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Václav Klaus from the Hillsdale College Cruise: Recent Changes in the World, in Europe, and in the U.S. as Seen from Prague

English Pages, 29. 5. 2025

Let me begin by greeting all of you and by expressing my hope that you’re enjoying the cruise as much as I am. My personal attitude toward being at sea is very simple. I have spent my entire life in the Czech Republic, in a land-locked country located in the very heart of Europe, and because of that, any opportunity to be at sea is something special and extraordinary for me. For the first decades of my life – more than half of it – I lived in the semi-closed communist country. Traveling abroad, let alone to the sea, was a rare privilege. That is why I feel obliged to enjoy the sea whenever there is a chance.

This is not my first Hillsdale cruise. I have been in contact with Hillsdale College, with this very unique institution, for decades already. I consider the school, under the wise and far-sighted leadership of President Arrn, to be a leading centre of free thinking and free teaching in America, and not only there. Receiving Imprimis every month for decades means an obligatory reading for me, I don’t have to be forced to read it. I quote the texts published there quite often.

I have been to the U.S. many times. Without trying to count, it may already be close to 60-70 visits. The first was in 1969, when I had the unique chance to spend a spring term at Cornell University. At that moment, I heared the very popular song Bridge Over Troubled Water at least ten times a day, whenever I tuned the radio. I'm not sure the waters were as troubled back then as they are today.

I visited the U.S. first as an academician, then as a politician, never as a tourist. I haven’t been there since 2018, however. Not accidentally. Travel ceased to be normal during the Covid pandemic and – in addition to that – I did not have a sufficient motivation to return to a country where the woke revolution was in full swing. We had enough of that in Europe.

Mentioning Covid may imply to some that the interruption of traveling was due to the pandemic. That is not true. The illness wasn’t as dangerous as it was declared. The change was much more the result of reactions of politicians and governments all over the world to this extraordinary epidemic. Since the very beginning, I have called this reaction covidism. It has become one of the many variants of leftist progressivist ideologies which ruled almost unopposed until recently.

This Covid episode of suppression of human freedom is now already part of the past, but we should not allow it to be forgotten. I tried – through my writings, my speeches and my resistance to the rules imposed upon us – to protest against it quite vehemently. No one in my country paid as many fines for not wearing a mask or for other expressions of civil disobedience as I did. It was not, of course, a protest against the Covid disease itself, but against the ideology of covidism and the repressive policies that followed. The protests of many brave men and women were more than justified, but most people did not dare to actively oppose it.

When I said – perhaps too optimistically – that the progressivist ideology ruled until recently, I had in mind the change brought about by the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election and by the implementation of some of his – for many highly controversial – radical policies during his first 100 days in office.

Some may regard my use of the past tense in that sentence as wishful thinking, but I know that the past is not over. The deep roots of progressivist ideologies, of wokeism, of genderism, of environmentalism, of globalism, of multiculturalism, and of all other similar “isms” dominate our everyday life, our government policies – and what is even worse – our universities and the entire educational system. To my great regret, they may continue to dominate for years, if not decades. We would need many more Hillsdales to shorten this timeline.

All these isms are flourishing in Europe, in the continent where I live. They have many self-assured aggressive exponents there. But – and this is the main reason I stopped visiting the U.S. in the Biden era – this way of thinking (and behaving) was in my understanding in many respects born in America and – because of the hegemonial American position in the world – exported to the rest of the West. It didn’t come from the East or the South. The Russian or Chinese Presidents did not do it.

You may not like to hear this. I am sorry I must put it that way. We have been importing from America not only jeans, rock&roll, jazz, hamburgers, hot dogs and other similar items, but also genderism, wokeism, Cancel Culture, Cancel History, belief in global institutions (many of them located not accidentally in America), the deification of nature (as a way how to control people), the global warming doctrine, etc.

I don’t deny the non-zero role of Europe in all of this. I am well aware of the German Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, connected with the Frankfurter Schule (the School of Frankfurt), of the decline of religious belief in Europe (especially after the Second World War), of the very European belief in the omnipotent role of governments as compared to trust in markets and the actions and initiatives of individuals, etc. Nevertheless, we have lived in an American century, not in a European one. The cultural impulses were mostly coming from America.

