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Speech at the British Conservative Party Conference

English Pages, 9. 10. 2002

1.      It is a great honour to be here with you. Let me, on behalf of the Czech Civic Democratic Party, express our greetings as well as our best wishes for your future political successes. We all in Europe need it and wait for it. My personal wish (and strong belief) is that you remain the strongest and most influential European political party in its advocacy of freedom, parliamentary democracy, free markets and traditional conservative values because your role in Europe is irreplaceable.

2.      As some of you may know, the Civic Democratic Party was founded in 1991 as a first broad-based, not exclusive, not just a single, narrow constituency representing political party in the Czech Republic as well as in Central and Eastern Europe which clearly, without hesitation and without any qualifications declared its position on the right of the political spectrum, a party which admired Margaret Thatcher and British Conservative Party, a party which originally wanted to use the same name. Our intention was to demonstrate that we did not want to belong to the predominantly Christian Democratic Central Europe. We looked for inspiration to the Anglo-American political style and ideas and this is where we keep staying.

3.      Such an attitude did not make us (and does not make us) many friends because contemporary Europe prefers both socialism and a substitute ideology I call Europeanism. This is exactly what we did oppose, do oppose and will oppose.

We spent decades living in a socialist (or communist) paradise and our over sensitivity in this respect forces us to be against all kinds of socialism, against socialism with all imaginable and even friendly looking adjectives, and against all versions of a third way which we consider to be just another socialist trick. It is nothing else than an old content in new bottles. I am sure you know it very well.

But that is not all. We spent decades living in a socialist (or communist) community of nations (or an empire), in Warsaw Pact and in COMECON, and we are oversensitive in this respect as well. We know what it means to lose sovereignty, to wait for directives coming from a remote city, to follow rules formulated not at home and not democratically. Due to it we are against unnecessary centralization and unification of Europe.

I would like to be correctly understood. No one in this room, I suppose, is against opening up, against free movements of people, goods, ideas and money over the continent but the current European unification process is not about opening up. It is about centralism, about regulation and control, about redistribution and social transfers, about the ever-increasing role of an unelected and uncontrolled bureaucracy, about the retreat from classical parliamentarism, about political correctness, multiculturalism, environmentalism, NGO´ism, etc. It is neither a technical and administrative exercise, nor a politically neutral development. It is an explicit and intentional political process and we should take it as such.

4.      The tragic events of September 11 have underscored the importance of strengthening the transatlantic ties and cooperation, the pillar of which is NATO. Its future seems to be, however, under attack of a non-military nature. We strongly believe that it is essential to uphold NATO as a competent defensive alliance and to prevent it from becoming a mere club for political debate and from being eroded by competing military structures within the European Union.

5.      To conclude, I wish you regain the glory of the Conservative Party of the past, especially of the 80´s and early 90´s when we all were looking for your leadership.

Václav Klaus, British Conservative Party Conference, Bournemouth, 9th October 2002