Ethics Newsline®

Judging from the crowds swirling through Prague Castle last month, tourism is booming in the Czech Republic. Golden Lane, whose tiny sixteenth-century houses abutting the castle wall would have astonished Walt Disney, is so popular you pay extra now to get in. Down in Old Town Square, crowds were elbow to elbow among Easter week hawkers of pasties, porcelains, and painted eggs.

Prague no doubt owes some of this popularity to the Czech Republic’s entrance into the European Union in 2004. The move from second-world status into equal partnership with its Western European neighbors gives extra comfort to skittish travelers. So Czechs should be fans of the EU, eager to ratify its proposed constitution, right?

Until last week, it might have seemed so. Then, in a morality play on how one person’s ethical fumbling can change the world, the shoe dropped. Prime Minister Stanislav Gross — handsome, youthful, canny, and the nation’s most popular politician when he came to office last summer — offered his resignation amid a drumbeat of corruption charges. With him would go the nation’s most visible supporter of the EU constitution. Left in power would be his political opponent, President Vaclav Klaus. Alone among the 25 EU heads of state, Mr. Klaus is an implacable and determined foe of the constitution who, given the prime minister’s distraction in recent months, has argued almost unopposed in his own nation.

Leave aside, for the moment, the case for and against that 332-page document — arguments formidably joined last week as France’s pro-constitution President Jacque Chirac strode onto television to gin up the yeas for his country’s May 29 referendum on the EU constitution. Prague’s morality play has a different plot, showing the way that an issue of global importance may be determined by one man’s inattention to ethical details.

Those details began emerging on January 17, when a Czech newspaper said that the amount Mr. Gross paid, in cash, in 1999 for an upscale apartment was more than he had earned throughout his entire career. Questions then arose about his wife’s business dealings with a woman who owned a building that housed a brothel. The ensuing scandal — which the English-language Prague Post says is “almost universally regarded as ‘the murk’” — probably could have been contained by a rapid and convincing rejoinder from the prime minister. Unfortunately, he tried serial explanations as to the source of his cash, none of them convincing. While his foes admit that nothing illegal has been proved against him, the moral murkiness may have finally forced him from office.

Such murk is not new to Prague, as Czechs sadly admit. Castle guides regale tourists with historical tales of intrigue, bribes, and deaths by tossing top leaders from high windows or from the Charles Bridge. More recently, the Communist era only deepened the corruption, says Jiřina Novßkovß, chair of an international legal organization, the CEEL Institute, and head of a small opposition party. Over tea last month at the Palace Hotel, she recalled that living under Communism without giving or taking bribes was actually possible, but only if you were content with the most minimal standards. If you wanted to improve in any way — through travel, better housing, or a better-than-average education for your children — corruption was your only recourse.

With the election of playwright Vaclav Havel to the presidency following the student uprisings in 1989, one of the world’s most visible moral leaders came to power. Havel did what he could to diminish corruption, aided by public disgust with the Communists and a growing realization that enjoying Western standards meant engaging Western values. The change hasn’t been easy. Prague hoteliers still warn you to determine the price of taxi rides in advance, lest cabbies lead you on a merry chase. But the pall of corruption, so palpable in pre-1989 Russia and its satellites, does seem to be lifting.

That it didn’t lift Mr. Gross is unfortunate. He may be innocent of wrongdoing. But in that fact lies one of the great lessons of this morality play, which is that public life requires the avoidance not only of wrongdoing but of the appearance of wrongdoing. Suppose France votes for the constitution. Suppose the Czechs then raise the dissenting voice that sends the document back to the drawing boards for a few more years. Will the constitutional moment pass? Will more doubts begin to surface? Will the result be a European Union without a constitution, scuttling one of the world’s most ambitious experiments in transnational unity? Will historians trace that failure to a decision in 1999 by a young Czech who never dreamed that failing to avoid the appearance of wrongdoing could affect the course of history?

That may be a long-shot scenario, but that’s the point. The chain of character gets welded link by link, with each as important as the others. Moral murk corrodes that chain wherever it’s weakest — a lesson worth noting these days not only in Prague but in Washington, London, and the rest of the world’s capitals.

©2005 Institute for Global Ethics