PANEL DISCUSSION 2024
Patrik NACHER:
BUREAUCRATIC DICTATE DESTROYS THE FOUNDATIONS OF OUR IDENTITY
Ladies and gentlemen, dear guests!
It is a pleasure for me to take part in the third year of this conference, this time on stage. In the previous years, I was in the audience. And I would like to apologise in advance that I don't know if I will keep to those allocated 15 minutes, because I have prepared my speech and as usual, I will improvise, so I will speak a little slower so that the interpreters have a chance to interpret it. As I was writing and preparing it, I arrived at what I neither expected, nor wanted at the beginning – five paradoxes. And I would like to share these five paradoxes with you. The first one will follow in a moment.
The world we live in has diminished thanks to globalisation and has grown bigger again thanks to the current contradictions and conflicts. Thirty years ago, we were amazed by the possibilities to see the other end of the world, which had been impossible behind the Iron Curtain, and we felt that the world was going to experience a permanent period of stability and development after the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, it is not happening now. On the contrary, we can see today that the global world is full of unresolved problems and conflicts. Freedom of speech serves as a great example. This is the first paradox. This freedom came to us in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Czechoslovakia, from Western Europe, and today, it is from the same direction that we see the influx of cancel culture, the principle of single correct opinion – the names of anything, such as products, greetings – even greetings are changed; the way I greeted you here "ladies and gentlemen" is no longer sufficient, because some may not identify themselves as men or women – anthems are changed, statues are torn down, people change their view of the future – excuse me – of the past. But also of the future. The censorship that we are so sensitive to has been renamed the fight against disinformation and hate speech. And when you look at it in practice, those who fight against it are often those who spread disinformation and get angry when they are advised of it, and spread even hate speech against those they disagree with.
And so I have remembered that we live in Central Europe, which is a fairly well-defined territory – after all, this conference is all about it – and which has a thousand years of common historical tradition that St. Adalbert and his contemporaries built as sovereign national Christian state formations. In addition to the geographical demarcation with three seas and three big rivers, we are united by our common past. We should not forget that.
Similarly, most of our states lived behind the Iron Curtain within the socialist camp before 1989. This experience also sets us apart from the countries of Western Europe, which were then on the opposite side and till this day – sometimes I have a strong feeling – they look at us as people or politicians of the second category, also because we entered their structures in the 1990s, and not the other way round. But it needs to be said here that our starting points are different.
Unlike the powers of the Western world, we have no colonial past. This needs to be repeated constantly. We do not need to apologise to anyone, give back anything to anyone, offer anything to anyone. We have no debt in this respect, neither moral nor ethical, although some exert this pressure on us, nor economic. In our countries, the traditional values of continental Europe – the nation and the nation-state – prevail as the basis of natural identity, the Christian cultural code, the natural perception of the family based on the union of a man and a woman with children as desirable fruit of such a union. We have our own language, cultural traditions and, last but not least, the indigenous population that has lived here for thousands of years prevails overwhelmingly in our countries.
And we want it to remain so. In this, we are different from countries in the western part of our continent, which prefer multiculturalism – which turns out to be no longer working well – and progressivist ideologies, and have given up their historical cultural code and its values. It is thus no coincidence how strongly Islam has taken root in Western Europe. It is natural. The spiritual vacuum that arose from a resignation to some kind of belief, natural matters, must simply be filled with something else. We have currently seen this with anti-Israeli sentiments after 7 October, last year. I say this as an agnostic. I confess without torture. And one of the qualities of the Muslim faith is its rigidity, which resists the pitfalls of the postmodern world, and therefore it is on the global rise today. This should be a warning to us!
Now comes paradox number two. It is the various minorities that most defend migration from Muslim countries; however, the same minorities will be the first to be persecuted in these countries and in the future in those countries of Western Europe. It is incredible that they do not realise it.
