Laureate of the St. Adalbert Award (Pretium Sancti Adalberti)
for the exceptional contribution of Central European co-operation for 2024 is

MÁRIA SCHMIDT

Hungarian historian, university lecturer, Director-General of the 21st Century Institute
and the House of Terror Museum.

The award ceremony on Friday October 25, 2024 evening was chaired
by H. Em. Dominik Cardinal Duka, the Archbishop of Prague and Primate of Bohemia.
The laureate for 2024 then presented his keynote address.

ABOUT THE LAUREATE

Mária Schmidt was born in 1953 in Budapest. She graduated in history and German studies from the Faculty of Humanities at Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest. After earning her doctorate in 1999, she received a second doctorate from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2005. She pursued postgraduate research and held visiting professorships at universities in Vienna, Innsbruck, Oxford, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Indiana University New York, Indiana University Bloomington, and the Hoover Institute at Stanford.

Since 1996, she has lectured at the Faculty of Humanities at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, where she has been a professor since 2010. She is a member of the Academic Committee of the House of European History in Brussels.

The institutions she founded or significantly contributed to include the 20th Century Institute, the 21st Century Institute, a public foundation for the research of Central and Eastern European history and society, and the highly popular House of Terror Museum.

This museum, opened in 2002, is now Hungary's most powerful symbol of the shift from totalitarianism to democracy and one of the most important memorials honouring victims of 20th-century totalitarian regimes.

Mária Schmidt is also responsible for the soon-to-open Puskás Museum in Budapest. She has also established three permanent museums outside Hungary's capital.

Mária Schmidt has published numerous books and studies in Hungary and abroad and has actively contributed as an editor to other publications. For her work, she has received numerous high honours, including the Széchenyi Prize in 2014 and the Commander's Cross with Star of the Hungarian Order of Merit in 2023​. She has also been awarded several state honours from France, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine, as well as prestigious awards from Hungarian non-governmental organizations and local authorities.

As a politically active citizen, she served as Chief Advisor to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán during his first term.

LAUREATE SPEECH

MÁRIA SCHMIDT:
THE AGE OF EMPIRES IS OVER,
THE 21ST CENTURY IS AGAIN ABOUT NATIONS

Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great honour to get such big and important award. Thank you so much.

St. Adalbert of Prague was born around 955 in Pomerania and was martyred on 23 April 997 in what is now northern Poland, where he was killed on his missionary journey. Saint Adalbert served as a bishop of Prague, a missionary in Hungary and Prussia, where he is revered as both countries' Christian martyr. He spread the Christian faith in Poland and in the Czech lands.

He came to Hungary at the invitation of Grand Chief Géza. Legend holds that our first king Saint Stephen was baptised by him. We do not know if that was true or not, but the mere fact that tradition attributes to him this act, which was so important for the course of Hungarian history, confirms historical significance of St. Adalbert's missionary activity in Hungary.

This is why Esztergom Cathedral, the seat of Hungary's Catholic Church, bears the name of Virgin Mary and Saint Adalbert, and why the building of the seminary at the foot of the cathedral is called Saint Adalbert Centre. Since 2001, in Saint Adalbert's remembrance, the Hungarian Catholic Church has annually awarded the Saint Adalbert Prize.

Ladies and gentlemen,

A thousand years ago, our region was converted to Christianity and thereby became part of the Western cultural world. Since then, our destinies have been intertwined by a thousand threads, despite occasional diverging directions. But our shared Christian culture, our shared destiny, and common interests inspire us again and again to seek a common path.

We have had common rulers, we have fought against threats of Turkish, Germanic and Russian origin, and if we look back to the recent past, apart from the interwar period of the 20th century, we have followed the same path for centuries, first within the Habsburg and then within the Soviet empires.

