The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the EU – Plzeň, Jiří David’s sculpture Entropa in Techmania Science Centre

Fact of the Czech figure „The memorial of cutting the barbed wires of the Iron Curtain”

Part of the „Back to Europe together” topic

Czechs have quickly become accustomed to many of the benefits of EU membership. The Czech Republic’s accession to the Schengen area in 2007, and the resulting removal of border controls, was a major factor in this. Rich financial support programmes from the common European budget have helped modernise a number of economic sectors, and as a result the face of Czech, Moravian and Silesian towns and villages has gradually changed for the better. Universities have also gradually become involved in Europe-wide exchanges of students and teachers through the Erasmus programme, and this form of university communication is intensifying.

However, under the impact of the EU institutions’ difficulties in dealing with the economic, migration and environmental crises of the 21st century, critical voices against the allegedly excessive and incompetent Brussels bureaucracy have intensified in the last decade, and this criticism has been reinforced, among other things, by the Eurosceptic and increasingly nationalistic stance of the political authority of the 1990s, former Prime Minister and President Václav Klaus. The Czechs have a very ambivalent attitude towards the European integration project, which is most evident today in the fact that the political representation and Czech society keep postponing the fulfilment of the commitment made at the time of accession to the EU to introduce a single European currency.

A satirical image of this contradictory attitude of the Czechs towards Europe and their European neighbours is depicted in a sculpture by Jiří David, which was exhibited in Brussels on the occasion of the Czech Republic’s first EU Presidency in 2009. The sculpture, entitled Entropa, depicted Europe as an unfinished jigsaw puzzle made up of pieces – the member states. Each piece represented an EU country and was depicted according to the stereotypes that Czechs have of their neighbours. Entropa has provoked a storm of enthusiastic, critical and offended reactions and is now on display in Pilsen, the European Capital of Culture for 2015.