Budapest mayor Karácsony: Europe must wake up before it repeats the mistakes of the past
After “breathing a sigh of relief” 80 years ago, it is time for Europe to “wake up”, Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony said in a video message on Facebook on Friday, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
“Eighty years ago, the most horrific period in history came to an end,” Karácsony said. “Let us never forget the unfathomable amount of suffering and the deaths of a hundred million people.”
He said the war that began in “civilised Europe” nearly ended human civilisation, “and it forever shattered the belief that the ideas of humanism and the Enlightenment self-evidently determine our lives”. Karácsony said there were no guarantees of “eternal peace”, adding that “if we want peace, we have to create these guarantees.”
He noted that this had been the purpose of the Schuman Declaration of 1950, the first step towards the establishment of today’s European Union. He said the EU in its current form “is far from perfect and warrants criticism”, but — quoting former European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker — added that “whoever does not believe in Europe, who doubts Europe, whoever despairs of Europe, should visit the military cemeteries in Europe.”
Karácsony said that in a historical context, European unity was “the greatest thing to happen to European nations in the past century”, and joining it had been “the greatest thing in the past century of Hungarian history”.
“But now, 80 years after the war, it’s as if Europe is starting to go astray again,” the mayor said. “It seems as if we have exhausted the intellectual legacy of the great founders, the Churchills, the Schumans and the Adenauers. Today there is a war going on again in Europe, and some argue as they did in 1938, when the world wanted to appease Hitler and allow the occupation for the sake of the desired peace.”
“Today more and more people are questioning our shared European values, and more and more are defying the institutions that were the guarantees of peace and prosperity in Europe over the last half century,” Karácsony said. “Let’s finally realise that with each passing day we’re drifting closer to the world we wanted to leave behind for good 80 years ago,” he added.
Karácsony said the “first mistake” Hungarians had made was to “expect everything to come from Europe”, but now they were “blaming Europe for everything”. “But if there’s a nation whose interest lies in a strong Europe, it’s Hungary,” he said. Hungary, he added, had a vested interest in a Europe that was an alliance of the people rather than of governments, states or multinationals.
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