Vaclav Klaus: halt the fall of Europe

Thank you for inviting me. First of all, I would like to say that I am always very happy to be in Budapest and Hungary. I feel like I'm in a free country.

I would besides like to thank you for the subject of my speech at your conference: «The importance of the sovereignty of the national state and Europe of nations». This thank you is not just a courtesy phrase. This name for the speech cannot be chosen present in any another European country, only in Hungary.

Hungary's circumstantial position on this issue stems from the current, highly favourable political atmosphere in your country, which, I believe, reflects the genuine feelings of Hungarians, is due to the strong position that Fidesz has managed to hold in parliament and government for so many years, and that is the decision of my opinion, action, political strength and yet the courage of my friend, Prime Minister Orbán. Hungary is the only country in Europe where, in the 3rd decade of the 21st century and 35 years after the fall of communism, it makes sense to talk about the sovereignty of a national state. No another country in Europe present is clearly pursuing or pursuing that objective. European political elites dare not even talk the words of national sovereignty in their speeches and political programmes. This is simply a priori considered politically incorrect. And anti-European.

In most European countries and in all EU associate States the issue of sovereignty was yesterday, if not the day before yesterday. This was last held as a fundamental issue in our country erstwhile I held the highest political positions. It's long gone now. This does not mean that we should not talk about it or that we should not talk about it. The another way around. Our task remains to rise this crucial issue for Europe again and again. I am truly glad that I have the chance to do so here present in Budapest.

The subject of sovereignty is not fresh and surely does not belong solely to the 21st century. It was debated, defended, and questioned throughout human history. Sometimes it looked promising, sometimes it didn't. It didn't look good most of the time. But always, after the collapse of any discredited empire, the concept of a national state emerged with fresh strength and began to be portrayed as the cornerstone of rational political order and as the only place where actual democracy could exist.

No wonder that the dominant ideologies of the modern world, globalisation and progressiveism – together with their additions, multiculturalism, environmentalism and genderism – see it rather differently. Over the last fewer decades, these ideologies have managed to carry out the widest metamorphosis of human society always carried out. In comparison, communism was a slight reversal of slow and gradually built human principles, institutions, customs and traditions. In particular, aggressive genderism increasingly penetrates the very essence of human existence. The French and Russian revolutions killed millions of their opponents, but did not effort to change the nature of man. It's different now. We live in an age of ruthless attack on the foundations of Western civilization. This is the most crucial test of the strength and stableness of our existing society, civilization and culture.

Resistance to specified improvement and the desire to do something about it are inactive comparatively weak, which many of us are frustrated with. People inactive don't believe that anything like this is possible. They see it as a temporary deviation from average development. However, this does not mean that we can afford to stay passive. I say that is besides the main reason why many of us are in this area today.

To change what is happening in the West, the West must return to the thought of Enlightenment, to its classical liberal traditions, to the best practices and institutions of the past, to the ideas of Mises, Hayek, Friedman and akin thinkers, and to what we utilized to think was normal. But is it realistic at all erstwhile we see the West, decadent and corrupted by its prosperity and weak due to the abandonment of Christian ideas that created it in the past? The East must besides return to the way of reasoning that prevailed in the recently free countries of Central and east Europe after the fall of communism. They are elsewhere present and are besides becoming rich and decadent.

Making a much needed return will not be an easy task. opposition will be strong and aggressive. This is already seen in the actions of the left-wing terrorism of Antifa in Western Europe. This will require rejecting both red and green socialism, defending the way and lifestyle characteristic of our civilization and uncovering a fresh balance between a free man and an ubiquitous and ever-expanding state (in addition with modern technologies).

However, let us return to the subject of national sovereignty. This is not a fresh debate and a fresh dispute. This is repeated repeatedly in history. Even now it didn't come suddenly. The seeds of the thought of rejecting the national states we are experiencing present have been sown, watered abundantly and fertilised abundantly over the past decades.

This has to do with the bad state of our democracy. We should be clear that democracy can only be achieved and ensured in a strictly defined and limited space. There can be no cosmopolitan democracy. Democracy needs clear boundaries.It cannot be in a foggy space with indeterminate and blurred contours. Democracy needs people, it needs demos that cannot arise without a clearly defined existence called a national state. There's no alternative. The look at it differently shows that it is so typical of the modern Western world, or alternatively its elites of belief in supranational idealism.

