Speech by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the opening of the 5th Budapest Eurasia Forum

Good morning to everybody.

If you allow me, I just would like to continue the way how Governor of the Hungarian National Bank presented his ideas in the Hungarian language, because we are now in Hungary.

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen.

The most important presentation has already been made. I feel as if all that is left is to address the few thoughts that we have all just heard. Thank you very much for inviting the Governor of the National Bank. We all know that this occasion would not have come about without the Governor of the National Bank. And I say this not only because of his work as the Governor of the National Bank, but also the fact that as Minister of Economy he laid the foundations of today's modern Hungarian economic policy after the momentous and significant change of government in 2010, when a national government was formed in Hungary. Back then we were already talking about the dimensions which he talked about now in his presentation. And then later, when he became Governor of the National Bank, instead of a strategy of splendid isolation he implemented an active central bank strategy. In keeping with Hungarian tradition, the National Bank's intellectual capacity has always been at a high level, and we agreed that it could use this and its international contacts to help the Government - in addition to ensuring a stable forint and low inflation, which is the primary task of the National Bank - by providing new approaches, new ideas and appropriately deep analysis of new phenomena on the horizon, thus helping us to develop economic strategy. I am grateful to the Governor of the National Bank for this work, and I believe that today's conference is a worthy reflection of this.

Why does a country of ten million people have to deal with such issues? After all, it has enough problems as it is. We have enough problems with the management of day-to-day affairs, with overcoming inherited historical disadvantages, with financial vulnerability, and with high public debt. So Hungary has enough problems for its leaders to think about. Why do they take on the extra burden of opening up these dimensions, of thinking about them, and then of the international consequences of this thinking? There is also an idea and tradition in Hungarian politics that it is better to keep a low profile, and not to deal with such big issues. Of course, this approach argues, we should understand them in secret; but even if we have an opinion, we should remain silent and somehow - as they say in sport - we should get through the big changes in the world by staying in the slipstream of others. In Hungary his has been a successful survival strategy for a long time, but now something is really happening that means it is no longer possible to follow this strategy of distancing ourselves from big ideas.

I started looking at the idea of Eurasia in 2009. Perhaps I am permitted to talk here about such personal experiences, which occurred during the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008-09. For a long time I aligned myself with the Western-style Hungarian tradition. This posited that if something goes wrong in the Western European economy, for example, a financial crisis - which we know was not global, but rather a European or Western financial crisis - then we have a European, Western, financial, economic system, including perhaps the political system, which possesses a well-developed and tested self-correcting mechanism. There are cycles, there will be problems, but the Western political and economic system has the capacity to rectify these mistakes through self-correction. So in such times there is no need to shake our heads, but we can believe in what we have. This Western world is capable of self-renewal, and so we must stay on the path that Hungarian political thinking has been following so far: technologies and modernisation that are more advanced than ours are always to the West, and we must pay attention to them and implement them in Hungary, mutatis mutandis. For a long time I believed that this was the case. I say this to those of you who have come from abroad: I have been involved in Hungarian politics since 1988-89, and the transition from communism itself; and the whole of the great Hungarian realignment of the system after communism was essentially dominated by this idea. According to this idea, it is worth looking to the West not only because they live better there, because they are more efficient and so on, which is undoubtedly true, but also because a self-correcting political-economic system was discovered and created in the West sometime from the 17th century onwards, which in the long term will guarantee our security - our strategic security. We can be sure that our answers to the big questions are pointing in the right direction. This conviction was reinforced in 2008-09, when I had to experience the onset of the financial crisis in the West, and I attended policy meetings where this was understood. What is the reason? What is its character? What results from it? And then I realised that the Western system was incapable of operating the self-correcting mechanism that it had been successfully operating up until then. The conclusion of all the consultations, taking into account intellectual and human weaknesses, and also systemic weaknesses, was that this was in fact one of capitalism's normal cyclical crises, and that the self-correcting mechanisms would work. At the time it was quite obvious that it was something else entirely. What triggered this crisis, and what has determined its course and afterlife, may of course have some element of cyclicality. But the crisis is in fact the logical consequence of a profound transformation of the whole world economy, which is radically reshaping the geopolitical balance of power and raising new centres of power in the world, particularly in Asia, which are creating a new situation in which modernity is no longer an exclusive Western category: it is not only possible to be modern in the West, not only in a Western way, but also in the East, in an Eastern way. And huge forces are emerging which are much more competitive than in Europe - partly because of their size, but for a variety of reasons - and which Europe does not see, does not want to acknowledge, does not accept. As an explanation for its crisis, Europe prefers to lock itself into an outdated theory. That is when I realised that there was a big problem here: if there was this legendary self-correcting mechanism in the Western economic system, it wasn't working. And that was when we decided that it was time to look not only to the West but also to the East - to look there too. Things are happening here that will be with us for a long time, that will define the new century, and so we have to deal with Asia.

