Speech of the Prime Minister of the CZ, Mirek Topolánek at the Inaugural Conference of the Movement of European Reform on Tuesday, 6.3.2007

Ladies and gentlemen, dear David,

It is the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome that we celebrate these days. Before I will speak about the presence and the future of the European Union, let me take a few moments to look back at the past fifty years.

Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, our first President, said that countries continue to exist through those ideas on which they were established. I believe this to be a very wise observation. Let us remind ourselves of the ideas on which the original European Coal and Steel Community was based. These ideas were peace and prosperity. FREEDOM, in one word. They were fulfilled: the old continent experienced fifty years of unprecedented stability, peace and economic growth.

I do not think we need new values or new visions. Let us hold on to those that made the European project successful. Let us appreciate the glorious voluntary cooperation of free people which gave us peace and prosperity. Let us not lose sight of those simple and comprehensible objectives of the European Coal and Steel Community. They are the traditional values and centuries-old visions of peace carried through European history by such visionaries as was the Czech king George of Podebrady. We do not have to seek new values.

Today’s global world is complicated, many people say the European Union needs more sophisticated steering mechanisms. They say we have to keep „stepping into the pedals“ of political unification in order not to fall off the European bike. Friends, let’s not believe that. Let us believe in the original values rather than long for the ever more perfect formalism. I like the conservative saying: The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Much is being said about the institutional crisis of the European Union. But in fact all the institutions of the European Union work. The Community was enlarged with ten new members, and most recently with two more, without running into problems. The European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers, all these bodies work and adopt decisions. I ask: Crisis? What crisis?

“A spectre is haunting Europe”, wrote Karl Marx. Europe is threatened by a crisis, say advocates of strict unification. It is not a crisis of institutions. It is the crisis of the content. The problem is not that the integration would not be deep enough, that Europe would not be unified enough and the decision-making mechanisms would not be operational enough. Friends, don’t you think that something essential is missing in spite of the brilliant form? What is it? Could it be freedom?

Freedom is, after all, the key European value. European integration takes place in the name of freedom and serves it. Freedom has become a victim of unification. We want actionable Europe for the 21st century in order to strengthen freedom. If we assess all formal, institutional and legislative steps of the European Union in the light of whether they give us more or less freedom, we cannot go, in my opinion, wrong.

Many feel that the European Union is not delivering. There is something to that. But why is it not delivering? It is not because of badly tuned power transmission or a weak engine. It is simpler than that: EU has too much dead weight. It carries too much regulation, too much red tape, too much unproductive redistribution.

We agree that the EU badly needs a reform. We call for this reform in our name. The question is from which end to begin. Adding more regulations to the existing ones, „stepping into the pedals“, enhancing the transmission system of the power distribution is not, in our opinion, the way to go, simply because it adds dead weight. It might increase the driving force to move forward but the move will be once again more cumbersome.

In our opinion, we need to go in the opposite direction. We need to get rid of all the ballast which curtails freedoms of citizens and the national governments. The reform must happen from the bottom, not from the top. We do not need a more powerful engine and a better transmission system. We need a modern, light vehicle not an old cruiser from the past era of the welfare state.

In the environmental language: we need a more economical European vehicle which will be a smaller burden for the clean environment with less euro-bureaucratic emissions.

We believe that the future of the Union lies in its original values, in complete liberalization of the internal market, in fair relations between the old and the new members, in less regulation, bureaucracy and discrimination.

European economy, once a driver of worldwide prosperity, fails to benefit from the global boom and grows only 2.4 per cent annually. Yes, we are rich. For the time being. But how do we take advantage of our wealth?

We pay for ever growing red-tape which „pays back“ by creating more and more senseless regulations and misallocates money from our taxes. It overburdens our businesses with pointless obligations, high taxes, do´s and dont´s, thus giving them great disadvantage in global competition.

The European Union continues to exclude its members from fair and equal access to the market. New members are discriminated against with respect to free movement of workforce as well as services, yet the free common market is the greatest advantage of the EU from which everyone should benefit. Mercantilist concerns of some old countries´ governments that the newcomers will benefit from their wealth do not belong to the 21st century.

Most European countries redistribute around fifty percent of their produced wealth. Misconceived domestic social policies enlarge the masses of the unemployed and people on welfare. Expensive and ineffective common agricultural policy takes money out of our pockets, makes food products expensive and crushes producers from third world countries.

Common agricultural policy is symptomatic of what is wrong with the Union today. It does not do us any good at home and complicates our negotiations with WTO, an organization through which we want to enforce our interest in free world trade. How can we possibly appear credible in our development when we brutally distort global trade exchange?

And how can poor countries trust our honest intentions to help them when we effectively prevent them from helping themselves? Let’s reform our agricultural policy which will do more for the people in third world countries than our direct humanitarian aid.

Europe is rich but it lags behind in supporting research, development and innovation. I agree with the European Commission that we have to put more emphasis on innovations and new technologies. This will be hard to do unless we reform our ineffective social systems which eat up too much of our resources. However, such plans are hardly applauded to.

