Twenty years after joining the EU the Czechs do not dream of Europe anymore

As soon as upon a time, within the bleak 12 months of 1985, when Konstantin Chernenko died simply 13 months after Yuri Andropov, and a sure Mikhail Gorbachev turned the top of the USSR, which was then nonetheless a rustic that was speculated to final endlessly, Jiří Dienstbier, some of the inspiring Constitution 77 dissidents within the phenomenally gray Gustáv Husák’s Czechoslovakia, wrote a captivating, extremely utopian essay known as Snění o Evropě (“Dreaming of Europe”). 

The essence of his utopia was a imaginative and prescient of a continent with out two energy blocs, no Warsaw Pact, no NATO, the place all residents would take pleasure in peaceable life in a “widespread European home”: the Czechoslovaks, the Balts, the Yugoslavs hand in hand with the Germans (united, in fact!), the Norwegians, the British; consider it or not, at the moment he even dreamed of the Russians becoming a member of the good European household.

In a magical flip of occasions, it took lower than 5 years for Jiří Dienstbier to change into the overseas minister of Czechoslovakia after the 1989 revolution, which was known as “light” or “velvet” due to its peaceable and civil nature. 

One of the crucial widespread slogans to be seen on the do-it-yourself banners that adorned Czechoslovak squares in these innocently naïve November days was fairly oxymoronic in nature, for it learn “Return to Europe” or “Again to Europe”, which appears to make no sense in a rustic that’s geographically described as Central European.  

However there it was, declaring the ambition to fulfil the utopia of …