Today, most of us live within the European Union, with which we have associated many expectations. It is actually similar to the admiration for Western Europe in 1989, which I mentioned in relation to the freedom of speech. Here is paradox number three. Instead of the advantages of a common market and equal opportunities, we are witnessing a bureaucratic dictate, various picturesque ideas (I was struggling here with the cap for example) that limit us, and anti-civilisation ideologies that destroy our identity, nature, uniqueness (each of those countries is simply different, has a different history and that otherness gives the added value and that is simply not liked). It destroys identity, economic concepts and leads to deindustrialisation, as has been said here, of the European continent. The Czech Republic and Slovakia are the most industrialised countries. And if you look at some statistics – I like figures – our countries have about 40% representation in the European Parliament, specifically, I counted 294 out of 790 EMPs. Even with non-members of the European Union – we are talking about Central and Eastern Europe now – all our countries have about 140 million inhabitants, which seems to me to be a pretty good amount. I am not fighting against the European Union here, although I have been consistently Eurosceptic from the very beginning, but I would like to see its reform and return to its original visions, original ideas. Unfortunately, the political reality of the western part of our continent is currently going in the opposite direction.
Our job is to protect our national interests. Pursuing a national interest is not a bad thing. I offer paradox number four here. Because when the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, simply the big countries, defend their national interests, it is okay, but when it comes to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, it has a negative rating. I feel there is some kind of negation there, as if it was not all right to defend national interests, because it is not a team affair, and yet, it is absolutely natural. Our perspectives on many topics differ naturally. I would like to mention two of them right now – migration and the migration pact (I have mentioned this before) and the Green Deal and the related energy policy. This has also been discussed by the previous speakers.
And so, in order to have something positive, we should look for solutions to defend our interests, how to ensure our economic prosperity and protect our values, especially, though not only within the current European Union. We have a crystallisation core; that is the Visegrad Group, which was formed in the early 1990s as a tool of our integration into European structures, but also later showed its viability, especially as regards anti-immigration policy after the Arab Spring. Nowadays, the challenge is how to expand this agenda precisely in the interests of the development of our nation-states. The fact that we defend our national interests does not mean that it is a fight against someone else. This is not any negation. It is a struggle for something positive.
Unfortunately, and I talked about it yesterday on TV with the professor here, instead of expanding the influence of Visegrad and joining other countries, we argue with one another. Let's take a look at the example of the cold relations between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which I feel very sorry about, because so far it has been true that regardless of the current political representation, we have worked together to defend our interests, which are based on our common history, and we have developed cooperation as much as possible. It is not by chance that the presidents and prime ministers of our countries – now I am talking about the Czech Republic and Slovakia – travel on their first foreign visit to a neighbouring country. The diplomatic conflict with Slovakia is our – for me – shame and its correction will be our task for the future.
It is no coincidence that if Visegrad does not work and stagnates, new possibilities of Central European cooperation are being sought. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced closer cooperation and the alliance of sovereign states, including Hungary, Austria, Slovakia and Serbia (he ranked it there this way), at the Budapest Economic Forum in March.
In the European Parliament, a joint club Patriots for Europe was created with the participation of the party I represent here, the ANO movement, and it also includes the Hungarian Fidesz and the winner of the Austrian parliamentary elections, the FPÖ. At the time of this conference, Prime Ministers Fico and Orbán are meeting with Serbian President Vučić in Slovakia. These are all initiatives that support the desirable cooperation of a wider group of Central European countries.
So what should we focus on? It is in our common interest that economic development must be built on energy self-sufficiency. I repeat: energy self-sufficiency. We could also add food self-sufficiency, drug self-sufficiency. And here again I offer paradox number five, the last one. I feel very much that when we start talking about self-sufficiency, we are accused of selfishness, which is quite the opposite. It's incredible. We want to be self-sufficient, and we are told to be selfish. We must restore stable energy mixes of our countries based on permanent resources, especially nuclear energy. We must also face undesirable migration together, especially by eliminating the Balkan or Italian route. And we also need to start developing technology together – as the previous speaker has said here – which is often beyond the strength of the individual countries of Central Europe, but it can help us build a common scientific-research base.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me conclude by quoting the author of St. Adalbert's monograph, František Dvorník, which he wrote in exile in Rome behind the Iron Curtain in 1967 during the Cold War: "St. Adalbert shall be a program for us to secure the future of small nations in Central Europe, which have so often given their misunderstanding of their own historical development and national resentment at the mercy of their powerful neighbours …" I hope and believe that we will succeed in dispelling the five above-mentioned paradoxes in the future, and that at least we will cast light on them and it will be a topic we will be dealing with. Thank you for your attention.