The Habsburgs ruled in Europe for sixteen generations, over twenty countries, including our region. A prominent figure in our shared past was Emperor and King Francis Joseph 1848 to 1916. He reigned for nearly 67 years, almost seven decades. During his long reign, he made a real institution of himself. In an age drunken with optimist faith in progress and development, while industrialising and modernising at a frenetic pace, he represented stillness, permanency and continuity. He was the last ruler of old Europe, representative and defender of traditional beliefs and values. He combined the role of the mythical king with that of a tireless servant of his empire. There was pomp and grandeur, there were balls, receptions, but there was also duty from dawn till dusk. He successfully moderated the various national and political antagonisms into peaceful coexistence, softening the most ardent radicalisms into balanced diversity. Over time, he became like a fossilised archaeological find. He became everyone's father, grandfather, even great-grandfather. There was no citizen of the dual monarchy of fifty-one million inhabitants covering 621,538 square kilometres from the Carpathians to the Adriatic, who had lived to see another monarch than Franz Joseph.

At his death, his empire was left behind in the midst of a deadly and bloody European civil war, World War One.

The Habsburg Monarchy was certainly the most enduring, most resistant empire in the history of modern Europe. It fulfilled its vocation until the rest of the World's great powers decided otherwise. That vocation was to ensure that neither Germans, nor Russians, nor Turks, nor anyone else had a free passage into the heart of Europe. The supra-national, multi-ethnic Habsburg monarchy was a breakwater to the ambitions of the pan-Germanic, pan-Slavic and anti-Western Ottoman empires. Conversely, its removal opened a window of opportunity for all three. The dismembered Austro-Hungarian Empire had been only second in Europe to Russia, and the third most populous state in Europe after the Russian and the German Empires. The destruction of the Habsburg Monarchy was also fuelled by hatred against Catholics, an inclination so characteristic of France's atheist Clemenceau, Britain's Protestant Lloyd George and Protestant Wilson of the United States.

It is no coincidence that Geneva, the city of Calvin and Rousseau, was chosen as the headquarters of the League of Nations, the first collective security organisation, seen as a first step towards a new utopian universalist world government.

The victorious powers of World War One decided to dismember the Habsburg Monarchy because they were confident that they would no longer need its balancing and countervailing role. But it soon became clear that without a central European empire there remained nothing to contain the expansionist forces threatening the peace of the continent. The vacuum created by this absence encouraged the German side, at first. With their Third Reich, they brought our continent, and of course themselves, to the brink of destruction. Then came the Soviets, who made our region part of their empire. However, they overcommitted themselves – and by 1990, their empire collapsed as well. In recent years, our continent has once again come under migratory pressure from the South. A hundred years on, it is clear how indispensable the Habsburg Monarchy was to the security and the balance of power of Europe. It is becoming increasingly clear that those who decided to abolish it after World War One were not only clumsy, short-sighted and ignorant, but above all, fatally irresponsible.

The dissolution of the Habsburg Empire took place before the eyes of the post-war generation. In its wake, the way of life of the peoples of Europe changed and began to be Americanised. US president Wilson, exhilarated by his victory, saw the abolition of monarchies and their conversion to a republican form of government as the first steppingstones towards Americanisation. The US started exporting democracy with the resulting chaos which has been a constant feature of American politics ever since. Thus, the emperors of Germany and Austria had to go. (British and other Western monarchs could stay. Obviously, those peoples could not be subjected to experiments as freely as East European and other "barbarians".) This plunged the region into a crisis of legitimacy that set back its development for decades. The world of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was multifaceted, diverse, and easy-going, or, as it was then called, clumsy – which made life exciting and bearable. What survived the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Habsburg Empire is looked upon with nostalgia and appreciation. We are at home in Trieste, Krakow, Prague, Budapest, and Vienna, because their cultural traditions are part of our shared cherished heritage.

The European order created in 1920 in a clumsy and superficial manner, has hardly been adjusted to this day. The new booty-seeking peace treaties of 1944–47 produced the novelty that, while the borders drawn in 1920 were left almost untouched, the minorities forced behind them, more than 12 million people, including Hungarians, Slovaks, Swabs, and other Germans, were deported from one country to another. The criminal and harmful peace agreements that were imposed on the world in 1920 and then ratified in 1945, partly because the decision makers had no better idea and partly because they had neither the wisdom nor the talent to create a new one, still define the world today.

