Dubbed “Eurosceptics,” two national leaders — Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic and Lech Kaczynski of Poland — refused to bow the knee to the European Union. Despite the efforts of organizations such as Open Europe to disseminate accurate information about the true character the EU will assume under the Lisbon Treaty, the pressure has been mounting on the remaining ‘holdouts.’

The situation was only made worse by the vote in Ireland in favor of the treaty. Although obviously not all the Irish were duped by the Eurocrats (according to one report, “The main reason for voting against the treaty in the October referendum was fears over the loss of Irish identity (30%) and a lack of trust in politicians (20%)”), the pressure was finally too much for Kaczynski, and he signed the treaty on October 10.

And then there was one: Vaclav Klaus.

An article at Guardian.co.uk makes it clear that Kaczynski’s decision was motivated by personal political concerns:

Regarding President Kaczynski's unexpected decision, perhaps taking a look at the election calendar in Poland can shed some light on it. In October 2010, Kaczynski is expected to run for another term as president, and his most likely rival will be the incumbent prime minister Donald Tusk, who has been in office since 2007, when his party defeated the Kaczynski brothers' Law and Justice party (PiS). As every single poll gives Tusk a vast advantage over Kaczynski, the latter has to convince the voters that he is a politician of the centre, and not of the extremes. That, given his past record, will not be an easy task. Still, using Lisbon for promoting a friendlier, pro-European image, as advised by his spin doctors, obviously increases the president's chances of re-election.

A huge majority of the Poles perceives the president's opposition to Lisbon as yet another sign of his aversion to the European Union and its federal ambitions. If Kaczynski followed the steps of Klaus, and Poland was subjected to the same amount of pressure that had been exerted on Ireland prior to 2 October, the overwhelmingly pro-European Poles would be unlikely to provide him with another five-year term. The Polish far right's recent disappearance from mainstream politics allows both the president and his party to shift safely towards the centre, now that law and justice's hegemony on the right is unchallenged.

For many Poles, the EU has made it easy to pursue work outside their country; according to a study in 2006, they were among the top five immigrant groups in Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia, Sweden, Denmark, and Cyprus. In Germany and the United Kingdom, Polish nationals made up the largest immigrant group, at 152,773 and 59,771 individuals, respectively. For many Poles, support for the EU is about jobs, and in the midst of a global economic meltdown, that’s a hard thing for a politician to ignore.

The article at the Guardian paints a very different picture of Vaclav Klaus:

Klaus, on the other hand, plays the same game from an utterly different position. As he has already been twice elected president by parliament, Klaus's career will die a natural death in 2013 if he does not find a way to reinvent his role on the Czech political scene. The centre-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS), which he founded, seems reluctant to endorse its former leader's ideas, and it is very unlikely that Klaus would step into any important political office after he ends his second presidential mandate. Becoming a widely recognised martyr of the Lisbon treaty would surely help Klaus reposition himself in politics, launch a Eurosceptic party, or perhaps even head some new pan-European movement.

Contrary to his own party's position, Klaus had steered six ODS senators to file a complaint against the Lisbon treaty with the Czech constitutional court. This move indisputably derailed the treaty's ratification for at least a few weeks, if not months, but the Czech president knows that the court's decision will presumably affirm the treaty's legality.

Today's [October 13] emergency session of the Czech cabinet is seen by many as the last resort to overcoming the power crisis. If the president is not persuaded finally to sign the treaty, the government may reach for more decisive and spectacular measures, including a senate lawsuit against president Klaus for conduct against the constitutional order.

In anticipation of the court's verdict, Klaus has set out his conditions to Brussels. Not only that he wants to obtain exemptions on the EU's charter of fundamental rights for his country, just as Poland and the UK previously did, but he also demands that a few sentences which, in his opinion, will secure the Czech Republic against eventual lawsuits from the descendants of the Carpathian Germans, expelled from the country after the second world war, be added to the very same charter. Needless to say, if these requests are followed, the whole ratification process will probably have to be relaunched in all 27 member states.

Thus one man is proving that resistance to the Internationalists is not in vain; if the effort to force the whole ratification process to restart is successful, perhaps a few more Europeans will find the will to resist.

Statesmen are always a pretty rare breed, and this may be even more true among the European nations than one finds in the United States. The rise of the Eurocrats, men and women who are thoroughly ‘postnational’ in their view of the world — that is, who believe that the received heritage of a Europe divided into states of distinct peoples, languages, and cultures is an embarrassment which must be overcome — signals what may be the extinction of the ‘old world’ statesman.

Half a century ago, Robert Welch declared in the Blue Book regarding Western Europe: “It is either dying before our eyes, or is already dead. For the vigor of its muscles and the strength of its whole body have been sapped beyond recovery by the cancer of collectivism.” Time may prove the validity of this observation and expanding its scope: the end of the division between Eastern and Western Europe simply accelerated the trend, and freed from the chains of a tyranny held in place by overt oppression, there have been many volunteers among the ruling elites to fashion new chains forged of panels, regulations and governing bodies. It is the phenomena which the late Samuel Francis named “Anarcho-Tyranny” and which he described in its American particular details as follows:

What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny — the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.

As the EU’s power grows, the danger of a universally imposed Anarcho-Tyranny across the continent grows. But the fight isn’t over yet.

Rt. Rev. James Heiser has served as Pastor of Salem Lutheran Church in Malone, Texas, while maintaining his responsibilities as publisher of Repristination Press, which he established in 1993 to publish academic and popular theological books to serve the Lutheran Church.  Heiser has also served since 2005 as the Dean of Missions for The Augustana Ministerium and in 2006 was called to serve as Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Diocese of North America (ELDoNA). An advocate of manned space exploration, Heiser serves on the Steering Committee of the Mars Society. His publications include two books; The Office of the Ministry in N. Hunnius' Epitome Credendorum (1996) and A Shining City on a Higher Hill: Christianity and the Next New World (2006), as well as dozens of journal articles and book reviews.

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DDW said:

	I wonder If this is just some sort of tap dance and, if so, what is it distracting our attention from?
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October 15, 2009
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Cazie said:

	... Good for Klaus + Kaczynski..the only hold-outs on everyones march to one world order. The author is correct- the fight isn't over! The excessively rich and powerful never have enough, and feel they are above us all and should decide all matters. True evil.
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October 16, 2009
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