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Václav Klaus
President, Czech Republic
Answers to Questions from the Audience
Q: Since the creation of the European Union, do Eastern Europeans feel that there are social and perhaps cultural and economic disadvantages to joining a different Western conception of being European - and fear potential domination amongst its members?A: I don't think this is the main feeling. For most of us, the day of entry was really a non-issue because we spent the last 15 years liberalizing our economy and our society and deregulating. At the same time, a precondition for entry was to accept EU legislation. Ninety-nine percent of events happened already in the last 15 years, and the day of entry was just as if a young couple lives together for five years and then the grandmother says, "If you don't get married you will not inherit this beautiful villa" - and then they go from their own apartment to the church, get married and return to the same apartment. Something like that happened in Europe on the first of May.
Q: The EU has specific constraints for the economic policy of its members. What particular requirements or constraints will cause hardship or challenges for countries like the Czech Republic?
A: There are two issues. One is whether EU policies coming from Brussels are rational, positive, productive for everyone, old members and new. Another issue is whether those policies are positive, helpful, instrumental and productive for the new members which are visibly at a lower level of economic development. I think it's wrong in both ways. But the richer countries can afford to have wrong policies much more easily; they are able to bear the costs of such policies.
Q: Should Turkey be admitted to the European Union? What conditions would you attach to the admission of new members? And what is the optimal size for the EU?
A: There is nothing like an optimal size of the EU. There is a trade-off between the size of any institution and the quality and mechanism of its functioning, so I don't believe that we can freely choose. If there is an ambition to have a tightly controlled, condensed, rigid unitary structure, then you cannot have 50 members. But if you are able to accept the European Union as a more loosely defined conglomerate of countries, you may take as many countries as you like. I am definitely in favor of the second approach - to have a more free, loosely defined conglomerate of countries. Therefore, I am absolutely in favor of expanding the EU; I am ready to accept even California.
I like the question of the entry of Turkey into the European Union, which is a right question. These days the headlines in the European press are usually "Does Turkey Belong to Europe?" And I say, No one by definition belongs to Europe and there is no one who has a right to give a stamp saying that you belong there and you don't belong there. Let's discuss entering a man-made institution called the European Union, but to define Who is Europe? is a wrong question.
Q: Do you see a parallel between the EU today and the United States at its beginning as a union of sovereign states? If so, will Europe be as controlled by Brussels as America is by Washington?
A: There are parallels; at the same time there are differences. The main difference is that the United States of America is a nation. There is something like the people of the United States of America; there is nothing like that in Europe. So in this respect the comparison is absolutely wrong. That's one point. The second point, I am afraid that even now the European Commission in Brussels has more power than the Washington, D.C., administration vis-à-vis individual states. So that's a second difference.
Europe may evolve in the next 200 years to become something - I am not sure whether a nation, but technically, organizationally, it can be solved. So the parallels between Europe and America are many. We discuss the single currency of Europe; the United States of America is the place of a single currency, the dollar. We now have 12 countries using the Euro, and we discuss whether it's a good decision and does it help Europe or not economically. The economists are studying monetary unions using the theory of a Canadian economist who got a Nobel Prize for the theory of Optimum Currency Areas. That's the term used in economic theory. I read recently a study done by one economist in the National Bureau of Economic Research here: "How Long Did It Take the United States to Become an Optimum Currency Area," which is an interesting question. The answer is that it took from the 1780s - and the really homogenous area that we call optimum currency area started to come together in the 1930s. So it was something like 150 years before the truly sort of homogenous entity was created. The last sentence of that study was, We hope that the Europeans will read this study, so that hopefully it will not take 150 years in Europe to do the same story.
Q: Why hasn't the Czech Republic dealt with the Communists more vigorously? Are you surprised by the strong showing in the elections that the Communists continue to enjoy in the Czech Republic?
A: I disagree with the general evaluation that we didn't do anything radical with the Communists. First, I must say that there is one difference, which is sometimes not sufficiently understood when you compare various post-communist countries. In practically all other post-communist countries, the Communist Party was prohibited somehow - which meant that the same people and the same party structure was just re-named. And in all countries around the Czech Republic there suddenly appeared the Party of Democratic Left, with the same group of people, just with a changed name. Nevertheless, the leaders of that party have become, in the last 15 years, presidents, prime ministers, members of the government - and they are accepted in California or elsewhere as true democrats. We in the Czech Republic decided, Let's keep the Communist Party as it is; if they want to use the old name; it's at least visible. It's visible, it's explicit, it's transparent; you know what it means. And I can tell you even in this Communist Party there is no one name I - and I'm sure that my Czech colleagues would say the same - there is no one name we know from the communist era, which means that there is no one who had any important political role in the past.
