Corbyn was certainly not the only MP to fall foul of Eastern bloc spying methods.</p>
<p>The documents reveal that Czech StB thought Corbyn was “reserved and courteous”, occasionally “explosive” on human rights, but often “calm and collected”. The reports noted that the Labour backbencher was “negative towards the USA, as well as the present policies of the Conservative Government”. It said he took a “positive” view of the Eastern Bloc and was supporting a Soviet-backed peace initiative. The documents also claimed that Corbyn was “well informed” and knowledgeable on people in contact with anti-communist agencies. </p>
<p>Corbyn was initially approached by Tony Gilbert, the general secretary of the anti-colonial civil rights group Liberation, and another campaigner, Sandra Hodgson, before meeting the Czech officer in the House of Commons. The StB were keen to maintain contact and even assigned the future Labour leader the codename COB. </p>
<p>Labour has been quick to deny the reports and a spokesperson said: “Like other MPs, Jeremy has met diplomats from many countries. In the 1980s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2018/feb/15/jeremy-corbyn-denies-ridiculous-smear-that-he-briefed-communist-spy-politics-live">he met a Czech diplomat</a>”. They added that Corbyn “had not offered any privileged information to this or any diplomat”.</p>
<p>The claims raised questions about Corbyn’s leadership credentials. “Mr Corbyn says he didn’t know, but it shows breathtaking naivety from someone who wants to head the British government”, intelligence academic <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5581166/jeremy-corbyn-communist-spy-cold-war-briefings/">Anthony Glees</a> suggested. Conservative MP Michael Fabricant called Corbyn an “embittered fool” while MEP Daniel Hannan <a href="https://twitter.com/DanielJHannan/status/964060616372736000">suggested</a> that the “story would (if true) disqualify Corbyn from holding any elected office”.</p>
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<h2>‘Owns dogs and fish’</h2>
<p>But the fact is that there is very little in this report that is revelatory. Corbyn’s views on the Thatcher government, US policy and Eastern Europe were known to many at the time. Contributions to Hansard and public speeches would have provided all this. After one meeting in October 1987, the StB reported that the conversation had focused on national liberation movements and Western policy in the Gulf. But the information – <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5581166/jeremy-corbyn-communist-spy-cold-war-briefings/">as even The Sun reported</a> – “could not be utilised” as it was “limited to general nature”. </p>
<p>In other words, it was mere tittle-tattle or small talk. The intelligence was limited. As a backbencher on Labour’s fringe with little frontbench prospect, there wasn’t much information for Corbyn to give. “Owns dogs and fish,” the Stb reported back to Prague – hardly the crown jewels. </p>
<p>The Czechs may have wanted to cultivate Corbyn for information on the Labour Party and the Westminster bubble. The same report mentions that the StB officer met Corbyn in the Commons to “strengthen mutual recognition” and develop trust. But it would appear that contact was broken off shortly afterwards. </p>
<h2>Spies, MPs and new recruits</h2>
<p>In the 1960s, Czech defector <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/oct/05/three-labour-mps-history-mi5">Jozef Frolik revealed</a> that three Labour MPs – John Stonehouse, Bernard Floud and Will Owen – had links to the StB. Stonehouse had been privy to sensitive information, but disappointed his handlers on the information he provided as a junior minister. Owen provided defence information and was known as <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=njWH7cW3aLAC&pg=PT802&lpg=PT802&dq=will+owen+stb+greedy+bastard&source=bl&ots=ja6A3dNjk0&sig=QxVRipVtqeb_ss9CUOB93CYpq4g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitheza1ajZAhUIa8AKHZLSABAQ6AEIQDAI#v=onepage&q=will%20owen%20stb%20greedy%20bastard&f=false">“greedy bastard”</a> in StB circles thanks to his demands for money and all-expenses paid holidays.</p>
<p>In 2012, claims also emerged that Conservative MP Raymond Mawby had <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tory-minister-raymond-mawby-spied-for-czechs-7896370.html">provided information to the Czechs</a> for a decade, including sensitive information about parliamentary colleagues. Mawby had been enticed to spy for the StB during off-the-record discussions about politics and trade unions, before being asked to provide “documents from Parliament”.</p>
<p>The StB reported that it paid Mawby for his information, gradually, “deepening the compromising of his position”. Mawby was vulnerable and loved gambling and money but provided little top secret information. Most was on internal Conservative Party politics, documents have <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9361396/Tory-minister-spied-for-Communists-in-the-House-of-Commons.html">since revealed</a>. He eventually stood down in 1983 and died in 1990. </p>
<p>Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies were always on the lookout for new recruits. In 1975, the East German Stasi even tried to recruit Labour’s general secretary <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-ron-hayward-1344325.html">Ron Hayward</a> – though he was likely unaware of the Stasi’s interest in him as a possible agent. “He likes chatting to women and is a heavy drinker”, reported the Stasi. Hayward was approached during a visit to the East Germany city of Dresden and commented on the “pulsating life” and wanted to avoid talk of “ideological differences”. Instead he wanted to focus on “united labour and the SED” (Socialist Unity Party). The approach failed and the Stasi quickly forgot about Hayward. </p>
<p>One of the more prominent targets for Eastern Bloc recruitment was Labour’s Harold Wilson. In 1956, the KGB gave him the codename <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tiNqCAAAQBAJ&pg=PT701&lpg=PT701&dq=OLDING+Harold+Wilson&source=bl&ots=N6xp86RIwJ&sig=YmF5PuKQPNZz-LK9Pax8ZenZPv0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjox_ySqajZAhWHbFAKHUPTCF8Q6AEIYjAJ#v=onepage&q=OLDING%20Harold%20Wilson&f=false">OLDING</a> and opened an “agent development file” in the hope of recruiting him. “The development did not come to fruition”, the KGB was forced to admit. </p>
<p>Trawling Eastern Bloc archives for names can also be problematic. Like their East German and KGB counterparts, the StB would embellish reports to justify meetings or show off growing influence. In the case of the KGB, the number and significance of contacts in the West were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/07/kgb-defector-cold-war-vasil-mitrokhin-notes-public">often exaggerated</a> to impress the leadership and maintain funding. </p>
<p>So was Jeremy Corbyn a spy? Well the material proves very little other than the fact he met someone from the StB. Corbyn maintains he thought the individual was a diplomat – a cover regularly used by intelligence officers during the Cold War. Does this make Corbyn stand out? Absolutely not. How many other politicians, civil servants, businessmen and women and ordinary travellers unknowingly met Eastern Bloc intelligence officials during the Cold War? The number is certainly high. </p>
<p>The now Labour leader may well have been someone the StB wanted to cultivate but Corbyn provided little information that couldn’t have been obtained elsewhere. The story provides more on StB techniques and tradecraft than it does about 00-Corbyn.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91962/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dan Lomas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The fact Jeremy Corbyn spoke to a Communist spy posing as a diplomat in the 1980s does not make him a Communist agent. Many politicians and diplomats were tricked into similar meetings.Dan Lomas, Programme Leader, MA Intelligence and Security Studies, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/908272018-01-30T04:35:17Z2018-01-30T04:35:17ZTasmanian election likely to be close, while Labor continues to lead federally<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203940/original/file-20180130-170413-11gb6dv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">If the Greens hold the sole balance of power after the Tasmanian election, the next parliamentary term could be a messy business for Labor's Rebecca White or the Liberals' Will Hodgman.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/The Conversation</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On Sunday, Premier Will Hodgman called the Tasmanian election for March 3. Tasmania uses the <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/elections/tas/2006/guide/hareclark.htm">Hare Clark system</a> for its lower house, with five electorates, each with five members. The electorates use the same names and boundaries as the five federal Tasmanian electorates of Bass, Braddon, Franklin, Denison and Lyons. A quota for election is one-sixth of the vote, or 16.7%.</p>
<p>At the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_state_election,_2014">March 2014 election</a>, the Liberals won in a landslide, with 15 of the 25 seats, while seven went to Labor and three to the Greens. The Liberals won 51.2% of the vote, to 27.3% for Labor and 13.8% for the Greens. The Liberals won four of the five Braddon seats, three each in Bass, Franklin and Lyons, and two in Denison.</p>
<p>With all polls showing a substantial swing against the Liberals, they are likely to lose their fourth Braddon seat and third Franklin seat. If the Liberals lost another seat, they would lose their majority.</p>
<p>Psephologist <a href="http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/2018-tasmanian-state-election-guide_25.html">Kevin Bonham</a> expects the pivot seat to be the Liberals’ third Lyons seat. If the Liberals lose this seat, they are likely to lose their majority. If they win it, they will probably retain their majority.</p>
<p>Other than the established parties, the populist Jacqui Lambie Network (JLN) has a realistic chance of winning seats – its main chance would be in Braddon.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/tasmania-the-first-test-in-an-election-laden-year-90828">Tasmania the first test in an election-laden year</a>
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<p>Both Hodgman and Labor leader Rebecca White have <a href="http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/tasmania-2018-what-happens-if-no-party.html">ruled out governing</a> with the Greens’ support. A large bloc of Tasmanians detests the Greens, and the three previous governments that involved the Greens have had major problems. If Hodgman and White stick to their promise after the election, and the Greens hold the sole balance of power, the next parliamentary term could be messy.</p>
<p>In most polls, the Liberals are leading Labor. The people who detest the Greens have in the past swung towards the major party most likely to win a majority. If this behaviour is repeated at this election, the Liberals could get home. On the other hand, the unpopularity of the federal Coalition government should help Labor.</p>
<p>In December, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jan/28/battle-over-poker-machines-to-take-centre-stage-in-tasmanias-election?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other">White announced</a> that a Labor government would remove poker machines from pubs and clubs within five years. I think this is good politics, as it differentiates Labor from the Liberals on an issue that neither major party had tackled in the past. I previously wrote that <a href="https://theconversation.com/will-elections-in-2018-see-2017s-left-wing-revival-continue-89922">left-wing parties</a> that differentiated themselves from conservative parties performed better in 2017 elections.</p>
<p>The Tasmanian upper house will not be up for election on March 3. The 15 upper house members have rotating six-year terms; every May, two or three electorates are up for election. Labor and left-wing independents currently have an upper house majority following a <a href="https://theconversation.com/dems-easily-win-virginia-and-new-jersey-governors-left-gains-control-of-tas-upper-house-86770">November byelection</a> win by Labor.</p>
<p>The last three Tasmanian elections have been held on the same day as the South Australian election (March 17 this year). So, the election date is good news for people interested in elections, as it avoids a clash.</p>
