Nation-State Sovereignty and the Concept of a Europe of Nations

Václav Klaus recently spoke at the EuCET Conference for Patriotic Intellectuals for Europe in Budapest on October 25, 2024.

Many thanks for the invitation. Let me start by confessing that I am always glad to have the opportunity to come to Budapest and Hungary. I feel I am in a free country. Thank you for selecting such an excellent topic for my speech at the conference: “The Importance of the nation-state sovereignty and the concept of Europe of nations”. My thanks are not just a courtesy statement. Such a title can’t be raised in any other European country these days, only in Hungary. 

The specific Hungarian position on this issue is due to the current extraordinarily favorable political atmosphere in your country which – I believe – reflects the authentic feelings of Hungarians, due to the strong position Fidesz has been able to hold in Parliament and in government for such a long time and due to the views, activities, political strength and, last but not least, the courage of Prime Minister Orbán. Hungary is the only country in Europe where – in the third decade of the 21^st century and 35 years after the fall of communism – it makes sense to talk about nation-state sovereignty. No other country in Europe is explicitly aiming at and working towards such a goal. European political elites even don’t dare use the term nation-state sovereignty in their speeches and political programs. The term is a priori considered politically incorrect. 

In most European countries, and practically in all EU member states, the issue of sovereignty used to be the topic of yesterday, if not of the day before yesterday. In my country it was considered a fundamental issue last time when I held the highest political functions. It is over now. It doesn’t mean, of course, that we should not talk about it or that people don’t talk about it. It remains our task to publicly raise this crucial issue again and again. I am more than pleased to have a chance to do so here today.

The issue of sovereignty is not new and doesn’t belong exclusively to the 21^st century. It has been discussed, promoted and denied continuously throughout human history. Sometimes it looked promising, sometimes not. More often, however, it has not. Always after the liquidation of an entirely discredited empire, the concept of the nation-state has emerged with a new strength and has come to be seen as the cornerstone of rational political arrangements and the only place where genuine democracy is possible. Today’s dominant ideologies, globalism and progressivism, see it differently. 

In the last couple of decades, these ideologies – together with multiculturalism, environmentalism and genderism – succeeded in bringing about the most widespread and far-reaching metamorphosis of human society. As compared to it, even communism was a smaller reversal of the slowly and gradually built rules, institutions, habits and traditions.¹ Aggressive genderism touches more and more deeply into the substance of human existence. The French and Russian revolutions killed millions of their opponents but didn’t attempt to change the sexes. Now it is different. We live in an era of sustained attack on the foundations of Western civilization. We are facing the most significant test of the health and stability of our society, civilization and culture. 

The resistance to it and the willingness to do something against it seems to be relatively weak so far, which is frustrating to many of us. People still don’t believe anything like that is possible. They take it as a temporary aberration. It is easy for a conservative like me to feel pessimistic about the many pathologies of today’s world, but we can’t allow ourselves to remain passive. I suppose that’s the main reason why many of us are here today. 

To make a change, the West must return to the ideas of the Enlightenment, to the classical liberal traditions, to the time-tested practices and institutions of the past, to the ideas of Mises, Hayek, Friedman and similar scholars. The West must return to normality. Is this possible when we see the West, decadent and spoilt by its affluence and absence of authentic Judeo-Christian values? I am not sure about it. 

The East must return to the way of thinking which prevailed in the newly free countries of Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism which are becoming affluent and decadent as well. 

To make a change will not be an easy task. The resistance in both the West and the East is and will be strong and aggressive. We are already seeing this now in various Antifa-like terrorist activities. It will ask for the rejection of both red and green socialism, for safeguarding the way of life characteristic for our civilization and for finding a new balance between a free individual and the omnipresent and ever-expanding state (equipped with modern technologies).

Let me return to the issue of the nation-state sovereignty. It is not a new debate and dispute. It has been repeating itself over and over again throughout history. It has not come out of the blue now either. The seeds for this new round of rejection of the nation-state that we are experiencing these days have been planted, generously watered and excessively fertilized for decades. 

It is connected with the state of our democracy. We should make it very clear that democracy can only be achieved and guaranteed in a well-defined and delimited space. Cosmopolitan democracy cannot exist. Democracy needs borders. Democracy can’t exist in a fuzzy world of undefined and unclear contours. Democracy needs the people, the demos, which can’t exist without a well demarcated specific entity called the nation-state. There is no alternative to it. To see it differently shows a belief in the transnational idealism which is so typical for the current Western world.