The global clash of World War One set the whole of the 20th century on a rigid trajectory, thus becoming a seminal catastrophe and, as we have seen, its impact is still felt today.

The two parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire have now become two separate worlds. Austria has shed its Catholicism, its bourgeois ethos and, above all, its Central Europeanism. The Austrians seem unable to come to terms with their Habsburg heritage. Without it, who and what are they? We, by contrast, have not denied the more than four hundred years of our history as part of the Empire. Acknowledging its achievements and being critical of its mistakes.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The "advanced" West still sees its twentieth-century victories in two world wars as its basis for legitimacy. In Western political thinking and public discourse, the division between winners and losers is still unchanged after a hundred years that have passed. That is why the Foreign Minister of Turkey recently said that World War One was not over, because the Paris Peace Treaties are still in force.

100 years ago, the victorious Westerners squeezed multi-ethnic Hungary into a homogenous nation-state. Although the Carpathian Basin had been for thousands of years one of the most ethnically diverse regions in Europe. But by that time, the western half of Europe was already made up of homogeneous nation-states, while we had various national communities and peoples living together. By now, however, the tables have turned. Now they have become multi-ethnic as a backlash of colonialism, and thus, in 2015, they came up with the idea that we should allow Muslim immigration, so that we too become multi-ethnic again. Yes, they still believe that they can tell us again and again whom we can and cannot live with.

Today we live in the geostrategically weakened Europe created by the Entente powers a hundred years ago. The centre of Europe was empty, the victorious powers being unable or unwilling to fill the void left by the Habsburg Empire. The Germans and the Russians now had a clear path to the East, West and South. From 1945 to 1990, the West created a bipolar world and subordinated the centre of Europe, including our region, to the Soviets. Nearly half a century of Soviet occupation became our shared historical experience and brought our region closer together again. Just like our shared experience of the collapse of an empire for the second time. We survived both, without being buried under the rubble – quite on the contrary. Freed from the Soviet occupiers, we were able to move independently and freely into the new, twenty-first century.

The new vacuum in the centre of Europe created by the demise of the Soviet empire was filled this time by the victorious power of the Cold War – the United States of America.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The collapse of the Soviet Empire put an end not only to the 20th century, but also to the age of empires. The 21st century is not a continuation of the 20th, but something entirely new. The western half of Europe, which hasn't had to bury its two empires, struggles to acknowledge that much. They represent continuity, the status quo – things that do not exist anymore. They act as if the end of the Cold War had only broken the Soviet Union and that both the US and the territories it ruled could afford sitting on their hands. They refuse to acknowledge that the decisive factor in the demise of the bipolar world was the old-new power whose existence they still try to deny. Namely: nationalism. The second half of the 20th century was still about empires. The 21st century is again about nations. In the 1990s, the nation states of our region regained their independence and, by doing so, crushed the Soviet Empire. Following in their footsteps, the Soviet republics also embarked on a path to independence, which sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. Nationalism has by now also eroded the hegemony of the US and the world moved from unipolar to multipolar. This realignment is fraught with trade wars and bloody conflicts because the US imperial elite feels it now has the power to halt this process of world realignment. Its challengers, however, are convinced that their time has come. Nationalism is the driving force behind this world-reshaping process. In this vein, President Trump's America First movement helped him to victory in 2016, just as the people of the UK left the European Union in the same year to take back control over their lives.

Today, nationalism is the X factor all over the world. China, Russia, Ukraine, Africa, India, the whole of the Turkic and Muslim world are all working to assert their national sovereignty and promote their national interests. There is only one exception, and that is the European Union, and within it, the denationalised Germans. The European Union sees itself as an empire and tries to behave like one. The problem is that it lacks the means to have its imperial existence recognised. It has no common army, no common currency, no common finances, no common foreign policy. Most of its members still see themselves as nation-states and do not want to be absorbed into such a pseudo-empire. Its imperial ambitions are mainly fuelled by its own bureaucracy that has gone loose. And it is supported by the US as a matter of convenience. By turning itself into an empire, the EU's current leaders hope to infinitely delay the task of answering the question – what the EU's interests are and how they should assert them.