<h2>Xenophon’s party leading in Galaxy polls of three South Australian seats</h2>
<p>There is no sign of any drop in support for Nick Xenophon’s SA-BEST. According to <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-29/nick-xenophon-sa-best-leading-in-key-seats-poll-shows/9370674">Galaxy polls</a> conducted January 11-14 for the corporate sector, SA-BEST had 37% in Liberal-held Hartley, which Xenophon will contest, followed by the Liberals with 32% and Labor with 21%; Xenophon led 57-43 after preferences. </p>
<p>In Labor-held Mawson, SA-BEST had 38%, the Liberals 25% and Labor 22%. In Labor-held Hurtle Vale, SA-BEST had 33%, Labor 29% and the Liberals 23%.</p>
<p>Galaxy also polled the federal South Australian seat of Mayo, where SA-BEST member Rebekha Sharkie could be disqualified over <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/citizenship-crisis-bites-nxt-mp-rebekha-sharkie-20171109-gzi5t9.html">the dual citizenship issue</a>. Sharkie would easily retain by a 59-41 margin against the Liberals, from primary votes of 37% Sharkie, 33% Liberal and 18% Labor.</p>
<h2>ReachTEL 52-48 to federal Labor</h2>
<p>A <a href="https://www.pollbludger.net/2018/01/28/reachtel-52-48-labor-4/">ReachTEL poll</a> for Sky News, conducted January 25 from a sample of presumably about 2,300, gave Labor a 52-48 lead by respondent-allocated preferences, a one-point gain for the Coalition since a late November ReachTEL.</p>
<p>Primary votes were 36% Labor (steady), 34% Coalition (up one), 10% Greens (steady) and 8% One Nation (down one). The remaining 12% very likely included some undecided voters who were prompted to show which way they lean. As usual, media sources have not given full primary votes. <a href="https://twitter.com/kevinbonham/status/957440956080439296">Bonham</a> says this poll would be about 54-46 to Labor by 2016 preference flows.</p>
<p>Malcolm Turnbull’s ratings improved; 30% gave him a good rating (up six), 37% an average (up two) and 32% a poor rating (down eight). Bill Shorten’s ratings were 31% good (up one), 32% average (down four) and 36% poor (up three). Turnbull led Shorten by 54-46 as better prime minister, up from 52-48 in November. ReachTEL’s forced-choice “better prime minister” question usually gives opposition leaders better ratings than other polls.</p>
<p>I think Turnbull’s ratings have improved in parliament’s absence because the public is less exposed to the hard-right Coalition backbenchers.</p>
<p>By 44-32, voters opposed cutting the company tax rate for businesses with a turnover of more than A$50 million. By 39-20, voters thought trade deals were good for employment. However by 49-20, voters thought Labor should oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership if it did not protect jobs.</p>
<h2>Essential 54-46 to Labor</h2>
<p>In <a href="http://www.essentialvision.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Essential-Report_300118.pdf">this week’s Essential</a>, conducted January 26-28 from a sample of 1,028, Labor led by 54-46, a one-point gain for Labor since last fortnight.</p>
<p>Primary votes were 36% Labor (down two), 35% Coalition (down two), 10% Greens (up one) and 8% One Nation (up two). <a href="https://theconversation.com/strong-us-economy-boosts-trumps-ratings-as-democrats-shut-down-government-for-three-days-90437">As noted last Friday</a>, Essential will appear fortnightly instead of weekly this year.</p>
<p>Essential asked whether the Liberals or Labor would be better at handling various issues. Labor’s position improved on economic management (from Liberals by 15 in June 2017 to Liberals by ten), interest rates (Liberals by ten to Liberals by four) and political leadership (Liberals by eight to Labor by two). The Liberals improved on water supply (Labor by five to Liberals by one).</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/will-elections-in-2018-see-2017s-left-wing-revival-continue-89922">Will elections in 2018 see 2017's left-wing revival continue?</a>
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<p>48% (up four since November) thought Australia’s political and economic system is fundamentally sound, but needs refining, while 32% (steady) thought it should be fundamentally changed, and 8% (down two) thought the system was already working well.</p>
<p>There were large, favourable changes in perceptions of how the economy and unemployment have performed over the last year, compared to February 2016. There was relatively little movement on other economic issues.</p>
<p>51% (down two since August) thought their income had fallen behind the cost of living, 28% stayed even (up three) and 14% gone up more (down one). Private health insurance continued to be very negatively perceived, with the questions last asked in September.</p>
<p>Essential asked whether sports were exciting or boring to watch. Tennis was easily the best with a net +13 rating, followed by swimming at a net +3 and AFL football at a net +2. Twenty20 cricket had a net -7 rating, rugby league and soccer both had a net -15, Test cricket a net -24, rugby union a net -32, and golf was at the bottom on a net -54.</p>
<h2>Far-right Czech Republic president re-elected</h2>
<p>In the a presidential election runoff held January 26-27 in the Czech Republic, the far-right incumbent, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo%C5%A1_Zeman#Views">Miloš Zeman</a>, defeated his opponent, Jiří Drahoš, by a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_presidential_election,_2018">51.4-48.6 margin</a>. </p>
<p>After a <a href="https://theconversation.com/will-elections-in-2018-see-2017s-left-wing-revival-continue-89922">generally good year for the left</a> in 2017 elections, this was a bad start to 2018.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90827/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The polls are leaning towards the Liberals holding power in Tasmania, but the unpopularity of the federal Coalition government could help Labor get over the line.Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/906532018-01-29T14:06:24Z2018-01-29T14:06:24ZMiloš Zeman’s victory in Czech presidential election is another setback for Western liberalism<p>Voters in the Czech Republic re-elected their current president, <a href="https://www.hrad.cz/en/president-of-the-cr/current-president-of-the-cr/curriculum-vitae">Miloš Zeman</a>, for another five-year term on January 27. He beat <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ji%C5%99%C3%AD_Draho%C5%A1">Jiří Drahoš</a>, a chemistry professor, who has never held political office but served as head of the country’s <a href="http://www.avcr.cz/en/">Academy of Sciences</a> during much of the past decade.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-42832720">Reports</a> quickly labelled Zeman a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/27/pro-russia-czech-president-milos-zemen-wins-second-term/">pro-Russian candidate</a> who based his campaign on a strong <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/czech-republic-election-president-milos-zeman-jiri-drahos-result-latest-vote-a8181216.html">anti-immigration platform</a>. Both statements are true. Yet it would be a mistake to file the result as another confirmation of a right-wing nationalist surge in central Europe.</p>
<p>The contest, its style, and the final outcome are symptomatic of the profound divisions and challenges besetting Western liberal democracies. The election was a Czech variation on the UK’s EU referendum result, America’s election of Donald Trump, or the popularity of Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders. Even the <a href="https://volby.cz/pls/prez2018/pe?xjazyk=EN">winning margin</a> of 2.75%, signifying the size of the gap between two polarised camps in the Czech society, was similar to the Brexit result.</p>
<p>The two groups behind each candidate formed along the now familiar lines – city vs countryside; modern economy vs post-industrial wastelands; higher vs basic education; young vs old. It was all there, accompanied, of course, by <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/fake-news-kicks-into-high-gear-czech-presidential-vote/28987922.html">Russian trolling</a>. More than anything, the election showed how much Czech politics is in a lockstep with wider Western developments.</p>
<p>Arrogant, vindictive, dismissive towards journalists and intellectuals, Zeman displays many traits exhibited by other politicians of the same ilk. A vulgar, <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-milos-zeman-the-czech-republics-answer-to-donald-trump-52036">Trump-like style</a> has been his trademark since the 1990s. A strong supporter of the war on terror, he shifted easily towards opposing migration and speaks about Islam in a way similar to France’s Marine Le Pen. His biting witticisms resemble those of former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage.</p>
<h2>No copycat populist</h2>
<p>But Zeman is not your run of the mill national populist. A highly educated, self-proclaimed <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phxVhJubLYw">European federalist</a>, he has long maintained that the EU should have unified foreign and security policies. He keeps calling for further integration in other areas as well. Among the first things he did upon his election in 2013 was to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-czech/czech-president-raises-eu-flag-to-signal-change-from-klaus-era-idUSBRE9320DK20130403">erect</a> the EU flag at Prague Castle with the then-president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso. Zeman advocates for the Czech Republic to be at the centre of EU integration and says its reluctance to accept the euro is <a href="http://praguemonitor.com/2017/06/23/zeman-says-czechs-are-irrationally-afraid-euro-adoption">irrational</a>.</p>
<p>Zeman will let you know where he stands. He likes nothing better than to do so in an abrasive and insulting manner. Toning it down in the final days of the campaign, he was back to his old ways in his victory speech, belittling opponents and making fun of journalists. Winding up “the liberal elites” remains his favourite hobby – and his voters love it.</p>
<p>Critics point out that Zeman is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/11/04/the-expletive-filled-presidential-interview-that-has-all-of-the-czech-republic-embarrassed/?utm_term=.696f91cca5ba">embarrassing</a>, shows no decency, makes them feel ashamed, and his vanity is just a tool of Russian and Chinese interests. There is much truth in these criticisms. His opponent, Drahoš, made them the centrepiece of his campaign, presenting himself as a steady, well-mannered, and dignified “Mr. Professor” (Central Europeans like their titles). He was unobjectionable, awaking little passion one way or the other. The promise of a less conflictual and more respectful leadership style got him close to being elected. But it wasn’t enough.</p>
<p>Zeman, aged 73, has little chance of forming a politically transformative movement. He has already announced this was his last election. The Party of Civic Rights, which bore his name until four years ago, has never done well at the polls and once again failed miserably in the September 2017 parliamentary election, netting just <a href="https://volby.cz/en/ps2017en.htm">0.36% of the vote</a>. But Zeman has allies and admirers in other parties. Notably, he <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/27/czech-republic-far-right-president-reelected">celebrated his victory</a> with the leaders of the Social Democrats and the anti-immigration Freedom and Direct Democracy Party. </p>
<p>Where he can do real damage is in his disregard for institutions. Demanding utmost respect for his own office, Zeman shows little regard for the institutions that make up a thriving liberal democracy. His remark that he will promote more direct democracy, because citizens are smarter than journalists and most politicians sounded ominously.</p>
<h2>Russia and China look on</h2>
<p>Internationally, Zeman’s Russian connections are very real. This was a good result for Moscow and Vladimir Putin hastened to send <a href="http://tass.com/world/987229">congratulations</a>. Symbolically, as Zeman rejoiced on a podium with his family and closest collaborators, at the <a href="https://www.info.cz/galerie/volby/prezidentske-volby-2018/32228/je-to-moje-posledni-politicke-vitezstvi-rekl-zeman-tvrdi-ze-uz-nezazije-politickou-porazku?foto=15">back of the group</a> stood the towering figure of Martin Nejedly. Zeman’s adviser, Nejedly is widely known to have strong links to the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/world/europe/czech-republic-russia-milos-zeman.html">Kremlin</a>.</p>
