New Year, new Europe

As the European Union prepares for a historic eastward expansion, Peter Popham celebrates New Year in Prague, a city on the brink of change

It's New Year's Eve in central Prague, and outside the Obecni Dum, the city's largest concert-hall complex, an Algerian called Joe, dressed in a powder-blue frock-coat, a ruff, gaiters, patent-leather shoes, and a woolly hat against the snow, is attempting to pressgang passers-by into signing up for a concert of "The Best of Mozart", "International Singers in Original Costumes", to beguile away the hours before midnight. Down the road a way, visitors stream into the Casino Palais Savarin – not to play roulette or blackjack but to visit the Museum of Communism, housed on the first floor. They hand over the 180 Czech crowns (£3.70) entrance fee and gaze blankly at statues of Marx and Stalin, posters of smug Czech Stakhanovites, and tins of socialist food, as if these were relics of some ancient and baffling civilisation recently disinterred by archeologists.

Up at Golden Lane, a huddle of diminutive, doll's house-like homes in the skirts of Prague Castle, there are so many Italians and Germans snapping each other in front of each quaint façade that they are treading on each other's feet. In 1916, Franz Kafka found a place to write in this lane when he rented No 22. "The quiet there," he enthused in a letter to his first fiancée. "I carry my supper up there, and am usually there until midnight. It is something special to have one's own house, to lock the door to the world... to step out of the door of one's home, straight into the snow of the quiet lane." If Kafka's shade paid a visit now, it would surely flit away, stunned at the change that has overtaken the place.

At the dawn of 2003, the Czech Republic, along with seven other countries of Eastern Europe plus Cyprus and Malta, stands poised at the threshold of the European Union. This year, all the aspiring new member states will hold referendums to secure a popular mandate for membership. Few people doubt that the Czechs will vote to go in: all political parties except for a tiny lunatic fringe support membership. Yet, when negotiations over entry were successfully completed in Copenhagen last month, only the Czechs did not throw a party.

Was it because they believe that there is nothing to cheer... or much to fear?

One reason for the apathy is that, as the thousands of Western Europeans braving the New Year's snow and ice in Prague attest, for the Czech Republic, the future is already here. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that brought Communist rule in Czechoslovakia to a sudden but peaceful end, accession to the EU was expected to take five years. Instead, it has taken 13 – but Western European tourists and businessmen have not waited for the EU to catch up. For industrialists looking for a cheap and ready labour force to build cars, for culture vultures open to breathtaking sights, and for boozers looking for a place where beer costs a fraction of the price in Britain, the Czech Republic is the one-stop solution. Even last year's catastrophic floods only caused a blip in the tourist numbers. Air fares from London as low as £18 return have put the "faraway country of which we know little" in everybody's backyard.

And Prague is so mild and easy-going, it's practically like being at home. "They're not really Slavs at all," asserts one half-Czech foreign resident. "They don't get excited about anything." So, when Prague gets adopted as the unofficial capital of the British stag-night, few people here even blink. "British men wallow in Prague's sex and beer," raved one newspaper last month. "Marauding stag-parties descend on one of central Europe's finest cities to end up drunk and fighting in the streets." So that's more company for the locals, then. Czech beer consumption – "this is not something we are proud of," said my tour guide diffidently, "but it is perhaps interesting" – is, per capita, the highest in the world at 155 litres (329 pints) per annum – "including small babies", as my guide pointed out.

Brits have seen the Czech capital as a brilliant opportunity before, though you have to go back some way to dig them out. In 1584, two English alchemists presented themselves at Prague Castle and offered Emperor Rudolf II their services for turning lead into gold: John Dee, a favourite of Elizabeth I who was reputed to speak the language of birds, and who transmuted mercury into gold before the emperor's eyes; and Edward Kelley, a notorious necromancer with a hooked nose and mousy eyes, whose ears had been removed by the authorities in Lancaster as punishment for forgery. Both men won the emperor's favour, and, according to legend, were housed in the same row of cottages later chosen by Kafka. Dee was later banished from the city for "commerce with Satan", but Kelley, nicknamed "Engelender", waxed prosperous, marrying a wealthy Bohemian lady, buying a brewery, and dividing his time, according to the author Angelo Maria Ripellino in his book Magic Prague, "between orgies of wine and orgies of women".

Both men came to picturesquely sticky ends, but took up permanent residence in the city's folk memory, from where they pop out sporadically in poems and novels during the following centuries.

But sinister British alchemists were only one gaudy corner of the extraordinary tapestry of Prague, which makes this the heart of Europe just as much culturally as geographically. A brief walking tour of the centre reveals an unrivalled richness of architectural heritage: Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Art Nouveau, Modern, all find their place in the picture. Successive rulers, all with their own cultural point to prove, brought artists and artisans from the corners of the continent to adorn the city. At one spot within the walls of the castle, you can admire four or five architectural styles, encompassing 500 years, merely by turning your head through 90 degrees.

