Outline of Recent Relevant World Events By Václav Klaus

A Short (and Very Selective) Outline of Recent Relevant World Events

August 21, 2015

Václav Klaus - I have to start by mentioning that this day, the 21^st August, is a very sad and distressing day for my country. Forty-seven years ago, the Warsaw Pact armies – led by the Soviet Union – invaded Czechoslovakia with the objective to crush the very promising development there, called – somewhat imprecisely – Prague Spring. Due to it, we had to wait for the coming of freedom for another two decades, till November 1989.

Many thanks for the invitation. I haven’t been to Crans-Montana for almost a decade. To be fair, I don’t want to pretend that I haven’t been invited. However, my presidential duties blocked my trips abroad in those years. Being here again, I must say that this place and its surroundings are even more beautiful than I remembered.

Let me take my rather long absence here as an advantage, as a point of departure for taking a longer term view. When I look at the current world with this perspective, my conclusion is that in spite of the fact that many things have changed since my last visit here, many other things have remained the same, just their negative aspects came to the fore. Let me differentiate these two groups of events.

I was here last time:

• before the 2008-2009 Euro-American financial and economic crisis which – to my great regret – keeps to be erroneously interpreted as a market failure whereas it was a huge and inexcusable  government failure;
• before the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, in the so called PIGS countries, especially in Greece;
• before the considerable acceleration of the diminishing of the American role and importance in the world (and before the rise of President Obama and his irresponsible leftist policies in the U.S.);
• before the series of “coloured” revolutions in Arab countries, sometimes called “the Arab spring”. They didn’t bring flourishing democracy there, but destabilization of countries, wars, chaos and the rise of religious fundamentalism;
• before the start of the home-made Ukraine crisis (misleadingly called the Ukraine-Russia conflict) and before a new phase of the dangerous confrontation between the West (and especially the U.S.) and Russia;
• before the appearance of the Islamic state and its victorious crusade throughout the Middle East, etc.

All these events are more than serious and they shifted the world to the worse. They are highly significant but are all of them really brand new and unexpected? Did they qualitatively change our societies? I am not sure about it. They didn’t appear out of the blue. (They didn't happen “all of a sudden”.) Similar dangerous tendencies had been present in the world already long time ago, long time before my last visit here. I would mention the following:

• Europe had been in decline and in an overall loss of prestige and importance long before the last decade;
• the consequences of the European post-Maastricht unification policies and especially of the launching of common currency (in an inappropriate economic zone) had been there already a decade ago (some of you may remember my dispute about it with the Eurocommissioner Almunia and with Belgian Prime Minister Deheane at one of Crans-Montana Forums);
• the irresponsible American foreign interventions and attempts to export Western-type democracy into countries with different religion, culture and traditions started soon after the fall of communism;
• the undermining of freedom, democracy, and market economy under the banner of the alarmist, irrational, and fundamentally flawed doctrine of global warming had been here also;
• the freedom and democracy endangering dissemination of ideologies of political correctness, of humanrightism, of transnationalism, of feminism, genderism and homosexualism, of NGO’ism, etc. had been gaining momentum already in the first decade of the 21^st century;
• the term BRICS countries was not a universally used acronym then, but the rapidly growing importance of the countries which belong to that group had been undeniable, etc.

All these topics could and should be addressed at future Crans-Montana meetings. Let me make – so late in the evening – just a few brief comments: