Chris Patten Quotes

I never wanted an independent Bosnia. I wanted Yugoslavia. That is my country.

There can be no unified southeastern Europe without Yugoslavia, and everything else is a continuation of political blackmail with which the Serb people and Yugoslavia were faced all these years.

If Yugoslavia is to exist, it can exist only as an alliance, a confederation of independent states.

The Serbian people certainly will never be an obstacle for the Montenegrins to have their own country.

The representatives of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes declare a new and most categorically that our people constitutes but one nation, and that it is one in blood, one by the spoken and written language, by the continuity and unity of the territory in which it lives, and finally in virtue of the common and vital interests of its national existence and the general development of its moral and material life. The idea of its national unity has never suffered extinction, although all the intellectual forces of its enemy were directed against its unification, its liberty, and its national existence

But the European Union does not have a concept of national identity. It was set up to abolish that idea, not to abolish German national identity because that was trying to save itself.

The United Kingdom is not, and never has been, a nation state.

The reason that the Croats want a state of their own is that they fear being cut into little pieces by the Serbs.

I feel incredibly passionate about Scotland not becoming an independent country.

I am strictly against a European superstate.

The European Union is robbing us of our national identities, our nation states.

We don't want a European super state.

First and foremost, Scotland is my home, and I do consider myself Scottish, but I also feel very British, and I hope that Scotland stays within the Union. I have a real concern about independence.

Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits. The United States unique sense of itself depends on an ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America's unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism.

We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.

Continent-wide nations require continent-wide leaders whenever they are in crisis. The 'idea of Europe,' much like the 'idea of India' was the construction of such continental leaders.

I suppose British people generally, probably have very stereotypical notions about the Irish that go back to Victorian times.

The nation state law has nothing controversial.

Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history.

I always needle a bit when people say I'm a champion of the Poles, because I've always had a very multinational view of Poland.

The people of the Balkans are like a dysfunctional family. We may fight and argue, but in the end we are family.

Israel is a Jewish state. It isn't a state of all its nations. That is, equal rights to all citizens but not equal national rights.

For many centuries, even thousands of years, patriotism worked quite well. Of course, it led to wars an so forth, but we shouldn't focus too much on the bad.

If you believe you're a nation, then I accept you as a nation.

I'm a Zionist who believes that every person has to have a country of their own.