VELVET DIVORCE INTELLIGENT MIND
the reasons why they have adopted the euro and have done their damndest to prove themselves a reliable member of the European community. Unlike Václav Havel, most Czechs, evoking the Hussite tradition of rebellion, have not realized they are just as parochial as the Slovaks and have behaved like the Brits, living on an imaginary island they created in their own image having expelled everyone who threatened to ruin it, from bears and wolves to the Sudeten Germans. This is why they are among the most ardent opponents of the European Union into which Havel pushed them. The number of these historical differences is greater than I used to admit, in my reluctance to accept the existence of a “national character”, a concept that smacks of nationalism. Presumably, Václav Havel did not admit these differences existed either, as they ran counter to his notion of a universal essence of our being. Even now, I feel as if I were venturing into forbidden territory. Yet who else, if not me, is entitled to compare Czechs and Slovaks without falling under the suspicion of favoring one or the other? Before the funeral, something quite characteristic happened when we – Havel’s ten Solvak friends – dropped in at a café near the Prague castle for a coffee and a shot: one of us picked up the whole tab and we all said thank you. This is something I’ve hardly ever experienced with my Czech friends, and although Czech pubs are famed for their cozy atmosphere, everyone typically pays only for themselves. This difference in the attitude to money and its role in life is widely known, and the Slovaks regard the Czechs as penny-pinching scrooges. Yet statistics show that Czechs contribute more to charity than Slovaks. The fact is that the Czech attitude to money is just another expression of their profound faith in the functional essence of civilization, based on a rational organization of society (without God). And the Czechs‘ ability to organize their life and the country can be astonishing. The country is interspersed with a dense network of roads and you rarely walk for more than three kilometers before reaching a village. In Slovakia by contrast, which is significantly smaller, you might wander for many miles in the mountains and not come across a living soul, let alone a village. Compared to Slovakia, I am always stunned at how
perfectly everything works in the Czech Republic. It was no accident that the economy kept running smoothly in 2006, when the Czech Republic had no legitimate government for six months. Nevertheless, there is one thing, quite unusual for Central Europe, which the Slovaks and Czechs have in common, in spite of the obvious difference in their attitude to money. Their experience from the 1920s, when Czechoslovakia was famous for its strong currency, has instilled in them the idea of strict fiscal discipline that is regarded as the government‘s historic obligation. It is no coincidence that Czechoslovakia’s communist regime – unlike those of Poland and Hungary – left very little debt behind. Similarly, no prime minister since 1989, Czech or Slovak, has dared to increase debt beyond a reasonable level. However, the Czech skill in organizing society also entails some risks, including the fact that they do not feel a strong need for reform. Twenty years of independent development have brought about a surprising phenomenon: institutionally, Slovakia is a more modern state than the Czech Republic. While the reasons for this development seem to be accidental, there is logic to it. In order to survive, Slovakia, with its traditionally less efficiently organized society, full of internal contradictions, needed better governance than the Czech Republic. The Slovaks experienced this first hand during the six years it took to get rid of the authoritarian Mečiar, who brought the country to the brink of collapse. The Czechs, on the other hand, enjoyed a seemingly ideal transition to democracy and capitalism in the 1990s and are only now beginning to realize how right Havel was to criticize “Mafia capitalism”. In terms of their institutions, the two countries had the same base line, as Slovakia has literally inherited most of the original constitution adopted before Czechoslovakia split. However, following Mečiar’s fall, enormous changes took place in Slovakia’s political system. Unlike the Czechs the Slovaks can now elect their mayors (as well as the President) by direct vote, which has curtailed the excessive power of political parties. The country has been more profoundly decentralized and the prosecutor’s office has been separated from the executive (the Prosecutor General is elected by the parliament, whereas in the Czech Republic he is appointed by the government).
In the fight against corruption, Slovakia puts greater emphasis on transparency: all state contracts with private companies have to be published on the Internet and for the past ten years, anonymous firms have been banned from trading their stocks. In the Czech Republic, most companies that are awarded state tenders still have undisclosed owners, many of whom are undoubtedly politicians. In Slovakia, the fight against the grey economy has even managed to override the aforementioned relaxed attitude to money. In a Czech pub a waiter will typically add up your bill on a scrap of paper, and you have to rely on his math skills. On the other hand, even in the most remote corner of Slovakia, if you order a beer you will receive a proper receipt from an electronic cash register. The Slovaks introduced these registers ten years ago as part of the fight against tax evasion while the Czechs still keep making excuses, claiming this form of oversight is too expensive. I could list many similar examples, but the fact remains that most of them ensure a better democratic framework in Slovakia than in the Czech Republic. So why is the extent of corruption actually roughly the same in both countries, and people are equally convinced that the system is unjust? It’s simply because the Czechs make up for the lower quality of their legislation with higher quality among their elites. For example, the Czech judiciary, which is in principle less dependent on politicians than its Slovak counterpart, enjoys a better reputation due to the judges‘ strong personalities. By comparison, Slovak judges have abused their independence to create a closed and deeply corrupt edifice. The differences in the developments of political systems, and their reflection in such trivial matters as electronic cash registers, are evidently the result of larger social processes and to examine them would provide material for several books. But there are also other differences, whose causes may at first sight seem quite banal. Every time I go to buy a newspaper or cigarettes in the Czech Republic, I notice that I can look the man or the woman in the kiosk in the eye and we sometimes exchange a few words, even though we don’t know each other at all. It’s because the Czech newspaper kiosks resemble little houses with a huge open window from which the salesperson observes the world and 53