I'm not going back to the distant past. Let us stick to a communicative that we more or little know and understand, and which, at least any of us, could "touch". The debate on the function of national states took on a new, unfortunately highly unfortunate momentum after planet War II. This tragic war was – rather wrongly – associated with nationalism and national state, although we know that it was created as a product of totalitarian ideology of Nazism (or national socialism) and communism. As a result, in the political elite and among leftist ideologists and activists, a false and misleading explanation was adopted that the national state was the primary blame for the war.

This fatal mistake has led to a "deification" of transnational structures, including the recently created institutions of the European integration process. European integration, in the current form of the European Union, has become their trailer. It seeks to weaken its constitutional elements, its members, which are national states, and to replace them with an alternate entity, regions. That is why the slogan of Europe of the Regions was created. Another, possibly the only hidden goal that will become crucial as shortly as there is simply a complete fragmentation of European society is the Europe of individual Europeans, a Europe of isolated individuals.

As I have already said, the progressive, undemocratic task of supranational dominance began to operate in Europe with fresh energy after planet War II. Its first – more or little innocent – task of the European economical Community step by step, almost unnoticed, has evolved into a process of unifying Europe. Both the Maastricht Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty shifted the first concept of integration, which meant better and deeper cooperation between sovereign countries to political unification. The European continent has been transformed from a historically established sovereign union, independent states into a very authoritative and centralised creation called the European Union. Those of us who have lived in a non-lifeline union of communist countries for decades see it very sensitively.

I am convinced that the national state is the exclusive and irreplaceable area of democracy and its sole guarantor. The state – not the region or continent – creates an authentic political community. Europe is not an authentic political community. The European political community is national. We are Czechs, Hungarians and Slovaks. We talk Czech, Hungarian and Slovak, not European Esperanto. We do not want to abolish borders and destruct the difference between a national and a foreigner. We, advocates of national sovereignty, know that people be "within national cultures, history, traditions and languages." When an empire is created, democracy ceases to exist. There is 1 form of autocracy or another.

Can specified a improvement be avoided? Certainly, but change cannot be achieved without a fundamental strategy reversal, without something like a fresh velvet revolution (to usage old but useful terminology). Are we headed this way? Optimists (and naive people) tend to answer yes. Pessimists (and realists) say decisively no. Or not yet. They know that wishes should not be confused with realistic plans.

Some effort – optimistically – to compare the current civilization crisis with the unexpectedly fast end of communism. However, we must be very careful about this. How are we doing now compared to the past of communism? My little optimistic answer is that we are surely not in the 1980s. I'm even afraid we're closer to the 1950s than to 1989. Our current political establishment, along with political parties and movements on the left and right, effectively blocks all political actors who effort to express the actual feelings of the people of our country and Europe. This year's elections to the European Parliament brought comparatively good results to the opposition parties, but what we are seeing is not democratic change, but consolidation of old trends and practices.

I'm afraid so. Gregory Copleythat “we do not know how to reorganize our society without breaking it.” He adds that "fall is always a precursor to the reorganization of society as a whole". If so, it puts us in the mediate of an crucial task: make a much needed change before the fall becomes besides sharp and deep. Unfortunately, we have not even begun specified a change yet. Let's do this as shortly as possible, otherwise the fall will be terrifying.

Avoiding discussion about the war in Ukraine is simply a fact. It has become widely accepted and politically correct to look at this bloody, tragic and unnecessary war by black and white glasses, to see only good and bad, to divide the planet into undemocratic aggressors and their innocent victims, to moralize war and not to pay adequate attention to the days preceding the "hot" war. Anyone who talks about this war as if it began on February 24, 2022, makes a terrible mistake.

But people are slow beginning to think. Even 1 respected American analyst, a erstwhile politician, aptly noted late that "The West is not liable for what Russia did, but is liable for failing to take steps that could prevent Russia from doing what it did." That's not adequate talk.

Ursula von der Leyen She boasted late that she had been to Kiev 8 times. It would be more interesting to hear how many times she was there before 2014, how many times she was there between 2014-2022 and what proposals she brought there to prevent – and later halt – the war. Many of us saw the imminent threat as early as 2014, if not earlier. And they warned me about it.

There's no request to come up with large plans and projects. I agree. Mario Fantinithat it is simply a "time of resistance". And it should have happened a long time ago. We request a revolutionary change. As the recently elected Italian MEP said Roberto Vannaci in the same edition of European Conservative magazine: "Normality is revolutionary". So let's get back to normal. It'll be revolutionary enough.

Václav Klaus

EuCET conference, Patriotic intellectuals for Europe, Budapest, 25 October 2024.

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