Western Ruritania says no to Czechia

Last Thursday and Friday the world was treated to such Ruritanian high campness that it could have be forgiven for assuming that the Eurovision final had already begun. Alas, no, I refer to the seemingly slick and well funded PR campaign outlining the case to change the name of the Czech Republic to “the shorter, snappier Czechia” - the campaign to change the "official short form" of the country's name.
Gullible international news media outlets scrambled to interview Talking Heads from an organisation called “Go Czechia” that had made themselves available to describe “the desperate need to re-brand the Czech Republic” and end “the confusion” caused by forcing the happy adjective “Czech” into an uncomfortable and confusing noun. In the UK, news programmes desperate for an alternative to the launch of the “Brexit Poll Campaign” quickly pushed the item to the “quirky, let’s raise a smile slot” at the end of each bulletin. 

Social Media outlets both inside and outside the proposed “Czechia” lit up with discussions ranging in tone from banal to outrage. Some were confused with the timing, others not. Some mentioned previous attempts to change the name to Czechia beginning in 1993 or was it 1997 or even as late as 2007. Some had no particular preference for Czechia or the over long Czech Republic with or without the definite article. Others, including former presidential candidate, minister and “Prince”, Karel Schwarzenburg, proposed Bohemia as an alternative. Some acknowledged that this new stage in the ongoing and often confused discussion about identity has been going on for centuries. Most did not.

That the term “Czechia” is largely absent from most historical analyses of the province known as Bohemia for most of its history as a polity, is one of the many things covered only partially by the Go Czechia PR handout and website. On Friday, no media outlets took the time to read or question this admittedly long and therefore superficially credible list of “myths and facts about the short name of the Czech Republic” provided by and equally new “Czechia Initiative”.

This introduced an element of shame and laziness to those organisations since it takes very little time to notice the partial, loaded and misleading responses to the notions listed “myths” in the PR puff. Alarm bells begin ringing with “Fact 1” but they have melted by "Fact 2" which quotes that “English is very flexible and it will adopt Czechia in a similar way it accepted short country names for other countries recently introduced by, for example, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Myanmar and Croatia”. That these names are not very positive examples to support the to “the shorter, snappier Czechia” is another aspect of the very partial Czechia Initiative.

By the time the very notional reader reaches the last "Fact 16", alarm bells have rung, melted and turned cold. In a chilling, linguistically sloppy (designated here by the note ‘sic’) and totalitarian narrative, "Fact 16" states that, instead of an informed discussion or even a public vote:

 “The decision about(sic) the name “Czechia” has been made by those who are qualified by the law (sic) to make it. November 2014 (sic) statement of the Terminological (sic) Committee of the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadaster (sic) states: “According to the article 3 of Act 1994/200 on Land Surveying, the standardization of names of settlement and non-settlement units is a land surveying activity (sic) in public (sic) interest and its results and recommendations should be followed by national and local state institutions. The position of the Terminological (sic) Committee of the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadaster (sic), an advisory authority of the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadaster (sic) for the codification of country names, on the use of the name Česko and its foreign language variants (Czechia, Tschechien, Tchéquie, Chequia…) is positive (sic). This position on the use of the one-word name Česko and its equivalents in foreign languages has not changed since 1993 (sic). The experts (unidentified) unequivocally recommended the use of “Czechia” in English and its variants in other language (sic) (Tschechien, Tchéquie, Chequia etc.). This is not an opinion but the outcome of the process of standardization (sic).”

Who are these "experts"? What exactly is the "process of standardization"?

Debate over naming this area has been going on arguably since the first century in the Christian era. Tacitus mentions a place called Boiohaemum in his text, Germania. What the residents called it then is unrecorded but it is fair to say that since the first century, this name has not excited much interest outside the area of Boiohaemum. However, it is more than self-evident that the name has excited much interest inside the area and among its neighbours, particularly from the late nineteenth century onwards. One of the more balanced and better-researched surveys of these events takes the form of a fascinating article by Tom Dickins. It appears in the July 2011 edition of Slavonic and East European Review and runs to 54 pages. In addition to a complete history of the discussion, he provides an observation of such languor and learning that it deserves to be quoted in full, “It is striking that even English-speaking Bohemicists are reluctant to adopt Czechia, and in some cases oppose it on the not altogether rational grounds of euphony”.