The prosaic consequence of this was that in 2009, after it became clear that there was a high probability that we would win the 2010 parliamentary election, György Matolcsy, Sándor Demján - God rest his soul! - and I boarded a plane together and went to China. This is how it started. And we launched the discussions that helped us to understand what you have just heard here, in its rather eloquent and mature form, from the Governor of the National Bank. This is how the attention of today's Hungarian political leadership turned to developments in the world to the east of us - in addition to, and sometimes instead of, Western Europe. This is the story.

But this is not the answer to the question of why we did all this. Of course, one thinks that if the traditional Western understanding of the world is no longer valid, then there is an intellectual urge to look for another. But there was, and still is, another reason that we have to deal with these issues, despite the modest capacity of the country. And perhaps something of this can be inferred from what the Governor of the National Bank said, because the change has been rapid. The essence of politics is a sense of timing. There are many smart people in the world, and a government can essentially collect all the knowledge in the world: it is available, it is obtainable knowledge - some of it can be bought, and some of it is available to decision makers from the world's foremost intellects. So there is always knowledge. Politics is not the realm of knowledge. Politics is the realm of application; and the essence of application is timing. You not only have to apply the right things, but you have to apply them at the right time. The smaller the country, the truer this is. So big countries can afford to miss a significant moment, because they are big enough to correct their omission later. For a country the size of Hungary, bad timing is fatal.

I do not want to bore the audience, especially the Hungarians, but neither do I want to bore foreigners too much with the lessons of Hungarian history. But if you look back over the last 150 years and see why Hungary has been a loser in those 150 years, then - in addition to the malign coincidence of many unfortunate circumstances for which we were not responsible - you will also see the problem of missing the right moment, of confusion over timing. To give just one example: the bad timing of our attempt to extract ourselves from the Second World War, which for the next sixty or seventy years put us at an irrecoverable disadvantage related to our competitors, whose sense of timing was better than ours. And I could cite many similar stories from the annals of modern Hungarian history.

So the point I am trying to make is that a country the size of Hungary cannot afford to be stupid. It cannot afford to be slow, to be boring, to be a follower, and it cannot afford to rely on the understanding and interpretation of others. If it wants to live up to the standards we want, if it wants to live up to the historical traditions of our thousand years of history, a country of Hungary's size must be sharp, quick, smart, open to the world and constantly thinking, so that it does not miss the right moment to make the necessary decisions. We cannot simply rely on the fact that we are a Member State of the European Union. The luxury that the big European countries have is that they can be slower, they can be more cautious, they can be more deliberate, they can be less sharp; because their weight, their size, the importance of their economies, the size of their GDPs, the number of soldiers they have, the enormous power of their military technology, all of this allows them to move forward and change more slowly, more cautiously.

So I do not think it is in any way unjustified for the Hungarian National Bank to have attempted to invite the international community here today to collectively think about the future, and the future of European countries. In fact, I think that Hungary is the place where this is most possible; and perhaps it is the Hungarian National Bank that is best placed to perceive this, and to organise such forums.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I would now like to say a few words about Eurasia, then Europe, and then Hungary, from a certain point of view. I will do this without involving myself in the Governor of the National Bank's favourite intellectual exercise of looking for valid analogies in certain periods of history in order to explain what is happening in our present age. I will avoid all of that, although it is undoubtedly a fascinating area. I would just like to say that my starting point - and this is the most important assertion of my presentation today - is that the changes we are seeing today are not simply a realignment, but a return to an earlier condition. So what is happening is something that is not unknown in the economic history of mankind. Moreover, since we do not know the future anyway, it is best to try to understand the past and thus draw conclusions for the future. In my workplace, on the wall of my office, there are three maps of the world. One of them is a map that you know: you have seen it in school in Hungary, and its design is based on the fact that when you lay out the globe on a flat sheet of paper, somehow Europe is always in the middle. And this is how you look at the world. Another map I have is one in which the United States is at the centre; and then when I look at it I can see exactly how the world seems when you look at it from Washington. A huge difference! And my third map is one with Asia at the centre, on which I can see what Asians understand the world to be when they look at it: how it is positioned, how it is positioned in relation to what. And I think that the very fact that for some reason the idea has occurred to me that the traditional map of Europe is not enough, that we need two other maps, shows that there are changes taking place - changes in Europe that cannot be understood without a global approach.

