Czech President Vaclav Klaus used a two-day visit to Spain in late September 2004 to mount a sustained critique of the proposed EU constitution, arguing the document drafted under former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing did little to address the bloc's underlying challenges.
Speaking at a Madrid conference, the long-standing Eurosceptic dismissed the text as focused on procedural minutiae, including how many commissioners each member state would receive and how voting weight would be distributed, rather than on Europe's real structural problems. He also questioned whether economic and monetary union was viable over the long term.
In an interview with El País, Klaus described Europe as a "geographical abstraction" lacking any genuine collective identity, and warned that erasing national borders risked harming the continent rather than uniting it.
On Iraq, he argued the conflict had not divided Europe but exposed an existing lack of cohesion. The Czech Republic, which joined the EU in May 2004, maintained a small military presence in Iraq as part of the US-led force.
Klaus, a former finance minister, also took aim at the EU Stability and Growth Pact, whose three-percent-of-GDP debt ceiling had been repeatedly breached by France and Germany. He was scheduled to meet Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero the following day.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in September 2004, in its own words.