Not much sign of success as Czechs find the fruits of democracy sour

`We lack experience of freedom and democracy," says Vaclav Zaoralek, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Czech parliament.

Foreign policy does not have a high reputation or priority in the popular mind, largely, he believes, because it is associated with the twin disasters which put an end to the country's two periods of independence this century: the Munich agreement in 1938 and the communist coup 10 years later which put Czechoslovakia in the Soviet camp throughout the Cold War.

A social democrat, he has been in the position for only a few months, following his party's installation as a minority government, dependent on opposition support to get its programme through. It is a difficult time to assume office. "The biggest problem is the high expectations people had about the change from communism," he explains. "There is real disappointment with privatisation and corruption. There are not many signs of success. We have a recession and low growth to contend with."

It is likely that further industrial restructuring will add to the relatively low numbers of unemployed. Czechoslovakia had the highest proportion of state ownership of all the central and eastern European countries after 1989. Privatisation has happened largely through the banking system, with the former managers selling the businesses to themselves.

This has worked out quite well for smaller companies; but for the large industrial enterprises it has piled up debt in the state-owned banks, amounting to perhaps 30 per cent of their assets. Unless the problem is tackled the government will lack credibility at home and abroad.

The new prime minister, Mr Milos Zeman, is convinced that privatisation as it was conducted over the last five years "was corruption, nothing more". It created an environment "in which the idea that you got something for nothing became the norm", he said.

After the high expectations there is a loss of enthusiasm for politics, which has been dominated by personality quarrels and factionalism, with roots often going back many years into the period of communist rule. Turnout in the recent local government elections was only 20 per cent.

A lot of political energy went into organising the break-up of the federation with Slovakia, which went extraordinarily smoothly. There are many signs of political convergence, now that the neo-liberal conservative government of Vaclav Klaus has left office in Prague and a new reformist bloc has taken over from the nationalist Vladimir Meciar in Bratislava.

Mr Zaoralek wonders whether there will not be a healthier and more equal relationship between the two peoples and states under the wider quasi-federal umbrella of an enlarging European Union. Meciar's defeat is much the most important recent political event in the region, based on a high election turnout and what appears to be definitive rejection of his populist nationalism. It puts Slovakia back on the fast-track route to EU membership and immensely improves relations with neighbouring Hungary, always concerned about the fate of the large Slovak Hungarian minority.

There is some disenchantment with the Union in Prague after a stingingly critical report from the Commission on the lack of progress made in converging towards EU norms.

It cited problems with privatisation; the failure to introduce reforms in public administration providing for senior civil service career paths independent of political clientelism; recent judicial decisions concerning the Roma minority; continued protectionism and slow progress in translating and implementing the 80,000-page volume of the EU's acquis communautaire. Czech media registered shock and wounded pride among political elites accustomed to thinking they are in the front rank of accession candidates.

Seasoned diplomatic observers caution against painting too black a picture, however. It is partly a matter of national psychology. The Czechs are the Scots of central Europe, doers rather than spoofers. Once they turn their minds to a task they have a good record of achievement. The new government is concentrating on getting its budget right before embarking on structural reforms and making up lost ground in the EU accession negotiations.

Although they still dwell much on missed developmental opportunities in the two decades after Russian troops stamped out the Prague Spring of 1968, the country was industrialised and prosperous from the second half of the 19th century under Hapsburg rule.

Arguably, indeed, it was the most developed part of that empire, although this was a period of political conflict between ascendant Czech nationalism and the still dominant German-speaking population. When Czechoslovakia became independent after the first World War it enjoyed a period of prosperity that made it the 10th industrial country in the world.

Strong engineering, porcelain and glassware industries survived the expulsion after the second World War of the Sudeten German-speaking population which had dominated them.

Its great cultural achievements in the inter-war period were, however, precisely the product of a mixture of Czech, German-speaking and Jewish peoples, a diversity destroyed by Nazism and narrowed further by the four decades of Stalinist rule.

The stunningly beautiful city of Prague is a monument to the buoyant period from the 1870s to the 1920s, as well as a reminder of the country's rich medieval and early modern civilisation. (Bohemia was, of course, one of the principal centres of the Reformation, until the reformers were suppressed and Catholicism imposed in the 17th century - a mirror image of the British-imposed Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, in which several prominent Irish Wild Geese took part.)

There is much talk now about stimulating an informed political debate about Europe and foreign policy. Mr Zaoralek sees an urgent need for it. The foreign minister, Mr Jan Kavan, in an interview with Carol Coulter of this newspaper, underlined Ireland's role as a model for the Czech Republic. He mentioned economic development, effective use of structural funds and how to preserve political identity in an integrating EU while escaping from the dominating influences of Britain or of Russia or of Germany in a more multilateral setting.

Ireland's reputation along these lines is not sufficiently realised in the domestic discussion of EU enlargement, which tends to be dominated by assumptions that enlargement is a zero-sum game for agricultural interests and those who benefit from structural funds.

In fact we have a strong trade and services surplus with the Czech Republic, as with Hungary and Poland. Czech and Hungarian diplomats are keen to forge a common position with Ireland on EU institutional reforms. They are also impressed with the Belfast Agreement as a potential model for handling relations between majorities and minorities in the region in a transnational setting.