<p>Beijing must have also been <a href="http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-01/28/c_136930827.htm">pleased</a> at the result. During his first term, Zeman travelled to China a number of times. He has shown a great deal of deference to Chinese interests and speaks with <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-czech-china/chinese-czech-presidents-forge-strategic-partnership-on-prague-visit-idUSKCN0WV1F0">admiration</a> about the Chinese model.</p>
<p>For Zeman these links with Russia and China may be another way to offend “the liberal elites”. But they are sure to grow in importance and will further entrench those interest groups who promote them. Preferring profit over anything else, these groups are contemptuous of any subtleties of liberalism that stand in the way of getting the job done.</p>
<p>If Zeman’s success replicates what has been going on elsewhere in the West, it raises the same challenges to the liberal political order. The coming years will show how resilient the democratic institutions in the Czech Republic are. Those Czechs who believe in liberal democracy need to keep calm in face of inevitable provocations, exhibit steely resolve in defending it, and engage in the daily grind of the democratic process.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90653/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jan Ruzicka received funding from the British Academy, Visegrad Fund. Both in the past for research project partly related to the topic. </span></em></p>Miloš Zeman, who has been re-elected for a second five year term at the Czech president, is not a run of the mill national populist.Jan Ruzicka, Lecturer in International Politics and Security Studies, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/884372018-01-24T10:14:39Z2018-01-24T10:14:39ZAnti-Roma stigma of Czech president Miloš Zeman threatens progress over Romani rights<p>Czech president Miloš Zeman faces a tough <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/13/milos-zeman-leads-first-round-of-czech-republic-presidential-elections">run-off</a> against rival Jiří Drahoš in the second round of the presidential election on January 26-27. Voters will deliver their verdict on Zeman’s open hostility to refugees, Muslims, and the European Union, and his support for Russia. </p>
<p>While the vote can be seen as a choice between the country leaning east or west in the future, Zeman’s controversial remarks about Roma demonstrate that many of the questions dividing Czechs are also rooted in the nation’s past.</p>
<p>In late 2017, Zeman provocatively <a href="http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/czech-president-says-90-of-inadaptable-citizens-are-romani">claimed</a> in a television interview that 90% of his country’s “unadaptable” citizens are probably Roma. He was responding to a UN human rights <a href="https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G17/235/37/PDF/G1723537.pdf?OpenElement">report</a> that called for better integration of Roma in the Czech Republic. Zeman <a href="http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/czech-president-shakes-his-fist-during-christmas-speech-references-inadaptables-rejects-early-elections">repeated</a> his criticism of “unadaptable” citizens in his Christmas speech. </p>
<p>Members of the Czech government council for Roma community affairs reacted angrily to Zeman’s allegations. Meanwhile, Roma <a href="http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/marie-sivakova-reaction-of-an-ordinary-roma-czech-woman-to-president-s-allegation-that-90-of-inadaptables-are-romani">citizens</a> eloquently pointed out that the Czech Republic is their homeland, too.</p>
<p>Racist stigmatisation of Roma as socially “unadaptable” has a long history across Europe. As a result, many people prefer not to declare their Romani identity. Just over 13,000 Czech citizens claimed Romani nationality in the <a href="https://www.czso.cz/csu/sldb/preliminary_results_of_the_2011_population_and_housing_census">2011 census</a>. Yet the Council of Europe <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/justice-and-fundamental-rights/discrimination/roma-and-eu/roma-integration-eu-country/roma-integration-czech-republic_en">estimates</a> that some 250,000 Roma are living in the Czech Republic, a little less than 2% of the population. </p>
<p>Widespread ignorance about the history of Europe’s Roma fuels damaging stereotypes and persistent discrimination. But far from being perennial outsiders or aliens, Roma have been intimately integrated into European societies for centuries. As I argue in my <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/rights-of-the-roma/9097F0C39DABC77433A7FDC748474EC0#fndtn-information">recent book</a>, Roma were not simply victims of human rights violations in postwar Europe, but citizens claiming equal rights for themselves. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005219">genocide</a> of European Roma during World War II casts a long shadow over <a href="https://romalegacies1945.wordpress.com/">postwar Romani history</a>. The “<a href="http://auschwitz.org/en/history/categories-of-prisoners/sinti-and-roma-gypsies-in-auschwitz/">Gypsy camp</a>” at Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an important symbol for commemoration of the Roma Holocaust. But persecution and discrimination took many forms. </p>
<p>Years before the Nazis came to power, many states across Europe, including Czechoslovakia as well as France and Germany, introduced laws requiring “gypsies” to carry special passports, or regulating their freedom of movement. During the war, Roma across Europe faced incarceration, deportation, and forcible sterilisation. </p>
<h2>Hope in postwar eastern Europe</h2>
<p>After the war, the largest Romani communities in Europe lived in eastern, not western, Europe. The “people’s democracies” in eastern Europe promised a new era of working-class emancipation in which discrimination on the basis of race and sex would be a thing of the past. In Czechoslovakia, one of the most industrialised countries within the eastern bloc after the war, Romani activists were outspoken advocates for their own rights under socialism. </p>
<p>During the late 1940s and early 1950s, many Romani activists in Czechoslovakia saw socialism as a path towards equality for Roma. To them, equality meant the right to work, to education, housing, healthcare, and to freedom from discrimination on the basis of race, class or sex. They knew that the Soviet Union had offered <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/brigid-o-keeffe/roma-homeland-that-never-was">cultural rights</a> to Roma during the 1920s and early 1930s. </p>
<p>During the Prague Spring of 1968, as Czechoslovaks sought to create a democratic socialism “with a human face”, Czech and Slovak Roma battled to establish their own associations and to be recognised as full citizens of their socialist homeland. They wanted Roma to have a greater say in political decisions that concerned them. They raised awareness of Romani language and culture. And they fought to win compensation for Romani victims of Nazi racial persecution. </p>
<p>But the socialist regimes in postwar Europe saw the path to equality for Roma lying in assimilation as worker-citizens. Communist officials claimed Roma were a “social group”, not a national or ethnic minority with the right to state support for their language or culture. Post-Stalinist states revived campaigns against Gypsy “nomadism” and debates about coercive sterilisation of Romani women. To justify this, experts argued that Roma were “unadaptable” citizens. </p>
<h2>Struggle for citizenship</h2>
<p>By the 1970s, however, Roma from socialist Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were at the head of a new international Romani movement that called for recognition of the Romani nation. Today, Romani movements across Europe are making their history accessible to a wider audience through initiatives such as the digital <a href="https://blog.romarchive.eu/">Roma Archive</a>. </p>
<p>The Czech <a href="http://www.rommuz.cz/en/home-2/">Museum of Romani Culture</a> in Brno has pioneered research on Romani history since the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. The museum’s director, Jana Horváthová, whose family were among the leaders of the Romani movement during the Prague Spring, seems optimistic. </p>
<p>For decades, a pig farm stood on the site of the former camp for Gypsies in Lety, from where Roma were deported to Auschwitz during the Nazi occupation. Years of lobbying by Romani activists persuaded the Czech government to <a href="http://www.errc.org/blog/genocide-and-the-pig-farm-end-in-sight-to-the-lety-controversy/183">purchase</a> the farm. Horváthová believes that most Czechs now <a href="http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/jana-horvathova-today-czech-society-perceives-removing-the-pig-farm-from-the-roma-genocide-site-as-necessary">agree</a> on the need to replace the pig farm with a memorial. </p>
<p>Whoever wins the presidential election, Czech and Slovak Roma will continue to face long-running struggles: to win compensation for Romani women <a href="http://www.errc.org/cms/upload/file/coercive-and-cruel-28-november-2016.pdf">sterilised</a> without their consent, to <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur72/5640/2017/en/">desegregate</a> the education of Romani school children, or to combat social exclusion. All these questions have deep historical roots, which are only obscured by reverting to negative and unfounded stereotypes about apparently “unadaptable” Roma.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88437/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Celia Donert receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council as Principal Investigator of an international research network exploring the Legacies of the Romani Genocide in Europe since 1945.</span></em></p>Racist stigmatisation of Roma as socially ‘unadaptable’ has a long history across Europe.Celia Donert, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century History, University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/861562017-10-23T12:21:37Z2017-10-23T12:21:37ZCzech far right scores big in elections, but struggles to form a government<p>As expected, the general election which took place in the Czech Republic on 20-21 October, was won by authoritarian, populist oligarch Andrej Babiš. He is well known for his <a href="https://blisty.cz/art/88084-czech-television-has-suppressed-a-hard-hitting-tv-documentary-about-andrej-babis.html">brutal business practices</a>, his desire to curtail the role of parliament, and his urge to interfere with the media. Although he is currently being <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/czech-prime-minister-candidate-andrej-babis-charged-with-fraud/a-40878682">prosecuted for financial irregularities</a>, he and his ANO party nonetheless won 29.64% of the popular vote. </p>
<p>The usually right-of-centre Civic Democratic Party (ODS), some of whose top politicians recently moved sharply to the extreme right, came second with 11.32%. In third place was the anti-establishment Pirate Party, with 10.79%, while the Czech-Japanese-Korean activist Tomio Okamura’s sharply xenophobic, anti-refugee and anti-Muslim Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) party was fourth, with 10.64% of the vote.</p>
<p>The left, meanwhile, met with electoral disaster. The Czech Social Democratic Party, which has to date been the senior partner in the government coalition and which <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/11/01/despite-winning-the-czech-parliamentary-elections-the-czech-social-democrats-have-been-firmly-upstaged-by-andrej-babis/">in 2013</a> won 20.45% of the vote, saw its share crash to a mere 7.27% – putting it behind even the unreconstructed Communist Party, which won 7.76%.</p>
<p>But what matters in the Czech elections is not the number of votes, but the number of seats gained. Babiš’s ANO won only 78 seats in parliament’s 200-seat lower chamber, and at this stage, it’s far from clear with whom it will form a governing coalition.</p>
<p>Babiš cannot go in with the fascist SPD or the communists alone: ANO-plus-SPD equals 100 seats, while ANO-plus-Communist Party comes to 93. Even though Babiš wants to make “simplifying” changes to the Czech constitution, this appears impossible after the election, because none of the potential coalitions of partners that might support this would reach the three-fifths majority (120 seats) required for constitutional changes. </p>