Europe wants to become an empire after not having even been able to bridge the gap between West Europe and East Europe for the last thirty-five years.

Europe's halves, after having been separated for decades by an iron curtain, are now further apart than they were when the Soviet empire fell. The main reason is that, while in our region, Marxism was extinct by the 1970s, in the West, as the great Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce pointed out shortly before his death in 1989, it triumphantly carried the day and took power into its hands. According to Del Noce, the core notions in Marxism were atheism and materialism, while its ideas on the economy, namely the abolition of private property, nationalisation and the practice of planned economy, were secondary, in fact irrelevant components of its ideology. The Marxist worldview was based on atheism, materialism, and a utopian belief in historical progress. These were coupled with relativism and nihilism. While in the East, communism had totally collapsed by 1989; in the West, by contrast, scienticism and technologism became an official worldview – a veritable substitute to religion. Western Marxists said goodbye without the slightest pain to a society of equals without exploitation, and began instead to believe in scienticism and technologism. Accordingly, instead of pinning their hopes on a communist future to be won through revolution, they believe in scientific and technological progress.

Marxism has swept Christian morality and values out of the Western world but without replacing them with anything, with the resulting increase in people's feeling of insecurity and alienation – almost to the point of intolerability. No common faith, no common purpose, no common vision. This is what the triumph of Marxism has brought to the West.

From 1945 to 1956, the Cold War between the Soviets and the Americans was fought between godless Marxism and Christian civilisation. The US represented the continuity of the old order, while the Soviets were representatives of the new, revolutionary one. By 1968, it was clear that Soviet-style communist regimes had failed to deliver on the Marxist promise of a paradise on earth in terms of material goods. It had also become clear that the proletarians of the Western world wanted to consume more and become middle class. This is what prevented the student movements from selling their cause to the bulk of the population, and that's what also sealed the fate of the terrorist movements of the 1970s, which tried unsuccessfully to revolutionise France, West Germany, Italy and the USA. Western Marxists began therefore to concentrate on achieving cultural hegemony, following Gramsci's teachings. They seized cultural bridgeheads and institutions, above all universities, schools, academic research centres and the media. They gave up on winning over the masses and only focused on the elites. Today, the cultural bridgeheads they have taken over, along with a series of tech companies and social media, have coalesced into a mindset-industrial complex that pervades and dominates the world.

1968 proved to be a milestone. Not that the rebellious youth wanted anything other than destruction. In Prague, the revolution made clear that communist regime could not be reformed. The western revolutionaries had no ideas – only desires. They had nothing to say about politics. Their elites were quick to incorporate Marxism into their revolutionary tradition, in other terms, they re-Westernised Marxism. They brought it into line with French universalism and the liberty-centred American export of democracy. Once the Western masses were satisfied with the spectacular expansion of their wealth and consumption, and the oppressed of the Third World were liberated from colonial rule, new oppressed had to be found. The common trait of the oppressed is that they are victims and as such – blameless, unlike the guilty members of mainstream society.

From the 1970s onwards, the Western elites that had been, by then, imbued with Marxism, were living in the fever of the sexual revolution which pitted them even more against puritanical and asexual Eastern communism, which was culturally uninteresting and politically unsuccessful.

It was then that young Westerners were introduced to nihilism, which sharply separated them from their fathers' generation that had rebuilt Europe from the rubbles of the war. The combination of the sexual revolution and drugs (LSD at that time) satisfied them for a while, and then most of them converted to neoliberalism and reconciled themselves with the economic and financial elite. The more Marxist vanguard merged with the neoliberal economic and political elite, the more interested they became in preserving and even reinforcing the status quo. The creation of an exploitation-free society was no longer part of their agenda.

