In Prague, at the Patrimonium Sancti Adalberti congress (sponsored by the Archbishop of Prague, Cardinal Dominik Duka) on October 25, 2025, there was discussion of how, caught between major international players who are not always friendly, Central Europe needs to rediscover a common vision based on freedom, culture, and shared roots. After the tumultuous last century, the task is to rebuild a consciousness capable of uniting without standardizing, rediscovering the cultural, linguistic, economic, and intellectual heritage that has made this region a crossroads of civilizations.
Marco E. Malaguti was present on behalf of the Machiavelli Foundation. Here is the full text of his speech.
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
As a researcher of the Machiavelli Foundation, it is my pleasure first of all to convey to you the warmest greetings of our president, Daniele Scalea, and of all our staff, and to thank you, as Italians, for allowing us to be here among you.
I come from a country — Italy — that is not usually regarded as part of Central Europe, and yet, if we look more closely, for a long time my country represented, through Venice, the most formidable naval ally of the Christian peoples of Central Europe in their struggle against the Ottoman occupier, and through Trieste, the principal maritime port for the peoples of Austria, Slovenia, and Hungary.
If we are no longer accustomed to being seen as belonging to the Central European context, it is because of the tumultuous history of the twentieth century, which has raised an almost insurmountable wall between our peninsula and Mitteleuropa.
Once again, today as in the past, it is in Central Europe that many of the geopolitical balances of the Eurasian continent are decided. When such a vast and important geopolitical space is deprived of a doctrine, a unifying ideology, and a common culture, it can only remain prey to the appetites of its neighbors—whoever they may be.
To overcome this problem and to fill a void that would otherwise soon be occupied by others, the peoples of Central Europe can rely on education and instruction, by valuing what once united them, by living what unites them today, and by building what will unite them tomorrow.
This is not about using the school system to create a new, artificial identity to replace national identities—identities which I allow myself to call sacred—but rather about joining together around a common goal: the safeguarding of our freedom.
History offers several examples of such unions of purpose. According to tradition, more than seven hundred years ago, on the meadow of Rütli, in the heart of the Swiss Alps, the representatives of the first three cantons of the future Switzerland (Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden) sealed their brotherhood with these words:
“Considering the wickedness of the times and for the better defence and complete preservation of themselves and their goods, they have made a loyal promise to give each other mutual aid, counsel and support, to protect both persons and property, within their valleys and without, with all their power and all their might, against all who might commit violence, wrong, or injustice against them or any one of them, with the intent to harm persons or goods. Each of the communities promises to come to the aid of the others whenever necessary, and to repel, at their own expense and according to circumstances, hostile aggressions and to avenge the injuries suffered.”
Those words proved so powerful, and took such deep root in men’s hearts, that the pact sealed that day still endures—after having overcome the gravest political crises and religious wars our continent has ever known.
Of the wickedness of the times in which Switzerland was born over seven centuries ago, we recognize the same malice that afflicts us today, and the same necessity to unite once again in order to preserve a freedom which has always had its home in Europe—for it was born here. Freedom must be protected, lived, and practiced first and foremost by us Europeans, and never granted to us by others, for there is no freedom without independence.
Education and school can do much in this crucial struggle ahead: above all, they can teach the young generations of this part of Europe that what unites us is far greater than what divides us, and that unions of intent—unlike technocratic utopias—can endure for centuries if cultivated with wisdom and care.
We must know one another, and continue to do so ever more deeply. Very few Italians today are aware of what our country, throughout its long history, has done for the freedom of Central Europe—from the Battle of Lepanto, where Venice was decisive in defeating the Sultan’s galleys, to Mogersdorf and Vienna, where my compatriots Raimondo di Montecuccoli and Eugenio di Savoia—here known as Prinz Eugen—fought for the liberty of these lands against the invader.
But I also think of Italians such as Antonio Bonfini or Filippo Buondelmonti (whom in Hungary you call Ozorai Pipó), who in different fields covered themselves with glory in the lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen.
These are only a few examples of what we share—and of what we should study and teach, on both sides of our borders.
To know one another also means to know each other’s languages. Strengthening the study of our languages is undoubtedly something our schools and universities should protect.
For my part, a few months ago I chose to devote myself to the study of the Hungarian language, yet at my university only a handful of students are interested in this idiom. To correct this situation, our work as consultants and advisors to policymakers must include a major effort to raise awareness among institutions and cultural bodies in our respective countries, ensuring that ever more young men and women study each other’s languages—not only for professional reasons but also, and above all, to gain a different perspective on reality: a perspective that only the reading of poetry and literature in the original tongue can provide.
We must rediscover not only national but also supranational languages.
The Italian government has recently, and commendably, strengthened the study of Latin in our schools. Yet Latin is not the exclusive heritage of the state whose capital is Rome today: it is a gift my ancestors offered to Europe and to the world—a gift that can and must be shared, for that was its vocation, fulfilled for centuries without ever flattening but rather enhancing the national and local identities of all Europe that chose to make use of it.
Latin gave linguistic expression to what, in political terms, was the imperial mission of Roman civilization—later inherited, in different forms, by Constantinople and Vienna.
The progressive Weltanschauung, as you know, manifests itself in education mainly in two ways: on the one hand, woke dogmatism, which views the school as a place of political indoctrination for new “inclusive militants”; and on the other, economic utilitarianism, which sees our schools and universities merely as factories producing new workers.
To revalue, starting from school, this imperial culture and worldview means to rediscover what one of the greatest scholars of Mitteleuropa, my compatriot Claudio Magris, defined as:
“the Faustian Streben, the incessant activist yearning that makes Faust, not by chance accompanied by Mephistopheles, also a great captain of industry, a capitalist,” which “is rejected in Austria as an anxious fever that destroys life, an anguish driving one to a frantic and purposeless activity, preventing one from living the moment, from enjoying, reflecting, maturing, harmoniously developing one’s humanity, crushed in the anguish of doing and producing.”
This does not mean applying an antimodern yardstick to our lives as citizens of the twenty-first century, but rather rediscovering ourselves as children of a historical and communal space, and no longer of a mere mechanical dialectic of history.
The word Tradition is not blasphemous; on the contrary, deriving from the Latin tradere—“to hand down, to transmit as inheritance”—it is the very foundation of education. Indeed, the school is the place where tradition is practiced!
Teaching young generations who they are does not make them less competitive economically or commercially; on the contrary, it gives them one more reason—to contribute to the defense and pursuit of the prosperity of their Heimat.
One of the most traditionalist states in the world, Japan, is at once an ancient empire, a democracy, and one of the most advanced poles of scientific and technological research on the planet.
Among the many rights taught in schools—often too lightly—there is one that is missing: the right to know who one is and to remain so, a right repeatedly defended by Pope Benedict XVI, yet too often forgotten.
It is important, instead, that this right be remembered and taught—more than ever—not to take away anyone’s freedom, but to give it: to provide the young with the axial coordinates they need to orient themselves in a world that is ever more complex, and in which Europe, isolated and deluded amid imaginary “hyper-rights” believed in only by herself, plays always and only the part of the prey.
That role—that of the prey—must not be that of our children, whom we want to be free men on free lands.
All our intellects must be devoted to this.
The very idea of Europe, when it first began to take shape millennia ago in the free cities of Greece, opposed to the infinite armies of the great kings of Persia, arose precisely from this: we are the land of free men, and such we wish to remain.
Thank you.
[photo: giggel, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56264280]