Yes, we are rich. But if we do not manage to reverse some of today’s trends, we will be relatively poor a few decades down the road. Europe urgently needs to modernize. That means going back to traditional values. I say there are three of them: First FREEDOM, second FREEDOM, and third FREEDOM.

What specifically do we need to do for Europe to retain its global competitiveness and for our children not to be left empty-handed?

First, we must not allow the debate on institutional reform, deeper political integration and tax unification to occupy the public space and dominate public discourse and the artificial haze surrounding the Constitutional Treaty to cover the real problems of the EU.

Second, we must complete the liberalization process, finish building the common market, ensure equal access for all to the four fundamental freedoms.

Third, for the 21st century we have to give businesses the same freedom – with some exaggeration – as in the 19th century. That is to say, we have to reduce taxes, remove unnecessary regulation, simplify bureaucracy and lift limitations which disadvantage European businesses in global competition.

Fourth, Europe has to be clear about its common economic interests. If we want others to liberalize trade, protect copyright and patents, not corrupt energy sources with political pressures, we must be not only uniform. We must not be hypocritical and continue our protectionist policies, namely the common agricultural policy.

Fifth, EU must remain open to new members. With some exaggeration, I would dare to say that Europe is wherever European values prevail. Let us not allow the European Union to close itself and give up on its civilization mission for false fears of losing its social securities. This is true as for Turkey, Western Balkans or the Ukraine. The vision of EU membership conditioned on meeting certain terms motivates these countries to continue their reforms and stabilization efforts. These efforts enhance not curtail European values and visions and enlarge not diminish the area of stability, security and prosperity.

Sixth, we have to give chance to European individualism. We need more patents, innovations, advanced technologies. We need to educate – and keep at home – more top experts. Only then we can turn around the demographic development and increase productivity faster than our competitors. European thinking is creative, let’s just give it more space.

Seventh, let’s forget about European unification. The future of Europe is in competition. Unification has run into a dead end. Voters in France and the Netherlands turned down the European Constitution because they feared the decline of their living standard. They simply feared that their social benefits would be „unified“ to benefit the poorer countries. British Financial Times carried a headline: Forget the European Anthem. Fix the economy.

European integration cannot serve as an end to itself. It plays its role only as a means to the real end: to enhance prosperity and quality of life of our citizens. That worked well in the first decades of the European Communities when removing trade barriers and enhancing competition within and without. The post-war prosperity of Europe was not brought about by unification but by competition. We have to keep that in mind and repeat that over and over again.

I, as a person from the East, may see this more clearly than people in the West. For forty years, we lived in a community so unified that European bureaucrats could not even imagine. One Czech band sings: „We will never go back to where we were miserable“. Surely, we do not want to. We did not join the EU to become a quiet witness to a unification race and we will not remain silent.

We simply know that unification is ineffective both within the Community as well as internationally. We paid high price for this knowledge and do not wish to pay it again.

Recent review of the Lisbon strategy proved that the „one size fits all“ approach did not work. If we are to carry out the necessary reform, democratic governments must be able to choose their own ways taking into account specific national situations. It is understandable that some governments, when faced with fierce and irrational resistance against liberal reform, feel more comfortable leaving the responsibility for social and budgetary policy to Brussels. Let me quote again our first president Masaryk: „If there are defects in our democracy, we have to overcome those defects and not the democracy itself.“

We need democratic Europe, flexible Europe. We need Europe which will provide framework to our freedom, define basic rules but will leave it up to its members to choose the level of their political integration. I certainly do not have in mind so-called multi-speed Europe in which a group of states would integrate faster and thus directly or indirectly force „late comers“ to join the core otherwise they would be left out as peripheral second-rate members. We need Europe which will neither prevent deeper integration nor force anyone into it.

Such flexible Europe will unite not divide the member countries.

These objectives have stemmed form the single European value: FREEDOM. In today’s Europe, we encounter irrational fear of freedom. Fear that freedom and competition jeopardize our welfare. Dear friends, this is not a game that ends with zero. This is not a game in which one earns what the other loses, in which success is based on exploitation of others. Let’s throw away this ideological rubbish. Devotion to freedom means to play the game with positive outcome. It is a win-win game.

This is precisely why I appreciate the opportunity to stand next to our partners from the British Conservative Party, a party with long democratic tradition and global view, at the opening of the MER conference. Unlike them, we are a young party, though based on the same foundation of conservatism and economic liberalism. I trust in our strong partnership for the future. It is the topic of the European presence and future that bring us together in spite of different history. I also know that for the very same reason more partners will join us. Let us not be discouraged and let us continue fighting for freedom. Let us fight for freedom even if they call us heretics. George Orwell, one of my favourite writers, said: „Freedom means to state freely that two and two is four. Once this is so, everything else follows.“ I would hardly find a better description for the kind of Europe we want to have.