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Europe Today |
Carte Blanche - Helmut Spudich of the Austrian newspaper der Standard on why Austria must not turn its back on the Czechs.
I am a Czech. Not by passport or by birth, as I was born in Vienna, Austria, of which I have been a citizen for all of my life. But I am Czech in the sense that a large part of Vienna's population is Czech, the Pospischils or the Hawelkas or the Zilks of this city.
Some of my ancestors came from Moravia, just as the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler came from Moravia, or the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. They all came here quite naturally, since this was the capital not only of Austria, but of the rest of the Hapsburg empire.
To say I am a Czech, much in the same spirit as President John F Kennedy forty years ago said, "Ich bin ein Berliner", is prompted by the current hostile climate between Austria and the Czech Republic. It is especially prompted by recent remarks by the former leader of the Freedom Party, Joerg Haider, who questioned the right of the Head of the Supreme Court, Mr Adamovic, to live in this country. Mr Haider's implication was this: If your name is Czech, you need to be questioned about your right to live here.
That is just the tip of the iceberg. The climate has worsened considerably over the past few years because of the nuclear power plant in the Czech town of Temelin, a few miles from the Austrian border. Austrians decided more than two decades ago to stay out of the business of nuclear power production, and since then, the anti nuclear movement has become something of a defining issue for this country, not unlike neutrality after World War II. So it is no surprise that a nuclear plant next to our border makes many nervous.
While all this is understandable, it has recently got totally out of hand. In January the Freedom Party initiated a referendum against the Temelin plant which was signed by some 15 per cent of the voters. And before that we had protests against the power plant which forced a closure of our borders with our Czech neighbours for some days.
All of that dealt a severe blow to Austrian-Czech relations. Mind you, this was the country the Czechs have envied for most of the past fifty years: In 1948, after the communists took over, many Czechs found refuge in Austria. While the Czechs had to put up with communism, they watched with envy Austria's democratic recovery after the war and its growing prosperity.
In 1968, when the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring, almost 200,000 of our neighbours fled to Austria; about 12,000 later became Austrian citizens. And again in 1989, just before the fall of the Soviet Empire, they watched closely as East Germans crossed the border from Hungary into Austria by the hundreds of thousands.
And now this: it's shameful. Austria, the country that after 1989 prided itself on its historic ties with the Czechs and the other countries of central Europe, simply turns its back on them and threatens to keep them out of the European Union because of Temelin, while at the same time Austria is surrounded by other nuclear plants on all sides of her borders.
To be sure, there are other issues, like the forced evacuation of the German speaking population of Czechoslovakia after the war, which by all means would today be considered as "ethnic cleansing". Of course these evacuations were a result of the Nazis' annexation and occupation of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia. But the Benes decrees, which are still part of the Czech Republic's legal system, are an obstacle to the Czechs' integration into the European Union, and they affect not only Austria but also Germany and Hungary.
But that is history, and needs to be sorted out peacefully. Austria is in a position of strength. Out of this comes a responsibility for our Czech neighbours. They need support and guidance, not threats of keeping them permanently locked out of a united Europe. Therefore I think it is time that more Austrians think of their family ancestry.
Many of us are Czech. We ought to say so, and act accordingly.
In Vienna this is Helmut Spudich for Europe Today.
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