Jubilee 10th Václav Havel European Dialogues International Conference: Europe in a Clash of Two Worlds

Throughout his life Václav Havel was in the habit of asking awkward questions. One of them concerned where Europe began and ended. Linked to this was also the question of where Russia began and ended. The answer to the first of those two questions – which was the focus of a European Dialogues international conference organised five years ago by the VHL in cooperation with ZEK – is in Václav Havel’s view more linked to the set of values and cultural wealth created by Europe over two millennia than to geography. Havel suggested that Russia itself had been searching for the answer to the second question for centuries. Instead of gradually moving closer to democratic and European norms, Russia has taken the opposite path, causing bloodshed on Europe’s eastern borders that threatens the results of more than 75 years of largely peaceful development. “European values” and the “Russian world” have found themselves in irreconcilable opposition. The future of the entire continent depends on the outcome of this conflict, which concerns more than the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine.