With apologies to France, whose eagerly awaited European Union presidency has not yet even started, it is tempting to cast one’s eyes forward and wonder what will happen when the Czech Republic begins its six-month spell in the driving seat next January.
The question is preoccupying more people in Brussels than you might think – starting with José Manuel Barroso. The European Commission president went to Prague last month and gave a rather curious speech in which he urged the Czechs to use their presidency “as an opportunity to engage with Europe”. You can’t imagine him needing to say something like that in Dublin, Rome or Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, which holds the EU presidency at the moment.
The problem is that the Czechs earned a reputation, soon after they and seven other countries joined the EU in 2004, as one of the most awkward and Eurosceptical of the new member-states.
Personally, I think it’s unfair. Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform think-tank makes the excellent point that Poland under the Kaczynski twins, and the Greek Cypriots under ex-president Tassos Papadopoulos, were much more prickly. I would add that the Czechs’ experiences as a small nation first in the Habsburg Empire, then at the hands of the Nazis after the British and French betrayal at Munich, and finally under Soviet domination, go a long way to explaining the Czech outlook on the world.
Still, there’s no doubt the Czechs have sometimes rubbed up their EU partners the wrong way. They have persistently brought up human rights violations in Cuba in a way that has exasperated those in Spain who feel Madrid knows best how to handle its former colony.
In President Vaclav Klaus, who openly opposed the EU’s constitutional treaty and who warns of the threats to national sovereignty posed by EU integration, the Czechs have a head of state who is as canny as the Good Soldier Svejk and as politically incorrect as a Brit.
So the worry in Brussels has been that, come next January, the Czechs’ alleged Euroscepticism would find expression in their leadership of the EU. They would, in short, spoil the party for everyone else.
Some of this concern is still around. The Czechs will be the first to hold the EU presidency in the new era launched by the Lisbon treaty, assuming it’s fully ratified by the end of December. They will therefore run the first “diminished presidency”, because from January the EU will have a semi-permanent president to chair summits and represent the EU abroad – you know, the job Tony Blair won’t get.
How to satisfy countries that will hold the rotating EU presidency, but won’t bask in the usual spotlight for six months, is extremely sensitive. It is bothering Sweden, which will assume the EU presidency in July 2009, as much as the Czechs.
But the good news is that the Czech government is already giving serious attention to its presidency. The bureaucratic machinery is in place and the policymakers are developing some interesting ideas. For example, the Czechs have suggested holding a summit of European energy consumers and suppliers to discuss energy security.
More broadly, the Czechs say the three core issues of their presidency will be “Competitiveness, the Four Freedoms [freedom of movement of people, goods, services and capital] and a Liberal Trade Policy”.
Not bad for a bunch of Eurosceptics, eh?
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