My views are best expressed by the title of a book we – in my institute, which is a sort of Presidential Library in the American sense – published in August 2020. Its title is “The Self-Destruction of the West”. Not destruction of the West, but its self-destruction.

This may sound like an extreme position, as unnecessary pessimism, as premature surrender in the – not yet final – battle. I don’t see it as extreme. My choice of words may be caused by my special way of looking at the world which has been inevitably shaped by my sad communist experience. In that era, we were deprived of many things considered normal in the – then free – West. We lost a lot, but we also learned something. Having lived without freedom, we understood what freedom means.

Because we didn’t have a functioning market economy but a non-functioning centrally planned economy, we understood what the meaning of markets is. We lived for decades in an era of economic irrationalities and inefficiencies, and as a result, we don’t believe in the government, its motivations and capabilities. Twenty years ago, I had the feeling these beliefs were over, that they could never return, but I see now that I was wrong. This explains the choice of the title Self-Destruction of the West.

Developments in Europe have many similar, if not identical characteristics to those in America. There is, however, one huge difference. The current European political, economic and social systemic shifts go together with a very specific restructuring of the continent which has no parallel in the world. This is characterized by the radical weakening of the position of nation states and the strengthening of continental institutions.

The slogan “Make America (in our case France, Italy, the Czech Republic, or e.g. Romania) Great Again” implicitly attacks the almost sacred idea of political unification of Europe. To say anything like that is considered heresy, something that is directed against the basis of the European integration process which started after the Second World War.

The European unification (as it is officially interpreted) is based on the transformation of individual nation-states into regions, provinces, cantons (or however you may call them). It requires getting rid of the term nation. This goes, of course, against all European traditions and against all well-established core principles of political (and social) sciences. These are based on the hypothesis that the nation-state is an optimal institution for democracy.

For democracy, you must have the people, the citizens. You can’t have a democracy in larger entities, in empires, which have no citizens, only inhabitants. This issue represents the essence of the European debate. We, the believers in the nation-state, don’t want to surrender power to the continental institutions. This is, however, what the European unification process is about.

You have, I know, similar discussions in America, but you are lucky not to have two-thousand-year-old states as building blocs of the United States of America. Not long ago, I participated in a dispute in a Prague pub about the quality of beer served there.

Some of you may know that beer is our national drink and that we have the highest per capita consumption of beer in the world. One of the two breweries supplying this particular pub was founded in 1269, the other in 1450. This doesn’t indicate or guarantee the quality of the beer, but it tells something relevant about our history. And about the role of traditions. When Anheuser-Busch wanted to buy a brewery in my country, it sparked an uprising, almost. On the other hand, selling a well-established Czech car company, our main export product today, to the Germans was accepted without any problem. I believe this says something about the meaning of history in Europe.

And what about Trump? People like me welcomed his victory in last year’s presidential elections. Many Czechs saw in it a long-needed change, an unimaginable opening of a window of opportunity to stop the dominant tendencies of the last decades characterized by the creeping loss of freedoms of all kinds, by growing belief in the omnipotence of the state, by stronger and stronger disbelief in free markets.

With our oversensitivity based on our life in communism, we are already comparing the most recent years with late communism – not geopolitically, but in everyday life.

Trump’s attack on such tendencies is a revolution of sorts. As an economist, I am often asked to comment on his tariff policies. As someone who was accused during the communist era of being “a Chicago boy”, a believer in Milton Friedman and free markets, I am not offended by Donald Trump’s behaviour. I am able to distinguish between a search for the best possible bargaining position and the formulation of final solutions. What is more important, I also understand that tariffs represent only one aspect of foreign trade parameters and of government distortions of the market in today’s West and that this aspect is relatively small compared to all other trade barriers and distortions.

I am convinced his policies make sense and can bring us to a better world.

 Václav Klaus, Hillsdale College Cruise, June 2, 2025