So, if you look at the map with Asia at the centre, and if you see that Europe is really a peninsula, and a peninsula of not very great geographical extent, you see that Europe and Asia are in fact an organic whole. This is not obvious from Europe, from the tip of this peninsula. But as soon as we change the focus and look at the world from Asia, a different picture emerges: an organic geographical entity completely free of physical boundaries - because in fact there are no natural, geographical boundaries between Europe and Asia. It is a unity. One can open political debates about what this implies, but the facts of geography are not worth questioning. Based on the lessons of economic history, this natural geographic unity has, of course, also displayed a natural economic unity, with the two complementing each other. This is the area in which the most flourishing areas of human civilisation, culture and economy have existed alongside one another. If from here, from this map, we look at the history of the centuries that have passed before us, we must ask this question: If this was the case, and it seems to be geographically natural, why has this organic unity not functioned in recent centuries? In my view, three factors have prevented Eurasia from existing as a natural economic unit. The first is that we learned at school that the centre - or centre of gravity - of world trade has shifted to the seas, and this has led to a completely different orientation in different parts of this Eurasian region. The second reason that the organic unity has not worked for centuries is that this reorientation led to the dominance of Western civilisation - and in fact upset the balance between civilisations in the Eurasian region, tilting it towards the West. The third obstacle to the organic functioning of the Eurasian region is a phenomenon of modern times: after the Cold War the Western elites decided that they did not want to restore this organic unity, but to westernise the whole world. So, after the collapse of communism, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Western elite's concept was that the world had to be westernised, that it had to be moulded in the West's own image. This was, of course, the notion of American exceptionalism. Added to this was European arrogance and conceit: the civilisational, real or perceived civilisational superiority that has existed as an idea since the European Enlightenment. As a result, after 1990 the task was not the restoration of Eurasia, which was not on the global agenda, but the westernisation of the world according to the principles on which the hitherto successful Western world had been built. The most brutal example of this - and the most obvious failure that we can all remember - was the Arab Spring. A major geographic area suddenly became fractured, strategically fractured, with space for action opening up to external forces. The West came up with the idea of how great it would be for this Arab, Islamic world to realign itself in accordance with the principle of the separation of powers - which sprang from Christianity - and a Western understanding of human rights. The failure of this became so obvious that in the end the only way to avert the enormous resulting problems was to assist in the restoration there of regimes with very strong executive power, which were then able to stabilise the region. Everyone knows this story. I just bring this up as an example, so that you all understand what I am talking about: in 1990 there was an opportunity to rebuild an organic Eurasian entity, but the West chose not to do that, instead pursuing the westernisation strategy I have described here.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We are here today because this era is at an end. If this era had not ended, if we did not need to talk about the thirty or more years since 1990 in the past tense, then we would not be here today. We are here because we all feel that this way of thinking, this Western strategy - including Europe's strategy - is invalid, is failing, and that something has come to an end. There is a great debate about how to describe what has ended. I would say that the liberal, progressive dominance within the Western world is over. This is the failure of the idea that the whole world should be organised along Western lines, and that the peoples chosen to undergo this would be willing to comply in exchange for economic advantages, financial advantages. The states of Asia have strengthened and have shown that they are capable of rising, existing and enduring as an independent economic and political power centre. As a result, the centre of the world economy has shifted eastwards, with Eastern economies growing four times as fast as Western economies; and the added value of Western industry accounts for 40 per cent of the world's total, compared with 50 per cent for Eastern industry. This is the new reality.

