Prague, a living refutation of post-liberalism

No 'family values' crusade necessary

The Czech Republic is, famously, one of the most irreligious countries in the entire world. Nearly three-quarters of Czechs do not identify with any specific religious group. This is not a quirk of one particular census or polling question, but rather something much more deep-rooted: in 2016, two-thirds of Czechs reported that they do not believe in God, meaning that their lack of religious affiliation is not merely a matter of disillusionment with or a lack of interest in organised religion; in fact, Czechs did not report especially negative views of religious organisations by regional standards. They are just not religious people. This makes Czechs both outliers within their region — belief in God was generally at around 85-95% in most of the rest of the former Eastern Bloc — and also in the West — in the United States, for instance, a majority of people without any religious affiliation stated that they did believe in God. Unsurprisingly, therefore, religion has in effect played zero part in the country’s recent politics and culture.

When it comes to sex, the country is clearly liberal — indeed, so much so that a number of sociologists have sought to find out why this is. It has been a long time indeed since there was any real taboo against pre-marital sex in this country; probably even longer than in most Western European countries. In the past, the country also became notorious with expats for treating infidelity — amongst both men and, more uniquely, women — rather lightly, though it is not clear how true this is today, given foreign cultural influences.

The same liberality is also extended to nudity more generally, although this is a somewhat more general Continental European predilection. In the ’90s, the country’s first (and at the time, biggest) private television channel, TV Nova, became notorious for broadcasting late-night weather forecasts from nude presenters, both male and female, though this has disappeared as the country became more wealthy. Another amusing example is the (in)famous children’s movie Goat Story — The Old Prague Legends (2008), the most successful Czech animated movie of all time. To an Anglo-American audience, Goat Story seemed bizarre for many reasons, but not least because of the sheer number of lewd jokes a children’s movie made involving sex and/or large-breasted women. The response of the filmmakers to Anglo-American opinion was — in stereotypical Continental European fashion — to complain of the unequal, and supposedly hypocritical, treatment of sex and nudity (which is ‘natural’) and violence (which, in their view, is not) in American film and culture.

Broadly speaking, sex work is tolerated, if not actually accepted. Prostitution, while not visibly rampant, as it is in certain other countries (especially in Asia), is apparently widespread, especially in Prague and in areas convenient for German-speaking sex tourists (i.e., on the border and/or along major roads). In the Czech Republic, prostitution is a legal grey area: prostitution itself is legal, though organised prostitution (e.g., keeping a brothel) is not. The law against keeping a brothel, however, appears to be less rigidly enforced than it is in many countries (including Britain). In a similar vein, the country also quickly became famous for its porn industry in the aftermath of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Although an attempt to fully legalise prostitution failed, there seems to be no general appetite for cracking down on it in the foreseeable future.

The country is somewhat less liberal when it comes to abortion and gay marriage, though the current legal position for both seems to be out of step with public opinion. Abortion is legal up to twelve weeks, which may seem low to British or American readers, but is in fact the same as Germany. Homosexuality was decriminalised in Czechoslovakia in 1962, and the age of consent was equalised in 1990 (eleven years before Britain). Gay marriage, while not legal yet, seems an inevitability, at least if we trust opinion polling. Although a recent gay marriage bill was turned down, a compromise of giving same-sex couples effectively identical rights to married heterosexual couples, but without the word ‘marriage’ attached, will come into force next year.

The employment rate for women, at 72%, is above the EU average of 67%. As in many other former Eastern Bloc countries, gender relations were rapidly modernised under the Communists — albeit in a somewhat distorted way. Women are, in effect, often expected to bear a double burden: first, of full-time work; and second, of housework, as until recently, few men believed they had any duty to share the latter burden, even when the woman works. The divorce rate is also substantially above the EU average.

Drugs? Cannabis products which contain only CBD (but not THC) are not only decriminalised, but entirely legal. You will see more shops advertising cannabis products than in even Amsterdam. Although such shops are especially prevalent in the tourist centre, they can be found across the city. In fact, rather astonishingly, even Prague’s main airport sells cannabis products: you can buy ‘cannabis vodka’ in the duty free, something that I did not see at Amsterdam Schipol (I am not sure how customs would work for these products). Cannabis products containing THC are not yet legal, but personal possession has been decriminalised for nearly fifteen years. Marijuana is cheap and readily available on the black market, primarily grown by the country’s large Vietnamese minority (much like in London, at least prior to the arrival of the Albanians). Medical cannabis has been legal since 2013. Other drugs are not legal, but there are few enforcement operations directly targeting the drugs themselves (rather than the nuisance they can cause); possession below a certain (fairly generous) amount is decriminalised; and purchasing drugs is also decriminalised. Peter Hitchens is aghast.

