How to Make a Bad International Image Worse

As EU correspondent for The Economist since 2007, David Rennie is one of Brussels' most influential journalists. He authors the weekly Charlemagne column on European affairs. He previously worked as a Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper that had also sent him to Australia, Beijing and Washington. Rennie is married with two children.

In the past half-year, the Czech Republic earned itself many negative headlines in western newspapers. You stoutly defended it. Why?
I like the Czech Republic. My wife grew up in Prague in the communist era as her father was a British diplomat sent to Prague. She's told me many childhood stories from Czechoslovakia and to this day has an emotional bond with Prague. But, above all, if I were to choose between spending time with people from the Romanian government who used to be part of Ceauşescu's Securitate secret service, or with people from a standard western government, or with those from the Czech government who used to be dissidents, I wouldn't hesitate and choose the Czech dissidents.

But there haven't been ex-dissidents in every Czech government nor former apparatchiks in every Romanian government. Isn't your view of Czechia too romanticised?

Mirek Topolánek's cabinet, for example, featured several very reasonable and inspiring figures who had stood on…