VÁCLAV KLAUS
For the Italian magazine Nazione Futura with Jacopo Ugolini
For more than a decade, Europe has been struggling with completely uncontrolled illegal immigration. The response of European institutions has been to redistribute migrants between countries. However, we know that this is only a partial and, for some European countries, harmful response. What do you think the European Union's response to this problem should be? Could the Italian Mattei plan, that is, the investment plan in Africa, be the solution?
A distinction must be made. We should not be afraid of individual migration, but of mass migration. It is a conceptual error not to distinguish between these two fundamentally different phenomena. Individual migration is spontaneous and voluntary. Mass migration is organised on both the 'supply' and the 'demand' side.
We should not just focus on illegal migration. Mass migration, both legal and illegal, is a problem that must be ended. It destabilises all nation states, their cohesion, culture, traditions and way of living together.
Migration is a problem of individual nation states, not of a vague geographical entity called Europe. Any redistribution that is the responsibility of the democratically under-supported European Union (and its institutions) must be considered totally unacceptable.
Advocating an investment plan for Africa is wishful thinking. The only sensible solution is to stop Europe's extremely generous welfare system, its welfare state.
The demonstrations we have seen in recent years in some European countries, such as France, where hordes of young second-generation immigrants are rioting in the streets of French cities, are proof of the failure of multiculturalism to create only ethnic divisions in European society. The left, which does not understand this problem, believes that the only solution is to increase the number of immigrants from non-European countries. How did we get to the point where young immigrants are rebelling against European institutions and also against our culture? What solution should European conservatives bring?
The behaviour of second-generation immigrants in many European countries demonstrates the irrationality of accepting the idea of mass migration. An individual migrant would never dare to do what hordes of migrants are doing today. Your question - when you mention 'failed' multiculturalism - suggests that there can be successful multiculturalism. I disagree. Multiculturalism is an inherently bad and dangerous, very left-wing collectivist and anti-conservative doctrine. The only solution is to say - loudly and unequivocally - NO to mass migration. Angela Merkel's infamous slogan 'wir schaffen das' must be reversed. Let us enjoy a multicultural world, but essentially monocultural political formations, nation states.
In recent months, farmers have been at the centre of protests against the European Union. In the Netherlands, the farmers' party, the BoerBurgerBeweging, BBB, has already significantly increased its support among the population a few months ago. Farmers' protests are nothing new on European soil. What do you think they represent? What is their significance? Are they an example of the failure of the environmental policy promoted by the European Union?
Agriculture in Europe is a sector that reminds those of us who have lived under an irrational communist system for many decades of the old centrally planned economy, its suppression of markets, its manipulation of prices, its dependence on subsidies and massive redistribution. Such a system is utterly wrong and inefficient, but already 'built in' and taken for granted in Western Europe. That is why any attempt to change the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) meets with strong resistance.
Another is the failure of EU governments to implement a rational agricultural policy. "However, a 'rational' policy would inevitably be incompatible with the - these days dominant - concept called the Green Deal. The Green Deal calls, among other things, for a reduction in agricultural production. In this respect, I am fully on the side of the protesting farmers. The green way of thinking must be radically opposed.
Jacopo Ugolini, published in Nazione Futura, No. 23, 2 April 2024.
institutvk.cz/gnews.cz-translation-Jan Vojtěch
https://www.institutvk.cz/clanky/2752.html
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