Just one week ahead of a momentous G-20 summit in London, inflammatory comments by the prime minister of the Czech Republic -- which currently holds the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union -- cast a spotlight on current ideological strains between Europe and the United States over the best way to stimulate flagging economies.

Speaking before the European Parliament on Wednesday, Mirek Topolanek described the stimulus measures and financial bailouts passed by US President Barack Obama as the "way to hell." He warned that the massive costs of the stimulus plans and financial bailouts would "undermine the stability of the global financial market" and that Obama was merely repeating the errors of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The comments also threatened to unravel the tenuous unity reached by EU member states for a joint response to the economic crisis. Last week, EU leaders reached a carefully constructed political truce designed to bury their differences and agree on a common policy ahead of the London meeting. At last Friday's summit, they pledged an additional €75 billion to finance loans by the International Monetary Fund and to double a credit line for struggling economies of Eastern European member states.

Topolanek may have felt unburdened by diplomatic niceties after his government lost a no-confidence vote in the Czech parliament on Tuesday. The Czech prime minister submitted his resignation the same day, but will continue on as a caretaker of the EU's rotating presidency through June.

Topolanek's comments come just one day after Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged the same EU legislators to increase their stimulus spending. "We can together deliver the biggest fiscal stimulus," he told the EU parliament on Tuesday.

Brown had hoped to use the G-20 summit to demonstrate trans-Atlantic unity in response to the economic crisis. It now looks like he may have his hands full trying to manage Europe's divergent viewpoints on coordinated fiscal policy.

In the run up to the summit, Obama has also implicitly criticized those countries that have resisted further stimulus measures. During a news conference on Tuesday evening, Obama said, "We don't want a situation in which some countries are making extraordinary efforts and other countries aren't, with the hope that somehow the countries that are making those important steps, lift everybody up."

Germany is among the countries that has prominently resisted calls to increase the scale of its economic stimulus packages. Angela Merkel has lobbied to use the G-20 summit to concentrate on tightening financial regulation -- the lack of which led to the excesses that fueled the current credit crunch.

But most European leaders were alarmed at the tone of Topolanek's rhetoric.

Martin Schulz, leader of the Socialist group in the European Parliament, said it was "not the level on which the EU ought to be operating with the United States."

"You have not understood what the task of the EU presidency is," he told Topolanek.

For his part, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso offered a tribute to the trans-Atlantic relationship. "I really believe it is not a helpful debate, as I see sometimes, to try to suggest that Americans and Europeans are coming with very different approaches to the crisis," he told legislators. "On the contrary, what we are seeing is increased convergence."