Via Prague

Czechs' new prosperity, America's new ... maturity?

It´s a great time to be Czech. So many times I´ve heard that from friends and students here in the Golden City.

You look around and find examples of this renewed national pride everywhere. The crown daily sets new records against the dollar and euro; all over Prague new shopping centers and hotels and houses are springing up, fueled by waves of foreign investment. In a country that for so long languished under a Communist regime, people are buying new cars, mobiles, laptops, jet-setting abroad.

'It's a different world!' one student, František said ecstatically, as we zipped around in his brand new black Skoda.

Or a reversal of fortune.

Take one middle-aged American woman I met outside a market near my flat. She came to Prague a decade ago after selling out her interest in a business in the States. She came over here with a $50,000 a year income, which in those days made for an outright princely lifestyle in Prague. These days, she's looking for work teaching English.

'I have to,' she sighs. 'The damn dollar has dropped nearly 50 percent since I've been here.'

So much for early retirement.

My friends and students often commiserate with me over my own homeland. Four years ago when I arrived the dollar held a strong 25-1 exchange rate. So if you had $100, that was 2,500 crowns. Even now 2,500 crowns can last you more than a few days, that would be eating out every meal at decent restaurants and going to the cinema and pubs besides. Now the exchange is 15 to 1 and falling. And of course, as I've written before, there's been the endless war, and the seemingly biblical wave of disasters – some natural, e.g. Katrina, others not-so-natural, the credit crisis, the horrific foreclosures, that have rattled Czechs' historical admiration for Americans.

I can't help but think sometimes of the American expatriates of the 1920s, who were sitting in cafes in Paris when news of the stock market crash came over the wires. Fitzgerald, in 'My Lost City,' captures some of the feeling of unreality:

We were somewhere in North Africa when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert.

"What was that?"

"Did you hear it?"

"It was nothing."

"Do you think we ought to go home and see?"

"No, it was nothing."

I've often had those kinds of feelings. Each day I nervously watch as the exchange rate drops, or a bomb blasts in Iraq, another flood in the Midwest, but there's also a sense of irony: Growing up, I was always accustomed to reading in the news the bad things happened to other countries. You feel a sense of bewilderment, a defensiveness, and feel it in other Americans living abroad.

With this year's presidential campaign, particularly the battle between Hillary and Obama, many of us have picked up a little second wind. It's like a fair breeze coming in through the window on an endlessly scorching summer afternoon. The embassies are looking to have a record turnout in November, a surprise considering that most expats traditionally have affected such a superior contempt for their home country. This year they actually care.

Czechs have also watched with keen interest. Here politics are still a somewhat corrupt, chauvenistic affair, and, another downside of the country, is that it's mostly homogeneous and a bit xenophobic. So the prospect of a woman or a black president has been as intriguing here as it has been around the world.

'So what will happen to Hillary?' asked one of my female students, Jitka, after the New York senator bowed out. 'Can she be vice president?'

'It's possible,' I said.

It felt good to say that, watching my students' eyes roam with a peculiar wonder, even envy. It would never happen in Czech Republic, they say.

They also inquire about McCain, but here, as elsewhere, people have long since wearied of Bush (here Czechs are against his proposed missile defense system for Central Europe). They mostly view McCain as Bush the older and whiter-haired sequel.

'James,' says a pub acquaintance, a man from Nigeria who lives in Prague. 'James, if America elects Obama all of Africa will have a new esteem for America. It will show it truly is the land where you can be anything.'

Many others here feel the same way. Certainly one must be realistic. An Obama (or McCain) presidency doesn't really guarantee anything – unless America's one true gift, it's ability to produce a great leader when it needs one (Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in the Great Depression and Second World War, for example) hasn't entirely vanished. In those hard times, the country came out of the hard times stronger and more mature, and more free. We've even survived worse presidents.

At any rate, we've often had these discussions, in pubs, in the classrooms, about Czech life and American life. Sometimes the conversations are testy, less so now than a few years ago when Europe's wounds over the Bush Admistrations hard-line policies were still fresh. These days hardly anyone even mentions the war or Bush anymore. Everybody's tired of them both.

And most Czechs, and other Europeans I talk to, are actually more excited about matters Europe. 'We have a saying,' another acquaintence says. 'When America sneezes, Europe catches a cold.' That has always been the case, regarding the markets. Nowadays, with the euro standing firm against the dollar, and the European Bank now beginning to chafe under and openly critcize the Federal Reserve, if anything it soon could be the other way around. America may in the long run need this revitalized, hard-charging Europe more than Europe needs a overspent, war-weary America.

But I don't think most Europeans want it to be that way. They just see a chance in Obama to re-engage with the side of America they like, the open, anything-is-possible America, not the headstrong, arrogant America of the past few years.

'I don't know if it's possible for America to be what it once was,' my friend Lenka, who has relatives in San Francisco, told me the other night. 'Now there is too much competition, from Europe, from India and China.'

She may have a point. Where for so long, America towered over the world like a colossus, and dictated policy, it now must learn to share power with other nations, listen to divergent cultures and points of view and arrive at some kind of new consensus. So perhaps that is where an Obama presidency comes in, and where America stands a chance at best defining its new role, and arriving not only at a new prosperity, but also at a new maturity.

That's not such a bad thing. I think of that American woman I met outside the market, the one who was forced to go back to work because the dollar's decline has gobbled up her nest egg.
'Actually it's not so bad,' she says. 'When I had money, I just spent it. At least with teaching, I'm getting out more, meeting new people.'