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Václav Klaus at the 22nd Vienna Congress: Remarks at the Speakers’ Reception

English Pages, 26. 1. 2025

It’s a great pleasure for me to be here in Vienna, in the more than beautiful Hotel Imperial, reminding us of the good old days, of the world of yesterday (die Welt von Gestern).

It is great to be here again at the end of January, on a Sunday afternoon, and to have the honour to say a few words at the very beginning of the 22nd Vienna Congress. I stress the timing quite intentionally. This moment and this place is for me and for many others who are here every year like myself a fixed point in our calendars. We know we cannot afford not to be here. David Ungar-Klein would not let us not to come.

As I said, I have been privileged to be here many times. This time, it is different. Vienna and the Kärtner Ring are quiet. I remember that, especially in the covid era, the street was full of demonstrators. Not today. Austria has been waiting already for four months for a new government, but it seems that the Austrians are not nervous.

This Monday, I was in Davos attending a conference organized on the occasion of the World Economic Forum. The title of this conference was “Expecting the Unexpected”. In my presentation there, when discussing what was expected and what unexpected, I suggested to differentiate trends and tendencies and individual events.

As regards the trends and tendencies we experience, they are – in my eyes – not unexpected. What is going on has been with us already for a long time and those of us, who are living with open eyes, have been able to see it. To my great regret, all the dominant trends and tendencies have been moving in the wrong direction. Especially here in Europe and in the whole West. Europe and the West are not under attack from the East or the South, what we are experiencing is the self-destruction of the West. The title of our today’s congress is “Europe of Tomorrow”. We will, I hope, have the opportunity to express our hopes and fears on this topic. We will not be able, however, to “set directions” as David put it in the second part of the title. At least some of us are modest enough not to allow themselves to set directions. Not to mention the fact that we already do have an institution which sets directions – it is the European Commission under the leadership of Madame von der Leyen. Her directions and directives very often damage the freedom and prosperity of Europeans.

Individual events are less expectable. The main tragedies – as I see them when looking at the world from Central Europe – are the continuation both of the Ukraine war and of the horrors and atrocities, violating all long-accepted norms and rules of human behaviour in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. The individual events don’t fall from the sky, they are part of long-term trends but could be – if there was enough interest and attention – solved or at least made look differently.

An unexpected event was for me the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. His election – which I applauded – positively shattered not only the US, but the whole world. It proved that it is possible to fight for something seemingly impossible. This result turned out to be a great impetus for us.

I have been repeatedly stressing my satisfaction with this result. But as time goes by, I started to warn against the cheap and irresponsible triumphalism of many people around me. We shouldn’t forget the reality. There are so many deeply ingrained features of the contemporary world, which are, in my eyes, constants, not variables. There are also some undisputable “constants” in the personality of Trump himself which make any forecast uncertain. One man cannot change the world. He just succeeded in opening a window of opportunity for the rest of us. To change the world is a task for all of us, not only for an American President. But I have only seven minutes. Let me, therefore, stop here.

Václav Klaus, 22nd Vienna Congress com.sult, Hotel Imperial, Vienna, January 26, 2025