The hundred hatreds of Helmut Kohl
Many people in France and Germany seem thrilled by Emmanuel Macron’s promise to invigorate Europe, said Jirí Pehe on Novinky.cz (Prague). But France’s president is going an odd way about it. He has made instant enemies of the “Visegrád” nations (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) by accusing them, at last week’s EU summit, of treating the EU like a “supermarket”, choosing which of its rules to abide by. He was referring to our refusal to take the quota of refugees assigned to us, for which Brussels is now threatening us with financial penalties. Why can’t West European politicians get it into their heads that we don’t want to saddle ourselves with a proven security risk? If “naive” countries such as Germany and Sweden want to risk harbouring terrorists, good for them. We won’t be pushed into doing so by “an arrogant Frenchman”.
Short-sighted liberals such as Macron complain about a lack of “solidarity”, but that’s unfair, said Éric Verhaeghe on Atlantico.fr (Paris). Since violence erupted in Ukraine, Poland has sheltered tens of thousands of Ukrainians whose plight inspired scant “sadness or guilt” in Western Europe. And Hungary was overwhelmed when Angela Merkel unilaterally opened the floodgates to refugees; yet it got almost no help from Brussels. Not much solidarity there. But let’s not blind ourselves to the deep-rooted xenophobia that exists, said Jarosław Kurski in Gazeta Wyborcza (Warsaw). It’s unforgivable how Poland’s ruling ultraconservatives have stirred up anti-islam and anti-refugee “hysteria”. Muslims in Poland today are treated like Jews were before the War. On a trip to a Holocaust memorial in Lublin recently, German schoolgirls wearing hijabs say they were abused and even spat at by local people. AntiMuslim attacks almost doubled last year in Poland.
Even so, Brussels needs to accept that the Visegrád nations have a point, said Ivan Krastev in The New York Times. It’s up to them, not Brussels, to decide who belongs to their communities. But their governments’ undemocratic behaviour and anti-refugee rhetoric so alienates Western opinion that their legitimate grievances get overlooked. And it doesn’t help that they’re so disunited. The Czechs and Slovaks hate their neighbours’ fondness for “Eurobashing”, while Hungary and Poland are split over relations with Russia. Still, collectively, they are right to be wary of Macron: his arrival has invigorated Merkel’s hopes for European integration. Now they must decide whether to fall in with the Macron-merkel vision of a federal Europe in which they’ll play a subsidiary role, or pursue their own path and risk being further marginalised.
Indeed, Czech leaders are already muttering about leaving the EU, said Petr Kamberský in Lidové noviny (Prague). President Miloš Zeman last week repeated his suggestion that the Czech Republic hold a Brexit-style referendum on continued EU membership. Oh, he would vote to stay, he assured his listeners; yet he then went on to complain that the EU was like the Warsaw Pact, with “limited sovereignty” for members. When a Czech president compares bureaucrats in Brussels to Soviet dictators, he is clearly urging his countrymen to throw off their shackles. And he’s not alone. Václav Klaus, Zeman’s predecessor, is now explicitly advocating quitting the bloc.
This is dangerous stuff, said Kamberský. It’s easy to complain about EU regulations that require us to take in refugees, or ban smoking in restaurants. But what we get in return is a “Europe free of major conflicts, a Europe of reliable allies”. An exit that cut us off from our neighbours would only benefit the country which once invaded us, overthrew our government, and kept us under communist repression for decades. President Vladimir Putin would love to see us peel off from the EU. “The question is this: why are Klaus and Zeman playing his cards for him?”