By expelling God from the core of its worldview, that is, abandoning sacrality and replacing it with utilitarianism, the Euro-Atlantic world removed the most important difference separating it from the communist Soviet system. From the eighties of the last century, it was no longer the godless against the godly, but two rival materialistic, utilitarian systems, one more efficient than the other. The revolutionary communist branch of Marxism lost, the anti-revolutionary, socialist wing won. The Marxist economic model was defeated, but the rest – anti-religion, secularism, scientism, technical and technological progressivism, with the expansion of sexuality into a central theme, got the upper hand. The separation of science from God became an accomplished fact, with the result of a pervasive moral relativism.

When, in 1989, Western Marxism renounced communism and revolution, it turned its back on all that was grand and heroic. It was left with no other aim but the pursuit of profit, money, growth, and consumption. The current moment is the only thing that matters to them. It has nothing to say about the future.

All this has resulted in the total alienation of Western man.

Today's nihilistic elite promises to find solutions to all social problems through science. It intends to and is capable of transforming societies – that is what the export of democracy is still about – in quest for universal happiness. But if societies are so easy to transform, why stop there?

The West today has become obsessed with perfectionism. It believes that through science and technology, it can transform societies and people, change their gender, their appearance at will (that is what genderism and LGBTQ+ is about). We, by contrast, believe that man's possibilities are limited, and perfection is unattainable. Although progress in both technology and living conditions is undeniable, neither man nor society can be simply reshaped. It is also an empirical fact that evil is present everywhere, in every age. Today's Marxists also expect science and technology to make evil impossible.

In the hours of the demise of the Soviet Union, the neo-Marxist business-oriented West immediately imposed on us the kind of neoliberalism intertwined with savage capitalism, that we hoped would help us catch up with them. We soon realised that this toxic mixture threatened to turn our region into a hunting ground for profit and lobbies. We also realised that the European Union is seeking to erase the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural identity of our continent for the sake of economic interests and actors whom it is increasingly difficult to see as representatives of the interests of the community of European citizens. That is why the eastern half of Europe sees the European Union more and more as a threat and not as an opportunity.

It is important to be aware that what the West is now trying to promote is the same Marxist ideology that we learned to know the hard way in the second half of the twentieth century and that we already defeated once, three decades ago.

We defeated it and survived. The shared experience of our region is that communism can be defeated.

As is our ability to withstand the most intense pressures. We did not become Nazis, we did not allow ourselves to be Sovietised, no matter how much pressure was put on us. We have not allowed ourselves to be Americanised. We have always had the necessary resilience.

That is what makes us confident.

Western European elites, following the ever latest American academic fashions as if on an acid trip, are increasingly terrorising their majority societies, taking their obedience for granted. They expect us to behave likewise. But over here, in the heartland of Europe, we have been through all the schools of totalitarian dictatorships. We immediately spot the totalitarian nature of the homogenising will we are confronted with. For us, it lacks the kind of cement that should be made of mutual respect, recognition of shared interest and goodwill.

That is why we can't help saying to them – no.

Thank you!

TOMÁŠ KULMAN:
INTRODUCTION AND LAUDATIO

Your Eminence, Dominik Cardinal Duka,
Your Excellences, Ambassadors,
Esteemed members of the diplomatic corps,
Honourable Members of Parliament, Senators,
Ladies and gentlemen,

It's been a year again since we met in this room. And I am glad that we have such a large audience again. Together with our partner organizations we have worked diligently both at the end of 2023 and also throughout this whole year. I would like to thank all of you who have actively contributed to this effort. And I am very happy that for the first time ever we have the honour of welcoming guests from Italy. Welcome to Prague!

This year, our proceedings "Saint Adalbert and Central Europe", which summarize the basic principles of Central European cooperation, have not been distributed to all participants. The book, however, is available to new participants at the conference reception desk and can be downloaded from our website in electronic form at any time.

