Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, is taking the helm of the EU. He will serve as EU President for next six months, starting January 1, 2009. This is not necessarily good news for Europeans, Americans, or any one else, given that my encounters with his oversized ego are rather typical for him.

The following is excerpted from My Brother’s Keeper (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003):

The hostile reception new communitarianism encountered from some of the Czech leaders mirrored concerns initially raised by leaders and intellectuals in other former communist countries when they were first exposed to our message. It also reflected the particular position of its prime minister, Václav Klaus. Klaus has been credited with the quick transition of the Czech Republic from a communist to a capitalist economy. He defines himself accurately as an extreme Milton Friedmanite and has taken great personal umbrage to my book The Moral Dimension, which challenges libertarian assumptions of Friedmanite economics. When Klaus ran into me during the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1997, he grabbed my lapel, waved his index finger in my face, and announced in a booming voice, “You are crippling my republic! You are undermining what we are trying to do! You do not understand that egoism and the profit motive are the best part of human nature. You work for those who want to return my country to communism!”

Fortunately, I was aware before this encounter that understatements and mincing words were not Klaus’ trademark. Rather than punching back, I tried to calmly defend the communitarian position. My main argument was that by providing people with a strong but community-based social fabric, they would not react to rough and tumble capitalism by running back into the arms of a communist-ordered social life.

After the translation of my first communitarian book, The Spirit of Community, into German, Klaus joined a seminar I was conducting in Alpbach, Austria, for the European Forum in 1998. For a short while, he listened, but then he pulled out a prepared statement and read in a voice that vibrated down the corridors, and up the Alps.

Communitarianism... in its aversion to individualism and its advocacy of coercive means of fostering human association, is another form of collectivism.

Klaus next voiced concern alluded to by other leaders of previously communist countries:

Communitarianism wants to socialize us by forcing us into artificial, not genuine, not spontaneously formed--groups or groupings.

Communitarianism cannot win through preaching only.... they try to reach the legislators and to legislate the world according to their dreams.

By this time the seminar was familiar with our viewpoint. It seemed that most present considered Klaus’s barrage to be way off the mark. It made it easier for me to respond gently one more time.

After the seminar Klaus and I went for a long stroll and then joined a few others for a lunch that lasted nearly three hours. It soon became obvious that Klaus’s bluster was skin deep. He rushed to emphasize that “there was nothing personal in my statements” and that “I just enjoy debating.”

During lunch he regaled us with stories about his boxing days, about testing a new racing car and other daredevil acts he was involved in. When others chimed in with their anecdotes, Klaus would soon work to recapture the center of attention. It did not take a psychologist to figure him out. Moderation, whether as a brand of communitarianism or lifestyle, did not suit Klaus’s personality any more than a society could be based on his extreme libertarian principles. The fact that his government fell apart, despite his very considerable economic achievements, suggested that there might be more room for communitarianism in the Czech Republic than Klaus favored. (It would not take much.)

The best evidence to that effect was the leadership of Václav Havel. When Klaus heard that Havel had invited me to participate in his Forum 2000, Klaus simply said, “He is not my kind of a guy!” and for once Klaus was very much on the money. Every bone in Havel’s body--and more importantly, the depths of his soul--is dedicated to the civic society and, through it, to his version of communitarianism. Havel carried his vision not merely to his people but to large parts of the world, through speeches that have won him great acclaim and following.

I was very much looking forward to exchanging ideas with him. On arrival in the pompously elegant, baroque Prague Castle in which the Forum took place, I found that Havel was surrounded by VIPs, including Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Adam Michnik (a flamboyant, well-known Polish dissident), Wei Jingsheng (a leading Chinese dissident), a bishop, a chief rabbi, and an Indian poet-philosopher who kept reciting the same poem about the inner beauty of lotus flowers. Moreover, Havel was absent from a good part of the proceedings; his staff explained that his health required that he rest frequently.

When I finally found myself alone with Havel, I found that his command of English was not much better than mine of Czech, in which I could not so much as buy a Pilsner Urquell. I did, though, not leave Prague completely empty-handed. I brought with me the text of a new address by Havel that we published in our quarterly The Responsive Community. In it, Havel predicted that in the next century the nation-state would cease to evoke the kind of emotional and irrational commitments it had in the past. Loyalty to the state would instead be divided among families, communities, and organizations of which we are members. Above all, he called for a commitment to principles higher than the particular interest of this or that nation, especially to human rights, freedom and human dignity, which Havel suggested are a reflection of an “infinite” and “eternal” force.

