Does a "Central European identity" really exist?
The prime ministers of central Europe, otherwise known as the Visegrad group, will be meeting in Hungary and Slovakia this weekend. Following elections in the Czech Republic and Hungary, they are hoping to put behind them such thorny issues as the post-war Benes Decrees, issues that caused the collapse of the last Visegrad summit in the spring. They are hoping, as the Polish Prime Minister Lezsek Miller put it, "to open a new chapter of co-operation" and come up with a joint position on membership talks for EU entry. But do ordinary Czechs actually feel 'Central European'? Do they really have more in common with Poles or Slovaks, than - say - the French or English? Is there a common sense of 'Central Europeanness', or is this simply a myth? Pavla Horakova went out onto the streets of Prague to find out.
