- Reset +

President Ilves at the doctor honoris causa ceremony at the Lublin Catholic University

19.05.2010

Rector Magnifice,
Your Eminences and Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear friends.

It is a great honour to be here today at the Catholic University in Lublin, a center of moral opposition to tyranny, be it Nazi or Communist, a university that has produced so many great Poles, and where the Reverend Karol Wojtyla served as head of the Chair of Ethics in the department of Philosophy before his election as Pope John Paul II.

It is also a sad time at the University, having lost a member of your faculty, Janusz Krupski, in the tragedy at Smolensk. Estonia grieves with you, your loss is our loss. Estonia, and I personally, lost too a great friend with the death of President Kaczyński. Lech and Maria Kaczyński became friends of our family; they visited my wife and me at our family farm; we consulted regularly; when things were tough in my country three years ago, the first foreigner to call me was Lech Kaczyński. For President Kaczyński European solidarity was not just an expression used at the EU summits, it was reality. Estonians felt this. I cannot remember an outpouring of emotion in Estonia for any one from outside the country as we saw for President and Mrs. Kaczyński those terrible days.

I mourn also an alumnus of your university, Mariusz Handzlik, a friend since we both were posted to Washington in the middle of the 1990s and with whom I just had spent an evening discussing the EU and NATO’s future merely a week before the tragedy. Mariusz symbolized to me the new Europe, the new Poland: bright, engaged, creative, an intellectual with drive and determination to make things happen. He was meant for great things and Europe is a poorer place without him.

I along with my countrymen bow my head in the memory of these great sons and daughters of Poland.

Ladies and Gentlemen.

In thinking of what to talk about here today, I asked myself what I would say to Mariusz were he to have been here today, as in fact he said he would be, when we said good-bye in Brussels and he said, „See you Toomas, in Lublin“

What I wish to talk about is Europe and where we fit in this European Union we belong to. By „we“ I mean Poles and Estonians as well as others who are for some reason beyond me still called „New Members“ more than six years after joining the European Union. Or still referred to as „formerly Communist“ a full generation after we threw off the yoke of communism and foreign domination. We also have been called, „New Europe“, causing no small degree of consternation in what was appositely names „Old Europe“. We were called badly brought up children who didn’t know how to behave or to shut up before our apparently brighter elders; two of the leading intellectuals of Europe Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida chided us for throwing off the yoke of communism in exchange for the yoke of America.

I use this term “New members” not because it has or should have any validity but rather, because it is imposed upon us and projects a Wittgensteinian cluster concept of meanings among „Old Members“ that implies “corrupt”, „incompetent“, “un- or anti-European“ „russophobic“, “not worthy of leadership positions”. I shall argue that only by acting together – unfortunately precisely as „New Members“, can we eliminate this division that persists to this day, six years after the enlargement.

In the case of earlier enlargements New Member status did not have this kind of persistence nor did it carry any long-standing implications. Not in the 1973 “Northwest” enlargement (Denmark, Ireland, UK), not in the 1981 and 1986 “Mediterranean” enlargements (Greece, Spain, Portugal) nor in the case of the 1995 enlargement to the so-called “Neutrals” (Sweden, Finland, Austria).

I would submit that this is a more basic problem that time alone and absent resolve will not solve. Rather it requires work from us.

OK, perhaps it’s merely an attitude problem, one that actually extends back to the Enlightenment, as Larry Wolff has so extensively described in his book, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilisation on the mind of the Enlightenment. Or a question of comfortable ignorance as the great historian Norman Davies has argued in a number of his books. Because what you don’t know means you don’t have to think about it

Attitude and ignorance we can live with. But when attitude and ignorance begin to set policy in the European Union then we are in trouble. The situation is made worse because of the continuing policy of Primi inter Pares, or perhaps more accurately, Pauci inter Pares, the firsts among equals or the few among equals. As we all are forced to concede, the so-called New Members simply are not taken as seriously as the older members of the Union. This is most obvious in hiring, where as I pointed out last year in a speech at Natolin European College in Warsaw, at the end of 2009 out of 158 foreign representations or embassies only one head of mission was appointed from a new member state. A look at senior decision-making positions shows the same pattern. A failure to take our concerns seriously is no less obvious in foreign policy, where our concerns about what happened in 2008 in Georgia were dismissed with an insouciant wave of the hand.

The stereotypes persist. In 2009 Poland was the only country in the EU to have positive growth, yet we remember it was a mere few years ago that populists talked about the Polish Plumber to defeat the French referendum on what was then called the EU Constitution. Were one of us to employ that kind of xenophobic rhetoric in an election, we know the European press would be filled with indignant editorials. Quod licet Iovi, non licet Novii. Nota Bene! Nec Iovi, sed enim Novii.

Today, in fact the countries in Europe that have behaved responsibly in their economies, countries that follow the rules for fiscal policy are not the Old members, but rather the New. If you look at which countries stay under the 60 percent of GDP state debt requirement, you will note that by and large, they are the „New „members. If you look at who has managed to keep the state budget deficit under the 3 percent required of all member states, Old and New, it is… a New member.

I raise these issues not because I am a euroskeptic. Or that I want to fan the flames of Euroskepticism. To the contrary, I am among the most pro-EU and pro-integrationisht politicians in Europe. I raise these issues because I am worried. Worried, that the vineer of a united Europe is thinner than it should be; worried that the persistence of shopworn stereotypes leads to members treated differently on the basis of irrelevant criteria; worried that unless we take a firmer stand for an united Europe, it is we, the so-called „new members“ who stand to lose the most.

Ladies and Gentlemen.