Spruced up now, gleaming with fresh paint, the neglect of the communist years a rapidly fading memory, Prague offers the casual visitor the instant gratification of a Disneyland trouvé, complete with astronomical clocks on which, on the hour, the skeleton rings his bell as the Apostles process; pretty wooden market-stalls like sentry boxes selling hot toddy; lacquered carriages hauled by pairs of black horses; and everywhere in the background, dozens and dozens of fairy-tale spires.

Yet the impression of Prague as a happy, historical smorgasbord is a sentimental delusion. Look down from time to time: at the wooden cross in the cobbles outside the City Museum, where Jan Palach immolated himself in protest at the Soviet invasion of 1968; at the 27 white crosses embedded in the paving outside the Old Town Hall, commemorating the Protestant leaders executed in 1621 when Prague was the great battlefield between Western Christianity's two wings; at the modern monument nearby, "a turbulent sea of blackened bodies", as one guidebook puts it, symbolising the martyrdom of the Czech national hero of the 15th century, Jan Hus.

The dazzling man-made beauty of Prague obscures the fact that the history of the Czech Lands is as tragic – and tragically repetitive – as any other part of Eastern Europe. Centuries of domination from Vienna by the Habsburgs were brought to an end only after the First World War. The First Republic of Czechoslovakia, a bold and successful bid at establishing a liberal, pluralist democracy, was snuffed out 20 years later by the Nazi invasion. The post-Nazi "liberator" was Stalin. For many years, both before and after the fleeting "Prague Spring" of 1968, the communist regime was one of the harshest in the world.

This country is at the heart of Europe, but for centuries it has also been thestamping-ground of alien armies. And though the EU presents no such menace, it is those memories of coercion and repression that help to explain the very guarded welcome that the Czech Republic has extended to the Union.

"The whole process of joining the EU has taken much more time than expected," says Jan Zahradil, deputy chairman of the Civic Democratic Party, the main centre-right opposition party. "That is one reason why there has been no celebration. Plus, the conditions of membership are not favourable: we have not been accepted as a full party in the Common Agricultural Policy, there are provisional measures about the free movement of labour – Czechs are, for now, not allowed to work in Austria and Germany... It seems to us that there are at least two categories of membership within Europe. Psychologically, for popular opinion in the new member countries, this could be harmful.

"The problem is that our political élites haven't told the truth. They've made promises that can't be fulfilled. We must make people aware that the EU is neither a charitable institution nor a paradise on earth, where our problems will be solved. That's bullshit, and everyone knows it."

Zdenek Zboril, a leading political scientist and commentator in Prague, says: "I am trying to be an optimist about accession, but the people are not as optimistic as me." German domination is so recent a memory that the campaign by Germany and Austria to bar Czechs from working or living in the two countries for several years "brought back bad old sentiments," he says. And now, people are not interested in listening to heady Europa rhetoric. "The people only just survived with their savings in the early 1990s," he says. "Now they want to know how their salaries and savings will be affected by joining. I'm worried about the referendum, because people react negatively to official propaganda campaigns: they revive memories of Communist propaganda."

Besides financial worries, Zboril sees popular misgivings focused on three main fears: that the country will be swamped by immigrants; that crime will soar; and that Czech industry will lose out to foreign competition. "But they also see the EU as the solution to these potential problems," he says. "It is something irrational."

"The Czechs are sleepwalking into the EU on sheer ignorance and information blackout," the Anglo-Czech writer Benjamin Kuras, who divides his time between Prague and London, told me. "The Czech Republic has been hypnotised by a decade of Czech politicians' and opinion-makers' mantra-like repetition that there is no choice to EU membership. Or, more precisely, that the only other choice is remaining forever in Russia's backyard."

The terrible things that have befallen this small country (present population 10.27 million) over the past 70 years were all imposed from outside. Now, with the EU, the novelty is that they have the opportunity to accept or reject it – but with no experience of active national self-assertion to call on, a sort of passive bemusement rules the day. And it is reinforced by superstitious doubt about the whole pan-European enterprise: a furtive belief that the EU, what Jan Zahradil calls "this mighty political and economic complex", may not, in the end, prove any more enduring than the other such complexes that have lowered themselves on to this country in the past decades and centuries.

"The Czech Lands have been part of supranational complexes before," says Zahradil, "but each of them broke up. We have a realistic evaluation of these complexes. Everything has limits – if these limits are crossed, disintegration could occur very quickly, very soon."

"From 1996 to the present," says Zdenek Zboril, "between 56 per cent and 63 per cent of Czechs have been in favour of joining the EU. But the polls also show that 70 per cent of women over 42, and 70 per cent of all Czechs over 60, are against joining.

"There is a reason for this view: people over 60 have had to survive five or six drastic political changes – and every protagonist of those changes said that the change was fundamental and eternal. But none lasted more than 10 years."