I have no intention to return to the distant past. Let’s stay in the history that we more or less know and understand and that we – at least some of us – were able to touch. The debate about the role of nation-states received a new, regretfully extremely unfortunate impetus after the Second World War. This tragic war was – quite wrongly – associated with nationalism and the nation-state, whereas we know it was connected with the totalitarian ideologies of Nazism (or national socialism) and Communism. As a consequence, the wrong and misleading interpretation that the nation-state was fundamentally guilty for the war has become more or less accepted, at least in the realm of political elites and among all kinds of leftist ideologists and activists. 

This confusion led to the “deification” of supranational structures, including or starting with the newly created institutions of the European integration process. The European integration, in its current form of the European Union, has become a symbol of it. The European Union seeks to weaken its constituting elements, its members, the nation-states, and would like to replace them with an alternative entity, with the regions. Therefore, the slogan Europe of regions. 

The last, but still only implicit, goal, which will become relevant once the total fragmentation of European society has been achieved, is to replace it with a Europe of individual Europeans, with a Europe of isolated individuals. The vicious circle would be completed if this happens.

As I have said, the progressivist, undemocratic project of supranational governance started in Europe with a new strength after the Second World War. Its original – more or less innocent – project of European Economic Community was transformed step by step, almost invisibly, into a process of European unification. Both the Maastricht Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty shifted the initial concept of integration, which meant better and deeper cooperation of sovereign states, into transnational unification. The European continent itself has changed from a historically evolved bundle of sovereign independent countries into a very authoritative and centralistic entity called the European Union. Those of us who lived for decades in the very aggressive and oppressive brotherhood of socialist countries are very sensitive to this.

I am convinced that the nation-state is an exclusive and irreplaceable playing field of democracy and its only guarantor. The state – not the region or continent – forms an authentic political community. Europe is not a political community. European political communities are the nation states. We are Czechs, Hungarians and Slovaks. We speak Czech, Hungarian and Slovak, not a European Esperanto. We don’t want to erase our borders and to get rid of the distinction between citizen and foreigner. We, the advocates of the nation-state sovereignty, know that people exist “within national cultures, histories, traditions and languages”. When there is an empire, the democracy fades away. One or another form of autocracy takes over. 

Is this development avoidable? It definitely is, but the change can’t be achieved without a fundamental systemic reversal, without a sort of Velvet Revolution (to use the old but useful terminology). Are we heading towards it? The optimists (and naivists) tend to give a positive answer. The pessimists (and realists) say resolutely no. Or not yet. They know that we shouldn’t fall into the tenets of wishful thinking. 

Some try – optimistically – to compare the current civilizational crisis with the fate of communism. We must be very careful, however. Where are we now as compared to the history of communism? My answer is that we are certainly not in the 1980s. I am even afraid we are closer to the 1950s than to the year 1989. The current political establishment (not to speculate about the US-like “deep state”) concurred political parties and groupings both on the left and on the right and is successfully blocking all political entities which try to express the real feelings of the people of Europe from gaining any influence. This year’s European parliamentary elections have brought relatively good results for the opposition parties, but the outcome is not democratic change but the hardening of old tendencies and practices. 

I fear, therefore, together with Gregory Copley that “we do not know how to reorganize our society without the collapse of it”. He argues that “collapse is always the pre-requisite to the reorganization of an entire society”. If this is so, it gives us one important task: to make the much-needed change before the collapse is steep and deep. We have, regretfully, not yet started. Let’s do it as soon as possible. 

It would be an act of cowardice to avoid mentioning the Ukraine war. It has become generally accepted and politically correct to see this bloody, tragic and unnecessary war in black and white, to see only the good guys and the bad guys, to divide the world into a group of undemocratic aggressors and of their innocent victims, to define the war in moralistic terms and not to pay sufficient attention to the days before the “hot” war. Anyone who discusses this war as if it started on the 24^th February 2022 is totally off the mark. People have, however, started to think. Even one well-respected American analyst, former politician, made a good point recently saying, “the West is not responsible for what Russia did, but is responsible for neglecting the steps that may have prevented Russia from doing it.” We don’t make that point sufficiently. 

Ursula von der Leyen recently praised herself for being already eight times in Kiev. It would be more interesting to hear how many times she was there before 2014, how many times between 2014-2022 and what plans she brought there to avoid, and later to stop, the war. Many of us saw the imminent danger already in 2014.

There is no need to come up with grand schemes and projects. I agree with Mario Fantini⁵ that “a time for resistance” has come. And is long overdue. We need a revolution. As a newly elected Italian MEP Roberto Vannaci put it in the same issue of the European Conservative, “Normality is revolutionary”. Let´s insist on returning to the normality. That would be revolutionary enough.