Q: On to last week's elections - yours, not ours. Did the poor showing by the government in the regional and state senate elections in the past weekend erode the government's credibility, and if so, should it step down and call for early elections?
A: Well, you know that you have very often different results in the national elections and the elections in individual states. If I'm not wrong, there are many cases in the last election in your country that the state voted for either Bush or Kerry whereas they voted for a senator from a different party. Nevertheless, the regional elections in the Czech Republic brought about a visible change and sent an important signal which will have macro political implications definitely, but it will not lead to any direct change at the level of the central government.
The government coalition lost, absolutely. We had not just the regional elections, we elected one third of the Senate as well - we were voting for 27 senators - and we have two-round elections. The first two candidates go to the second round, which will be this Friday and Saturday, which means 27 times two because the two go in the second round; which means 54 candidates are in the second round. And the leading political party in the central parliament and the party having the prime minister has among those 54 candidates for the second round just three representatives. To call it a disaster - I don't know how to call it - it is a message, but I don't think it will directly lead to a change in the government.
Q: You have publicly differed in your position on Iraq with President Bush, yet you are reported as having welcomed his re-election. Comment on your view of Iraq and terrorism and what global policy might differ from his.
A: First, I don't know if I have differed with President Bush. Let's put it in a different way: The Czech Republic took a slightly different course. It was done several days before I was elected president. Both the government and the parliament decided not to be part of the fighting troops in Iraq, not to be part of the "coalition of the willing," just to send their complementary troops with their military hospital and things like that. Since that time I think I haven't made any strong statement about that.
I know something about the transition of a country; we call it transformation. I know that it's a domestic task. It must be done at home; I spent 15 years doing that. The role of the rest of the world in doing it is very small, if any. Therefore, I have my doubts about the possibility to export democracy to any country in the world; to export a systemic change. But this is my position, well known for many years, and Iraq is just one potential example of a success or a not success of such an approach.
Q: What do you think about the different roles that the following bodies play in the world: the UN, the EU and NATO?
A: We are members of all three of them now. We were always in the UN. We became members of NATO almost six years ago. My last visit to San Francisco was in November 1997, just before the final vote in the American Congress about enlargement of NATO, so I spent 10 days in this country as prime minister, knocking on all the doors, speaking with important people in the Congress about accepting the Czech Republic into NATO. For us, membership in NATO was psychologically the final step saying that the past is over and we will never again be under a Russian oppression.
European Union membership is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we are a small Central European country, located in the heart of Europe, and we had no chance not to participate in the European integration process. We didn't have the luxury of Switzerland to be a special country, which somehow escaped the First World War and the Second World War, escaped membership in UN, escaped membership in EU. We had to participate. To give a lecture here 10 years ago, I would be as critical vis-à-vis the European Union as I am now, but I would be in one respect more optimistic: I would say that, We the Czechs are experts on Velvet Revolutions, so we plan the following morning after entering the EU we will start a Velvet Revolution in the EU. That would have been my answer when I was 10 years younger and more optimistic. Now I have to admit that we did not start the Velvet Revolution there… yet.
Q: If you could be any jazz pianist, who would you be? And Czechs reportedly drink more beer per capita than any other people in Europe. If that's the case, what is your favorite beer?
A: We don't drink beer any more than any other country in Europe; we drink more beer than any other country under the sun. The per capita consumption of beer per year is 160 liters, per capita including babies - so it's really a lot; there is no comparison in any other country in the world. The best beer is a beer which probably has a similar name to a special drink consumed in the United States of America, called Budvar in the old country. There is a soft drink resembling, in color, beer - called Budweiser; it's a totally different drink. It's the same difference as between Italian espresso and American coffee. Just being honest.
I will never be a jazz pianist in my life. Nevertheless, I think that jazz music for us is very important, and I must say that in the early 1960s, the beginning of jazz clubs in the Czech Republic, in Prague, was part of the culture of revolution which brought about the 1960s and the Prague Spring and all of that - so jazz plays a very important part in our lives.
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