Let me, first, express my gratitude to Ambassador Gandalovič for the organization of this early morning gathering. And, let me thank all of you for accepting his invitation and for joining us here.

I would like to use this opportunity for saying a few words about my short book “Migration des peoples” which was published this year by Harmattan. I wrote it together with my long-term colleague Jiří Weigl. This book, originally published in Czech, has already eight editions in foreign languages. I am very glad that in France as well.

The book tries to fight the misinterpretations of the current European migration crisis which are based on an aprioristic, progressivist, politically correct assumption of the European political and intellectual elites that migration is a positive social phenomenon, that it is normal to migrate. I strongly disagree, I am convinced that it is normal not to migrate. It is normal to accept the country one was born in, to identify oneself with it and to take it as a highly respected homeland. Migration is only an extreme solution of one´s existential problems.

I would like to be well understood. I don’t speak about an individual migration, about the slow, non-disruptive, sufficiently humble and non-aggressive procedure known for centuries and millennia. I speak about, and our book is devoted to, the issue of mass migration, about the contemporary – as politically correct considered – artificially stimulated mass migration.

Mass migration creates necessarily substantial cultural, social and political conflicts, shocks and tensions. It undermines the – for centuries and millennia gradually developed – structure of society in individual countries, their culture, habits, customs, behavioural patterns, ways of life.

We should be – in this era of confusion – very clear and straightforward. Some people want to “manage” migration. No, the only relevant effort should be “how to avoid mass migration” or “how to minimize it”.

The current conflict about migration shouldn´t be misinterpreted as a conflict between humanism and xenophobia, or as a conflict between solidarity and egoism. It is something else. It is a conflict between those who believe in freedom and in a nation state and those who don´t share such a belief. Mass migration can be justified or defended only by means of the failed doctrine of multiculturalism. For countries to function, they need a minimum (which is not low) degree of homogeneity and unity, not a maximum of heterogeneity (and diversity). The ideology of multiculturalism tries to deny this.

The European politicians probably still believe in the half-baked and ill-conceived utopian idea of Schengen which has proved to be fundamentally wrong and untenable. Borderless society can´t exist. The current migration wave to Europe has been made possible by the fact that the EU borders have been open and unprotected for a long time and remain open even after all what has been happening since 2015.

I suppose you look at it in a similar way. There is, however, a difference of a perspective. I am from Central Europe which has a long experience with communism. We do not forget totally failed communist experiments similar in nature to the current migration project – including an unauthentic solidarity forced from the outside, the calls for self-sacrifice in the name of the future, and the attempts to create a new species, a new, truly European, man.

We are convinced, as relatively new-comers to the EU, that it is connected with the post-democratic EU. The current migration wave is a by-product of the already long time existing European crisis, of the systemic errors and misconceptions of European policies, of the built-in defects of EU institutional arrangements, and of the ideologic confusion and prejudices of European multicultural political elites. I criticise them, not the migrants. I criticise them and us.

Václav Klaus, Introductory notes at the book presentation, Café Le Procop, Paris, France, December 8, 2017.