Czech politics has attracted little international attention. Most educated British people can (at best) probably only name two Czech politicians: Václav Havel and Alexander Dubček. Those who can name a third are probably just as likely to name such figures as Czechoslovakia’s founding father Tomáš Masaryk or Stalinist brute Klement Gottwald as anyone contemporary, such as the previous and current presidents, Miloš Zeman and Petr Pavel, or other political heavyweights like billionaire and ANO party leader Andrej Babiš or incumbent Prime Minister Pietr Fala. This is not merely by dint of the Czech Republic being a small country: even Slovakia has more recognisable contemporary politicians, such as Robert Fico — let alone Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

On the whole, it seems safe to say that Czech politics is centre-right, corporate, and rather boring, conspicuously lacking in any big push to defend ‘Western civilisation’ and ‘the family’ against the corrosive forces of Global Liberalism. As such, the Czech Republic has never been a country that has received much attention from the international Right: attention is instead reserved for countries like ‘Based’ Hungary and ‘Based’ Poland.

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If we were to fully absorb the post-liberal worldview, we would assume that Czech society must be collapsing. The reality? The streets are clean; the country is prosperous; the city is lively, yet basically orderly. The beer is cheap, and the economy has been growing.

Of course, Prague is no Singapore. There are some annoyances for the perfectionists among us. There is, it must be admitted, a certain seediness (if that is even the right word) to parts of the very centre of the city, but this is a seediness that is associated more with overtourism than with genuine degeneracy and/or social disorder: rip-off bars and restaurants, Thai massage parlours, crap nightclubs, strangely empty sweet shops, and stores selling cannabis products and tacky trinkets. This seediness disappears as soon as you venture out of the very centre, suggesting that the biggest threat to the much-vaunted social liberalism of the Czechs is not social liberalism’s real or alleged ‘natural’ consequences, i.e., social disorder — let alone any kind of genuine social conservatism — but something that is rather less ‘natural’; that is to say, the undesirable and basically artificial consumer demand generated by certain groups of badly-behaved tourists, especially from Germany and the United Kingdom — in fact, some Czechs have said as much to me personally.

The Czech police seem to do a good job at dealing with troublemakers while leaving the great majority of people free to do as they please. Some of the most common travel advice online when it comes to the Czech police is ‘don’t be a nuisance’. If you follow this rule, they are apparently likely to turn a blind eye to minor infractions that, at least in their view, harm no-one. Similarly, while you will see beggars and drunks in Prague, their presence in public seems to be conditional on them not causing serious problems for everyone else.

Insofar as there are immigrants — based on linguistic data, the Czech Republic is probably 90-95% Czech (given that there will be some national minorities who have assimilated into the 95% Czech-speaking majority group), with another 1.5% or so Slovak — the biggest non-European groups are the Vietnamese, Mongolians, and Chinese, the first two clearly being a legacy of Communism. You will see very few Arab or African migrants: the only ones I saw were some African men, clearly illegal immigrants who, for whatever reason, had failed to make it further West, dressed up in sailor outfits selling boat tours next to the Charles Bridge.

Unlike in some other cities, where the nice buildings and the flow of wealth can stop quite abruptly once you leave the tourist centre, you can walk in effectively any direction for a mile or more and still find something nice — often architecturally, and certainly in other respects — yet cheap (500ml of beer will usually set you back around £2.20), usually also with generous opening hours. Czech food is acceptable, though not spectacular; it has an unfortunate tendency to send you to sleep due to how heavy it is, especially when combined with the beer you will presumably be drinking.

The sad reality is that Prague shows that what needs to be done is not actually that hard, nor, in fact, is it even that exciting: limit immigration, maintain law and order and basic standards of public behaviour, and keep taxes low and regulations to a minimum. No grand ideological confrontation is strictly necessary — at least before the Left have become deeply rooted in a country, like they have in Britain.

Even the fertility rate, an obsession of the post-liberals, is (by European standards) rather healthy: the Czech Republic’s TFR reached a high of 1.83 in 2021. Although rates have fallen back somewhat in the last few years, TFR remains higher than aggressively pro-natalist Hungary, let alone Poland. This becomes even more impressive when we remember that in the late ’90s and early ’00s, fertility rates were persistently below 1.2.

