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Speech by Václav Klaus Commemorating the 107th Anniversary of the Founding of the Independent Czechoslovak State

English Pages, 30. 10. 2025

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,

We are gathered here, in front of the building where the Czechoslovak Republic was proclaimed on October 28, 1918, for the sixth time already. It was the hysteria surrounding the COVID era that brought us out to this historic place. We are beginning to forget and to underestimate that sad and humiliating period of our recent history.

A tradition has begun to emerge—somewhat unplanned—which we should strive to maintain. By organizing today’s gathering, our Institute proudly continues this tradition. For us, October 28, 1918, represents a pivotal moment in our history. After centuries of foreign domination, we could finally begin to decide for ourselves.

Today’s meeting takes place in a time when we are still full of our recent parliamentary elections. Even after four weeks, it remains unclear what government will emerge and when. It should be recognized that for those of us gathered here today, the elections brought about a significant change in our political landscape—a change we welcome. It is the duty of the election winners to bring this change into reality through the formation of a new government, for otherwise a large portion of voters would feel deeply disappointed, perhaps even losing motivation to participate in future elections. This will not be easy. Those who lost are unwilling to concede defeat and, in cooperation with powerful media, are doing their utmost to complicate the creation of a new government.

On this national holiday, I would like to call for a calming of the social and political atmosphere in our country. We have witnessed an extraordinarily aggressive election campaign that has left many painful wounds. Yet we should all accept that both the campaign and the elections are now behind us.

Let us not continue in the same tone. We must hope that the defeated will accept their defeat and refrain from further inflaming tensions in the country. The victors should handle their success with humility and prudence and offer the people an optimistic vision for the future. In today’s divided world, that is, and will remain, no easy task.

We are gathered today to commemorate the most significant event of our modern history—not only the end of our long-lasting subordination within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, but also the attempt to build a new, never-before-existing Czechoslovak state. When I dictated this sentence, my assistant asked whether the word “Czechoslovak” should contain a hyphen. I said I wanted it without a hyphen, because the debate over the hyphen reminds me—and surely not only me—of the beginning of 1990, when that very dispute foreshadowed the breakup of the original Czechoslovakia. Let me remind you that our republic was officially called “Czecho-Slovak” (with a hyphen) only during the tragic months between November 1938 and March 1939—and at no other time.

The creation of our modern state was the result of centuries of effort by many generations of our ancestors. To them we owe the duty to safeguard the free and independent existence of our country in the future.

Today, it is different. We are now the Czech Republic. One hundred and seven years ago, the goal for which generations had strived was the establishment of an independent and sovereign state. It was not enough merely to rid ourselves of the monarchy. Our forebears in 1918 understood well that they had to create a democratic political state on republican foundations. The goal was not only to free ourselves from subordination to Vienna. The task was to create the conditions that would allow us to govern ourselves rationally from Prague. The former was easier than the latter.

Our First Republic did not last long—only two decades. At the end of the 1930s we fell under the domination of Nazi Berlin, and—after a brief breath of freedom between the end of the Second World War and February 1948—we came under the rule of Moscow. Even in those difficult times—and my generation can attest to this—our parents and grandparents remembered October 28, 1918, and dreamed of the day when our independence and sovereignty would be restored. That happened with the fall of communism in November 1989, when we were once again given the chance to shape the life of our country according to our own will.

The 1990s – today disparaged and caricatured for political reasons – were a decade of extraordinary freedom. Such moments have been rare in our history. We should be proud of that era and do everything to ensure that false interpretations of it, which were encouraged even by the previous government, do not prevail. I believe that those of you who have gathered here in front of the Municipal House today feel the same.

But it is not only about the 1990s – though without a rational understanding of that decade, no further development is possible, or it will be inevitably distorted. Above all, it is about today.

By our own choice – though we had little real alternative – we became participants in the current phase of the European integration process. This phase is marked by an ever-strengthening political unification of the EU member states, producing a new, different kind of structure – one that appears modern but in fact erodes the sovereignty and independence of individual European nations. There is nothing new about this. Our state today is sovereign only in form; in substance, it is increasingly subordinated to, and willingly submits to, the Brussels bureaucracy. That is how the current European parameters are set, and no amount of loud rhetoric will change that.

Our defeatists – and some of our neighbours – try to convince us that we are small, insignificant, and irrelevant in the world, and that therefore we must cling to something or someone large, and thereby become large ourselves. This is, of course, a complete illusion. We did not become greater through the German Protectorate, nor through belonging to the Soviet Empire. On the contrary – we became ever smaller, to the point where we risked ceasing to exist altogether.

The European Union is, of course, neither Nazi Germany nor the Communist Soviet Union, but its transformation in recent decades from an economic integration into a political unification has produced similar effects.

Among these are: excessive and ever-growing centralization of decision-making in Brussels; the adoption of alien and inauthentic ideologies – today above all the green ideology; the purely symbolic nature of the European Parliament, which was supposed to add a democratic element to the Union; the impossibility of governing effectively from the center over such a vast and diverse continent; and, last but not least, the natural diversity of interests within this grouping.

All this inevitably leads to the fact that not every “interest” can be truly understood or respected, even with the best of intentions. Moreover, much depends on whether such “good intentions” exist at all—or whether what prevails is merely the will of the biggest and strongest. Whether the will that wins is the one that labels all disagreement as populism or extremism.

But this is not a political seminar. I will not prolong my speech further. My intention today was to contribute, on our national holiday, to a deeper awareness of and reflection on these broader connections. Let us not merely hang out flags and pin tricolours to our lapels. For years now there has been a danger that the celebration of October 28 is turning into precisely that—and into a ceremony for the awarding of state decorations—instead of a true commemoration of what happened in October 1918. Let us not allow that to happen.

Thank you for your attention.

Václav Klaus
at the IVK Assembly Commemorating the Anniversary of the Founding of the Independent Czechoslovak State, in front of the memorial plaque at Prague’s Municipal House, October 28, 2025.