<p>There’s been speculation that ANO could form a coalition with the right-of-centre ODS, but that would still only get it to a mere 103 seats. Coalitions of several parties are also being discussed; the strongest possible combinations of <a href="http://volby.idnes.cz/poslanecka-snemovna-2017.aspx?t=koalice">three or four parties</a> would have 125 of the 200 seats. The ultimate question, then, is whether the hard-right SPD will be included. </p>
<h2>Pirates and cynics</h2>
<p>Babiš has tried to reassure the world that he is <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-czech-election-babis/czech-vote-winner-babis-wants-active-eu-role-not-favoring-government-with-extremists-idUSKBN1CQ0U8">strongly pro-European</a>, adding that he is not in favour of forming a government coalition with SPD extremists. But at the same time, he has expressed intentions to form a pan-European “anti-refugee” alliance in order to stop all immigration into Europe. </p>
<p>In the past, he has issued various <a href="https://blisty.cz/art/88207-future-czech-pm-we-must-sink-those-refugee-boats-operated-by-the-smugglers.html">brutal anti-refugee statements</a>, and in his new “EU anti-refugee project”, Babiš is hoping to gain the support of the new Austrian Chancellor, migration hawk <a href="https://theconversation.com/sebastian-kurz-just-who-is-austrias-fresh-faced-new-leader-85848">Sebastian Kurz</a>.</p>
<p>The problem with Babiš, though, is he can’t be taken at his word. In business and in politics alike, he has a long record of <a href="https://blisty.cz/art/88084-czech-television-has-suppressed-a-hard-hitting-tv-documentary-about-andrej-babis.html">almost always doing the exact opposite</a> of what he promises. And while Western commentators might justifiably be wary of a potentially anti-European, xenophobic, authoritarian and anti-refugee leader who might further destabilise Europe, the fact is, in spite of Babiš’s win in the Czech election, his position seems rather unstable. </p>
<p>With the exception of the ODS, most of the other parties might be unwilling or unable to form a lasting coalition. The anti-establishment Pirate Party, which has entered parliament for the first time by winning 22 seats, has no consistent ideology or political programme, and its elected figures are politically inexperienced; its incoherence means it could disintegrate within weeks. </p>
<p>The same applies to the anti-Muslim, anti-immigration and fiercely xenophobic SPD. Only couple of years ago, its leader Okamura was still an ardent supporter of multiculturalism and of welcoming foreigners. Cynics say that someone may have advised Okamura to stand on an anti-Muslim, anti-refugee platform simply to gain access to large amounts of money; after all, many Czech politicians enter parliament principally to gain access to lucrative contracts.</p>
<p>Babiš is also dogged by the European Union’s <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/anti-fraud//home_en">OLAF</a> anti-fraud office, which is investigating allegations of fraud and misuse of EU subsidies for his entertainment centre Čapí hnízdo (A Stork’s Nest). The inquiry is <a href="https://echo24.cz/a/pkEDd/kauza-capi-hnizdo-jde-do-finale-olaf-uz-mel-dokoncit-vysetrovani">reportedly nearing completion</a>. Should he be prosecuted or even jailed, it could be disastrous for his party, an extremely autocratic organisation that would all likelihood collapse without him.</p>
<p>So why exactly did the Czech general public vote for an authoritarian oligarch who has promised to “simplify” parliament and who is under criminal investigation for fraud? I spent the election weekend talking to voters in the Czech Republic, and their views were almost unanimous. As one told me: “All the establishment politicians over the past 28 years of post-communism have been corrupt. This is why we have now voted for an anti-establishment figure. Are we bothered that Babiš is being prosecuted for financial irregularities? No, we admire him for being able to outwit evil Brussels.”</p>
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<p><em>This piece has been updated to correct the number of parliamentary votes needed to pass constitutional changes. The correct number is a three-fifths majority, i.e. 120 seats.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86156/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jan Culik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A lurch to the right in central Europe runs into a familiar obstacle: the tricky maths of coalition.Jan Culik, Senior Lecturer in Czech Studies, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/857962017-10-18T11:25:08Z2017-10-18T11:25:08ZControversial oligarch Andrej Babiš could be about to win the Czech election<p>The Czech Republic is holding an election on October 20 and 21 and, so far, the campaign has been characterised by extreme voter frustration and anger.</p>
<p>Up to 50% of Czech voters have not yet decided which way to <a href="https://www.respekt.cz/politika/hlavni-hadankou-voleb-neni-kolik-procent-dostane-okamura-ale-jak-dopadne-pravice">vote</a>. However, the <a href="http://showme.median.cz/volby-2017/">most likely candidate</a> for prime minister is the controversial oligarch Andrej Babiš, who heads the ANO movement, which is currently supported by some 25% of Czech voters.</p>
<p>The Czech Social Democrats, the senior partner in the current coalition government, have been victim of a spectacular fall in fortunes over the past year. They are currently supported by only 12.5% of voters and, according to some opinion polls, their support is even lower. What is also remarkable is the almost total collapse of the once highly popular right-of-centre parties TOP 09 (now supported by 6% of voters) and ODS (9%). </p>
<p>The frustration among the Czech voting public has manifested itself not only in the collapse in support for the traditional mainstream parties. Both the left of centre and the right of centre are suffering. And the ANO is not the only beneficiary. Other openly anti-establishment parties are on the rise, too. The Pirate Party currently enjoys 8.5% of voter support, while the sharply anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-muslim SPD Party is on 9.5%. In the final days before the election, support for these anti-establishment parties has been on the rise. The SPD Party, which has <a href="https://twitter.com/astroehlein/status/918509328189018119">plastered Islamphobic posters</a> all over the country, has been predicted to win as much as 13% of the vote.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190808/original/file-20171018-32355-15y8xxt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190808/original/file-20171018-32355-15y8xxt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190808/original/file-20171018-32355-15y8xxt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=276&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190808/original/file-20171018-32355-15y8xxt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=276&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190808/original/file-20171018-32355-15y8xxt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=276&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190808/original/file-20171018-32355-15y8xxt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190808/original/file-20171018-32355-15y8xxt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190808/original/file-20171018-32355-15y8xxt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A projection of the election result from October 16.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Median polling</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Almost all the Czech political parties have jumped onto the anti-islamic and anti-refugee bandwagon and many are strongly eurosceptic – <a href="https://blisty.cz/art/86538-czech-deputy-pm-babis-wants-to-take-czechia-out-of-the-eu-integration-process.html">as is Babiš</a>. Indeed, <a href="https://blisty.cz/art/88377-ceska-republika-a-eu-co-chteji-kandidujici-politicke-strany.html">11 out of the 20 parties</a> standing in this election want the Czech Republic to leave the European Union. This hostility towards the EU is often connected with the refusal of Czech voters to accept EU <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/06/eu-court-rejects-refugee-quota-challenge-hungary-slovakia/">refugee quotas</a>.</p>
<p>While it’s almost certain that Babiš’s ANO will become the strongest party after the elections, due to the fragmentation of the political scene and the spectacular drop in support for the mainstream parties, it’s unclear whether he will be able to form a government coalition. Many people are so disillusioned that they genuinely do not know who to vote for. The options could be for Babiš to form a minority government or for fresh elections to be held.</p>
<h2>Who is Andrej Babiš?</h2>
<p>Babiš grew up as the son of a highly favoured communist Czechoslovak diplomat. He spent his childhood and early adulthood in France and Switzerland and speaks French as a native. On graduating from university as an economist, like his father, he embarked on a diplomatic career. Before 1989, he worked as a diplomat for communist Czechoslovakia in Morocco for six years.</p>
<p>Thanks to his political connections, Babiš was able to set up Agrofert, an agro-chemical holding that has grown into an empire of agriculture, food producing and chemical enterprises. Babiš is now worth some <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/andrej-babis/">$4.1 billion</a> and is the second richest person living in the Czech Republic. In 2013, Babiš also acquired the two most influential Czech daily newspapers, Mladá fronta Dnes and Lidové noviny.</p>
<p>Babiš entered politics in 2011 as a result of his dissatisfaction with the then highly unpopular right-of-centre government of Petr Nečas. After Nečas’s government fell in 2013, Babiš and his ANO movement scored a spectacular early success in the general election that year to become the second largest party in parliament.</p>
<p>Babiš and his ANO set up a coalition government with the Social Democrats and the catholic People’s Party. Babiš became finance minister, despite continuing to own a huge business empire. He remained in the coalition government with the full support of his partners until the spring of 2017.</p>
<p>That’s when electoral support for the Social Democrats started waning. Just as the ANO started to look like it could become the largest party in the next election, the Social Democratic prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka <a href="https://blisty.cz/art/86934-czech-republic-now-seems-firmly-en-route-to-authoritarian-rule.html">removed Babiš from office</a>.</p>
<p>Sobotka cited accusations of financial misconduct when he fired Babiš, and these continue to raise questions. He is being investigated by the <a href="http://www.praguemonitor.com/2016/03/03/ec-anti-fraud-unit-checks-eu-grant-babi%C5%A1s-farm">European Union</a> for misusing subsidies for one of his properties and has been <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/czech-prime-minister-candidate-andrej-babis-charged-with-fraud/a-40878682">charged with fraud</a> by the Czech authorities. In September 2017, the Czech parliament voted to deprive Babiš of his parliamentary immunity, so that he could be prosecuted.</p>
<p>So why is Babiš so popular despite the scandals and the fact that he is actually being prosecuted for financial irregularities? It’s a bit of a mystery, although a Trump-like factor of total disillusionment with the mainstream, establishment parties seems to be playing a major role.</p>
<p>Commentators have been pointing to the fact that in the post-communist period, the Czech Republic has failed to create genuine political parties. Those political organisations that have been set up are more like businesses, selling their political influence and power to entrepreneurs. The majority of Czech voters therefore regard politicians from all the mainstream parties as basically corrupt. Many think it hypocritical that Babiš is the only one actually being prosecuted for his dealings.</p>
