Leave the Czechs alone

Should the Czech Republic be punished if President Vaclav Klaus continues to stall in signing the ratification treaty? This is the question aired by Tony Barber in his renowned Brussels blog for the Financial Times, referring to “loose talk” in the corridors of the Union that the Czechs be “denied a seat in the next European Commission.” This, as Barber points out, would only be fuel for the Czech leader who has described the EU as “the Soviet Union reinvented.” With his parliament having approved the treaty, Klaus is more and more isolated, explains Barber. There are also, he reminds readers, the “sobering lesson” of 2000, when Austria formed a coalition government with Jorg Haider’s far-right freedom party, during which the EU’s other member-states downgraded relations and froze contacts with Austrian ministers. “But it ended up producing the opposite effect to that intended by making a martyr of the Austrian government and by stiffening the patriotic pride of the Austrian people”. “The EU,” he writes, “is an organisation whose first instinct is to do things by forging a consensus, not by crushing dissent.”