Czech communists and the EU

["Magnus Bernhardsen" <magnus.bernhardsen@xxxxx>]

http://www.rednet.org/mapi/rednetarticle.asp?ID=000000001A447390AA6611CD9B
C800AA002FC45A0300E4612C6FB9F6CF11990D0000B4528C430000001E5C690000

Dear Comrades, 
Attached is our latest news release, on Czech communists and the campaign
for an EU referendum. 
With best wishes, 
Ken Biggs 
Editor 
Postmark Prague 
PO Box 42 
182 00 Prague 8 
Czech Republic 

POSTMARK PRAGUE No.340 
News release (1140 words) 
Tuesday 10 July 2001 

THE IRISH REFERENDUM?S LESSON FOR CZECH COMMUNISTS 
by Ken Biggs, Editor of Postmark Prague 
July 3 should go down in Czech history as an infamous day. It was the day
last week when the right-wing dominated lower house of the Czech Parliament
voted to surrender the country?s national sovereignty to the European
Union. By 158 votes to 23 (all Communists) the Chamber of Deputies passed a
constitutional ?Euro-amendment? which allows EU-inspired international
treaties to over-ride Czech laws. Previously only international treaties
relating to human rights took precedence over Czech legislation. 

Communist MP Dalibor Matulka called the amendment ?a servile declaration
which testifies to the Czech Republic?s subordination to the European
Union.? 

Adoption of the amendment is also a setback for supporters of a referendum
on whether the Czech Republic should join the EU. They will now have to
persuade 60% of the chamber?s 200 deputies to vote for a further
constitutional amendment allowing a referendum to be held. But the only
parties officially committed to a referendum on the EU are the Communists
and the Social Democrats, and they can muster only 98 votes between them 22
short of the required number. Apart from that, the ruling minority Social
Democrat government is quite capable of reneging on its referendum
commitment as it has on so many other of the other policies with which it
won the 1998 election, out of deference to the right-wing Civic Democrats,
the party whose deputies? votes keep it in office and whose leader,
Vaclav Klaus, submitted the Czech Republic?s official application for EU
membership when he was premier. 

Some referendum supporters take comfort from the fact that at the end of
June the upper house (the Senate) passed a resolution supporting a
referendum. But it only scraped through by one vote in a house which has
three Communist members. Like their counterparts in other bourgeois
parliaments, Czech Senators like to put their lower house colleagues on the
spot from time to time by a show of independence, and it remains to be seen
whether most of the Senators voted for the resolution for any reason other
than this: with the exception of the Social Democrats, the right-wing
parties which dominate the Senate are not in any way committed to or
sympathetic to a referendum. Nevertheless, the Senate resolution will at
least now have to be discussed by the Chamber of Deputies. 

The track record of the right-wing parties on what the Communist Party
calls ?direct democracy? is not encouraging. In 1999, with the support
of President Vaclav Havel, the minority Social Democrat government took the
country into NATO without a referendum, even though membership seriously
compromised Czech national sovereignty especially during NATO?s
aggression against Yugoslavia, when its bombers and munitions trains used
Czech air space and railways in a war which most of the Czech people did
not support. And in 1992 the federal republic of Czechoslovakia was
dissolved without a referendum, because the right-wing politicians who were
behind the split knew that they had little popular support even less than
they have today for EU membership. 

According to a poll earlier this year, 75% of the 10 million Czechs want a
referendum on EU membership. Support for EU membership in the candidate
countries is lowest in the Czech Republic, and it is still falling. A March
survey reported that only 45% of Czechs favour it, which is 3% fewer than
last October and in sharp contrast to public opinion in the early days of
the ?velvet revolution? when ?Into Europe!? was a popular slogan of
Havel and his friends. 37% of respondents were undecided a figure which
reflects the minority Social Democrat government?s policy of keeping the
public in the dark about what EU membership involves. Against membership
were the remaining 18%, which roughly corresponded to the Communist
Party?s support in opinion polls. 

The policy of the Czech Communist Party (officially the Communist Party of
Bohemia and Moravia) is that it opposes membership of the EU ?in its
present form?. This suggests of course that the EU can be changed from
within. The programme adopted at the party?s 5th Congress in December
1999 sees an all-European left party based on the United Left-Nordic Green
(GUE/NGL) group in the European Parliament as the main engine of ?EU
democratisation?. 

The language of Euro-enthusiasts like the party?s vice-chairs Miloslav
Ransdorf and Jiri Dolejs is rich in rhetoric about ?socialising the
European project?, but they fail to explain why so little progress in
this direction has been made to date by the ?Euro-Left? or why
communist parties which have chosen the road of ?reforming the EU? have
suffered major electoral and other setbacks in recent years. And Ransdorf
and Dolejs comprised themselves badly last month when, in a proxy public
dispute with the small but highly active Communist Union of Youth (which
opposes the EU as the other side of the NATO coin), they called for a tax
on parents to help fund education which was completely at variance with the
Communist Party?s policy of free education and to some ears sounded too
much like indirect support for the unreformed EU?s call for cuts in
public spending. 

In March Communist Party chairman Miroslav Grebenicek told the Chamber of
Deputies that ?my own and my party?s support for EU membership is
gradually but nevertheless perceptibly waning?. This reflected a change
in the mood of some sections of the Czech people. Quite apart from the
economic consequences of the association agreements signed by right-wing
Czech governments with the EU, not a few eyes have been opened by the
arrogant Brussels response to its recent defeats in two key referendums.
The Czech Republic, like Denmark and Ireland, is a despised ?small and
unimportant? country too. Neville Chamberlain had similar thoughts in
1938 as Hitler?s guest in Munch 

Czechs are also becoming more aware of the threat posed by an expansionist
and armed German-dominated EU, after Chancellor Schroeder?s remarks on
June 26 about EU enlargement being in Germany?s interest and Germany?s
role as the main beneficiary. As the Communist Party of Ireland?s Dublin
newsletter Socialist Voice put it: ?So there you have it: We all thought
they wanted the eastern Europeans in to help them develop and to overcome
decades of ?communist misrule?, but instead it is just about German
expansion and profits. Who would have believed it?? 

There is an important strategic lesson which the Czech Communists can learn
from the Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty: no matter how powerful the
enemy in the case of Ireland, it was the combined forces of the government,
big business, the media, the trade unions and the Church it can be beaten
if a broad alliance of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary forces is
built and the call for a referendum is taken out of parliament into the
trade unions, the communities, the squares and the streets. END