This third year of our international St. Adalbert's Conference, which we are about to launch, has set the aim of enhancing our activities in qualitative terms, which is also reflected in its title: "Central Europe at the Crossroads". The times when any changes in the global world were taking place somewhere in the background or behind the curtain, if you want, are over. From now on, changes in the world order are becoming more and more visible and need to be responded to directly and visibly.

The existence of two distinct parts of Europe has become a reality. One part, mainly to the west of our borders, is multicultural and progressive. It believes that its main task is to deal with climate change and the rights of minorities, including LGBT+ communities. That part is satisfied with the process of fast de-industrialisation of Europe.

The other part, especially in our wider Central European area, does not want to give up its national identity, its Christian cultural roots, the idea of nation-state, traditional values, including the traditional family model. It doesn't want to be just a producer, but also a global economic competitor.

The gap between these two approaches is constantly widening, as has been fully revealed, for example, by the current Hungarian Presidency of the European Union. Some 30 years ago, the Hungarian positions would have been accepted without any reservations by the European community. However, it is not Hungary that has changed, but rather the European power elites and their understanding of the reality in life. And, unfortunately, the instruments they use to impose this understanding on others.

The speed and scale of global political changes which are aimed at transformation of the unipolar world into a multipolar world have gained strong intensity, and ignoring these facts can have fatal consequences for all stakeholders. The world is becoming more dangerous, less predictable and more divided. The old order is turning into chaos. Old alliances are crumbling and new ones are only to be created. The only certainty left is a nation-state, built on belonging, solidarity and coherence, capable of helping its citizens through this difficult period. This idea was unexpectedly confirmed by global political strategist Henry Kissinger in his article, "The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever Alter the World Order", published in April 2020.

And I quote: "The founding legend of modern government is a walled city protected by powerful rulers, sometimes despotic, other times benevolent, yet always strong enough to protect the people from an external enemy. Enlightenment thinkers reframed this concept, arguing that the purpose of the legitimate state is to provide for the fundamental needs of the people: security, order, economic well-being, and justice. Individuals cannot secure these things on their own. The pandemic has prompted an anachronism, a revival of the walled city in an age when prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people."

Let me add that the true source of chaos isn't just the impact of COVID-19, but rather the radical transformation of the world order itself. Globalisation is an objective process, but it can take different forms: not only the form of multiculturalism, but also the form of cooperation between nation-states, which play a role in the world order similar to that of organs in the human body.

That is why we claim we are presently at a crossroads. Either we will genuinely defend our interests, or we will simply disappear from the map. At this conference, we want to focus on security threats, mutual economic cooperation and, last but not least, the role that the Central European countries should play in a changing world.

On Saturday afternoon, we will all have the opportunity to join one of the conference sessions, which we have organized according to subtopics.

The topic of the first session will be security threats of today that cannot be interpreted only as a phenomenon related to the military invasion of our states by another state. They should be understood in a broader sense of energy, food or cyber security. Multiculturalism and uncontrolled migration are also threats, as are the implementation of progressivist ideologies, manipulation of the media and censorship. And last but not least, it is the change in military doctrines of the three main global actors of today, meaning the United States, China and Russia.

Topic number two is Central European economic cooperation. It must be built on the cooperation of sovereign nation-states, which cannot develop until they revive their national economic thinking and joint infrastructure projects. Part of this economic emancipation is to bring strategic infrastructure back under the control of nation-states. And the changing world and Europe also opens up the issue of defining a common Central European economic area.

The last topic is the role of Central Europein a changing global world and its paths to power. It must be said that Europe, as a centre of power, has unfortunately disappeared from the global political map and basically is not involved in global political decision-making at present. The question is: what does the end of transatlantic hegemony mean for Central Europe in particular? And is Central Europe supposed to become a construction project defined from above by the great powers, or is it to emerge bottom-up from sovereign nation-states?

Dear friends, as you can see, we have a truly packed agenda ahead of us, and I believe it will inspire not only broad discussion but, in the near future, concrete actions as well.