Vive l'Europe!
Gelegenheid:Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
I welcome you very warmly to the Knights’ Hall. Let me tell you a little about it. The hall is a 13th century Gothic structure, often used as a meeting place for the States of Holland, but mostly as an antechamber before going upstairs for drinks. It is where the States met in the past. It has been many different things during the ages. During the time of the Dutch Republic – I hasten to add it was the time we were a world power – the Hall was used to sell books. Later, when we were under the protection of Napoleon, he used to stable his horses here, which shows what he thought of Dutch self-rule. Since 1904 it has been the place where the Queen delivers her annual speech to the States General. I would like to greet the presidents of the two houses of our States General, who are present here today. For me, having been a member of parliament for nine years and now a member of the government, this is a very common place to be, albeit not where I’m now standing. I’m very grateful for your presence and I salute all of you as great Europeans, as people whose efforts we need in today’s Europe because we have such a long way to go.
Today we are commemorating what happened in 1948. One of the fun things you can do to prepare for a speech is to go through the files at my ministry dealing with those events. I can show you all the documents. Some are in facsimile, like the Prime Minister’s speech. But the interesting things are the documents from our embassies. A number of things really strike your imagination when you read the files. First of all, how difficult it was to travel in Europe in 1948. We’ ve forgotten that today, but they needed a visa. The trouble the poor Germans had to go through to get here is incredible. They needed a visa from the Dutch, and an agreement with the military authorities in the region where they lived. Then they needed to find some money to pay for their expenses, which of course was very difficult to do. Then they had to deal with the Dutch authorities, which were not exactly enthusiastic about organising such a big event because they were afraid of all the potential diplomatic repercussions.
So my first conclusion after having read the files is that Schengen, the euro, the single market – they’re not as bad as all that. My second conclusion is that we should contradict all those who still maintain that Europe started off as and has remained an elitist project. That is absolutely untrue. In actual fact, the elites were not so fond of the Congress of Europe. They saw all sorts of problems. It was individual politicians, thinkers, writers and journalists who thought it would be a good idea to talk about a federal Europe in 1948, not the governments or politicians (with a few exceptions).
I love to quote Churchill but I won’t do so today as he has been quoted so much in last couple of days that you might think he was the only person present. But I do accept that some of what Churchill said was intended to tease Attlee. He wanted to embarrass Labour. He described Attlee as a man who had so much to be modest about. But by and large there was a strong sentiment that building a federal Europe was something that peoples needed to do themselves. Going through the files, you can see all the courageous people who came here, often from governments in exile; that was true of the Spanish delegation, for example, whose secretary was Javier Solana’s great uncle. Great people met: Denis de Rougemont has already been mentioned. Commission President Barroso is a great fan of his, as I am too. And of Spinoza. I must say, Mr President, that after today we are even closer than we were before having heard who your heroes are, for they are mine as well.
I would like to go back to the basic idea of 1948. A lot has been said about the conference during the last couple of days. But let me mention something that has inspired me over the years. It’s a brilliant article written by Albert Camus, published in Combat in 1948. In it Camus analyses in a literary way the reasons for Europe’s incessant tendency to relapse into barbarity and war. He says that what Europeans sometimes lose out of desperation and lack of vision is the ability to look at the world through somebody else’s eyes, the capacity for dialogue. For Camus, dialogue is what distinguishes us from animals – the capacity to listen to somebody else and the willingness to be convinced by somebody else’s arguments. I think that this was one of the foundations of 1948. And this is what we need to reinvent time and again under new circumstances. For I do believe – and I echo what was said earlier by the presidents at the meeting in the Nieuwe Kerk – that this fundamental point of opting for dialogue, of being prepared to be convinced by someone with other views, should be the basis of every European policy we still need to develop. This is the basis of what we are as Europeans. For too long war has followed war, due to the fallacy of believing that we can strengthen the position of our own people by dominating other peoples. In 1948 we said we would not do that again and that we would choose democracy, which means dialogue, as the instrument of the Europe to come.
I believe we need to look at this again today, not out of nostalgia, but because today this fundamental idea is – not so much under threat – but under discussion. It is something that is not yet self-evident; it needs to be fought for. Today, ladies and gentlemen, in many parts of Europe, especially in what someone on the other side of the Atlantic once called ‘old Europe’, but it applies to some of new Europe as well, many people intuitively believe, for the first time since the Second World War, that things are going to get worse rather than better. I think we are at a crucial moment in European history because we need to convince people for the first time in 60 years that we can have a better future and that it is not necessary for our children and grandchildren to be worse off than we are. This is no longer self-evident so we need to fight for that understanding. This has a lot to do with fear – fear for our identity, for our culture. I want to repeat what Gijs de Vries said earlier this morning – that the importance of fostering intercultural dialogue, of again and again creating the possibility to look at the world through somebody else’s eyes, is perhaps more necessary today than ever before in our post-war European history.
Je dois absolument saluer deux personnalités aujourd’hui, Guy de Rouville et Jean-Pierre Gouzy, qui étaient ici aussi en 1948. Sans aucun doute, vous verrez, le machin a changé un petit peu; nous ne sommes pas aussi nombreux, nous sommes peut-être un peu plus vieux, nous ne sommes en tout cas pas uniquement des hommes, il y a beaucoup de femmes maintenant, finalement, nous sommes peut- ê tre plus éparpillés dans les milieux politiques et dans la société, ce qui est bien, ce qui montre que l’Europe a réussi à créer un mouvement d’émancipation et de solidarité.
J’en termine en vous disant que l’idée fondamentale de l’Europe, qui est l’ idée fondamentale de Churchill et de tous les autres qui étaient ici il y a soixante ans, qui devrait être l’idée fondamentale de nous tous aujourd’hui, c’ est de créer un milieu de solidarité et d’émancipation à l’échelle européenne. C’est comme ça que l’Europe peut encore une fois être un exemple pour le monde entier.
Vive l’Europe !