Laureate of the St. Adalbert Award (Pretium Sancti Adalberti)
for the exceptional contribution of Central European co-operation for 2023 is

DIMITRIJ RUPEL

Slovenian sociologist, politician, diplomat, writer and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Slovenia

The award ceremony on Friday October 13, 2023 evening was chaired
by H. Em. Dominik Cardinal Duka, the Archbishop of Prague and Primate of Bohemia.
The laureate for 2023 then presented his keynote address.

ABOUT THE LAUREATE

Dimitrij Rupel (* 1946, Lubljana) is Slovenian sociologist, politician, diplomat, writer and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Slovenia. He was one of the main faces of Slovenian public life already before the fall of the Iron Curtain. In the 1970s and 1980s he lectured at the University of Ljubljana on the sociology of culture and art and contributed to journals that were not beholden to the official ideology of the time. Of particular note was the politically courageous magazine Nova Vremija, of which he was editor-in-chief for a time.

As a supporter of freedom, democracy and Slovenian independence he was instrumental in founding the Slovenian Democratic Union in January 1989 and became a member - for two years - of the first non-communist government as minister of foreign affairs. In 1992 he was elected to the Slovenian National Assembly and in 1994 he was elected Mayor of Ljubljana. He returned to the post of Foreign Minister in the first decade of the 21st century, where he served his country for another eight years. He also has extensive diplomatic experience, having represented Slovenia's interests in the USA.

However, Professor Rupel is not only a leading politician, but also an important member of the Slovenian intellectual and literary community. In 2017 he was one of the founders of the private university Nova Univerza and became its rector. Today, he serves as vice-rector.

LAUREATE SPEECH

DIMITRIJ RUPEL:
CENTRAL EUROPE HAS ITS OWN VISION OF THE WORLD

Eminence, excellences, associates of The Patrimonium, then panelists, friends, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen!

Let me first thank the leadership of the Patrimonium Sancti Adalberti for having chosen me for the St. Adalbert Award. It is a great honour by itself, but I am particularly happy for being recognized by an association active in the research of the Central-European issues.

An impressive report on Central Europe during the Cold War has been contributed by Milan Kundera. In a way, his essay of 1984 (The Tragedy of Central Europe) has influenced my own - and my generation's - writing and politics. The controversial/dissident journal Nova revija translated it from The New York Review of Books, and published itin one of its early issues.

Kundera says that the nations of Central Europe, Slovenians included, "boxed in by the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other… have used up their strength in the struggle to survive and to preserve their languages". Indeed. In 1869, a Slovenian publisher wrote to a Slovenian writer: And I quote: "Slovenians do not have a future, we shall become either Prussians or Russians!" End of quotation.

The countries belonging to Mr. Kundera's Central-European map have been – until the end of the Cold War – in one way or another dominated by Communists and released from their domination due to the collapse of Soviet Union. It is a paradox that Yugoslavia that was considered as a country of better educated Communists, changed to democracy only partly and with delay, and – at least at the beginning – more violently than the Warsaw Pact or Soviet Union. Of course, three factors have to be taken into account: the great divide between the Catholic and Orthodox components; the combination of two demands (democracy on one hand, independence on the other) and the foreign policy fiction of non-alignment – famous Yugoslav and Indian and Egyptian invention. A few months before independence, the American President asked his European interlocutors, American president of 1991 (that was George Bush senior), asked his European interlocutors, presidents and prime ministers of European countries, one question about Slovenia: Is it an ethnic quarrel or a liberation movement?

Kundera tells that in 1937 Franz Werfel in a Paris speech, proposed "to found a World Academy of Poets and Thinkers (Weltakademie der Dichter und Denker). The task of this academy, free of politics and propaganda, would be to 'confront – that's a quotation – the politicization and barbarization of the world.' Not only was this proposal rejected, it was openly ridiculed." says Kundera.

Similar reactions to artistic/cultural proposals were produced by the Yugoslav and Slovenian nomenklatura until 1990 - and even later. Almost the same way, the Slovenian authorities in 1987 ridiculed the journal Nova revija that published The Slovenian National Program. Next year, our Communistsmade fun of the Constitution of Independent Slovenia published by the Association of Slovenian Writers. It was called literary fiction, but in 1991, it became a basis for the official Constitution of the free Slovenia.

Some of us have lived in times and under conditions so impressively described by the utmost Czech author Milan Kundera in his essay. Some of us have witnessed political changes that brought Central Europe from tragedy to the – let me put it this was – "right side of history". In 1984, Kundera may have been realistic and pessimistic, but he encouraged critical thinking.

