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Europe at a Crossroads between War and Peace

English Pages, 27. 11. 2025

Many thanks for inviting me to this year’s EuCET conference. I remember our last year’s gathering with very positive feelings and hope that the 2025 meeting will be at least as successful as the last one. The year (plus one month) between our two conferences brought not only new, hopeful and promising developments, but also the deepening and strengthening of some very problematic trends and tendencies, which we have felt as a problem already for a long time.           

What was new (and unexpected) in the last 13 months was undoubtedly Donald Trump’s victory in the American presidential elections and his radical entry into his office. This challenged some of the old habits and customs in America and other Western societies and revealed their untenability. I am convinced the world needed this important impetus. 

What was not new, and still isn’t, is the continuation of two tragic conflicts with hundreds of thousands of victims in our vicinity – the Ukraine war and the war in Gaza. In both cases, at least as I see it, without any hope of an imminent solution. It is becoming more and more evident that Trump’s initiatives don’t work, or don’t work as he promised and as many expected. They are, as I see it, blocked by Europe or, more correctly, by some European politicians and political groupings. 

What is new, and highly relevant for us in Central Europe, is the very problematic shift in politics in Germany after this year’s parliamentary elections, which brought Friedrich Merz to the top. We are confronted now with a different Germany, with Germany whose characteristics we had almost forgotten. 

What is most worrying for me is the growing acceptance of war as a method for solving political disputes. 

What is undeniable is the growing awkwardness of European political decision-making and the absence of any concept of what the EU should do (with the exception of insisting on the continuation of the Ukraine war and of the stubborn belief in the economically destructive Green Deal). 

I am sure today’s speakers will discuss these and other issues in more detail. This will help us to understand the differences of the ways how problems are seen and felt in individual European countries. I am sure we will be enriched by this. 

This year, I published two books. One in Czech, another in English. The first was devoted to the 80^th Anniversary of the End of the Second World War and to the criticism of attempts to rewrite the history of this still-remembered historic moment. This is a very sensitive issue, especially here in Central Europe. 

The second book, called In Defence of Normalcy, deals with my efforts to oppose the ideas and behavioural patterns which are massively and aggressively promoted in the ideologies of wokeism, progressivism, genderism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and last but not least globalism. The gradual implementation of these ideas has been radically changing the contemporary world. I find these ideologies to be the main danger of our era. 

Last year, I was asked to speak here about “The Nation-State Sovereignty and the Concept of Europe of Nations”. I recognized the special position of Hungary saying that “no other country in Europe is aiming at and working towards such a goal”. I am convinced, and this is a minority view, that the nation state is and will even in the future be the only place where genuine democracy is possible because – as I said last year: “cosmopolitan democracy cannot exist. Democracy needs borders”. This statement makes it evident that I don’t believe in transnational idealism, and – as a consequence – in all kinds of supranational structures. 

My arguments are, of course, directed mainly at the intellectual apologists of the EU, who are active both in Brussels and in the individual EU member states. These two groups reinforce one another. 

Brussels’ politicians often complain that their voice is not heard enough in the rapidly changing world and suppose that – to overcome this defect – the EU should be more centralized. I am sure, however, that transferring more competencies to Brussels will not solve this. Our eventual importance doesn’t lie in our size. It lies in our freedom, in our diversity, in our free competition of ideas. It should stay that way. 

We have to keep fighting the existing clichés and false apriorisms. 

I don’t think the long-lasting, creeping stagnation of the European economy (and, as a consequence, falling living standards of Europeans) should be called the failure of Europe. It is not Europe that is failing. It is the political and institutional arrangements of the EU that are responsible for it. Especially the overregulated and overcentralized economic system and the economic policies that violate historically proven economic rationality. 

The current EU system subordinates the economy to politics. Again. As in the past. The Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and other Central and East Europeans know something about this from their own historical experience, which is – luckily – not yet fully forgotten. Because our current problems are of a systemic nature, any improvement requires fundamental systemic changes, not a disorganized patchworking. Not playing with details only, as is often the case in Europe these days. 

The organizers of the EuCET conference suggested that I speak today not only about “the most important challenges facing the EU”, which is what I have tried to do until now. They asked me to discuss – I quote – “the message of peace”. I don’t need to be pushed to do this. Peace, as opposed to war, is for me the main missing ambition and dangerously forgotten goal in the current world, and in Europe especially. 

Last year, I said here that “it has become accepted to see the bloody, tragic and unnecessary war in the Ukraine in black and white, to define the war in moralistic terms and not to pay sufficient attention to the days before the ‘hot’ war” which started on the Ukraine territory in February 2022. Nothing has changed in the last 13 months in this respect. The same sentences must be stressed again. The current leading EU politicians, however, don’t even know the word peace. They know just the term war. 

Due to it, Europe, or, better to say, the European Union, stands at a crucial crossroads, at a crossroads between war and peace. A choice must be made. And we shouldn’t let our politicians make this decision without asking us and without paying attention to us. Falling into the war is not necessary and it is, luckily, not inevitable. We must say this very loudly. 

I am afraid the people have forgotten what war really means. The younger generations can’t imagine it. It is not surprising, because they don’t study history. History is not taken seriously these days. 

We have lived for more than three decades in an extraordinarily peaceful world. Russia, defeated in the Cold War, didn’t have to be taken into consideration in the 1990s. This ceased to be true now and we should be aware of it. In spite of this change, we don’t need to go into an already preprogrammed war. We should rationally analyse the situation and not irrationally misinterpret hypothetical threats coming from Russia. Even the European exponents of war don’t believe – I suppose – that Russia wants to come to Budapest, Prague or Berlin. 

As it looks, the war is planned as a substitute war, as a war which is meant to conceal the European economic stagnation and ongoing evident political failures. The war has been prepared as a way to keep the old, unsuccessful and discredited European elites in power. This endeavour is particularly evident in Great Britain and Germany (not to mention the Baltic countries). 

The real problem is not a shortage of potential political solutions. The problem is a shortage of will. A shortage of will on the part of European politicians. The question is what must happen to shock the public and force political leaders to make a change? A war could undoubtedly bring about such a change, but at extremely high and unacceptable costs. We should try to avoid it with all our efforts. 

Conferences like this one should discuss these issues openly and freely. We shouldn’t stay in a safe space of current political correctness. We must abandon it. This is, I believe, the aim of most of us who gathered here today.

Václav Klaus, 6th EuCET Conference, Budapest, November 28, 2025