 Thanks to the Institute for International and European Affairs for inviting me to be able to reflect on the 10 years of the membership of the Czech Republic within the EU. And as Catherine said, my background is also Slovak. I have been working at the Slovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So maybe in a couple of moments I could also compare the Czech situation with the Slovak one. To be one country, but now it's pretty obvious that the ways, the past of the countries took very different dimensions and directions. I would like to congratulate the organizers for a very selection of countries to be represented here in the panel. I would maybe try to give them labels. Aniko, you are representing a country which is a follower in the EU. Yuagata, you are representing a country which is leader or wants to be a leader in the EU. And I am now representing a country which is labeled as a troublemaker within the EU. I hope this label will soon change and I will comment on this. If we talk about the 10 years membership in the European Union, of course we have to divide it a bit into different periods because the first years of the membership for all the countries which entered the European Union in 2004 were the years where the countries already was only looking for their place within the EU. They were learning how the decision-making process works and this was the case also for the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic was looking for its place within the EU and during its first years it was able to find some areas where it could have some impact on the EU decision-making and these areas were mainly in the foreign policy, the Czech Republic decided to pay attention especially on the enlargement process of the European Union, especially on the countries of the Western Balkans. Then together with Poland and Sweden, but I know at the end it was only Swedish and Polish initiative, worked on the creation of what we now know as Eastern Partnership policy of the European Union and it tried to impulse into the EU foreign policy, the value-based foreign policy and became a strong supporter of the strong position, for example, towards Cuba or it was one of the hawks in the policy towards Russia. Now I am currently on the attitude of political elites towards the EU. In 2009 the presidency of the Czech Republic in the Council of the European Union came and this was the famous moment, the five minutes of fame for the Czech Republic at the stage. You might remember how it started with the big scandal with the entropa. I don't know how Ireland was reflected there, I don't remember, but it was very fresh air into the European Council. We became in the same time very famous for being one of the few countries in the history of the EU where the parliament didn't give its confidence to the government and the government had to be changed during the presidency. In the same time we became very famous thanks to our president, Václav Klaus, who became the leader of the entire whatever EU movement in the EU and he refused in the first moment also to ratify the Lisbon Treaty. The whole European Union had to wait. You had your story, of course, with the Lisbon Treaty, but it was a decision of people, not a decision of one man as in case of the Czech Republic. But finally, at the end, after the strong pressure from all the political elites, the Czech Republic, he personally decided to sign the treaty and then to take back Czech Republic into the European mainstream. In the third period of the Czech membership in the EU started in the year 2010 when the new government came into power, very extremely weak government. What did it mean for the EU at first? It meant that the whole EU policy was dominated by President Klaus Dan and you know the opinions of President Klaus and how does he think about the EU and the future of the EU and he did everything possible also to influence the Czech political and public opinion and thanks to the fact that the government was so weak he was extremely successful in this. So what were the attitudes of the Czech political presentation then since 2010 in the EU? That was the time when the Czech Republic became a tribal maker. It refused the euro plus pact. It refused to sign the fiscal compact. It refused to basically agree on almost whatever. We did commission research and we discovered during the research that the Czech Republic together with the UK was the biggest policy killer within the different aspects of the EU policies. It looked like that whatever is coming from the European Union is suspicious and it's not positive for the Czech Republic. This reflects very nice feature of the Czech nature and I would comment on it. It's the feeling that we can do always better on our own that we are smarter than the others. So this is where the Czech also negativism towards the EU came. The last breaking point or milestone of the Czech EU policy was the year 2013 when both the president and the government changed. New president Zeman, former prime minister who led the country to the EU is known as Euro Federalist. I wouldn't comment what does it mean in his opinion federalism because I don't think he at the end have it backed by some ideology. Probably he created his own ideology of Euro federalism where some of the issues the EU is working on fit and some of the are just out depends on his personal opinion. But what was important the symbolic change in Czech EU policies? For the first time in history the EU flag in 2013 was put on the Prague Castle because the former president Klaus refused for all the ten years he was in the office to raise the EU flag and he ratified the incorporation of European stability mechanism into the primary law of the European Union so ESM could become the tool of the European Union and also the new government finally signed the fiscal compact which was again more important from the symbolical point of view than from the real policy making point of view. Why originally even the Czech government refused to sign and the fiscal compact and remain the only one country together with the UK which has got some reasoning for not signing the fiscal compact was very weak argument of not being at the table when the fiscal compact was negotiated but I don't know which countries were