Slovenian intellectuals may have been romantic and optimistic after the end of the Cold War. But, some realism we should keep and store also for our present day and future analyses. My feeling is that we have come to the end of the end of the Cold War, and that we should be prepared for more dramatic changes ahead of us. The question is what we can expect after the end of the end. History will not stop "another time" (actually, it never ended, as predicted by Fukuyama), and we – or our successors – shall face some kind of a continuation.

What kind of continuation? Continuation is a magic word and one of the most beautiful phenomena. As far as the end (of their career or life) is concerned, governments, leaders, people generally prefer continuation (prefer continuation to break-down, turmoil, revolution…). Until 1991, most Western European leaders supported Gorbachev and Marković (Ante Marković, Prime Minister of Yugoslavia); and preferred a continuation rather than a collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Indeed, it seemed for a while that history (or at least, the history as we knew it) was approaching its end: at the beginning, we had containment, then came Kissinger and Nixon with the idea of detente. Then, we had The Star Wars, the empires collapsed, new countries - also in Central Europe - were established, former Communist countries joined the EU and NATO; Russia was invited to join the G8 group, let us not forget that, and The Russia-NATO Council. The eastern border of the West moved east. Almost as if Kundera's complaint (Central Europe is culturally in the West and politically in the East – that's his words) was taken care of. The end of the Cold War brought (actually, or is identified with) the dissolution of Soviet Union – dissolution of Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and also Czechoslovakia. The EU grew to 27, NATO grew to30 members.

At this point, I would like to mention an important meeting in a Carpathian dacha, where – myself, of course – as the CIO of the OSCE in 2005 – I met the leaders of Ukraine and Georgia: Victor Yushchenko and Misha Sakashvili. They told me that the old (wrong) history has ended, and the time we lived in was revolutionary. First, there was The Rose Revolution in Georgia, next was The Orange Revolution in Ukraine. It would be followed by another revolution in Belarus, in the end, the revolution would reach the Kremlin and Mr. Putin. The scenario was nice but wrong.

In 2008, in Bucharest, there was a summit of NATO. There, the Americans proposed to invite Ukraine, Georgia and Macedonia to start participation in the Membership Action Plan, meaning that they would be put on the NATO track. The EU leaders objected, and only Croatia was supported. In 2008, Putin took Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in 2014, it was the Crimea. The truce after the Cold War (also called the Cold Peace) was ended.

What happened - or might happen - after the End of the End (of the Cold War)? A lot happened in the (almost) 40 years between 1984 and 2023, especially after 1990 and before 2008. Actually, these were good years for Central Europe.At this point I would like to include an observation by another Czech author, Václav Havel. In his book To the Castle and Back, he reported on the difficulties of the transition to democracy in Czechoslovakia or Czech Republic after the fall of Communism. He observed the formation of a new business ("oligarchic" he called it) class of the well-connected and well informed former Communist bureaucrats abusing the privatization legislation introduced after 1990. This seems to be a characteristic phenomenon of most former Communist countries, a development that is slowly but surely replacing the generation (if you want: critical intellectuals? dissidents?) initially responsible for the democratic changes and the demise of the old regime. Havel expects that – after a certain period – a new critical generation would take care of this anomaly.

But the main challenges for Central Europe – plus Baltic and East-European countries – dwell in the area of international or rather European relations. The challenging story has begun in 1994 with the famous Schäuble-Lamers paper, continued with the Convention of 2002, the negative referenda of 2005, during the enlargement of the twelve, and with the white paper by Jean-Claude Juncker of 2017.

After Brexit, the core group of the EU is led by Germany and France. These two countries have represented the European Union and European interests on many occasions. Their cooperation and solidarity have been symbolically demonstrated in the European Coal and Steel Community. The common market for coal and steel (for the countries willing to delegate control of these sectors to an independent authority) was established in 1950 by Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet. They believed that a new economic and political framework was needed to avoid future Franco-German conflicts. Avoiding conflicts led to close cooperation and sharing power in the European Community and (after 1992) in the EU. The alliance that some people called the "German-French train" was symbolically confirmed by François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl holding hands at Verdun in 1984. The Normandy format applied in the process of the Minsk agreements (2014) was again a Franco-German enterprise. The French Anti-Americanism, the German Ostpolitik, the reunification in 1990 and assistance to the independence movements of Slovenia and Croatia created the impression that there were actually two separate trains traveling in different directions. The Franco-German solidarity was really prominent during the years of the tri-partite (French, German and British) directoire of the European Union.