<p>Many people also seem to admire Babiš as a strongman who, when he gets to power, will finally “put an end to this post-communist chaos”, and maybe even “free” the Czech Republic from the “diktat” of Brussels.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85796/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jan Culik supervises a PhD student funded by the Czech government.</span></em></p>He’s been charged with fraud and is under investigation by the EU, so how did this former finance minister become the most likely candidate for prime minister?Jan Culik, Senior Lecturer in Czech Studies, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/705462017-01-05T11:11:29Z2017-01-05T11:11:29ZSlovak president vetoes controversial law heaping hostility on Muslims in Central Europe<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/151734/original/image-20170104-18641-117t5j6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A church in Slovakia, where it has become harder to become a state-registered religion.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/luka78/14348860067/in/photolist-nRXEc6-ApoABr-ba2BVF-7F2Q2E-cFwCU7-aidEkX-zspRnp-cJ9fMs-c8utNC-biiaWx-ugqX-dbMuo4-eLDshm-8ZASc-sGHr8g-n2nb8U-jiqz4V-a58owG-5zxvJM-bojmKp-9T4VFo-aqFCtd-bEdybg-4QKE6S-aqCUcZ-bzwYaT-5thJUh-9T4ZF3-22pfXJ-gordKT-5EAStA-8x5KXu-asanQ7-bnpRry-4b4Ukv-dxLHfZ-4xEZAv-bCEMoH-22pcPQ-jma7pg-nzdqQS-jmaUbp-goq8j3-4QRYaY-dNQRau-9ZAWoV-nRUCkX-pg68FU-nd5xnz-cJFLxL">aktarian/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a controversial move in late December, Slovak president Andrej Kiska <a href="https://www.prezident.sk/article/prezident-vetoval-novelu-zakona-o-registracii-cirkvi/">vetoed</a> a law that would make it harder for any religious organisation in Slovakia to become a state-registered religion. The veto was much to the dislike of the right-wing and anti-Islam Slovenská Národná Strana (SNS) which had <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-slovakia-religion-islam-idUSKBN13P20C">managed to pass the law</a> in the Slovak parliament in November 2016.</p>
<p>The law would have prohibited any religion from becoming state-registered unless it could prove to have at least 50,000 followers who are 18 and over and have permanent residency in Slovakia – a significant mark up from the current 20,000. The president <a href="http://spectator.sme.sk/c/20415784/president-vetoes-changes-to-the-registration-of-churches.html">said the law</a> “inappropriately interferes with the fundamental rights and freedoms guaranteed by the constitution.”</p>
<p>The SNS is one of the four coalition parties in government and the new law had been part of its manifesto for a couple of years. It was proposed in a <a href="http://www.ta3.com/clanok/1054193/tb-a-danka-hrozba-islamizmu-v-europe.html">press release</a> following the Paris terrorist attacks in January 2015 by SNS chairman Andrej Danko, who also declared that Slovakia should ban burqas and mosques. </p>
<p>There are currently around 2,000 Muslim people living in Slovakia out of a population of 5.4m and many will not have a permanent residency status – which is not easy to get in Slovakia. So while Muslims would not be directly affected by the new law, it would have made it harder for Islam to register as a religion in the future. The law could be seen as a preemptive measure ahead of more Muslim refugees and migrants arriving in Europe in the future, and pressure for European countries <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-ability-to-enforce-mandatory-migrant-quotas-is-slipping-out-of-the-eus-grasp-66623">to take some of them in</a> through a quota system. </p>
<h2>What the law means</h2>
<p>State-registered religions enjoy substantial privileges in Slovakia including the right to build places of worship, set up and teach their religion in schools and conduct marriage and funeral ceremonies. Crucially, they have access to state funding to be able to carry all this out and also to organise and support outreach activities and public engagement.</p>
<p>Before the law was proposed, <a href="http://www.mksr.sk/posobnost-ministerstva/cirkvi-a-nabozenske-spolocnosti-/registrovane-cirkvi-a-nabozenske-spolocnosti-f9.html">there were 18 state-registered religions</a> mostly of Christian origin with the exception of one Jewish and one Bahai organisation. The proposed legislation would not affect organisations already registered even if some of them have only few thousand members.</p>
<p>The SNS insisted that the law did not target any specific religion, arguing instead that it is there to prevent bogus organisations such as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster from gaining access to state funding. This church is <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/church-of-the-flying-spaghetti-monster-conducts-first-legal-wedding-new-zealand-a6987971.html">a social movement</a> recognised in the Netherlands and New Zealand and is in process of registration in Poland. </p>
<p>The legislation did not specifically mention Islam and would have had no immediate effect on Muslims in Slovakia. But reading between the lines there was little doubt that its target was Islam. </p>
<p>The law was covered widely in foreign media in the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/slovakia-bars-islam-state-religion-tightening-church-laws-robert-fico-a7449646.html">UK</a>, <a href="http://eurodenik.cz/zpravy/slovensko-prijalo-zakon-ktery-fakticky-zamezuje-aby-se-v-budoucnu-islam-stal-oficialnim-nabozenstvim">Czech Republic</a> and <a href="http://reporters.pl/3905/slowacja-zdelegalizowala-islam-zadnych-meczetow-ani-publicznych-modlow/">Poland</a> as a law banning Islam, accompanied by pictures of women in niqabs or burqas. But these reports were misleading: Slovakia was not trying to ban Islam. The proposed law would have prohibited any mosques with minarets from being built. This would mean that existing places of worship would remain prayer rooms, rather than mosques with a minarets.</p>
<p>There was some opposition to the legislation within Slovakia. Ondrej Dostál, chairman of the Civic Conservative Party, was very critical, but <a href="http://www.konzervativnyvyber.sk/v2/poslanec-dostal-z-klubu-sas-v-parlamente-odhalil-viac-ako-chcel/13561/">was slammed</a> by many in Slovakia especially the right-wing parties, for being ignorant and defending Islam. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/151730/original/image-20170104-29222-ac64mn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/151730/original/image-20170104-29222-ac64mn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/151730/original/image-20170104-29222-ac64mn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/151730/original/image-20170104-29222-ac64mn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/151730/original/image-20170104-29222-ac64mn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/151730/original/image-20170104-29222-ac64mn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/151730/original/image-20170104-29222-ac64mn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The law passed with a two-thirds majority in Slovakia’s parliament.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/theodevil/7829632428/sizes/l">Miroslav Petrasko via flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Slovakia is a liberal democracy and a member of the EU with legislation protecting religious groups and minorities, yet the right-wing SNS managed to mobilise and pass the law in parliament with a two-thirds majority. At <a href="http://www.ta3.com/clanok/1095326/tb-poslancov-sns-o-prisnejsej-registracii-cirkvi.html">a press conference</a> after the law was passed, the SNS repeatedly claimed that the law followed a party promise to its electorate and did not violate religious freedom. </p>
<p>When asked by a journalist if this was about Islam, Tibor Bernaťák, deputy leader of the SNS, categorically denied it. His colleague and MP Eva Smolíková spoke of the increasing pressure on state funding and the need to direct funds to Slovak education and healthcare. By pushing through the legislation, the SNS has presented itself as a rational party with a Christian system of values that is increasingly being seen as a force to be recognised within the ruling coalition. It is aiming to increase its appeal with Slovaks who question whether the mainstream parties have the best interests of Slovak people at heart. </p>
<h2>A European trend</h2>
<p>The SNS has already made it clear that they <a href="http://hnonline.sk/slovensko/879920-kiska-vetoval-dalsi-dankov-zakon-sns-ho-prosi-aby-to-prehodnotil">will try to pass the law again </a>. In order to do that they will need the same parliamentary majority that they achieved in November. Given the parliamentary timetable, that means the law could be in force from March 2017. </p>
<p>If the law is passed again – and if the president does not veto it – the new law could send a strong message to Muslims living in Slovakia and other parts of Europe, but also any potential refugees and asylum seekers considering making Slovakia their home. The trend could also spread to the rest of Europe where right-wing politicians are pressurising mainstream parties to accept controversial policies affecting minority groups particularly when it comes to Islam. Examples include <a href="https://theconversation.com/frances-burkini-ban-could-not-come-at-a-worse-time-64249">burkini</a>, burqa and niqab bans in public places in France, burqa bans in public places in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14261921">Belgium</a>, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-religion-burqa-swiss-idUSKCN11X1HJ">Switzerland</a> and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/bulgaria-burka-ban-benefits-cut-burkini-niqab-a7340601.html">Bulgaria</a>, where it was driven by the right-wing patriotic front coalition. </p>
<p>In 2011, Hungary’s Fidesz Party passed a law that changed the legal status of churches and religious communities that were not recognised as “traditional”. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the law violated human rights in 2014, but <a href="https://foref-europe.org/2016/09/24/statement-of-foref-europe-at-the-osce-human-dimension-implementation-meeting-2016/">it still remains in place</a>. The Czech Republic is also likely to follow Slovakia and increase its current requirement for state-registered religions to have at least 50,000 followers from the current 10,000.</p>
<p>The SNS’s success in getting the law passed in Slovak’s parliament and their promise to try to pass it again before March 2017 shows how there is an opportunity for other right-wing parties in Europe to use legislation and the democratic system to prevent certain “unwanted groups” from getting access to state funding.</p>
<p><strong>Amendment: This article was amended on January 9 to reflect that the Slovakian president vetoed the proposed law before it was scheduled to come into effect, and that the SNS party would try to push it through parliament again.</strong></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70546/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Miroslava Hukelova receives funding from Arts and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p>State-registered religions will now have to have 50,000 followers with permanent residency, making Islam unlikely to be approved.Miroslava Hukelova, Research Fellow, University of HullLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/680142016-11-03T14:46:27Z2016-11-03T14:46:27ZTown and country: Prague stands alone against Czech Republic’s nationalist president<p>The year 2016 may well be remembered as a global turning point. The perennial conflict between right and left has been replaced with something far more extreme. As social psychologist <a href="http://www.humansandnature.org/the-ethics-of-globalism-nationalism-and-patriotism">Jonathan Haidt</a> puts it: the defining struggle of the times pits liberal globalists against illiberal nationalists.</p>
<p>In the West, there have been occasional attempts to talk to the supporters of illiberal nationalists in order to identify what has led them down a certain path. As the late US psychologist <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07q87sm/broadcasts">Marshall Rosenberg</a> argued, talking to frustrated people and asking them what they need is the only efficient way of resolving intractable conflicts.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Talking nationalism.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Regrettably, exactly the opposite is happening in Central Europe – and the Czech Republic is an interesting case study. Recent <a href="http://europe.newsweek.com/auschwitz-survivor-snub-prompts-scandal-czech-republic-514535?rm=eu">vociferous protests</a> seem to indicate the existence of an intractable conflict in Czech society. It’s a conflict which no one is attempting to address. </p>
<p>There is a major difference culturally and economically between the city of Prague and the rest of the Czech Republic. The former is home to one million of the country’s 10m inhabitants but accounts for about <a href="http://www.statistikaamy.cz/2015/09/prijmova-nerovnost-prahy-a-regionu/">25% of its GDP</a>.</p>
