One of the pleasures of the Czech Republic’s forthcoming presidency of the European Union will be to watch in action a thoughtful, humorous, bow-tied 71-year-old who rejoices in the name of Karl Johannes Nepomuk Josef Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Mena, prince of Schwarzenberg. Karel Schwarzenberg, as he is better known, has served as the Czech foreign minister for the past two years, and I caught up with him over breakfast.
An old friend of Vaclav Havel, the philosopher-playwright who became the Czech head of state after the anti-communist Velvet Revolution of 1989, Schwarzenberg will have the task of keeping the Czech ship on a steady course at a time when quite a few other EU countries are worried about how Prague will handle its six months in the hot seat. Schwarzenberg is diplomatic elegance personified but, as with Havel, that doesn’t mean he’s afraid to speak his mind.
I’ll give just one example. The question came up of whether the EU should continue to delay implementing its so-called stabilisation and association agreement with Serbia, an accord that would put Belgrade clearly on the road to EU membership. The EU is taking this line mainly because the Dutch government is unhappy that the Serbian authorities have not yet arrested Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader accused of war crimes in the 1990s.
Like many other EU foreign ministers, Schwarzenberg says he understands the Dutch point of view, but thinks they are wrong: Serbia should be brought in from the cold. His reasoning, though, is quite distinctive. ”I look back at Europe after the second world war from the perspective of each future EU country. If each war criminal had had to be dealt with first [before launching the EU], I’m not sure the process would have started before the 1980s,” he said.
He was too polite to mention which countries had failed to prosecute war criminals until four decades after the war’s end - the 1980s were famous in France for the cases of Klaus Barbie and Maurice Papon - but in fact I didn’t get the impression that Schwarzenberg was trying to accuse other EU states of hypocrisy. Rather, he was just suggesting that the world is an imperfect place and we must accept that reality and move on.
“Each country has its own bloody history,” he said. “I think Iceland is the only country that’s had no connection with war criminals over the past 100 years – and perhaps Denmark. Everyone else did something. We shouldn’t behave as if we’re all saints.”
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