'Democracy building' and building nuclear power plants are, in the Czech context, incompatible ambitions.


"The state can wait: I have roads and nuclear reactors to reconstruct."

Erik Best’s withering comments this week on the calibre of U.S. diplomats, and their failure to temper America’s efforts to remodel the world in its own, bellicose image, are most welcome. See 'Obama's soap-opera ambassadors'.

“Without a familiarity with the language, country or region”, he writes, “[US ambassadors] are much less likely to object when the State Dept., CIA and various NGOs do their democracy thing and bring the world to the edge of another war.”

Judging by recent U.S. diplomatic activity in the Czech Republic, Best’s assessment of the quality of his country’s ambassadors, and their ability to provide good counsel to the folks back home, is a fair one.

Perhaps the best example of the ineptitude of Washington towards Prague is its pursuit of mutually exclusive objectives: Washington wants to ‘build democracy’ here, and to build new nuclear power stations as well, with a notable lack of success in either.


‘Building democracy’ with the help of Andrej Babis...

U.S. diplomatic mishandling of initiatives to fight corruption is an example of how ‘doing the democracy thing’ is backfiring, at least in the Czech Republic.

When the Polish politician, Radek Sikorski, spoke of the false sense of security Poland gains from its special relationship with the U.S. (“We’ll think that everything is super, because we gave the Americans a blow job”, were his exact words), he was expressing his frustration at America's failure to accommodate the interests of Poland.

How many Czechs feel the same frustration as Sikorski? How many have been lured into a false sense of security by the special relationship they enjoy with the U.S. embassy in Prague? You can find such people in the Czech anti-corruption industry. Take the most prominent initiative of them all, ‘Reconstruction of the State’.

This NGO, which sought to persuade politicians to adopt nine anti-corruption laws, relied upon the backing of the former U.S. ambassador to Prague, Norman Eisen. The new ambassador has apparently now dropped 'Reconstruction', as another failing initiative co-opted and then made obsolete by the very people it was meant to marginalise.

Recall how ‘Reconstruction’ faltered. Best again: “There can be no denying that the initiative was a significant factor in the meteoric rise in politics of Andrej Babis. He threw his full weight behind it and used it routinely as a base to criticize the existing parliamentary parties.”

The campaign was hi-jacked by Babis, who used it to legitimise himself before an election. Once in power, his enthusiasm for the campaign evaporated -and the credit of 'Reconstruction' along with it. Why did the U.S. ambassador allow the young Czechs running ‘Reconstruction’ to be sucked into Babis’ lethal slipstream, there to be asphyxiated? Surely, he must have known that Babis would make useful idiots of them all? Or perhaps he thought Babis' triumph over the parliamentary system of government is progress?

The young professional NGO-ites who led ‘Reconstruction’ are living proof of the need to remain alert to how the U.S. is ‘building democracy’ here, in order to avoid making the same mistakes again.


...and ruining democracy with help from Rosatom.

The contradictions of U.S. policy towards Prague are no more obvious than in Washington’s ambitions to fight corruption and at the same time win a contract to build nuclear power stations here.

The Czech energy establishment is the most corrupt, and the most incestuous, part of the political economy of this country. Power over the sector is concentrated in the hands of a handful of people, most of them politicians. How many multimillionaires has the Czech energy sector spawned over the last ten years? And how many of them are former politicians?

If Washington’s purpose is to 'build democracy' and fight corruption, why does it encourage the Czech government and industry to embark upon a project that will cost billions of dollars in public subsidies, extracted from the pockets of Czech households? Surely it understands that a part of those billions will be diverted into the offshore bank accounts of Czech politicians and their business partners?

U.S. support of the Czech desire to build more reactors undermines its democracy building efforts in Prague. It is likely to be a lost cause as well. Even though there is no sensible hope of Westinghouse winning a nuclear reactor contract from the Czechs, Washington persists in its policy of urging Prague to build more power stations. This is as misguided as a besotted lover arousing feelings of sexual desire in a woman who refuses even to shake his hand.

Imagine the American reaction if ever the Czechs were to follow Hungary’s example, and to choose Rosatom over Westinghouse (which is half-owned by the Japanese Toshiba, which wants out of the nuclear business altogether) without a tender. The Americans, even though they themselves have spent years feeding the Czech desire for more reactors, would turn their backs on this country, just as they did in 1946 after Jan Masaryk applauded a Soviet minister in Paris who had described the U.S. offer of economic aid to Czechoslovakia as ‘economic enslavement’.

In short, Washington should decide what it wants more from the Czechs: good governance or nuclear reactors. If it is serious about good governance, it should encourage Prague to give up its plans to build more nuclear power plants and persuade it to reduce the nuclear concentration of its generation fleet.

If Washington, on the other hand, is serious about competing effectively with Russia's imperial ambitions in the field of civil nuclear energy, it should put 'democracy building' programs aside, and compete. To attempt both is to fail at both.