The other new development that opens up the space for collective thinking is that the Western world has failed not only in its concept and strategy for reorganising the world, but has also failed within its own environment, within the Western world. Issues have arisen for which the liberal, progressive-dominated mindset has no response. Such are migration, the whole gender ideology related to traditional values, ethnic antagonisms, or the war now in progress. So the European political system - based on liberal, progressive dominance - is increasingly unable to itself provide governance. As a result of the West's loss of confidence, five hundred years of Western civilisational dominance have come to an end. At the end of the Cold War the West accounted for half of the world's economic output; today it accounts for 30 per cent, and the Eastern power centres account for 34 per cent. If you do not believe in ideas, then believe in numbers.

If this is the case, then we still have no answer to this question: If the future will be different from the past, why is Eurasian cooperation the future? After all, the fact that something has failed does not mean that what went before must return. When the Hungarian government reflects on this issue, we tend to make the following observations. The renaissance of Eurasia is returning to the political agenda because, first of all, it is the largest contiguous landmass on the planet. We do not usually talk about it like that, but there is a 9,000-kilometre temperate climate zone stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Of course there are differences, but on the whole we can stay within a single climate for 9,000 kilometres. If we move within it, we do not have to deal with the extreme weather that, say, maritime peoples have to deal with. This is an advantage that we do not usually appreciate in geopolitical thinking, but it would be worthwhile doing so.

The second argument in favour of Eurasia's rise is permanence. Of course, as with any broad statement, there are exceptions to this, but the essence is that the political and trading players in this region are stable. We read about the same people in records from a thousand years ago as we do today. Here we have stable groups of peoples, territories, states, tribes and cultures. We know one another. Yesterday I was visited by the President of Kazakhstan, a key player in Eurasia. It was as if we had known each other for a thousand years. When we talked about the world, about the new situation, about the changing circumstances, about what is to come, it was as if we were continuing a conversation that had been broken off a few hundred years ago. So this constancy - this constancy in the world of peoples, states and tribes - is a great advantage when it comes to finding answers to new challenges in a new era.

The third important advantage of this region is that Eurasia was not one civilisation, but has always been made up of several civilisations. It includes the Far East, which we now identify with China, but it includes more than that: Indian civilisation, Arab civilisation, and our own Western civilisation. The fact that we are all in the same region is a major competitive advantage, because in the more fortunate periods of history these civilisations have cross-fertilised one another.

The fourth aspect the Hungarian government considers when it thinks in terms of Eurasia is that 70 per cent of humanity's population lives in this region. Size matters in the market, in trade, in the economy. For a single region to contain 70 per cent of all humanity is a huge advantage. If I look at this as Eurasia, not calculating in terms of the East and the West but looking at Eurasia, then this region's share of the world economy is 70 per cent. It is home to three quarters of the world's leading science clusters. It is home to fifteen of the world's twenty largest financial centres. And if the Governor of the National Bank is right, which is likely, we are also at the dawn of a new technological era; and this region is also preeminent in possessing and processing the minerals that are critical to this technology.

Taken together, all of these circumstances led the Hungarian government to accept an invitation to such a conference, to cooperate with the National Bank's knowledge centre, which is seeking to interpret the future of the Hungarians in a Eurasian context. This is why I am delighted to be here, to speak before you.

I cannot leave without saying a few words about Europe. This is partly because it is the area we know best, and partly because it is one of the areas in which the stakes are the highest. Europe is a continent of drama, with all the desirable and unfortunate consequences that entails. Even if it is true that the next period, the next century, will be the century of Eurasia, we cannot help but notice that Europe is not yet able to find its place in this context of thought. So if you listen to European leaders today speaking about the future of Europe, you will hear that Europe is unable to place itself in the Eurasian context. Maybe it will be able to, but today in the political debates in which I participate, it is failing to do so. Some Western leaders do not see the importance of Eurasia, while others see it but do not like it. And this is why - despite what I think are obvious facts, which I have also presented to you here - at the moment Europe is unable or unwilling to place itself in this context. There are probably psychological factors behind this - after all, history is made by human beings, even if that is within the framework set by God; but we make it, and it is difficult for Western leaders to abandon the psychologically understandable, almost innate, sense of superiority in the way they see the world. I do not exactly know since when, but for hundreds of years Westerners have been used to thinking that we are the finest, the smartest, the most advanced, and the richest. And once you see that we are no longer the finest, we are no longer the smartest, we are no longer the most advanced and we are no longer the richest, it is not an easy task to face up to and admit this. Men of my age, in their early sixties, suffer from a similar problem, so you can see that what is true at small scale is also true at large scale. Sooner or later, however, this problem will have to be overcome, otherwise Europe will be the loser in a changing world. Today that is what we are.

