CONFIRMING THE EUROPEAN VISION Speech by MARY ROBINSON at the Berlin Press Conference Dinner
BERLIN, 5 December 1992
On the night of my election as President of Ireland I began my acceptance speech with a reference to the European context. It seemed natural to do so. My election had occurred on 9th November 1990, a year to the day on which the Berlin wall had come down. It seemed symbolic, appropriate and hopeful to remind myself of that event; to connect an occasion in my own country with a wider occasion of European hope and progress. In my mind - as in the minds of so many people at that time - I took one new beginning as an encouraging sign of others. In fact, I think all of us felt the excitement, the change in the air. All of us spoke of the speed of progress and the chance that the old wounds of Europe would heal. There was an overnight feeling of hope. Willy Brandt - whose presence we all miss tonight, to whose memory I pay special tribute for his contribution and enlightenment - said when the Wall came down: "Now what belongs together is coming together". The optimism of his words spoke for many people.
But as I stand before you now that hope is no longer there in the same way. The simple and bright prospects of change and consolidation now give way to a much more complex scene. We can observe old tendencies of division and suspicion. We can observe them, but we should also put them in context.
My life span has fortuitously coincided with the recent history of Berlin, from its fall to the Allies in 1945 through the 1948 blockade, the building of the Wall in 1960 and its final demolition in 1989. For me, then, Berlin has always been a frontier town in Germany and Europe, both historically and geographically, between East and West, between past and present.
The frontier role of Germany in Europe's history and geography extends far beyond my lifetime or yours to the very origins of Europe itself. Certainly from the time of the Roman Empire, through its Christian successors in medieval Europe and on through the vicissitudes of the Reformation and the development of nation states and modern empires, Germany and the Germanic peoples have been at the centre of the contact, communication and conflict between the diverse traditions, cultures, religions, ethnic groups, economic and national ideologies of the greater Europe. At no time was Germany more central to the fate of Europe than it is today. Without a peaceful and prosperous Germany there will be no peaceful and prosperous Europe. One may safely add that without a peaceful and prosperous Europe there will be no peaceful and prosperous Germany. Germany's frontier status in the present - as in the past - highlights the common destiny of all Europeans.
The frontier as the locus of encounter with the different or the other pervades personal and political experience. It has been the subject of renewed philosophical reflection as modern thinkers have wrestled with the encounter with the stranger or other as threat or promise, as potentially destructive or creative. It is illuminating to examine the most intimate of human relations between husband and wife, parents and children, friends and lovers from this angle. The broader threat and promise of the relations between men and women in society illustrates still, in too many places and spheres of life, how the encounter with the different realises threat rather than promise, oppression rather than mutual liberation. The encounter between strangers, between different nations, races, cultures, religions and economic systems has too often - within Europe and without - followed the way of oppression and destruction.
The diversity and difference have been part of Europe's glory as well as of its shame. Without attempting any superficial survey of the creative achievements of Europe over the centuries, achievements born of the creative interaction of diverse persons and peoples, it is worth reflecting just now on the remarkable creativity in diversity which has characterised the last forty years of Western European history and of your country's outstanding contribution to those creative developments. The establishment and maintenance of stable parliamentary democracies with internal and external guarantees for human rights through the courts, national and European, is part of the glory. Through its Basic Law or Constitution the Federal Republic of Germany has provided a crucial bulwark for human rights on frontiers where they were being denied wholesale. The scope of the German guarantees on human rights in its Constitution should be an inspiration to the rest of Europe. Given these basic provisions for all individuals Germany through its federal structure enabled the diversity of its own peoples to be respected and to flourish. All the while it entered energetically into the formation of the European Community. Creativity born of diversity has been notably promoted in and by Germany not only in strictly political terms. As Germany was central to the Reformation the ecumenical coming together of Catholic and Protestant, in which I have a personal and family stake, has experienced powerful intellectual and practical impetus among your peoples. The older more painful division of Christians and Jews has, I know, engaged many of the best and most generous of German spirits.
Our most durable creative achievements can often seem fragile. We have our own painful experiences of this in Ireland. The different, the stranger as nationalist or unionist, as Catholic or Protestant can appear too threatening. The creative coming together of the different communities is deferred in fear. And it is a human phenomenon more wide ranging and deeper than the Irish experience. Brendan Behan, the Irish playwright, was once appointed chairman of a board to restore an old Irish monument, a jail in fact. He was speaking to something painfully universal in humanity when at the first meeting he announced, jocosely: "The ~firs-d item on the agenda is a split. We are bound to have one so we should get it over as soon as possible." There are times when Europeans and Germans, for all the heroic gains of the last decades, must be tempted by the Behan proposal. The strangeness, the otherness of these eleven other countries and more to come, can seem too much to the one reasonable one, ourselves.