The confused reader will be forgiven for thinking that a narrative about identity in a “far off” land is familiar theme. Those with a passing acquaintance with nineteenth century adventure fiction will be familiar with the less-than-convincing confusion of identities central to the plot of The Prisoner of Zenda set in the fictional land of Ruritania. A fictional land that popular scholarship has posited as not too far removed from Boiohaemum/ Bohemia/ Czech/ Czechia.

Ruritania’s two main features are that it is ruled by an absolutist clique and is unfortunate enough to possess deep social unrest. These are also conditions recently familiar to residents of the countries quoted above in Fact 2 demonstrating that “English is very flexible and it will adopt Czechia in a similar way it accepted short country names for other countries recently introduced by, for example, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Myanmar and Croatia”.

This might sound a little far fetched if unsupported by facts. Unfortunately, facts support the notion that the proposed new Czechia is a “nation ruled by an absolutist clique”. Facts also support a notion that all is not well in the proposed new Czechia. In recent weeks, a state visit by China’s President Xi excited much anger amongst its Czech citizens. Then, they had concerns that the Czech Republic, as it was then, was becoming a vassal of Chinese political and corporate interests. After that, the Panama Papers brought the recent flouting of Czech law by Czech political parties into sharp relief. Czechs began last week as citizens of the Czech Republic and ended it as potential citizens of new Czechia without even being consulted. Their perception is that corrupt practices remain while the corrupt remain in power and change means only the name - is hard to ignore.

On his Facebook page on Friday, Erik Best, the American commentator on Czech business and politics and founder of The Fleet Sheet and The Final Word, proposed his status for the day as a “Guide for foreigners. 1) Czechia 2) chechia 3) Chechnya 4) Chiquita”. This status received more than 30 comments in Czech and English including many stronger negative opinions on the Czechia initiative; suggestions shared by 80 of roughly 10,000 friends and followers. The allusion to power abusing its power for its own sake and mocking those without it was very difficult to miss.
All this contrasts unfavourably with how similar changes are implemented in other "far away" small countries like when Australia held a referendum about whether or not to keep the British Queen as head of state. New Zealand, even smaller and further away did the same for the proposed change to its national flag. Both countries engaged with international media outlets in thoughtful, well-researched, well-planned and well-resourced strategies. Both campaigns were received by international media outlets sympathetically for months before and weeks after the refenda occured. Both nations received sustained favourable publicity that it would not have received otherwise. Given the cost of undertaking such a thing, positive international “outcomes” were undoubted priority items in the documents supporting those PR initiatives. Positive outcomes would include boosting interest in, trade with, and tourism to, both countries - plus many other “soft power” benefits as well.
International approval and positive perception matters a lot to most countries, particularly “small ones” who need international trade and tourism like Australia, New Zealand and new Czechia and/or the old Czech Republic.
It would appear this doesn’t matter to the current Czech government. Instead, it issued a decree, on the recommendation of "experts", in crap English, supported by mad looking people on Skype with funny accents. All this was later edited and portrayed as a joke item in the UK TV news, if not many other nations' TV News programmes. This sort of thing makes the place seem like a banana republic and damages a country’s reputation. No-one outside new Czechia knew or cared that its president is a drunk prone to making unfortunate remarks in public or its Prime Minister appears to have a personal financial stake in many aspects of the nation's economy. Now, the world will remember the place negatively as somewhere with a joke name they can't quite remember.

The less-than-convincing PR campaign surrounding the less-than-convincing case for a name change makes it difficult not to conclude the timing of this announcement is a deliberate attempt to distract attention away from mounting discontent in “Czechia/Chechia /Chechnya/Chiquita Republic. The activities of its president and prime minister remain an international scandal waiting to happen.

Further, it is difficult how the world beyond the soon-to-be-forgotten new Czechia will retain any recollection of the name change beyond a vague notion of that Czechia and its people remain as they always were, part of a far-away, camp, unhappy and confusing part of Ruritania.