Many thanks for bringing us to Budapest and for organizing today´s presentation of our book devoted to the issue of mass migration. Both of us, Dr. Weigl and me, would like to express our gratitude to the Századvég School of Politics Foundation which made the publication of this book in Hungarian possible. We would like to thank especially Dr. Szabo for spending so much time with us in recent weeks and months.

The book presented here today was written by me and by my long-term colleague and collaborator Jiří Weigl in the autumn of 2015. Originally written in Czech, it has already seven editions in foreign languages. We are honoured that – starting today – the Hungarian language is one of them.

Our intention was to enter into polemics with the false and purposefully misleading interpretations of the European migration crisis. As we see it, these views are based on an aprioristic, progressivist, politically correct assumption of the European political and intellectual elites that the mass migration is a positive social phenomenon, or to put it differently, that it is normal to migrate. We strongly disagree.

The experience of mankind is that it is normal not to migrate. We consider it normal to accept the country one was born in with all its pluses and minuses, to identify oneself with it and to take it as a highly respected homeland. Migration has to be considered an extraordinary exception, an extreme solution of one´s personal existential problems, a failure to solve it in a usual way.

We would like to be well understood. Our topic is not the individual migration, the slow, non-disruptive, sufficiently humble and non-aggressive practise known for centuries and millennia. Our book is devoted to the issue of the mass migration, to the contemporary – as politically correct considered – artificially stimulated mass movements of hundreds of thousands or millions of people.

The mass migration inevitably creates 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.

It is necessary – in this era of confusion supplemented by the tyranny of political correctness – to be clear and straightforward. Even the serious, moderate and thoughtful European politicians have a different ambition – they want to “manage” migration. No! The only relevant and meaningful effort is “to stop the mass migration” or “to minimize it”. It should be understood and accepted that Europe doesn´t need any mass migration.

The phenomenon of mass migration has been justified and defended by means of the unacceptable and intellectually untenable doctrine of multiculturalism. We argue in our book that the allegedly unexpected events of 2015 were in reality prepared (if not organized) by the followers of this doctrine. We feel that Prime Minister Orbán interprets it in a similar way as we do.

The current conflict about migration must not be interpreted as a conflict between humanism and xenophobia, between solidarity and egoism, between good guys and bad guys. It is something else. It is a conflict between both liberals who believe in freedom and conservatives who believe in a nation state and those who don´t share these beliefs. We consider it as an undeniable truth that 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 suggests and glorifies the opposite.

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 that they remain open even after all what has been going on since 2015. In spite of that the European politicians continue to believe in the half-baked and ill-conceived utopian idea of Schengen which has proved to be fundamentally wrong and untenable. Borderless societies can´t exist.

Once again, we are very pleased that our book was translated into Hungarian and published in this country. We are not able to control the quality of the translation but we hope it was done well.

We are aware of the specifics of the Hungarian stance to the current mass migration due to the courageous and in Europe singular and isolated position of Prime Minister Orbán whose views are very much supported in the Czech Republic. We can assure you that they are supported much more by the common people than by politicians and all kinds of “elites” or pseudoelites.

The Czech and Hungarians have many things in common. We have not yet forgotten the 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. It helps us to see that the current migration wave is a project, not an accident.

The people in both our countries – as relative newcomers to the EU – look at the EU highly critically. We are convinced that the contemporary migration crisis is connected with the post-democratic character of the EU. The crisis is a by-product of the 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 confusions and prejudices of European multicultural political elites. We criticise them, not the migrants. We criticise them and eventually us – for our inability and lack of courage to radically oppose the current European way of thinking the current European paradigm.

Václav Klaus, Introductory notes at the book presentation, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, February 21, 2018.