My post from last month in which I reflected on my time teaching at the military school was republished on Czech Fulbright’s blog which you can find here.
Shortly after the blog went live, the program coordinator of Fulbright’s ETAs in the Czech Republic shared with me some information from a poll conducted by GLOBESEC, a foreign policy think tank based in Bratislava. Her framing of the research suggested that, contrary to my perceptions, Czech attitudes toward the military are actually quite favorable. It seemed that 87% of Czechs trust the Czech army and that more and more (84%, up from 43% last year) see Russia as the biggest security threat to the nation. These statistics would seem to undermine the anecdotal evidence I relied on to suggest that the Czech Republic is still stuck thinking of the military as a dysfunctional appendage of the post-Soviet state. However, I took a look at the survey and the numbers seem to tell a much different story.
First, 87% of Czech respondents answered yes to remaining in NATO (this too, up from 72% last year), not to a broad question of trust in the military. This makes sense as Russia’s attempted land-grab in Ukraine is precisely the kind of military action NATO set out to deter. Its success in carrying out its mission aside, NATO has experienced a recent groundswell of support across all Central and Eastern European countries. The countries surveyed (the Visegrad group plus Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, and Romania) were all in one way or another under the Soviet sphere of influence for the bulk of the Cold War, so strong NATO support seems historically intuitive. Notably, Hungary was the only country to see a decrease in NATO support in the last year, dropping from 54% to 50%. Now Hungary and Czechia are very different countries, but they are not so different as to not wonder at the sizable gap in NATO support. Does 87% support for remaining in NATO really correlate with the overall support of the military? Maybe, but I also think that the war in Ukraine and the current alignment of the Budapest-Moscow axis could account for the gap. On the one hand, you have a country that has struggled for greater autonomy ever since Czechia and Slovakia divorced in 1992, while on the other you have a particularly populist moment taking hold in Hungary, which entails the kind of nativist sentiments of the old Soviet order.
If I try to see this survey as evidence that many Czechs do in fact support their troops, I see three somewhat conflicting explanations, which means it’s probably some fun combination of reasons. The first explanation is that I was flat-out wrong to say that many Czech resent the military and I will own the fact that I went largely on the anecdotes of my colleagues and of other people in Fulbright. Next time, when writing such a piece, I will certainly do my homework first. However, the second explanation could be that the attitudes of my students toward the military are representative of a more general generational shift. Their positive views on service and well-intentioned reasons for joining up could very likely correlate to an overall change in public perceptions. In this case, I was all the luckier to have 300 cadets as a large portion of my data set. Finally, if the NATO question is equivalent to the “we support our troops” question, we could have a situation in which pay lip service to an ideal in a survey but live a very different life privately. Basically, no one wants to say they are anti-military.
This is about as far as I am willing to go in pulling apart the survey, which was full of interesting data, but ultimately a flawed piece of social science. Not because the science was unsound, but because all of these surveys can only do so much. Does the data truly destroy my argument that many Czechs do not look favorably on their military? Again, even if the questions were identical, the survey does not replace the anecdotal responses I receive, it merely adds texture to the story I am trying to tell. Without slipping down the rabbit hole of the nature of truth, I would only say that there are many different ways of knowing if something is true and we can explore each one and respect them all on their own epistemic grounds, or we can mix and match.
George Saunders shared a delightful fable to highlight this point in more artistic terms. It’s the fable of the three blind men and the elephant. One man grasps the elephant’s tail and concludes “elephants are like a rope.” Another grasps the tusk and concludes “elephants are like tree trunks.” The last one grasps the trunk and concludes “elephants are just big snakes.” All three blind men are correct in a way, they just lack a little bit more context.
Two parts of my writer identity often clash here on this blog, one which is trained in aesthetic appreciation and literary analysis and one that really hates being wrong. Something in our culture, and indeed in me, points towards the sciences as having a unique grasp on truth, numbers being the coldly rational mirror to a world only describable in words. I, like anyone else with a little curiosity, want to know what precisely this world is. What is it made of? How did it get here? But I also think, as a literary humanist, that I cannot attempt to talk about what the world is without first knowing what it feels like.
Was I wrong in my earlier post? Probably yes, and probably no. What does it say that now 87% of Czechs would choose to remain in NATO? Just that. And also, my story is just one story; a better one now for taking on this added element, this new development.
Ramble on!