On September 18, few days ago, a Franco-German working group have published a report on the European Union institutional reform necessary to accept new members in or by 2030. The sensitive parts of the report concern the composition of the European Commission. Concern the qualified majority voting and diversification of the future of European integration. And I shall quote: "Before the next enlargement all the remaining policy decisions should be transferred from unanimity to qualified majority voting. The report suggests reducing the size of the Commission's College to two and developing a hierarchical modal. Then differentiation between so-called Lead Commissioners and normal commissioners with potentially only the Lead Commissions voting in the College. And, of course, the report divides Europe into four distinct tiers. First the Inner Circle, second the EU Usual Members, third Associate Members and four the European Partners.

In the present-day situation, a closer political cooperation between the Central European nations (and the members of the Three Seas initiative) is necessary. There are at least two reasons for that: the predicted majoritarian voting in the European Council, and the solidarity concerning Ukraine – of course accompanied by a common formulation of the EU-Russian policy.

The Central European nations should work together and avoid disagreements that proved to be detrimental for them in the past. On August 21, 1938, on the eve of a major European scandal (so-called Munich agreement between Hitler and Chamberlain), an indecent political event took place at Bled in Slovenia, then still a tourist resort of the Yugoslav Monarchy. This happens to be the same day (thirty years later, in 1968) when Soviet Union took over Czechoslovakia. In August 1938, the Foreign Ministers of the Little Entente (composed of Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia) paved the way for Hungary to participate in the destruction of the Versailles/Trianon Treaty and contributed to the precarious position of Czechoslovakia.

Let me – ladies and gentlemen, dear friends – conclude these remarks with a couple of historical and present-day recommendations:

First: Unwillingness to give up our cultural roots built up over at least the last ten centuries, our overwhelmingly anti-colonial history, the anti-Muslim experience which has historically contributed to our unity, our problematic relationship with Germany and Russia, and the post-war experience of the socialist camp countries in which we have mostly all belonged.

Second: Renewal and preservation of nation states, their sovereignty, their natural identity, demographically relatively homogeneous societies built on the cornerstones of family, nation and common national language…

Third: Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a vision based on a deep distrust of history. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx, that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate – that is the history of conquerors. The people of Central Europe are not conquerors.

Fourth: Central Europe is not a state: it is a culture or a fate. And that is another quotation from Kundera.

These remarks and their title (I wrote the title "To be Continued after the End of the End") are evidently essentially inspired by the Slovenian experience. Hereby, I mean a continuation, maybe I should say revival of the mentality that had determined our lives during the Cold War, meaning before its end.

Thank you very much.

TOMÁŠ KULMAN:
INTRODUCTION AND LAUDATIO

Your Eminence, Father Cardinal,
Your Excellencies, Ambassadors,
Dear members of the diplomatic corps.
Honourable Members of Parliament, Senators,
Ladies and gentlemen,

It is more than a year since we gathered here for the first edition of our international conference. We are still inspired by the person of St. Adalbert and his life's work. A year ago his ideas led us to believe that they still deserve attention, revival and further development after a thousand years.

Our association, Patrimonium Sancti Adalberti, has published, as a starting material for discussion, a Czech-English thesis entitled "Saint Vojtěch and the Central European Space", which you have all received today, in which we have tried to summarise the basic aspects of the whole topic from different points of view,

The response we have received from our partner organisations and personalities in the countries of the wider Central European area has reinforced our conviction that our joint efforts are not only worthwhile, but will be increasingly so. We are very pleased to welcome a much larger delegation from Austria in Prague than last year, as well as representatives from Hungary, Croatia and Bulgaria. Welcome!

The turbulent global political changes that we have experienced over the last year or more, which are mainly related to the transformation of a unipolar world into a multipolar one, bring with them not only expectations, but also threats and risks. These changes only confirm our original thesis that we need to defend the interests of our states and nations in a European and global framework.

Today, therefore, we are jointly launching the second edition of the St. Adalbert International Conference, this time under the title "The Future of Central Europe". Unlike last year, when we dedicated our conference to the very fact of closer Central European cooperation and the values that unite our countries and nations, this year we want to focus mainly on economic and social issues.

There are signs that times and the world are indeed changing in a fundamental way. Two examples even from the mainstream world. The British Secretary of Interior, Suella Bravermann, herself an ethnic Indian, spoke out against illegal and legal mass migration to Europe at the Conservative conference in Manchester last week. She literally told delegates, "The winds of change that swept my own parents around the world in the 20th century were a mere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming".

