The Czechs and the second world war. Who’s the madman

Czech leaders wrangle about history, politics - and sanity

BEING a big man in a small country is bad enough. But President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic is also fed up with the constraints of his largely symbolic office, and with living in the shadow of his celebrity predecessor, Vaclav Havel. In the past couple of weeks he has called for the scrapping of the European Union and its replacement by a free-trade block called the Organisation of European States. He has denounced multiculturalism as a breeding ground for terrorism. And he has declared that the country's new prime minister, Jiri Paroubek, “has taken leave of his senses”.

This last claim is harsh even by Mr Klaus's robust standards. The worst that had previously been said of Mr Paroubek, a former deputy mayor of Prague, was that he seemed an undistinguished candidate for the job. But that now seems unfair. He has put a new zing into his country's foreign relations - to Mr Klaus's intense, if unjustified, annoyance. Recently, the prime minister has addressed one of the big frozen questions of central Europe: the expulsion after the second world war of 3m-plus Germans and Hungarians from the former Czechoslovakia.

Czechs and Slovaks are twitchy about this. It may have been brutal and unfair, they argue, but it was necessary. Many of the Germans had supported Hitler, and thus contributed to the destruction of the pre-war Czechoslovak state. The issue was parked by a joint Czech-German declaration in 1997, in which the two countries agreed to disagree about this aspect of their history. But Mr Paroubek now says that he wants his country to pay at least symbolic compensation to the surviving anti-Nazi Germans - Catholics, trade unionists and the like - who were deported despite having resisted Hitler and defended democracy.

That may have been commendably fair-minded and thoughtful, but it annoyed many people. An outfit for surviving expellees said it was a bid to divide them (they want compensation for all Germans, not just good ones). Slovakia said it wanted nothing to do with the scheme. And Mr Klaus termed the move “exceptionally dangerous”. When Mr Paroubek noted that the president was in “peculiar company”, by allying with revanchist Germans, Mr Klaus said he had gone mad.

Reconciliation is in fashion across central Europe. Poland has just buried a thorny dispute with Ukraine over bloody conflicts in both world wars. A top Slovak politician, Frantisek Miklosko, has made a personal apology to Hungarians for their post-war deportation and repression.

Mr Klaus loathes all this, seeing it as the kind of elitist mushiness that was a trademark of his predecessor. In a recent speech on the anniversary of the war's end, he criticised both the desire to “rewrite history” and the failure “to distinguish between culprits and victims”. Many Czechs, who like Mr Klaus's confident, brainy approach to the national interest, will agree. But it is the modest-seeming Mr Paroubek who is running the country, and he is making friends too.