I have no firsthand evidence to support my hunch that the Czech people’s views lie somewhere between Klaus’ hostility and Havel’s natural communitarianism. Possibly, as the distance from the communist days increases, Czechs will find it less onerous to acknowledge their own communitarian bases and expand on them.

One thing I can conclude with much confidence: citizens of all former communist societies cannot go long without some new, shared moral understanding. Those in older capitalist nations need them too, but their absence is merely more glaring in the vacuum left by collapse of communism. Communitarianism has a lot to suggest to these people--especially if we are better able to show to that it has no affinity whatsoever to communism.   

Not long ago you'd have been hard pressed to find a more universally admired head of state than Vaclav Havel, a man whose name is synonymous with dissidence and who, at least in contemporary terms, most closely approximates the ideal of the philosopher-king. Havel's essay, "The Power of the Powerless," in which he showed how the "post-totalitarian" society inculpates everyone who inhabits it, from the state official to the lowly greengrocer, became an instant classic of its genre as well as a founding document of the one revolution in 20th century Europe that went off without a single shot being fired, or a single drop of blood being spilt. And if Havel suffered from executive shortcomings -- the treatment of the Czech Roma has not reflected any ism with a human face -- then these were minor in comparison to his counterparts in other developing second world countries. It was Havel, let's not forget, who made the case for deposing Saddam Hussein on strictly humanitarian grounds, Saddam being just another genocidal fascist living well past his species' expiration date.

Things change.

George W. Bush, the least popular American president in several generations, is leaving office in fewer than two months, and his successor is most universally admired politician on the planet--with no record of lived or legislated accomplishment to recommend him as such. France, formerly a bete noir that birthed a thousand New York Post headlines, has a philo-American centre-right president of Jewish heritage with a wife worth going to war over. Britain, after more than decade of New Labor, is set to elect a bicycle-clipped, user-friendly Tory prime minister who loves to cook and recycle. Russia has rewound the historical tape and tried to see if 19th-century imperialism can't come out better this time. As for the Czech Republic, its current president is a thundering megalomaniac who worships Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, snuggles up to Vladimir Putin, thinks global warming science is a dangerous ideology on par with communism, and sees the European Union, whose presidency he's about to inherit in the natural rotation, as an overextended joke:

[Vaclav Klaus's] anti-Europe credentials stretch back to his failed general election campaign in 2002, when he opposed the Czech Republic’s entry to the EU. As president he refused to give any direction to the Czech electorate during a referendum campaign on the issue, except to say that joining the EU would significantly reduce Czech sovereignty. The vote was 77% in favour of joining.

Klaus has vetoed the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and last week he again called on his party to oppose it.

The Lisbon Treaty, signed in December 2007 and still awaiting ratification, is the latest update of Maastricht would create a non-rotating EU Presidency and a High Representative of Foreign Affairs, who would essentially act as a secretary of state for the entire continent. When he last visited the UK, Klaus openly befriended Declan Ganley, who is known as one of the few Irish neoconservatives and Europe's most outspoken opponent of a United States of Europe.

So the Czechs, who have been done over by every major power with a roving army for centuries, are now in the rare position of being able to determine the course of European politics at the infancy of the age of Obama. That their elected spokesman should be a right isolationist with warm feelings towards revanchist Russia is only the latest sign that history never ends but proceeds like a drunken ironist.

Hey comrade, can you spare a Prius?: Vaclav KlausI didn't say it, Czech President Vaclav Klaus did:

'Communism has been replaced by the threat of an ambitious environmentalism,' Klaus wrote in response to questions from the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce.

[...]

'[Poor countries] will not be able to absorb new technological standards required by the anti-greenhouse religion, their products will have difficulty accessing the developed markets, and as a result the gap between them and the developed world will widen,' he wrote.

'This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the slogans of their protection – similarly to the old Marxists – wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world,' he added.

Actually, Marxists are much closer to anti-Kyoto skeptics of global warming since both think unfettered industrialization is a good thing. But one appreciates the point of turning a push for societal reform into an encompassing, messianic ideology.

That Al Gore has little time for anything else besides chlorofluorocarbons and soggy glaciers is termed "passion" in the American press. In Eastern Europe, it's reason to crank up the Velvet Underground.