Politically, the Left has hardly a foothold here. Left-wing parties hold just four seats in the Czech Parliament. This is partly just a matter of formal ideological identification: in Romania, for instance, if we do not count the ‘Social Democrats’ as ‘left-wing’ — despite their name, they (like all the other major parties there) support a flat income tax of 10% and mostly have functionally identical economic policies to right-wing parties — their Parliament arguably has zero seats for left-wing parties. Nonetheless, it is remarkable how much consensus there seems to be on economic matters in this country: in short, they are broadly centre-right, though not libertarian, and rather distrustful of attempts at state-led economic levelling. For a long time, the Czech Republic wholly resisted the evils of progressive taxation. Sadly, in 2020 it fell to the Woke (or, perhaps more accurately, budget constraints); fortunately, rates remain low and the system is still only weakly progressive, with a standard rate of 15% and a higher rate of 23%. Instead, like many other Eastern European countries who adopted a flat tax, converted by American libertarian missionaries in the ’90s, the state relies disproportionately on (seemingly hypothecated) social security contributions and a sales tax.

In Prague, despite the liberalism of the country, there is actually less visible ‘Wokeness’ than in cities like Warsaw and Krakow; and, furthermore, there also seems to be less ‘Wokeness’ bubbling away under the surface, like there is in Budapest, where the state resorted to heavy-handed measures (such as the closure of the Central European University) to suppress it. Although Czechs — in line with their deep-rooted ‘live and let live’ liberalism — care little about homosexuality, making seemingly no effort to suppress gay culture, there are few Pride flags in the city; where they do exist, they seem to usually be advertising gay bars rather than trying to make a broader political statement. By contrast, we might wonder what will happen when Viktor Orbán steps down, or indeed if he (or his successor) is politically defeated — as happened to the hapless Law and Justice Government in Poland. In this sense, the happy political situation in the Czech Republic feels more stable, more sustainable than in such darlings of the Global Right as Hungary and (until recently) Poland.

The comparison with Hungary is perhaps most apt. Czechoslovakia inherited a large proportion of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire’s industrial base when it became independent after the First World War; it thus began the Communist Era as a comparatively wealthy country. Hungary, by contrast, was less advanced, but had a famously liberal Communist regime (‘Goulash Communism’). Through the Velvet Divorce, the Czechs separated from Slovakia, which was (and still is) poorer, easing the burden of fiscal transfers to poorer regions.

As such, both countries began the ’90s as relatively prosperous countries by Eastern Bloc standards. What has happened since is that, while the Czech economy has gone from strength to strength (GDP per capita: $29,801), the Hungarian economy (GDP per capita: $23,319) has performed relatively poorly — by former Eastern Bloc standards — since the fall of Communism. It has already been overtaken by Slovakia, will imminently be overtaken by Poland, and, if things don’t change, will also soon be overtaken by Romania. The Czech Republic also more generally seems like a more pleasant place to live than Hungary. This becomes especially clear once you exit the wealthiest areas of the capital city: unlike in Prague, things start to feel ‘poor’ in Budapest rather quickly once you leave the centre.

It is not my intention here to ‘counter-signal’ Orbán. Far from it: he is a man who we must, for all our criticisms, admire for his ambition and forward-thinking. Nonetheless, looking at Prague, we might also wonder what all of this fervid ideological activity was even for, especially given how potentially unpopular it is compared to core, if unexciting, right-wing policies like ‘limit immigration’ and ‘lower taxes’. That is not to say that we should not fight on ‘cultural’ issues at all, especially in a country like Britain; we should, however, go about it intelligently, not forgetting our core mission. Indeed, we might wonder whether in Eastern Europe specifically, this kind of self-consciously confrontational politics is more likely to backfire, activating certain strains of the Left that might otherwise lie dormant. It can politicise young people in a deeply unhelpful way, as money (and plaudits) from the West inevitably flows in to reward those who ‘speak out’ against the New Big Bad Thing. Reaction can spark counter-reaction: the Civic Platform of old were really not that bad — before Law and Justice started spitting at the Polish youth.

There is a useful comparison that can be made here with the Conservative Party in this country, who (especially from 2019 onwards) repeatedly made headlines for their tough talk and occasionally inflammatory rhetoric, but in fact did little. They were ultimately defeated after alienating people on all sides: losing the Centre with their rhetoric, and the Right with their inaction. Sometimes it is better to do what’s necessary, to ignore what can be ignored, and, more generally, to say less.