Dr. Daniel E Miller

While president of the Czech Republic between 2003 and 2013, Václav Klaus, an outspoken critic of the European Union, employed speeches, interviews, and writings as a means of discrediting the EU in the eyes of Czech citizens.  The author used opinion polls from Eurobarometer and the Public Opinion Research Center (CVVM) of the Czech Academy of Sciences to establish the correlation between Klaus’s popularity and Euroskepticism.  In the early years of Klaus’s presidency, scepticism about the EU among Czechs grew, and between 2006 and 2010, there was a strong correlation between Klaus’s popularity and Czech Euroskepticism.  As Klaus’s popularity waned during his last years in office, Czech confidence in the EU began to rise.  This study not only helps to explain some bases of Czech Euroskepticism, but it also addresses the influence Czech presidents have in shaping public opinion in their country.

Excerpt- The creation of Czechoslovakia, as a result of the First World War, was the culmination of national awakening movements among Czechs and Slovaks that were typical in the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century in the Balkans and East-Central Europe. Few Americans, in the years from 1914 to 1918, knew much about the historical developments of the many ethnic groups between the Baltic and the Black Sea, but most were aware of some of the events related to the establishment of Czechoslovakia, along with other border changes that took place in Europe in the wake of the First World War. Like many small towns of America that had limited concentrations of Czechs, Slovaks, or other immigrants from the Baltics, East-Central Europe, and the Balkans, the inhabitants of the western portion of Northwest Florida knew only some of the sensational aspects of the state’s creation. Their main source of news was the Pensacola Journal, published in Pensacola, the county seat of Escambia County, Northwest Florida’s largest city and the host of a naval base. The Milton Gazette, from the small city of Milton, which lies less than 25 miles to the east of Pensacola and is the county seat of Santa Rosa County, also was a source of news for some.1 Nevertheless, of all the newspapers in the region, the Pensacola Journal was by far the most important. Not only did it have a following in Escambia County but in other parts of Northwest Florida, including Okaloosa County, with its county seat of Crestview and its coastal community of Fort Walton Beach. The Pensacola Journal even had a “Fort Walton Page” that catered specifically to readers in that town. There were other newspapers in the area, but either no copies of them exist, or they contain little or no information about the Czechs and Slovaks.

With the creation of the Czechoslovak First Republic in October 1918, politicians began debating the fate of the great estates the new country had inherited from the Habsburg monarchy, and within six months, the National Assembly enacted a sweeping land reform. With some of the land, the state sponsored colonies—new or expanded agricultural settlements. The announced purpose of the colonization program was to relieve land hunger, which was a genuine concern. Equally important in the minds of many who administered the program and participated in it, however, was altering the ethnic composition of the border areas, where most of the colonies were located.