IF IT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE CZECHS...(via Paul Cella):

Santa Klaus: John Laughland talks to the Czech President, Václav Klaus — Thatcherite, Eurosceptic and much loved by the people (John Laughland, 5/29/04, The Spectator)

The man who has dominated Czech politics for more than a decade is not usually associated with symbolic, still less mystical gestures. A neo-liberal former professor of economics in the Hayekian tradition, and a one-time president of the Mont Pelerin society, [Vaclav] Klaus’s name evokes money supply more than mediaeval mythology. And yet it is precisely his skills at statecraft, and in particular his deep belief in the political value of nationhood, which form the real bedrock of his political identity. [...]

Unlike his British Tory friends, however, Klaus has enough sense not to fall into the equal and opposite sin of thinking that America is the universal panacea. The man who was ousted as prime minister of the Czech Republic in 1997 because he started to talk about national interest rather than frenetic privatisation is no slavish follower of the latest faddish dictates from Washington. This is in stark contrast, for instance, to the President of neighbouring Poland, who seems to spend more time in the White House than in Warsaw. Before becoming President, Klaus published articles questioning both the Kosovo and Iraq wars — ‘And I was right in both cases,’ he tells me proudly — and as President, he struck a Gaullist note when he said that he did not want US military bases on Czech soil, because Czechs had had enough experience of foreign soldiers on their territory in the past.

‘The Americans on the one hand,’ Klaus explains, ‘play visibly a card of national defence. They speak about the nation. We do not, because it is politically incorrect. At the same time, they speak about exporting ideas. So for me there is a contradiction in their position. They export more ideas than national defence. That’s a problem for me. We know something in this country about the export of ideas and ideology. I have recently engaged in a debate on the difference between human rights and citizens’ rights: I always advocate citizens’ rights, because mankind is not an entity which could potentially guarantee your rights, whereas the nation is an entity where it is possible.’ It takes guts to say you are against human rights, and indeed Klaus insists to me that he opposes the idea of using military force to promote ideas rather than to defend territory. ‘The military defence of human rights is a political agenda and an ideological standpoint.’ It is also precisely that for which Nato now stands, to which the Czech Republic has belonged since 1999.

As if the field were not already strewn with slaughtered sacred cows, Klaus also likes to puncture the hubris of those ‘dissidents’, his predecessor in the first place, who present themselves as heroes for having defeated communism. He is convinced that, instead, communism collapsed of its own accord. It is, paradoxically, his left-wing enemies whom he denounces for their professional anti-communism today. He caused a stir last week when he told a meeting of former political prisoners under communism that there are plenty of new isms to be afraid of today, ‘such as Europeanism and internationalism’, and yet these are of course precisely the new conformisms that have supplanted the old left-wing orthodoxies to which so many subscribed before, especially the so-called dissidents themselves. In other words, if there is one true dissident in today’s Euro-American internationalist morass, it is none other than Václav Klaus himself.

But the Czech Republic is a nation and one worth defending, largely because of folk like the two Vaclav's--who long ago internalized the ideology of America. Saddam's Iraq was not such a nation, nor is much of the Middle East as yet. All nations are not equal.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 28, 2004 3:07 PM