<p>The capital is different politically, too. Locals are becoming increasingly opposed to Miloš Zeman, the populist Czech president, who is a <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-milos-zeman-the-czech-republics-answer-to-donald-trump-52036">Donald Trump-like character</a>. But their anger is not reflected in the rest of the country.</p>
<p>Zeman was voted into post in January 2013 by voters keen to punish the austerity-orientated right-of-centre government of Petr Nečas, which was in power at the time. Although his position is ceremonial, Zeman has spent the past few years boosting his popularity by making highly controversial and alarmist statements. He has developed a strong line in whipping up nationalism and xenophobia. And it works. At the end of September 2016, <a href="http://www.parlamentnilisty.cz/arena/monitor/Pruzkum-Zemanovi-veri-57-procent-obcanu-o-dost-vice-nez-vlade-456152">57%</a> of Czechs said they trusted him.</p>
<p>Just like in the West, economic inequality is the cause of political conflict. It seems tragic that the middle classes of the capital don’t seem to realise this. They have been taking to the streets to demonstrate against Zeman, little realising that the rest of the country is looking on in disdain. </p>
<h2>A squabble too far</h2>
<p>The latest flare up began when the Dalai Lama was invited to Prague to attend Forum 2000, an international conference which was co-founded by the late President Václav Havel in 1997. The aim of the conference was to discuss globalisation and <a href="http://www.forum2000.cz/en/projects/forum-2000-conferences">“difficult issues that are key to the future of civilization”</a>.</p>
<p>Unlike in Havel’s times, the current Czech government refused to receive the Dalai Lama. Its attempts to cultivate economic links with China were deemed to be too important to risk offence by greeting the Tibetan leader.</p>
<p>There was one exception – the Catholic culture minister Daniel Herman, who defied his fellow ministers’ boycott to meet the Dalai Lama. A reaction followed almost immediately. The government, president and parliament issued a sycophantic pro-Chinese public statement, in which they <a href="http://blisty.cz/art/84105.html">dissociated themselves</a> from the meeting. </p>
<p>Then Zeman took further revenge against Herman by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2016/10/21/world/europe/21reuters-czech-president-medal.html?_r=0">withdrawing</a> an award that was meant to be bestowed on his uncle, an 88-year-old holocaust survivor, on the Czech national day in October.</p>
<p>This act prompted a wave of passionate protests from Zeman’s Prague-based critics. A group of activists even took over a TV chat show and, with the consent of the presenter, took turns to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu1VTP5zQNo">condemn the president</a> in the strongest of terms. And on the Czech national day, thousands <a href="http://www.ceskenoviny.cz/zpravy/na-staromestskem-namesti-se-sesly-davy-lidi-brady-prevzal-medaili/1409610">demonstrated</a> in the capital.</p>
<p>Both events have been met with scathing criticism on social media. Zeman’s supporters say he understands their problems and defends the national interest. </p>
<h2>Mutual contempt</h2>
<p>It is beyond doubt that the Czech president divides society, encourages conflict and provokes extraordinarily passionate reactions from both mutually hostile camps. </p>
<p>Many Czechs have become obsessed with this issue to the exclusion of anything else. That might seem a grossly overblown response to petty personal politics, but the Zeman scandal is part of a broader, and very serious, issue.</p>
<p>While the Prague middle classes organise passionate demonstrations against the president, criticising his excesses, it does not occur to them that it would be perhaps much more effective if they actually ventured out into the Czech countryside and asked Zeman’s admirers about why they are so frustrated – and how they can be appeased.</p>
<p>There seems to be no dialogue between the two sides in the Czech Republic, so social divisions only deepen. And as the two sides drift further apart, populist politicians like Zeman only profit.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68014/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jan Culik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>While the citizens of the capital protest against their president, everyone else hails him as their saviour.Jan Culik, Senior Lecturer in Czech Studies, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/637422016-08-11T12:53:02Z2016-08-11T12:53:02ZBrexit: the view from Eastern Europe<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/133821/original/image-20160811-11853-2a4g2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">I can't believe what I'm seeing. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cmbellman/3352664450/in/photolist-67ghku-GohKz1-3umMW-ntxsPc-agQrHV-juLPhm-8JNLNP-4jfney-ohsU7b-Lwx64-cJCmtG-ioyRha-npJbWL-ipm839-amTyeh-jPf8Rx-5CHFY8-FYQLLK-6FcFt-kTNAHT-dsoynA-4TSeij-4gWFCA-8gGNrg-nah722-vgDHS6">Anders Adermark</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Anyone who has been exposed to only the British media before and after the Brexit referendum would be amazed to find out how different the narrative has been outside the UK. The public discourse on Brexit in the UK has been significantly coloured by the anti-EU stance taken by most tabloid newspapers. Their coverage has normalised some quite extreme and irrational views within the UK.</p>
<p>While some European media organisations also peddle fear and hate (particularly about the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/migrant-crisis">refugee crisis</a>) they seem to have been reacting much more rationally to Brexit than their British counterparts.</p>
<p>Eyebrows have been raised about the decision to leave the EU. Why would Britain want to cut itself from Europe and diminish its international status? Having suffered on the fringes of Western democracy under communism, the liberal elites of Eastern and Central Europe were extraordinarily pleased when their countries were able to join the European Union in 2004. They were integrated into what seemed to be a civilised, democratic and stable West. And just as the new EU members were able to join “the West”, it started to fall to bits. First came the financial crisis and now Brexit.</p>
<p>In the UK, many people mocked David Cameron for <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/08/cameron-brexit-will-increase-risk-of-europe-descending-into-war/">warning</a> that Brexit might lead to war on the European continent. But many Europeans, on the basis of their traumatic experiences from the past, take this warning very seriously indeed.</p>
<h2>Against Brexit</h2>
<p>In the Czech Republic, an <a href="http://www.rozhlas.cz/zpravy/evropskaunie/_zprava/pruzkum-pro-cro-odchod-britanie-z-eu-si-nepreji-temer-dve-tretiny-cechu--1625674">opinion poll</a> carried out at the end of June 2016 showed 60% of Czechs were opposed to the UK leaving the EU. Although Czechs are often critical of the EU, particularly its social policies, only people on the extremes of the political spectrum supported Brexit. </p>
<p>Czechs fear that Brexit will lead to unemployment in Central Europe and to a drop in their exports to Western Europe. And another <a href="http://www.tyden.cz/rubriky/byznys/cesko/chteji-cesi-czexit-exkluzivni-pruzkum-pro-tyden_390185.html">opinion poll</a>, carried out in July, indicated that most Czechs believe Brexit will strengthen Germany’s position in the EU, which would be disadvantageous for the Czechs, who, for historical reasons, fear domination by the Germans.</p>
<p>As many as 43% were also afraid that Brexit marks the beginning of the end of the EU. They also fear Brexit will strengthen Russia’s influence in Europe because it will weaken the European Union. Many Czechs openly worry about a possible re-imposition of a Russian regime in Central Europe. They expect Brexit to lead to a pan-European economic crisis.</p>
<p>[Daniel Prokop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2qoMRZQpIw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2qomrzqpiw), a leading Czech sociologist, sees Brexit as a mutiny against globalisation. It is a demand for a return to the past and to local solutions. Very similar policies are advocated by the new parliamentary party of Slovak fascists, lead by Marian Kotleba, says Prokop.</p>
<p>However, a nostalgic view of the past is not quite such an effective narrative in the Czech Republic. For them, there is no nostalgia about life before the EU. Before 1989, they had 40 years of communism, which is very difficult to be enthusiastic about. The inter-war democratic Czechoslovak Republic lasted only 20 years before it was destroyed by Hitler. And before 1918, the Czechs were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which they regarded as an alien state.</p>
<p>Prokop also argues that Brexit frustration is the result of unsolved social problems. He predicts that if the EU does not concentrate on solving these quickly and effectively, destabilisation will follow.</p>
<p>Very similar results were thrown up by opinion polls in Hungary, where 60% of people felt Brexit would be bad for their own country. Asked if Hungary should also leave the EU, <a href="http://hungarytoday.hu/news/hungarians-dislike-brexit-prefer-stay-eu-survey-shows-60879">64% were opposed</a>. </p>
<p>The Hungarian government is, however, seeking to capitalise on Brexit with an official programme aimed at wooing companies with bases in the UK to relocate to its own territory. Hungary is being presented as a <a href="http://budapestbeacon.com/featured-articles/hungary-eyes-brexit-opportunities/35537">“beacon of stability in a Europe of disorder”</a>.</p>
<p>Likewise, shortly after the Brexit vote, Romanian president <a href="http://www.nineoclock.ro/the-effects-of-the-brexit-vote-on-romania-president-iohannis-calls-emergency-meeting-at-the-cotroceni-palace/">Klaus Iohannis</a> promised Romania will remain “an oasis of stability” in the EU and that the impact of Brexit on the Romanian economy will be minimal.</p>
<p>However, Doru Pop of Cluj University, <a href="http://adevarul.ro/news/societate/nu-mi-e-frica-brexit-ci-roxit-despre-dusmanii-occidentului-1_576abe425ab6550cb83222cd/index.html">warned</a> the British referendum has strengthened extreme nationalist and eurosceptic tendencies in the country, with politicians suggesting that multinational companies are exploiting Romania. The recent social democratic Prime Minister Victor Ponta was critical of Western influences in Romania. Pop sees in this a throwback to the anti-Western propaganda of the 1950s. These tendencies have been further encouraged by Brexit.</p>
<h2>The legitimising effect of the EU</h2>
<p>Things are a little different in Poland, where the national government is under fire over Brexit. Some feel that Poles have been leaving to work in the UK because of the lack of opportunities on offer at home. Now the opportunity is to be cut off.</p>
<p>Polish sociologist Wojciech Lukowski said in a recent interview in the journal Polityka that the UK needs immigrants for the menial jobs the English can’t be bothered to do. That’s why it opened its borders to Eastern Europeans in the first place, he suggested. However, he added:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The English were then stunned when they found out how hard-working and how assertive the Poles are. They did not expect them to climb the social ladder in the UK so quickly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>About <a href="http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/tylko-w-onecie/sondaz-polacy-beda-chcieli-wyjezdzac-z-wielkiej-brytanii-po-brexicie/txn4kw">10% of Poles living in the UK</a> are now planning to leave for other EU countries, while others are applying for British passports. All this raises the question of why more is not being done to encourage them to come home. </p>
<p>But while Brexit has been interpreted as an encouragement for extreme right wing parties everywhere in Europe, loyalty to the EU remains strong among most Central and Eastern Europeans. Many feel their countries could not make it on their own. They genuinely fear a possible renewal of hostilities between their nations if they were to leave the bloc. What’s more, membership of a “Western” organisation gives them legitimacy. It makes them part of the West – an important statement in a region keen to assert itself against the Russian sphere of influence. </p>