She went on to say: "Be under no illusions, we will do whatever it takes to stop the boats and deter bogus asylum seekers." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/suella-braverman-immigration-tory-conference-b2423239.html

A few days ago, the Green Deal Summit was held in Prague with the participation of the President of the European Commission, Ursula van der Leyen. Quite surprising announcements were also made at this forum. In contrast to the previously harshly proposed globalisation, the plea for a 'service economy' and the pressure to move the production of anything to a distant foreign country, words could be heard about the 'transformation of the economy', the importance of European industry, the strengthening of self-sufficiency, the end of the era of globalisation, the need to have our own production with high added value, etc.

Yes, the world is changing.

It is gratifying for us that these are the thesis we have been presenting and promoting since the very beginning of our activities. Central European cooperation must be based on the cooperation of sovereign nation states, which cannot develop without the renewal of national economic thinking and joint infrastructure projects. Moreover, the application of fashionable, but in practice dysfunctional green-deal policies to the ostracizing practices of mainly foreign multinational banks leads to a renaissance of the theme of independent national sources of financing, which would not be influenced by ideological prejudices and would be able to finance the economic development of our countries. The legitimate issue is the recovery of strategic infrastructure under the control of nation states, which is primarily intended to serve the citizens of the country concerned, who, moreover, have paid for its construction with their taxes.

It is evidence of a mental block that some are seriously asking - what is 'nation-state thinking'? It can be put very simply: it is a set of economic measures that result in maximizing the return on the value added that stays in a given territory and continues to circulate in its economy.

Just as food self-sufficiency says that we will have enough food of our own and will not depend on someone from abroad to sell it to us - if they want to, at a price and quality they decide is right. Which, at a time of possible disruption in the general exchange of goods, may even be fatal.

The most traditional of all institutions, the family, faces incomprehensible pressure today. It is a historically, culturally and sacredly fixed concept that cannot be debated in society, let alone voted on in parliament. If such a process is taking place, it only speaks of the degradation of a society that is in serious existential danger. Only a pro-population policy is indicative of the healthy development of society. Moreover, those who have enough children also have enough labour forces, which they do not have to import from elsewhere! Also directly related to the pro-population policy is the question of the proper implementation of the pension reform in its stable and functional form. We will talk about all this tomorrow.

Today, however, we have a solemn and pleasant duty on the agenda. And that is the award of the St. Adalbert Prize.

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests,

Allow me, before I ask Father Dominic Cardinal Duke, Archbishop Emeritus of Prague and Patron of our Conference, to present the St. Vojtěch Prize Pretium Sancti Adalberti for 2023, to briefly introduce this year's winner, Mr. Dimitrij Rupel.

Dimitrij Rupel was born in 1946 in Lubljana. During his eventful life, he is remembered by the Slovenian public as a sociologist, writer, politician and diplomat, and was one of the main faces of Slovenian public life already before the fall of the Iron Curtain. In the 1970s and 1980s he lectured at the University of Ljubljana on the sociology of culture and art and contributed to journals that were not beholden to the official ideology of the time. Of particular note was the politically courageous magazine Nova Vremija, of which he was editor-in-chief for a time.

As a supporter of freedom, democracy and Slovenian independence he was instrumental in founding the Slovenian Democratic Union in January 1989 and became a member - for two years - of the first non-communist government as minister of foreign affairs. In 1992 he was elected to the Slovenian National Assembly and in 1994 he was elected Mayor of Ljubljana. He returned to the post of Foreign Minister in the first decade of the 21st century, where he served his country for another eight years. He also has extensive diplomatic experience, having represented Slovenia's interests in the USA.

However, Professor Rupel is not only a leading politician, but also an important member of the Slovenian intellectual and literary community. He is the author of a number of social novels and dramas, writes on topical issues in the field of social sciences, Slovenian history and international politics, and sets the tone for discussions on the state of Slovenian culture and Slovenia's position in Europe.

In 2017 he was one of the founders of the private university Nova Univerza and became its rector. Today, he serves as vice-rector.

On the basis of his life's work, the Czech association Patrimonium Sancti Adalberti awards him the Pretium Sancti Adalberti prize for his significant contribution to mutual understanding and cooperation between the countries of Central and South Eastern Europe.

I kindly ask Father Cardinal Duka to personally pass on the 2023 Pretium Sancti Adalberti Award to the laureate, Mr Dimitrij Rupel from Slovenia, for his outstanding contribution to Central European cooperation and the strengthening of common traditions and values.

Before I give the floor to the laureate, I would like to publicly thank H.E., Father Cardinal Duka, for having granted the official patronage of our conference for the second time and I trust that he will continue to show us favour also in the future.