Name? Petr Fiala
Westphalian identity? Czech
Age? 58
Why is he in the news? Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala just hosted 44 heads of European governments in Prague for the inaugural meeting of the European Political Community (ECP). The original idea for this format comes from French President Emmanuel Macron. He described the aim as forging a common strategy to confront Europe’s challenges. “Up until now, that did not really exist and could lead to divisions,”, divisions like the ones between Armenia and Azerbaijan or Turkey and Greece … we assume.
Why do we care? We have been trying to understand this new community. Nothing concrete has come out of this meeting. It remains unclear what the EPC’s core rationale, the community’s final membership, its relationship with the EU, how it should make decisions and even whether it should have a budget of its own. Given the countries involved in this project, it seems unlikely that there will be any concrete agreements coming out of this community any time soon.
Why should you care? We honestly could not think of a single reason why anyone would care. So, you should care 0/10. In German one would say “Außer Spesen nichts gewesen” – Nothing but expenses resulted from this (for Petr Fiala in this case). We thought our readers should take away at least something interesting here …
Who else cares? Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko because they were the only ones not invited. But do they really care?
Any further comments? What could the ECP do except give publicity to Petr Fiala? For economic and political cooperation there is the EU, for Human Rights there is the Council of Europe, for security and cooperation in Europe there is the OSCE, for aviation there is Eurocontrol, for fighting crime there is the Europol and the list goes on. There is just not much room left for yet another organisation within Europe…
