The Czech people overcame the illusion that they want to live in a country-bridge between the East and the West, reaching a clear decision that they want to integrate into the Western civilizational area. This choice is in the interests of the people from the Czech Republic and Moldovan society should also make a choice, based on the own interests, Ambassador of the Czech Republic to Moldova Zdeněk Krejčí stated in an interview entitled “People from small countries cannot afford the luxury of quarreling between them over basic issues” that was given to IPN Agency.

“Surely, we want everyone to meet in our country, we want to have good relations with all our Western and Eastern neighbors and I’m convinced that things stand like this at the current stage. But we know for sure that we want to integrate and know to what civilizational area we belong,” stated Zdeněk Krejčí.

According to the Czech diplomat, before realizing the place and role in history, the people of his country experienced several unattainable illusions, one of these being associated with the “Prague Spring” of 1986. “As to the “Prague Spring”, this was an attempt to reform socialism. We wanted to build democratic socialism or, how it was called then “socialism with a human face”. Today we already know that they worked on the “quadrature of the circle”, on an illusion as it is impossible to reset the Socialist order of Soviet type. That was a very interesting period, with hopes and pronounced development in all the spheres of life, both in the economy and in the spiritual life. For example, they still speak about the Czechoslovak New Wave in cinema. We also had another illusion that appeared in 1945 – 1947, after World War II, that we will be a kind of bridge and the West and the East will meet in our country. This illusion reappeared in the 1960s, especially in 1968, during the “Prague Spring”. And we finally understood that the bridge is the place where everyone is heading for different directions and it is better to keep to a bank, but best of all to the correctly chosen bank.”

This option of the Czech society was primarily realized at the start of this century, when the modern state joined the two large organizations with a big weight in contemporary world.

“For us, it is important that our army should be functional in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. For us, it is important that we form part of the European Union and take part in decision-making, where our voice and our influence are greater than they would be if we had worked as a solitary country. This decision was taken based on our historical experience. The Republic of Moldova has its own historical experience and the Moldovans will decide what is better for them and the orientation of their state. Surely, I know about these discussions here, in Moldova, and do not want to tell the Moldovans where and how they should orient themselves. I only referred to the experience of the Czech Republic and I don’t think that it would be ideal for us, like a small country, to be in a gray area that does not belong to any civilization model. We want to have solid security guarantees through the membership in integrationist unions that undertook to help each other,” the ambassador stated in the interview for IPN.