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Václav Klaus in Skopje: "Cultural Diplomacy or Just Diplomacy?"

English Pages, 20. 5. 2025

Many thanks for the invitation to participate in the Skopje Cultural Diplomacy Forum 2025. I am grateful to be here. This is already my sixth visit of Macedonia. I was here only as a politician, never as a tourist, which is, because of the well-known beauties of your country, my fault.

For the first time I was here in 2004 attending the funeral of the tragically deceased President Trajkovski. I will never forget the solemn and deeply respectful atmosphere that prevailed at the funeral. My last visit here was in 2022 when speaking at the School for Young Leaders in Ohrid, organized by my good friend President Ivanov. Seeing Ohrid is always unforgettable.

In my lifetime, and even in my political lifetime, the name of your country has been changed several times, which was not entirely extraordinary in Central and Southern Europe. I have lived all my life in Prague, but I was born in the Protectorate of Böhmen und Mähren, belonging to Germany in the Nazi era. The following 47 years, I spent in Czechoslovakia whereas the rest of my life in the Czech Republic. For me, your country is, and will always be, Macedonia.

Only a few years of my life I could claim to have lived in a sovereign and independent country. These were the three years after the end of the second world war and the first 15 years after the fall of communism. In 2004, in the moment when I was President of the country, we became a member state of the European Union. This was another change.

This artificial construct was originally founded as the European Community, which was planned as a community of states. More than thirty years ago, it was transformed by the Maastricht Treaty, and even more by the Lisbon Treaty into a new political entity, into a union of citizens of individual European member states. This radical and far-reaching political unification has changed the substance of the original integration process, as well as the meaning of independence and sovereignty.

I know your country has been striving for an EU membership for a long time. Both as Prime Minister, and as President, I have always supported this ambition of yours. The Czechs have been waiting for membership for a much shorter time than you have. But in spite of that, it seemed to us to last too long.

To be frank, we didn’t like being on the waiting list and, above all, we didn’t like being patronized by West Europeans during the accession negotiations. I suppose you know something about this. I can also understand the frustration of Macedonians when they hear promises given to Ukraine to accelerate its accession talks with the EU. As compared to Ukraine, you are not at war, your country is not half destroyed and functions in a standard way. But it is not fighting Russia.

This forum is not about the European Union, but about cultural diplomacy and its importance for the current world. Let me make a few comments on this.

In the past, diplomacy used to be the main vehicle for exchanging messages and statements among countries, for presenting views and political stances, sometimes for offering promises, sometimes for delivering threats. It was a way how to negotiate, how to make compromises, how to make deals.

It is different now. The role of diplomacy has substantially changed due to the information and transportation revolutions of recent decades and due to the different atmosphere in the world. In the past, diplomacy meant personal visits, personal face-to-face talks. Today, it is very often sufficient to send an email (which in my understanding still belongs to the category of personal exchanges of views) or even worse – as President Trump brought to perfection – to post the message on one or another social platform and to assume that it will be eventually read, studied and reacted to. These developments have also fundamentally changed the roles of ministers of foreign affairs, as well as of embassies and of ambassadors. The currently fashionable absence of human touch makes a fundamental difference. It is, in my eyes, a difference for the worse.

This is, however, only the technical side of the matter. Much more important is something else. Diplomacy was (and is) relevant only in a situation when all relevant parties are genuinely interested in a dialogue. I am afraid the world of today left the era of dialogues and entered an era of monologues. This is untenable. We must start not only talking, but listening as well. It could eliminate many tensions, conflicts and wars. I suppose this is one of the aims of this forum.

This brings me back to the term “cultural diplomacy” in the title of the forum. This – probably – means not the exchange of cultural artefacts (books, paintings, sculptures), but rather a diplomacy among cultures.

Countries with different cultures used to communicate in the past, but the rise of multiculturalism made – paradoxically for many, not for me – an end to it. This ill-conceived ideology did not want communication, friendship and the best possible cooperation among cultures in the world, but seeks to transplant different cultures into existing entities of the current world, and especially – and this is relevant to our topic – into a nation-state (or a state with a dominant nation).

This is not rational. It leads to conflicts and wars. This danger is, in my understanding, the fundamental argument against the advocacy of mass migration. In other words, wir schaffen es nicht. Frau Merkel’s policy ten years ago was entirely wrong. We should strive for a multicultural world but keep states as monocultural as possible.

Václav Klaus, Cultural Diplomacy Forum, Panel Discussion "Sustainable Development and Cultural Diplomacy - Fostering Global Partnerships", Skopje, May 20, 2025