exactly behind the table probably only the top five or six countries but that doesn't constitute of course the reason not to not to sign it. So nowadays the new government which is in the office for more or less two or three months prepares a completely new EU strategy which directs Czech Republic in very different direction than it was last five years since this 2009 EU presidency. The new strategy changes the main allies of the Czech Republic within the EU. It won't be any more the UK. It was I can be very open. It was very naive and really close to think for the last government that the UK would be the main ally of the Czech Republic within the EU because of the absolutely different position of the both countries within the Czech Republic is in the center Europe integrated reason the center Europe especially with the German economy and in this direction also the new EU strategy of the government will go. The closest ally will be Germany of course and the Visegrad group for the Czech foreign policy. The Czech foreign policy will orientate itself and the EU policy much more on the economic integration within the eurozone. It's not in the plans of this government to adopt Europe. There are various reasons for that one of them is that they need the Czech national bank and the whole governing board of the Czech national bank was appointed by President Klaus. So it's his people very opposed to the euro introduction. Another reason is extremely role public support. I will talk about that a bit later and also the possible costs of introduction to the EU. Introduction of euro in the near future. On the other hand Czech Republic is fulfilling the criteria for introduction of the euro. The public finances became consolidated so I predict that in two, three years term the Czech Republic can reevaluate and start working on the introduction of euro. So this was the behavior of political elites during the 10 years of membership and now what the people thinks. I was looking at many opinion polls starting with the euro barometer ending with many national polls. Of course it depends a lot how you pose the question and you can get very different results. But the truth is that in the moment of accession in 2004 Czechs were one of the highest supporters of the membership of their countries within the EU. The support was always much higher than 60% until the year 2009 when there was a peak because of the Czech EU presidency. And since that together with the political crisis within the country together with economic crisis in the EU the public support was dropping until this moment when it is one of the lowest in the European Union. I pick up one concrete question which was given to citizens and it was a question, do you think your country could prosper better outside the EU and the number of those who said yes it was equal to the number of those who said no which is quite a bad result and the number of those who said yes was the third highest within the EU after not surprisingly Cyprus and UK. What are the reasons for this extremely low public support and why it changed since 2009? We did do even focus groups, our institute to research better and to better understand what are the reasons of it and I can name some of that. First of all it's absolute lack of understanding what the EU and its institutions are doing. Only 30% of our respondents did know that members of European Parliament are elected in direct elections. Another 30% of the people so they are enacted by the national governments, another 30% by heads of states and another 30% that they are co-opted from the members of national parliament. I'm sorry it was 2020 and 2020 not 30, 30, 30. So lack of knowledge is one of the reasons. Then the absolute domination of the political discord by President Klaus, the leader of Eurosceptics in Europe, then also the fact that the internal political problems that resulted in changes, constant changes of government in the Czech Republic made people not to trust to any institution, not even the EU but at the end we could see that the trust to national institutions were even lower than the trust to EU institutions. For example the last months of the governance of the last government, the trust over the government reached 9%. So it was probably very unique even within the whole European Union. What is positive on the positive note? The situation, how the situation in economy and real economy is changing. Then this is reflected also in how the press informs about the EU and situation. It's also then reflected in the opinions of people. So from the very bottom public opinion which was in case of Czech Republic in 2012, 2013, now we can again see that very slowly and slowly how the EU is able to tackle the problematic countries and the problems within the Eurozone, how the employment growth and the GDP growth also in the Czech Republic, the opinion of people is better and better. Also the businesses which were during the crisis very likely to relax them to support for example the introduction of Euro, they start to raise their voices in its favor. Maybe the last remark, very interesting comparison with Slovakia, the comparison of discourses within the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Whenever you opened a newspaper in case of Czech Republic, you could see opinions from political leaders, from leaders from civil society, from economists that claiming how lucky the Czech Republic was not to introduce Euro before the crisis because thanks to the preservation of independent monetary policy it was able to tackle better the crisis and that it could support the Czech Republic export and so on and the crisis would be more profound if Czech Republic would introduce Euro. And now open a Slovak newspaper, Slovakia introduced Euro 1st January 2009 and everybody, completely everybody, even those Eurosceptics in Slovakia they praised their Euro. They replied, how lucky Slovakia was to introduce Euro in 2009 because thanks to the fact that we became a part of the stable club with a stable strong currency Slovakia avoided the shaking of the exchange rate and avoided attacks of speculants towards its currency. So two economies very similar, two at the beginning very different positions and two absolutely different trajectories at the end. Thank you.