Companies were rushing to meet new protocol, government was rushing to find new suits for the photo-opts, and citizens were rushing to figure out whether or not they supported the move. Now, a full year after E-day, I decided to pin these Czechs down and force them to form an opinion once and for all. That’s when being an English teacher comes in handy. Sure, you can talk to your Czech friends, but in an English lesson you’re the boss, and you’ve got an hour and a half of your students’ undivided attention. I resolved to keep my questions simple and vague so as to get the most uncensored views. Unfortunately, given ten minutes or ten hours, the answer never seems to satisfy.

Me: “How do you feel about the EU?”
Jana*: “Well, there are any problems with agriculture and a limits they put on us.”
Jan: “The politicians don’t really give us many informations.”
Pavel: “They were worried much Czech people will move to the West, but any people who wanted to do this made it before the EU.”

Basically, what I gathered from the answers to my first question is that Czech people don’t feel much when it comes to the European Union. A recent poll says that 25% of Czechs consider themselves to be Eurooptimists, 54.5% consider themselves to be Eurorealists, and 20.5% see themselves as Euroskeptics. To put that into perspective, 100% of my students called themselves Eurorealists, but as you can see from their responses they’re more like Euroneutralists. Clearly, though, we had more than this four-line dialogue. And you’ll have to trust me when I say that none of them argued with the other; they just went back and forth presenting pro-EU, anti-EU, and who-cares-EU arguments without getting passionate about anything, and, of course, without passing any broad judgment.

Me: “What about the constitution referendum?”
Pavel: “How?”
Jana: “The constitution. My boyfriend has a book about this big [holds thumb and index finger to imitate thickness of book] that talk about constitution. But it’s in legal Czech. I try to read it, couldn’t understand at all.”
Jan: “I don’t know anything about it.”
Me: “Are you going to vote?”
Pavel: “Yes.”
Jan: “Yes. But I don’t know how I’ll vote.”
Jana: “Yes. I think I’ll probably vote no. Or maybe yes.”

As far as voter apathy goes, my students were incredibly ahead of the general population; that same poll claims only 20% of voters plan on casting ballots. But it seems that those conscientious citizens will be grossly uninformed about the actual issues involved. The referendum here in the Czech Republic doesn’t have a date set yet, but will likely happen sometime in 2006. Even though that’s miles away, with the current political crisis having been dragging its feet for a good three months and with no end in sight, everyone’s kind of got their minds on other things, and will continue to for a while. Ask around: you too will find that no one really knows what’s up.

I did extract one intuitive statement from a student, “Honza”, when I posed a question about Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria’s probable accession: “You know, lots of people have tried to do the same thing – Alexander the Big, Hitler. They all failed.” Hmm...

*Names have been changed to ensure privacy.