Author Archives: Scott MacMillan

About Scott MacMillan

Scott is on hiatus from afoe. An American freelance journalist who lived in Prague for nine years, where he also owned a restaurant. He is now on the run and was last spotted beneath a table at a pub in Dublin. An occassional contributor to Slate, Scott considers himself center-left in America but increasingly center-right in Europe. Writes Scotty Mac.

Welcome to the EU, suckers

Posted on by

NOTE: The first version of this post contained a factual error. I’ve corrected it. The Hungarians and Poles did, in fact, successfully negotiate a transition period for their VAT laws.

One of the big items in the Czech papers yesterday was the fact that most restaurants and bars will raise the price of food on May 1, the day of Czech EU accession, as food gets slotted into the higher 22% value-added-tax category as per Brussels’ demand. On Tuesday, the EU rejected a French proposal to keep food in the 5% category.

I am not among those that think harmonized tax regimes are part of an evil socialist plot to radically redistribute wealth. But Jeez, people, could you not have come up with some other way to phase this in?
Continue reading →

European crony capitalism

Posted on by

A post today on The Final Word, a Prague-based email bulletin put out by a local English-language Czech news digest, got me thinking. Titled “PPF spreads its tentacles,” it’s about the secretive Czech corporate conglomerate PPF and how it uses its media holdings to advance its numerous business interests.

It’s long been the Czech Republic’s dirty little secret that it’s one of the bastions of corruption and crony capitalism in the middle of Europe. After basking in the glow of much of the 1990s as the “star pupil” of economic transition, it took a much deserved fall from grace starting in the late ’90s, with much publicized cases like Ron Lauder’s suit against the Czech Republic over TV Nova giving the little nation plenty of bad press. Vaclav Klaus, ex-premier and now the president, has often been complicit in securing the country’s dubious reputation, if not the very nexus of crony capitalism. Today, far-flung provinces of the empire like Estonia and Slovenia appear clean as a whistle compared to the Czech Republic.

This is all pretty old news. But what strikes me today is how this compares to other European countries.
Continue reading →

Detente with Czech Communists?

Posted on by

I’m mighty flattered that I’ve been promoted to “guest blogger extraordinaire” even though I’ve been silent the whole of this year so far (due mainly to illness). Sorry about that!

Well, here goes.

Take a look at this Czech press review from today, in which Prague daily Lidove Noviny reports that Miroslav Grebenicek, the Communist Party for over a decade, narrowly missed getting ousted from his position. (He was apparently told he could run for European Parliament if he stepped down.) This might sound like small beans to outsiders, and truth be told, viewed by itself, it is. But it’s one small piece of a much largers story…
Continue reading →

Klaus: Grumpy Old Man

Posted on by

Jiri Pehe — once an advisor to Vaclav Havel, now an academic and a go-to man for international journalists seeking smart quotes about Czech politics — once pointed out to me that Czech president Vaclav Klaus is more anti-integration than just about every mainstream politician in Europe with the exception of one branch of the British Conservative Party. The only other guy who might approach him is Hungary’s nationalist noisemaker Viktor Orban, whose star was fading last I checked.

Yesterday’s Czech papers were awash with Klaus’s comment that he’d prefer to have no European constitution at all. He’s thus the first European head of state (but oddly, not an EU head of state) that has rejected the constitution. EuroSavant hits the nail on the head with this sentence: “I get the picture here of old grandpa over there sounding off in the corner, right when the rest of the family has gotten together to try to make a decision – he’s got some mighty strange views, and he’s sure to express them in his cranky way, but as long as you are polite and say ‘Yes, grandpa’ you can otherwise pretty much ignore him.” (Pragueblog expressed similar sentiments recently: The Czechs are dealing with Klaus the same way they dealt with the Communists. That is, let him have his special title and then ignore him.) But…
Continue reading →

Stability Pact

Posted on by

First of all, let me say I’m flattered to be invited to guest-blog on Fistful of Euros, which I’ve long thought was the coolest name of any blog ever.

I’d hazard a guess at two big reasons nobody has much to say about the security pact unraveling: First, there’s simply not that much to say at this moment beyond the bare facts of the case (although neither The Economist nor US bloggers Daniel Drezdner and Atrios have really captured the outrage that European editorialists have spewed at Paris and Berlin over this). The message from Germany and France is pretty clear: Do as we say, not as we do. End of story.

Second, this is a pretty difficult topic for a layperson (such as myself) to get his head around. Hence the usage of compact but vague phrases like “Europe Rips Up the Rulebook,” the headline given my recent press review on Slate covering this topic. (Feel free to read that if you want a review of the basic facts of the case from a non-economists’ perspective, plus a dose of what the European papers have said about the topic; but naturally I can’t compete with The Economist‘s coverage.)

So they tore up the rulebook. Seems a little back-to-basics is in order here: What was the rulebook for anyway? And what does this mean for the future of the euro?
Continue reading →