We have to keep remembering that the differences, for all their difficulty and ambiguity, can be promise rather than threat. As the prospect of a larger Europe emerges, deeper and more creative unity will be required. As your country faces fresh difficulties, political and economic, it will need the solidarity of all Western nations but particularly of the other eleven member States of the European Community. They must offer understanding and effective support in regard to the refugee and other problems. Their own difficulties in currency and economic issues must be understood in turn. The peoples of the Community have the talents and the resources to overcome these identifiable difficulties, and to strengthen their common framework, but to do so they must recognise the creativity of difference in reinforcing mutual understanding and close cooperation.
Tonight, therefore, I want to raise one of the great issues of the moment: the identity and survival of the European vision and the need to confirm it at this critical time. After all, is it so strange that just at the moment of greatest progress there should be a recurrence of turmoil and doubt? The Europe we know, in which each of us has grown up - which has so powerfully directed and informed our intelligences over the years - has always been a place of paradox and contradiction. A place of hope. And of pessimism. A place of progress and, equally, a place where old factions and patterns of conflict can quickly break out.
Just because Europe is a theatre of contradictions, that does not mean we are actors with a script. Now, as never before, we need to take this time with its difficulties and reflect on what we can do to find a way through with the original vision of a constructive Europe intact. We want to avoid fatalism and disappointment. And we have every reason to do so. We can hardly be surprised that Europe over the last year has shown signs of its old tendency to divisions. There is nothing surprising in that. And nothing unfamiliar either. It was because of such recurrent tendencies on this continent that the dream of a European community came into existence. The breaking out of faction and suspicion - far from disproving that dream simply confirms that we who are Europeans were right to have it and that what we now need to do is to re-state it, rather than lose faith in it.
We can take some of that faith, in difficult times, from sources that are not immediately obvious. From the writers, the intellectuals, the witnesses of other difficult times. For instance, I went last summer to Achill, a small island off the West coast of Ireland. And there, Heinrich Boll, the wonderful German writer, had a cottage which he returned to often. I like to think of this deeply conscientious and courageously troubled imagination writing his sense of his own time on a small Irish island. It brings me to a feeling of what has been most precious in the European initiative of the past two decades: the bringing together of resources; the interdependence of the international and the national; the refreshment of a wider culture by the recognition of a local one.
It also brings us back to basics. The European Community was based on a modest, and at the same time, a radical question. The question was: how do you pool people's interests? How do you encourage them to continue to share their sovereignty and engage in a process of negotiation, cooperation and agreement so that war between them becomes simply unthinkable?
And the European Community, despite its current difficulties, has been remarkably successful. We need to remind ourselves of those successes at a time like this. And I'm speaking here out of some personal experience. I worked in Luxembourg and in Strasbourg as a lawyer. I saw at first hand the power and scope of the legal system of the European Community; I saw and studied the cases out of which came new legal concepts, new protections for civil rights. I saw, as did many others, the building up of a treasure of experience and precedent and protection. Much of it remarkably effective.
But the questions remain and we would be foolish to ignore them. This may well be the moment to assess the conflicting views expressed about European Union during the past year. Under the stress of division and controversy we could easily lose sight of the purposes and aspirations of that Union - and the vision which brought it into existence. Now is the time to re-formulate that modest and radical question with which the European Community began. And perhaps part of that question should be: in a Community that has known peace for nearly two generations, how can the enormous benefits of close cooperation between individuals, communities and states be demonstrated in practical and concrete terms? How do we remind ourselves and others that the unglamorous work - such as removing barriers to the free flow of people, goods, services and capital - is a basis on which this lasting peace has been built. Above all, how do we remind ourselves of the alternatives to co-operation?
Let me give one very personal, very committed answer to this. And by way of doing so, let me return to that visit I made to Heinrich Boll's cottage in Achill in the West of Ireland. When I went there and saw the house on a spare and isolated hill on this beautiful coast, I reflected that Heinrich Boll's is truly a European voice. He is one of those writers whose conscience is a benchmark for the stresses and choices of an age. And yet, for all that his experience is the European one of his age - an experience of war and dispersal he was able to see to the heart of the Irish experience. Let me quote you what he says about Ireland in his Irish Journal: "...... the isle of saints" - these are his words "still hiding from the sun in the morning mist, here on this island, then, live the only people in Europe that never set out to conquer, although they were conquered several times, by Danes, Normans, Englishmen - all they sent out was priests, monks, missionaries, who, by way of this strange detour via Ireland, brought the spirit of Thebaic asceticism to Europe. Here, more than a thousand years ago, so far from the centre of things, as if it had slipped way out into the Atlantic, lay the glowing heart of Europe."