<p>There are varying levels of understanding for the UK Brexit vote, but most people think that the UK has voted for Brexit out of irrational frustration – and that they will pay a heavy price for the decision.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63742/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jan Culik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The UK’s decision to leave the European Union has baffled many in Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania, where nostalgia for life before the EU is virtually non-existent.Jan Culik, Senior Lecturer in Czech Studies, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/585272016-05-06T10:51:32Z2016-05-06T10:51:32ZShould the UK legalise cannabis?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121066/original/image-20160503-19847-3n4csp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Judges smoke it, even lawyers too.' – Peter Tosh.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&search_tracking_id=76peBUyTCp5navgwHXUzBg&searchterm=marijuana&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=359713784">www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A number of countries have decriminalised cannabis for personal use. None of them have descended into anarchy, so what’s preventing the UK government from following suit?</p>
<p>The Conservative government claims to be in favour of evidence-based policies – in rhetoric, at least – yet successive UK governments have signed up to the United Nations international drug convention, a convention based on prohibition and the “war on drugs”, neither of which have any evidence of working. </p>
<p>But does signing up to UN drug conventions matter when agreements can be sidestepped by individual states? Portugal’s decision to decriminalise all psychoactive substances in 2001 being a case in point. </p>
<p>And Portugal is not alone. It is now 25 years since the Czech Republic effectively decriminalised the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use. And in 1994, Switzerland introduced heroin-assisted treatment, a form of state-sanctioned heroin supply for certain users. But it is with cannabis that the most significant developments have occurred. In late 2013, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-25328656">Uruguay</a> took the decision to legalise the recreational use of cannabis (as opposed to “decriminalise” where possession can lead to a fine, but not a criminal record). It was the first country to do so since the global drug prohibition framework was established by the United Nations in 1961. </p>
<p>Uruguay demonstrates that policy alternatives are possible without any international enforcement. Several <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/map-united-states-legal-marijuana-2014-2016">US states</a> have followed Uruguay, extending liberalisation to recreational as well as medical cannabis users. But the UK remains steadfast in its resolve, maintaining that <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2010-to-2015-government-policy-drug-misuse-and-dependency/2010-to-2015-government-policy-drug-misuse-and-dependency">current policy</a> is working. </p>
<h2>False logic</h2>
<p>The UK is looking increasingly out of step with many other countries when it comes to its approach to drugs in general and cannabis in particular. In the aftermath of changes in the US, polling suggests increasing numbers of UK citizens are also in favour of a <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/legalising-cannabis-47-support-sale-of-drug-through-licensed-shops-poll-reveals-a6976796.html">change in the law</a>. </p>
<p>The Home Office <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/368489/DrugsInternationalComparators.pdf">acknowledges</a> that there is no “obvious relationship between the toughness of a country’s enforcement against drug possession, and levels of drug use in that country”. Convictions relating to cannabis use have reduced by 46% over the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35954754">last five years</a>. This could suggest that cannabis has been quietly and partially decriminalised. Yet the government maintains its outdated and dogmatic tough approach to drugs when making public statements about cannabis.</p>
<p>The government claims that prohibition works because cannabis use has declined in the UK in <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tables-for-drug-misuse-findings-from-the-2014-to-2015-csew">recent years</a>. This decline in use may account for some of the fall in cannabis conviction rates. But if we follow the government’s false logic in relation to prohibition and simply wait for cannabis use to fall further, assuming it does (a very big assumption), then it would take a further five decades before their aim of eliminating cannabis use is achieved. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120689/original/image-20160429-10488-958x0h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120689/original/image-20160429-10488-958x0h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120689/original/image-20160429-10488-958x0h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120689/original/image-20160429-10488-958x0h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120689/original/image-20160429-10488-958x0h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120689/original/image-20160429-10488-958x0h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120689/original/image-20160429-10488-958x0h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But such simplistic interpretation of the data is clearly wrong. Although cannabis use has fallen it ignores what is happening with certain sub-groups of cannabis users. For example, an increasing number of young people are accessing drug treatment services as a result of using <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09687637.2015.1090398">potent strains of cannabis</a>. </p>
<p>Individual and covert commercial growers have used advances in seed technology and access to hydroponic growing equipment to cultivate more potent varieties of cannabis. There is little doubt that stronger strains of cannabis elevate the risk of developing a range of health problems such as <a href="http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana">psychosis</a>. Increasing potency is a compelling reason to change the current legal position, not one that endorses it.</p>
<h2>What are the options?</h2>
<p>Although the drugs debate is commonly framed as a debate of two extremes – legalise or criminalise – there are actually many options. For example, Beau Kilmer, co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center suggests an incremental approach to regulation (see chart below).</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120683/original/image-20160429-10485-noqp0k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120683/original/image-20160429-10485-noqp0k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120683/original/image-20160429-10485-noqp0k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120683/original/image-20160429-10485-noqp0k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120683/original/image-20160429-10485-noqp0k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120683/original/image-20160429-10485-noqp0k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120683/original/image-20160429-10485-noqp0k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Source: Beau Kilmer, RAND Drug Policy Research Center.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This proposal could inform a new policy approach which has the potential to enhance health at a population level. Introducing state regulation would provide users with a cannabis product that has been tested for potency and supplied without the risk of harmful additives. It would also generate revenue, adding to our collective wealth. Evidence supporting such a change is accumulating across the world thanks to those jurisdictions that have moved beyond an ideological commitment to the drug war. </p>
<p>The government’s duty is to protect the people it serves. With cannabis it fails to meet this obligation in two ways. First, it outsources the production and supply of a widely used product to organised crime, meaning that there is no quality control or regulated standards of production. This leaves people who use cannabis conducting daily experiments with their health. Second, by publicly endorsing prohibition yet quietly allowing its agencies to do the opposite, it lacks credibility. It’s difficult to work out who this policy serves other than a few elite criminals who control the production and supply of cannabis.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"728504014405550081"}"></div></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58527/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The UK may have signed the UN drugs convention – with its emphasis on prohibition – but that doesn’t mean it can’t legalise the drug.Ian Hamilton, Lecturer in Mental Health, University of YorkMark Monaghan, Lecturer in Crimimology and Social Policy, Loughborough UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/579012016-04-15T16:06:24Z2016-04-15T16:06:24ZCzechia – is the Czech Republic’s new name real?<p>The Czech Republic wants to <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/15/europe/czech-republic-name-czechia/">change its name</a>. Czech foreign minister Lubomír Zaorálek has led calls for the country to be internationally known by the short, rather commercial-sounding name – Czechia.</p>
<p>The word is quite obscure. Despite the argument by a <a href="http://www.go-czechia.com/">Czech activist website</a> that Czechia was first used in the 17th century by some Latin writers, there is really no precedent for using it. The change – which must <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/15/czech-republic-czechia-new-name">pass cabinet approval</a> and be put to the UN – may prove more trouble than it’s worth. </p>
<p>The Czech Republic is no stranger to international recognition problems, particularly after the country of which it used to be a part, Czechoslovakia, had peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. </p>
<h2>Bohemians vs Czechs</h2>
<p>The protestant <a href="http://www.britannica.com/place/Bohemia">Kingdom of Bohemia</a> became absorbed into the absolutist and Catholic Austrian Empire after a catastrophic defeat of the Czech protestant nobility at the <a href="http://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-White-Mountain">Battle of the White Mountain</a> near Prague in 1620. While the Kingdom of Bohemia or the Lands of the Czech Crown technically existed until the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, when Czechoslovakia was born, not much was heard about the Czechs and their country in the wider world before then. </p>
<p>The name of what is now the Czech Republic was primarily known in Czech as <em>Čechy</em> – “Czechlands” or the “Lands of the Czechs”. In German it is <em>Tschechei</em>, an expression which gained a nasty connotation during the Nazi occupation of the country in World War II, when what is now the Czech Republic <a href="http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Protectorate_of_Bohemia_and_Moravia">was known as</a> the Nazi “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/118922/original/image-20160415-11155-1q0312r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/118922/original/image-20160415-11155-1q0312r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/118922/original/image-20160415-11155-1q0312r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/118922/original/image-20160415-11155-1q0312r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/118922/original/image-20160415-11155-1q0312r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/118922/original/image-20160415-11155-1q0312r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/118922/original/image-20160415-11155-1q0312r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Prague wants a rebrand.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dzung_banme/14613393619/sizes/l">Dzung Banme/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is a difference between what “Bohemian” and “Czech” means. “Bohemian” (<em>boehmisch</em> in German) denoted a citizenship which was defined by belonging to a territory. “Bohemians” were all citizens, regardless of whether they spoke Czech or German or any other language, as long as they lived on the territory of the Lands of the Czech Crown.</p>
<p>“Czechs”, on the other hand, were those people who defined themselves by their Czech language only. Since the 19th century, more people have tended to refer to themselves as Czech, rather than Bohemian. </p>
