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Can Switzerland Remain Switzerland in a Registered Partnership with the EU?

English Pages, 28. 4. 2014

Thank you for inviting me to come here, thank you for giving me the opportunity to address this audience which was put together by the Zürich Business Club. I highly appreciate it.

My long-lasting interest in Switzerland has been recently raised by the referendum you organized about immigration at the beginning of this year, and, perhaps even more, by the EU reaction to it. On the one hand, I have to admit that this reaction was expected by many of us. The question formulated in the referendum was evidently politically incorrect and the answer given by the majority of Swiss citizens even more so.

All that did not tell us anything about Switzerland but it told us something very relevant about the EU, about the thinking of its high political representatives and of their powerful “fellow travellers” in the academy and media. By its reaction, the EU only confirmed it has become a post-democratic and post-political entity where free expression of views is not welcome.

The Czechs feel it very strongly. Our, already ten years (minus five days) lasting membership in the EU was an important – but I am sorry to say not very positive – experience. It is visible also from the official opinion polls. The last poll devoted to this topic (March 10, 2014) indicated that only 34 percent of Czechs – the lowest figure ever –believes in the EU now. It was much more before our entering the EU.

Our views on such topics were sharpened during decades spent in another economic and political grouping, at that time led by Moscow. After having spent significant parts of our lives in an unfree state, we were not entirely naive, at least some of us were not. We didn’t expect entering paradise when entering the EU. Nevertheless, I have to stress that we resolutely refused interpreting our entry in the EU as “entering Europe” as some West Europeans were trying to tell us. We have always been part of Europe, even in the era when we were closed behind the Iron Curtain.

We have been an integral part of Europe not only geographically but in a civilizational and cultural sense as well. It is difficult to easily demonstrate it, but I remember how surprised many people were here, in this country, two decades ago when I was able to demonstrate that we were not without contact with the contemporary Swiss culture – the plays of Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch belonged to our cultural life even in the darkest days of communism. I also regularly read Kyklos and Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft und Statistik all the time. They were available in academic libraries in Prague.

We were, of course, deprived of being part of European democracy and prosperity as they developed in the second half of the 20^th century. Especially the absence of freedom was the main source of our frustration.

This frustration was also the reason why we – after the fall of communism – wanted to become a normal European country again as soon as possible. Our choices how to do it were, however, rather limited. We had to go together with the – then unchallenged – European mainstream. We did not have the luxury of taking the Swiss independent way. We did not have the unique and unrepeatable position of your country.

The Czech Republic – like all other post-communist countries – was forced to demonstrate its willingness to be enthusiastically European, not to express any doubts about the charm and beauty of Jacques Delors style of European integration. We understood that speaking about sovereignty and independence was wrong, that it did not belong to modern Europe. We were, therefore, not allowed to go alone or to follow our own way – based on our traditions and historical experiences and, of course, failures and mistakes we inevitably made. Our reluctance to get rid of our newly gained independence was mistakenly interpreted as an effort to keep our old ties with the East, which was, of course, not true. Nobody in Europe tried to understand our desire not to be governed from any distant city again. The fact that we did not consider a great victory to be governed from Brussels instead of Moscow was not understood.

People like me see in Europe (and in the whole West) a long-term decline and in the EU a growing tendency towards unification, centralization, bureaucratization, harmonization and standardization of the whole continent which is accompanied by the weakening of liberty, freedom and democracy. These processes go hand in hand. They progress slowly but steadily. Sometimes they accelerate.

One recent reason for the acceleration of these undemocratic tendencies was the Euro-American financial and economic crisis which offered a good excuse for the strengthening of the centralistic and dirigistic process in Europe. As a result, the substance of European economic and social system has been changed. We are the victims of the renaissance of Keynesianism, of the introduction of new types of regulation, of the unproductive and inefficient increase of subsidies in selected sectors of the economy, of new trust in the ability of the governments to mastermind the economy.

Another, more recent reason for the acceleration of European undemocratic tendencies threatens to be the situation in Ukraine.

We are confronted with a blunt misinterpretation of events and with a new wave of arrogant brainwashing. To force Ukraine into making a decision now whether the country belongs to the West or to the East – as it is asked for by Western intellectual and political elites – is a certain and guaranteed way how to destroy it. The mainstream media and politicians use the many times proved to be effective Orwellian newspeak – they try to tell us that they do intervene in Ukraine in an attempt to save (or introduce) freedom and democracy there whereas the only way how to save or introduce freedom and democracy there would be to let Ukraine to solve its own problems without foreign intervention.

The violent political destabilisation of Ukraine was not a genuine domestic political uprising but an imported revolution. Not from Russia. Its organisers had other plans and ambitions than introducing freedom and democracy. They wanted to create a confrontation with Russia. The Orwellian shift of causes and consequences is here again. It will, inevitably, have negative consequences.

To artificially create a new era of rising tensions in Europe and in the world, to destabilize the international status quo, to return to the Cold War rhetoric is a very dangerous method how to shift public attention from the evident failures of the European integration process, of the problematic idea of the European common currency, of the unsustainable levels of public indebtedness, to seemingly grave geopolitical problems. It will be quickly misused to further accelerate the European unification and to create a centralized European superstate with only a limited right to hold an independent opinion.

Switzerland is unique and singular, but even Switzerland does not exist in a vacuum. Its flirtation with the EU is a reality. Its participation in various European integration projects is well-known and I don’t have any motivation to engage in any detailed discussion of it now. I will return to the title of my today’s speech: “Can Switzerland Remain Switzerland in a Registered Partnership with the EU?”

I did not choose the term registered partnership accidentally. Conservative people like me consider this newly fashionable concept unacceptable. As President of the Czech Republic, I vetoed a bill which tried to introduce this institute into the Czech legislation system (the veto was, however, later overridden). I used this term now in a different meaning in an effort to warn against Swiss gradual acceptance of EU rules and procedures. I don’t deny the right of Swiss citizens to hold a referendum about EU membership and eventually say “Yes”. I would “only” like to point out that in such a case Switzerland cannot remain Switzerland.

Our experience tells us that entering the EU means

- losing sovereignty of the country;

- the obligatory acceptance of the dirigistic EU legislation leads to a centrally administered society;

- the legislation is not drafted in Bern but in Brussels. The role of individual, especially small countries in it is only marginal;

- the anti-liberal ideology of europeism based on environmentalism, genderism, human-rightism, multiculturalism, transnationalism, etc. is used for indoctrinating children at schools, adults in the media;

- global (and European) governance is used for undermining the coherence of old nation states;

- the economy has been weakened and deprived of its competitiveness.

All that is inevitable because it is part of the EU. That would deprive Switzerland of being Switzerland.

Václav Klaus, Speech at the Business Club Zürich Luncheon, Restaurant Kronenhalle, Zürich, April 25, 2014.