Europe today is the loser in a changing world. I use a piece of data to illustrate this. If you look at it in purchasing power parity terms and imagine the European Union as if it were part of the United States, a constituent state, then of the fifty states - fifty-one including us - the EU would be the third poorest state. We do not usually think in this way, but I repeat, if the European Union was a state within the United States, it would be the third poorest among the fifty-one. This clearly shows that Europe is losing, it is continuously losing, and within the processes currently underway it is the number one loser. A European economy no longer features among the five largest economies in the world. Even Germany is not in the top five - not today, and not yesterday. And there are all sorts of predictions about the ten biggest economies of the future; these include different countries, but are also similar. Assuming that at this point we do not include Russia among the European countries, the first European country is in tenth or eleventh place. Further proof of our current defeated condition is the fact that Europe is lagging behind in the technological race. Among the top twenty technology centres in the world, none are European: only American, South Korean, Japanese and Chinese. The European innovation of which we were so proud has evaporated. If I come down one level of abstraction, I can say that never before in Europe has energy - of which there is so little in Europe - increased in price as much as it has now, within just a few years. In Europe the price of natural gas has gone up fivefold, and oil one and a half times.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In the current situation, the European elites - by which I mean not only the political decision-makers, but also the think tanks, the academies and the universities - are clearly geared up to defend the status quo of past glory. Here I will recount a discussion we had in the European Council many years ago. It was the first time that the European Council of prime ministers put on the agenda the question of our relationship with China, of how Europe should think strategically about China. We set up a complex - typically European, intellectually complex - three-tier system: partner; competitor; and at the end Angela Merkel said that China is our most important "systemic rival". Systemic rival! And then, with the modest intensity appropriate for a country of our size, I asked if I could be told who had entered us Hungarians in this competition. Because I do not know of China being Hungary's systemic rival, and we do not think of the world in terms of a competition, a systemic competition, with a civilisation that is completely different from ours. We can talk about cooperation, about convergence of interests, about conflict - we know all about that. But what has this got to do with us deciding to classify a rising civilisation as our systemic rival or challenger? And even if some people think this, and at that time America was not even at the table, but if some people think this, why should we Hungarians be in this competition - since we did not enter it? This shows, Ladies and Gentlemen, that, having seen the rise of the Asian power centres, the mindset of the European elite is still running on the same old track. Meanwhile, the European economy is not growing, with European economies not even reaching 1 per cent this year. The United States is growing at 3 per cent, the Eastern economies are growing at 5 to 7 per cent, and if I have read the forecasts correctly, this will continue in 2025. And I am convinced that if Europe cannot break with this logic of defending the status quo ante, this will lead to the formation of trade, economic and political blocs. And if it cannot switch from bloc formation to a pattern of thinking and a trajectory of thought based on connectivity, then the process of Europe losing out in the changes taking place today will continue in the longer term.

I am convinced that Europe must break out of this thought bubble, find its place in its relationship with Asia, understand that our peninsula - which we call Europe - is part of the Eurasian region, and exploit all the advantages that this fact brings. If we do not exploit them, we will not be able to compete with other centres of power in the world. In short, we need a good European strategy. But this is where our competence ends. Hungary only has the strength, the political strength, to implement the strategy it has devised for itself. We can engage in a European discourse about what strategy Europe should have, but this is the arena for the big players, where the decision has to be made, and not only to contribute intellectually to the debate. And I have to say that among the current European elite I do not see an intellectual force in Europe today that can break out of the bubble it has created and urgently define its relationship with the Eurasian reality.

