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Address of the President of the Republic delivered to the members of Diplomatic Corps on the occasion of the Czech National Day

English Pages, 28. 10. 2005

Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

· It is a great pleasure for me to meet all of you here on the occasion of the Czech National day. Today, as you know, we celebrate our independence, our sovereignty as well as the birth of our state and of our Republic.

· It is an important moment for us now, again, because it was not always so. In the communist era, we did not have a sufficient reason to celebrate, because our country was deprived of its independence and the Czechs, as individual citizens, were deprived of their basic rights. We live now in a totally different time.

· Last year, the Czech Republic entered the European Union. The period of our re-integration into the core organizations of democratic and developed world was, at that moment, completed. The Czech Republic is now fully integrated into the most important economic (WB, IMF, WTO, OECD), military (the NATO) and political (the EU) organizations and groupings of the free world. This we consider as a big achievement.

· I can assure all of you that the Czech Republic wants to be a reliable, respected and respectable partner and neighbor. We don’t want to teach anyone anything, we don’t want to be patronized either. We will try to contribute to the true meaning of partnership as well as to the true meaning of bilateralism and multilateralism. We are no champions of the now so fashionable supranationalism, or of various forms of open or hidden federalism. We rely upon good neighborhood and we do not want to be rivals to anyone. We will always look at each country with full and genuine respect to its different historical and geopolitical conditions. We hope that this period of the far best relations, we have ever had with all our neighbors and partners on all continent, will last.

· I would like to stress as well that even now – regardless of all the changes we can observe today – the embassies and ambassadors play an irreplaceable role and remain to be important. That is why I would like to thank all of you for everything that you have been doing for a successful development of relations between the Czech Republic and your respective countries.

· Let me, at the end, thank you sincerely for being here with us and I look forward to seeing you again tonight.

Václav Klaus, Prague Castle, 28.10.2005