I don’t want to get too sentimental, but it is clear that our centuries-long common and shared history is no mere accident and that without exactly this similarity and closeness maybe our shared history could never have been so long in the first place. Again, this does not mean that we do not have our differences. Yes, we are still not equally wealthy, for example. Our elites have different opinions on many issues. Logically, we have different historical national wounds and pains. But again, this changes nothing in our mental – and not just geographical – closeness. Ladies and gentlemen, we are in Vienna, and my favourite Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser once said that Vienna and Prague are just two halves of one, single city. I very much agree. Perhaps this is ultimately why Czechs feel good in Austria: they feel very much at home. Therefore allow me right here my last point: if you are looking for anecdotal evidence of the closeness I am talking about, here is one anecdote I like to give here in Austria. Because we have friends here at the central bank, it is good to realise that the governor of the Austrian central bank is named Nowotny, his vice-governor and my dear friend is named Duchatczek, and the head of the local financial markets authority is called Pribyl. All these are typical Czech names.
After several years spent within the Austrian financial group Erste and its Czech daughter bank, after many visits to Austria on business and on pleasure, and after many working meetings with Austrian partners on various occasions, I have become convinced that Czechs and Austrians have a very similar mentality and share many habits and customs. I would even go so far as to say that hardly any other nation is so similar to the Czechs than Austrians – maybe not even the Slovaks. There are many on either side who will not like this thesis, but I believe there is a lot of truth in it. Not only are Czechs and Austrians typical small savers with a conservative approach to money and debt, and not only do they have similar cultural attitudes to those many petty things important for our lives, from the culture of alcohol drinking to obsession with academic titles, from very similar attitude to clothing to shared mania with sometimes overly bureaucratic procedures here and there. And from comparable attitude to what we deem as the so-called status products in our lives to similar phenomenons and problems also in politics. Moreover however, there is a similar attitude to work. It was Jack Stack, the former head of Erste Group’s Czech subsidiary Česká spořitelna, who made me realise this. He once remarked that it was almost unbelievable how Czechs and Austrians as employees produce very similar outputs and results when given the same tasks to perform.