<h2>Difficult task ahead</h2>
<p>There are several reasons why the Czech foreign minister’s attempt to rename the Czech Republic is problematic. It will be extremely difficult to force the international public – which does not discuss the Czech Republic too often – to change linguistic habits and start calling the country “Czechia”. Many people, more than 20 years since the disintegration of Czechoslovakia, still use the expression “Czechoslovakia” when referring to the Czech Republic as it is now. </p>
<p>The new name may confuse people further. After the Boston marathon bombings in 2013, many Americans, even a CIA agent, mixed up the Czech Republic with Chechnya. When calls to bomb Prague in retaliation appeared on Facebook, the Czech embassy in Washington was forced to <a href="http://www.mzv.cz/washington/en/czech_u_s_relations/news/statement_of_the_ambassador_of_the_czech.html">publish a disclaimer</a> saying that the Czech Republic was not in fact in Central Asia and had nothing to do with the attacks. Czechia would make this kind of situation worse. </p>
<h2>Change could be costly</h2>
<p>The change may also cost the Czech government a considerable amount of money. Since 2012, the Czech Ministry for Regional Development has been internationally using an officially <a href="http://neovlivni.cz/czechia-tak-zni-dohoda-z-hradu-slechtova-bude-chtit-za-nazev-zpatky-miliardu/">approved trademark</a>: “The Czech Republic – Land of Stories” to advertise the country to foreign visitors. </p>
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<p>Over the past four years, the ministry has spent a billion Czech crowns (some US$42m) on marketing the Czech Republic to international tourists under this slogan, with some of the money coming from the European Union. Karla Šlechtová, the Czech minister for regional development, <a href="http://neovlivni.cz/czechia-tak-zni-dohoda-z-hradu-slechtova-bude-chtit-za-nazev-zpatky-miliardu/">has pointed out</a> that the terms of the agreement with the EU may have been breached by the decision to replace the name of the Czech Republic by the term “Czechia” – and that the EU might want its money to be returned for breach of contract. </p>
<p>In English, the expression “Czechia” also sounds rather commercial (think Nokia …) and seems to indicate that the Czech authorities are willing to do just anything for the purpose of marketing. But some people might not find such an unashamedly commercial name for a country to be very reputable. Maybe it is not surprising, however, that the Czech Republic is thinking about its brand. Czech deputy prime minister and finance secretary Andrej Babiš does say often that he wants to <a href="http://www.politico.eu/article/andrej-babis-czech-oligarch/">run his country “like a business”</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/57901/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jan Culik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It might face an uphill battle for the world to adopt the proposed name change.Jan Culik, Senior Lecturer in Czech Studies, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/524252016-03-17T10:07:11Z2016-03-17T10:07:11ZA look inside the Czech Republic’s booming fertility holiday industry<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113908/original/image-20160304-17740-1bjg1c6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nick Lehr/The Conversation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2008, a friend sent me a link to a Czech company called IVF Holiday. Clicking the link, I saw images of quaint European towns. These were accompanied by pictures of smiling white babies – and promises of affordable and safe rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF). </p>
<p>I soon realized I’d stumbled into a new type of tourism: fertility holidays.</p>
<p>As a medical anthropologist, I knew I had to pursue this topic. Here was a perfect example of patients turning to medicine’s global marketplace when high prices of health care back home block access to treatments.</p>
<p>I subsequently conducted three years of fieldwork in the Czech Republic and North America to trace the fertility journeys of 29 American reproductive tourists. Their stories are in my forthcoming book <a href="http://nyupress.org/books/9781479849109/"><em>Fertility Holidays: IVF Tourism and the Reproduction of Whiteness</em></a>. </p>
<h2>A souvenir of a different sort</h2>
<p><a href="http://americanpregnancy.org/infertility/in-vitro-fertilization/">IVF</a> is an assisted reproductive technology that increases the chances of conception for women or couples suffering from infertility. It monitors and stimulates a woman’s ovulation, retrieves a woman’s eggs and fertilizes the eggs with sperm in a lab. The fertilized egg or eggs are then transferred back to a woman’s uterus. For women who suffer age-related infertility, they may need IVF using an egg donor. </p>
<p>However, costs in the United States for IVF can quickly become prohibitively expensive, running in the tens of thousands of dollars.</p>
<p>After looking further into IVF Holiday, I soon learned that it was owned by a married couple named Tom and Hana. Hana, a Czech woman, and Tom, an American from Ohio, learned early in their marriage that they would need IVF. With costs running as high as US$30,000, it was a procedure they simply couldn’t afford in North America. </p>
<p>However, there was a cheaper option: in 1995, in order to counteract a declining birth rate, the Czech government had decided to insure women for three cycles of IVF. </p>
<p>In January 2006, Hana and Tom embarked for Hana’s Moravian hometown and visited a clinic in Zlín. Pictures of their twins hugging one another show they returned home with the souvenir they sought. </p>
<p>Soon, the idea dawned on Hana and Tom to start a company that would help other lower-middle-class Americans travel to the Czech Republic to undergo IVF at a much lower cost. They realized they could act as intermediaries, providing transportation, travel recommendations and translators for all clinic visits. </p>
<p>IVF Holiday was born. </p>
<h2>The typical fertility traveler</h2>
<p>With companies like IVF Holiday paving the way, reproductive travel has become an increasingly popular option for North Americans who can’t afford treatment in the U.S., but still long for babies of their own. </p>
<p>When many first encountered IVF Holiday’s website, they felt empowered by the amount of information available. They spoke of reading endless online testimonials and contacting previous fertility tourists, acting as diligent consumers before making the decision to travel abroad for treatment. </p>
<p>Kay, a lawyer from the Northeast, traveled to the Zlín clinic in 2006 as one of the first North American patient clients seeking IVF. </p>
<p>When I interviewed her, she laughed as she recalled her first impression of the clinic – its large, rickety elevator that she took to the second floor of a former Communist-era building. Fearful of the elevator, she hesitated. Hana encouraged her to take this literal and metaphorical step. Thankfully, the door opened to the clinic that was the same clinic she’d seen on the IVF Holiday website.</p>
<p>So far, the North Americans traveling to the Czech Republic from North America have been predominantly white and lower- to middle-class. (I did interview one Puerto Rican couple and one African-American couple.) They’re typically in their late 30’s and early 40’s, and their age-related infertility often means they need IVF using an egg donor. </p>
<p>The majority were well-versed in the world of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), having undergone several IUIs (<a href="http://americanpregnancy.org/infertility/intrauterine-insemination/">intrauterine insemination</a>) in the U.S., often with the help of fertility drugs. They may have even tried one or more IVF cycles, but couldn’t continue due to financial constraints. North American reproductive tourists were also relatively well-traveled, although some were venturing abroad for the first time. </p>
<p>A number would end up staying at a small bed-and-breakfast in the hills of the town. This quaint bed-and-breakfast became a communal space for IVF travelers, many of whom became immediate friends, bonding over the fact they were undergoing IVF in a foreign country. </p>
<h2>Contrasting costs</h2>
<p>Back in the U.S., the reproductive medical industry is largely unregulated, and many have been critical of the commercial nature of a “baby business” that is largely profit-driven. Currently, there is no limit to the amount an egg donor can be paid – a number that typically ranges from $8,000 to $10,000. Given patient demand for reproductive technologies – and high profit margins – there’s little incentive for clinics to reduce their prices.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Czech reproductive medical industry is also profiting. But it’s from a lower price structure and liberal legislation that stipulates that sperm and egg donation must be voluntary and anonymous. While donors cannot be paid for their eggs, they’re offered attractive compensatory payments of approximately 1,000 euros for the discomfort involved in ovarian stimulation and egg retrieval from the clinic. (This amounts to roughly three months’ salary for egg donors.) </p>
<p>For North American patients traveling to the Czech Republic, treatment for IVF was $3,000. For an egg donor cycle, the cost was $4,000. On average, North Americans spent $10,000 for the entire trip. By comparison, a round of IVF with egg donation in the United States <a href="http://ivfcostcalculator.com/">costs between</a> $25,000 and $40,000. </p>
<h2>A shifting business model</h2>
<p>While IVF brokers were initially needed to facilitate travel between North America and the Czech Republic, their role has diminished significantly over the past decade. </p>
<p>Doctors were finding themselves answering too many direct questions through Hana, so in March 2009, the Zlín clinic hired its own coordinators. Previously, patients had to work with IVF Holiday as an intermediary; now they can work directly with the Czech clinic, which has become savvy at offering patient-centered care. </p>
<p>One of the new coordinator hires was a Czech woman named Lenka. The wife of a doctor who also works at the clinic, Lenka is a petite Slovak who has traveled extensively throughout the United States. As someone who also needed in vitro fertilization for her second child, she’s able to empathize with the pain of infertility. Like Hana, she’s able to deftly bridge Czech and American cultural differences. </p>
<p>In 2010, Lenka had been the only coordinator at the Zlín clinic. But when I visited the summer of 2014, I was struck by the cramped quarters of a larger office, where there were eight cubicles facing one another – and eight women typing emails or on the phone speaking Russian, Italian, French and English. Furthermore, the clinic built its own en suite accommodations for foreign patients, cutting the favored bed-and-breakfast out of the profits. </p>
<p>I quickly discovered that North American patients had become a very small piece of the Czech reproductive tourism pie. In a clinic in Prague, there’s a world map in the main conference center with the heading <em>Nase Deti v Svete</em>: Our Children in the World. You can see pins in every country where a recipient couple had IVF using egg donor in the Czech Republic. An estimated 20,000 IVF cycles were completed in the Czech Republic in 2006, a quarter of which were for foreign couples. By 2014, that number had grown to 30,000, with foreign couples accounting for one-third of the total. </p>
<p>Clinics are also opening farther east, in countries like Hungary and the Ukraine. While this may detract from the profits of Czech clinics, with more and more international consumers becoming aware of fertility tourism’s viability and affordability, it’s a market that’s ripe for growth. </p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: to protect the identities of those interviewed, the author changed the names of the people and company in the article.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52425/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Speier receives funding from the National Science Foundation. </span></em></p>Confronted with skyrocketing IVF costs at home, North American couples are packing their bags, making an overseas trip and returning home with a special souvenir.Amy Speier, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at ArlingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.