When I want to answer this question about how we can remind ourselves of the worth and importance of the European vision I think of Heinrich Boll's words - and what they imply. For me they imply that shifting, glittering interchange between a strong national identity and the wider identity of Europe. Heinrich Boll is right in this. We did in Ireland have a European identity - and an awareness of it - very early on. Our scholars, monks and missionaries left a shining trail of knowledge and faith in early Christian Europe. Therefore one of our first treasures of nationhood - this sense which underlies what we could achieve and contribute - is intimately bound up with our sense of Europe. Our scholars and monks played their part in constructing Europe. And this, in a very special sense, has come full circle in this century, when some of our most important Irish writers - James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are examples have themselves been constructed by their own sense of Europe.
Therefore, at a time when the European experience - the joining of the Community and its continuance - has sometimes been questioned as having a damaging effect on a regional culture and a local identity it seems right to me to insist on the opposite. As our scholars and monks, and our contemporary writers have discovered, I do not think being European means being less Irish; in fact the opposite. It seems to me to be in the best spirit of Europe to find and sustain the national and local resources we possess.
The Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann wrote these lines about the German language: I am afraid it emphasises my local and not my European identity that I am reading them in the translation of Michael Hamburger.
I with the German language
this cloud around me
that I keep as a house
drive through all languages.
Her lines are vivid with the sense of what a language is: at once a register of everything individual and isolating about our origins. And at the same time a passport to every other language and every other origin. I like to think of her words in the context of our Irish language which is a vital part of our own Irish identity. One of the first commitments I made as President was to that language: to speak it, to listen to it, to read in ~i-- and to try to hand it on to our children so they will know it in the way Ingeborg Bachmann knew her German language. When I took up office, there seemed to me no incongruity at all between the images of the Berlin Wall coming down - with the sense of Europe as a widening theatre of challenge and opportunity - and this fragile and precious language which must be sustained not just in the spirit of the Irish identity, but in the spirit of the European one as well. I emphasise this interchange between our national identities and our European sense because this is a time of stress and doubt. I accept that there are understandable fears: fears of losing identity. of losing individuality. Of seeing the customs and conventions that distinguish and enrich us somehow argued away or even legislated away. But this misses the essential point that we are Europe. We shape it, we choose it. our relation to Europe cannot be a passive relation. We cannot perceive it as something which will happen to us: that can only be the way that fear turns into fatalism.
At such a time as now, it seems to me this is one of the deepest resources we can draw on. We have all known - those of us who shared in the European aspiration - that it never was a dream of a monolith, or a faceless programme, or a centralised bureaucracy. Now, more than ever, we need to emphasize the creative relation between the individual culture which has nourished us and the continent where that culture, far from being threatened, can best be protected. At the heart of that European dream is the double image of the regional language - the individual culture - and the European centre where such things can be valued and cherished and strengthened: when we see the relation of those things we can repeat Willy Brandt's hopeful words: " Now what belongs together is coming together".
I should add, however, that the creativity of this relation can only be assured if it is neither introspective nor altogether self-absorbed. As Germany is not Germany without Europe, so Europe can never be itself in isolation. Close ties with the United States of America over forty years have underlined that. These relations will undoubtedly continue even as they change. The Federal Republic's frontiers with Eastern Europe and the extension into the great landmass of Eurasia offer tremendous promise of creative interaction. Such planet-wide unity in diversity must continue to focus our ambitious gaze. I wish for a moment on this, International Development Day, to look in a different direction, from North to South rather than from West to East. The whole southern hemisphere has historic ties with Europe, not always of the happiest kind. Today the peoples of the hemisphere, particularly in Africa, look to Europe and the North for help with the most basic human needs. on my recent visit to famine-wasted Somalia I had first hand experience of the direness of those needs. Europe would betray its own heritage and compound its past failures if it were to turn in on itself and exclude the extreme physical need and potential human enrichment of the peoples of Africa. In its many governmental and voluntary programmes your country has contributed generously in the past. It must maintain, and indeed greatly exceed, that generosity not only for the sake of human existence in Somalia and Africa but also for the sake of human existence in Germany and Europe. We are all diminished by the neglect of the truly needy.
And who, in confronting these national, continental and worldwide challenges shall give the lead or carry the burdens? The obvious characteristic of democratic government, that it must operate by persuasion and consensus under the law, can seem a limitation in face of such urgent and difficult challenges. The temptation to more autocratic rule is sometimes hard to resist. Yet it must be resisted. Bertolt Brecht's famous interchanges in his play on Galileo can be misleading and yet illuminating in our situation, and I give it again in translation:
Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes.
Galileo: No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.
Heroism must be democratic also. Leadership must be shared in the truly democratic state. Only if the people themselves are willing to carry the burden can governments act effectively. Education and persuasion to recognising and assuming responsibility for the others is the democratic way to heroism. The leaders and institutions of the developing Europe are challenged to enlighten and enable the peoples of Europe to their responsibilities, so that what belongs together can truly come together.