A political treatise is a special genre of book that is born when a politician puts their head to writing. The treatise is fundamentally a theoretical genre, while politics is mostly the realm of everyday action. A political actor therefore always ventures onto unstable ground if, stepping back from daily events, they think about world affairs and the state of their country in a broader context.

The situation is particularly difficult if someone does this in their early thirties – well, mid-thirties. When I was still a student, I heard the following saying during a lecture, which stuck with me for a long time: "Son, he who writes a lot in his youth will be ashamed a lot in old age!" What can I do? I try to refute this statement...

Such a work is necessarily incomplete, not just descriptive, and not necessarily objective. It is incomplete because we can never fully know reality – as the saying goes: "we see the world through a glass darkly." It is not just descriptive because working in politics means not only trying to understand the world we live in but also, wherever possible, to "influence, create, and enrich." It is not necessarily objective because in the flow of events, it is impossible to scientifically compare reality with the ideal. It must also not be forgotten that a politician's writing and activity will ultimately be judged by history, while in the present it inevitably sparks debate.