After this, Ladies and Gentlemen, at this point I must say a few words about Hungary. Because if we are in the situation I have described, then this question must be asked: What should we do? What? In any case, we should not wait, because, as I have said, the deadlines and windows of opportunity for making the right decisions will pass or close. So Hungary must not wait for Europe to develop a strategy, in which we will then find our own place. Because I do not believe that Europe will develop such a strategy. The only faint initiative relates to the French president, who has created a formation called the European Political Community, which has a lot in common with what we saw in the presentation by the Governor of the National Bank - and I think he described it in terms of a "European Commonwealth". But this is a rudimentary, undeveloped idea that does not yet have the support of the vast majority of European countries. By the time this becomes a strategy, you will certainly be listening not just to the next prime minister, but to the one after that. So certainly not tomorrow. What must Hungary do? We cannot wait, we must develop our own strategy. In other words Hungary must be ready, it must accept the fact that the period ahead of us will be the century of Eurasia, we must define our place in it ourselves, and not derive it from a European strategy. I will say this quietly: the good news is that we have such a strategy. Of course unsuspecting observers who are not engaged in geopolitical analysis mostly perceive this only in the form of clashes and disputes. But all the disputes we have with Brussels today stem from that fact that Hungary has an independent strategy, one which is based on the realities, on the new realities, which takes note of the givens that I have mentioned, and which seeks, defines and finds Hungary's place in this strategy - regardless of what Brussels' doctrine might be. So when it comes to its European relations, Hungary is not walking through a battlefield or minefield, but is implementing a very deliberate national policy and national economic strategy, the defining element of which - not the only element, but the defining element - is the fact that Hungary is in Eurasia. This does not marginalise Hungary's membership of NATO, the existence of the United States, or the Hungarian strategy's need to define itself not only in Eurasia and in relation to Eurasia, but also in relation to the United States, with which it must develop its network of relations. We hope this will be easier with the new administration than it was with the old one - which will not be very demanding, because we had no success at all with the old one.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Hungarian strategy is based on the recognition that Hungary occupies a favourable position in Eurasia. Therefore we trade with everyone. In the last ten years the value of Hungarian exports has doubled, because we have doubled our exports to the West and to the East at the same time. So this strategy works. If we look not only at trade but also at investment, we see that Hungary is perhaps the most colourful in those terms. I will quote the figures by heart; I apologise if there is some inaccuracy, but it will not be by an order of magnitude. So we see that the Germans have unloaded some 25-26 billion euros in working capital into Hungary, and the Americans 9 billion euros; for the Chinese the figure is 10 billion euros, by the end of the year this will have risen to 13 billion euros, and this will continue to rise in the year after that. Then come the South Koreans, and then all the Europeans. This shows that Hungary has a strategy that is also reflected in trade and investment policy. In other words, Hungary is successfully diversifying its trade - more slowly than it should, but successfully - and has successfully and quickly diversified its investment policy. Likewise, as we are an energy-poor country, an important part of the Hungarian strategy is to diversify our energy supplies, which now includes Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. And, of course, Hungary must participate in all the important international forums in Eurasia: we are there everywhere, and we will be there in the future.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I think that the fact that in 2025 investments will be made next year on an outstanding scale - even by global comparison - will prove that this strategy is the right one. Next year will see completion of the largest railway development perhaps in the whole of Europe: the Budapest-Belgrade railway line, taking place with Chinese financing and Chinese construction in part. New automotive factories are coming on stream. BMW is opening a new factory, as are China's CATL, a major player in battery manufacturing, and China's Sam Corp. Audi has already increased its capacity this year, and BYD will start production in Szeged next year. This clearly shows that not only do we have a strategy in our heads and on paper, but we are also making good progress in implementing this strategy. If I add to this the fact that, according to the text of the Budget Act that has just been submitted, three hundred major government-backed investments will be launched next year, it shows that our hopes for the success of this strategy are not unfounded.

In conclusion, why is it that we in Hungary - including even the Prime Minister - can speak so openly about the interrelated issues of Eurasia and Europe? There are few countries in Europe today where such a conference would take place, and one in which the Prime Minister would talk about Eurasia in this context is very unlikely to be found anywhere else at all. Why is this? Actually, if you think about it, and Hungarians like to think about it, we are the living idea of Eurasia. We are the embodiment, the reincarnation of this word. We are a people that arrived from Asia. Yesterday I greeted the Kazakh president by saying that Magna Hungaria, the confluence of rivers, is in fact today a Kazakh region, on the eastern side of the Urals. We came from there, and then became a thoroughly Western, European, people. We are the living idea of Eurasia. Therefore I am convinced that things are going well for Hungary; because if we are facing an era in which we ourselves are almost its expressors and formulators, then we can think that the world economy and the European economy are finally facing a fortunate period which will also give Hungary a historic opportunity for development. Whether this will be the case depends on whether conferences like today's will continue, whether they will be repeated, and whether they will generate new ideas and proposals for the European governments of the day - first and foremost for the Hungarian government. I am grateful to you for today's conference, and I wish you every success in your deliberations.

Thank you for your attention.

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