I raise these issues because we who are entering our seventh year in the European Union are ourselves sometimes too caught up in our pasts to allow ourselves to exercise our clout, to make our concerns matter. We fear what some think of as a „loss of sovereignty“ in the Union and miss out on making ourselves heard. Or we allow ourselves to be cowed when in fact we should stand up more.

I believe we need to fundamentally rethink our approach to the Union by looking more at our own history. No, not the occupations, the partitions, the annexations, the foreign rule but further back, when our peoples were rather more inclined to co-operation than was common in other parts of Europe. It is the dark side of our histories that lead to closing ourselves off, to view co-operation as a zero-sum game.

I believe we should find our inspiration for our approach to the European Union in two successes of voluntary association in our part of the continent: the Lublin Union and the Hanseatic League. The Lublin Union, like the Hanseatic League should be viewed as precursors, earlier European integration programmes of mutual benefit on subordinated sovereignty for better well-being and security. Krakow was a Hansa city and capital of Poland. The part of Estonia I hail from, Livonia, was part of the Lublin Union and three Livonian cities, Pärnu-Pernau, Viljandi-Fellin and Tartu-Dorpat were part of the Hansa. Both pre-modern trans-national systems, the Lublin Union as well as the Hanseatic League, ultimately fell apart, each because in its day it was not strong enough to withstand pressures from abroad. Both from the East as well as the West. They fell apart because neither the Union nor the League was strong enough.

What I would like stress is that we both, Estonians and Poles, have enjoyed in our histories positive experiences with supranational trading and political union. Just as we know all too well from our histories that forcible union of the sort we have experienced in the past three centuries has created in us a justified distrust of loss of sovereignty.

We should not confuse the two; conquest and partition on the one hand, and on the other hand, voluntary pooling of sovereignty for better economic ties and political support, as in the European Union; or for better security, as in the case of NATO. In the latter case, NATO, I should point out that we tend to forget that Article five, the collective security clause of the North Atlantic Treaty, which we see as a guarantee that others will come to our defense if we are attacked, is in fact as great a surrender of sovereignty as possible for a nation-state. For we pledge as NATO members to go fight with our own troops to help any other member of the Alliance. That means we are treaty bound to wage war if need be.

Pooling sovereignty, giving up some of the rights of the nation-state as we have known them since the Treaty of Westphalia, is something our populations are wary of. Especially when talking about the European Union. For the far greater loss of sovereignty we gladly agreed to when we joined NATO seems not to really bother too many. The European Union, however, seems a different matter. Precisely because of our experiences under the Czarist and or Austro-Hungarian Empire and our experiences in the Soviet Bloc.

This leads many in so-called Eastern Europe to grumble about going from one union to another, drawing false analogies between Moscow and Brussels, between Gosplan and Comecon on the one hand and the Common Agriculture Policy or CAP and the European Commission on the other.

We can argue this points forever. I am convinced from the Lublin Union and Hanseatic League experience that in fact, we need not to weaken but instead to strengthen the European Union. We need not to let outsiders exploit divisions in the Union. To do that we need to make ourselves better heard in the Union, rather than letting us be overridden and then grumbling at home. To do that we need to stop thinking about Europe as them but instead, as us.

Take the issue of the month: the crisis on the Euro. We can of course go along with the hue and cry and say the Euro is doomed and that speculators and bankers are to blame. Where will that lead us? Or, we can be adults and face up to reality and responsibility. We need to say bluntly: the hedge funds that are shorting bonds and driving up point spreads are no different from other forms of checks and balances. When investors see something wrong or unhealthy in a country‘s fiscal policy, they make it known. Instead of blaming bankers and investment funds for Europe’s troubles (although they clearly carry responsibility) we must recognise and admit that if we don’t police ourselves, if we disregard our own rules, then there are forces that that will make us pay, forces that will keep us from living beyond our means if we don’t do it ourselves.

Looking to blame others after we ourselves have made serious errors is something that adults don’t do. Europe as a culture developed because we have placed such great importance on taking responsibility for our actions.

Europe is the home of Rule of Law. The European tradition is to stick to the rules. If we make rules, then we abide by them. If we abide by the rules, then we expect that all that is part of following the rules is respected. This is what made Europe so appealing to us when we were shut out; this is what distinguished Europe from the brutal, irrational and ad hoc world of totalitarianism.

We need to keep this in mind and get back to our more idealised understanding of Europe, when we were imprisoned and not yet „new“ or Post communist and Europe for us meant rule of law and freedom and dignity, not the size of the CAP allowance. We need to make clear that when we gave up, freely gave up part of our national sovereignty we did it so that we would be part of the rules. That we would be equals, that there would be no Paucis inter Pares.

I believe that Poland has a special role to play here. No member of the Union has a greater right to demand moral clarity in the Union. Moral clarity either in Foreign Policy or Fiscal Policy. Fairness and solidarity but equality too. Poland understands these issues, as does much of the Union that threw off totalitarian rule. But Poland has something else too: Poland has a special role and responsibility as the only large EU member state that went through the totalitarian communist nightmare that we small members experienced. For Poland cannot be dismissed.

Precisely because Poland cannot be ignored, we in Estonia and elsewhere need Poland to make its voice strong. We need Poland to be the country that can stand above petty national interests and as the EU member that understands it has a responsibility to do so. Estonia understands and stands with you.

These, Ladies and Gentlemen, were the issues Mariusz Handzlik and I argued over and discussed when we got together. We each had our own perspectives but fundamentally we saw that without Poland, without Estonia, without the concerted efforts and ideas of all those nations who in recent memory or in their own lives saw the dark side of Europe, the stifling of the human spirit under communism, Europe would not be whole or complete. And so if we believe in Europe, as Mariusz Handzlik so deeply did, then we must work much more closely and make Europe work. We need to delve into our own histories of co-operation to make sure that all of Europe is a New Europe.