Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-11-Speech-3-124"
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"en.20050511.16.3-124"2
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"Mr President, Mr President of the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, 60 years have passed since the end of the Second World War. Remembering 8 May 1945, the date that marked the surrender of the Third Reich, is a profound duty, and I should like to congratulate the European Parliament on not failing to remember 8 May 1945 here today.
I should like to tell the elected representatives of the German people present in this Chamber that the Germans are better neighbours to us now than they have ever been.
In truth, in remembering 8 May, 9 May and 10 May we are also showing our gratitude to the people who combined their strength and energy with that of Europe to liberate the European continent. With 60 years having passed, rather than 60 years late, I should like to state the extent to which we, as Europeans, must show our gratitude to the young US and Canadian soldiers who came from the other side of the ocean to Europe in order to liberate it, and we do not even know the number of other countries they helped to liberate. We ought never to forget.
I am also thinking of the soldiers of the Red Army. What losses! What an excessive number of interrupted life stories amongst the Russians, who contributed 27 million lives to the liberation of Europe! No one needs to harbour a great love – although I do – for the profound and eternal Russian State to acknowledge the fact that Russia deserves well of Europe.
I should like to pay particular tribute to the people of Europe who were able to say no whilst others were all too often tempted to give a faint yes. I should like to pay tribute here today to the people of Great Britain who were able to say no, and without whose contribution nothing would have been possible.
The restored freedom at the start of May 1945, however, was not enjoyed in equal measure throughout Europe. Comfortably installed in our old democracies, we were able to live in freedom in Western Europe after the Second World War, and in a state of restored freedom whose price we well know. Those who lived in Central and Eastern Europe, however, did not experience the same level of freedom that we have experienced for 50 years.
The duty of remembrance is a profound duty, and I believe that it is particularly profound for those who were born after the Second World War, the men and women of my generation. When we set about remembering 8 May 1945, the surrender of German democracy in 1933 and the dreadful period separating those two dates, as the younger generation, we must remember with a great deal of restraint, at least as regards the generation of men and women involved.
They were subjected to the law of someone else. The Baltic States, whose arrival into Europe I should like to welcome and to whom I should like to point out how proud we are to have them amongst us, were forcibly integrated into a group that was not their own. They were subjected not to the
but to the
that was not their own. Those people and nations that underwent one misfortune after another suffered more than any other European.
The other countries of Central and Eastern Europe did not experience that extraordinary capacity for self-determination that we were able to experience in our part of Europe. They were not liberated. They had to evolve under the regime of principle imposed on them. It is with great sadness in my heart that I mention the harsh words said today on the subject of enlargement. With the Second World War finally coming to an end, however, I say today, long live enlargement!
This post-war Europe which, without the War, would never have become the Europe that we know today; this Europe, risen from the ashes of the War, would never have come into existence if it had not been for the so-called founding fathers of Europe – people such as Schuman, Bech, Adenauer, de Gasperi and others – who, from the post-war phrase ‘war, never again’ gave birth to hope, prayer and a programme for the first time in the history of the continent. Today, we must remember with emotion and gratitude those people who had the courage to say yes after having first said no.
They could not have done so if they had not felt overjoyed by the noble and profound feelings of their people. We say nothing against the will of the people. We have been able to build Europe as we have done after the Second World War because the people of Europe wished never again to relive the tragedy experienced by the European continent twice over during the 20th century.
There are the founding fathers of Europe who are well-known; there are the peoples who evolved in the shadows and who shared these noble feelings, and then there are the philosophers, the thinkers and the politicians whom we all too often forget: Leon Blum, who dreamt of Europe from inside a French prison, the great Spinelli who was incarcerated on an Italian island by the Italian Fascists, and others who are nameless but to whom we owe a great deal. I should like to pay tribute to those people, whether forgotten or anonymous, who made it possible to create what was created after the Second World War.
There was the free part of Europe and the part of Europe that was paralysed by the disastrous historical decree, the Yalta Agreement, which sought to divide Europe into two forever. It sought to divide it into two parts which very often stood glaring at each other and between which we have all too often been unable to build bridges. The Cold War – the term lovingly used to describe the other tragic period of European history – paralysed Europe’s greatest powers and prevented its foremost talents from expressing anything of benefit that they might have expressed if given the opportunity.
Personally speaking, I was born in December 1954, but I prefer to say that I was born in 1955. First and foremost – if I may digress – I grew up respecting the achievements of my father’s generation, which experienced an awful two-fold fate. Firstly, because the people of Luxembourg born between 1920 and 1927 were forcibly enlisted into the German Wehrmacht, and secondly, because they wore a uniform that was not their own, and which served ambitions other than theirs. It is an awful fate to have to wear the uniform of your enemy. The same comments apply, moreover, to the people of Alsace and Lorraine, to whom I pay homage.
People who, like me, were born after the Second World War – in 1954, 1955 and later – must remember with restraint because we were not witness first-hand to the tragedy that descended upon the European continent. We did not see, as those before us saw, the concentration camps and the prisons where people were killed, tortured and humiliated, to the point of complete debasement. Unlike them, we did not see the battlefields, because we did not have to cross them with our souls, and very often our bodies, carrying the weight of death. We could not, nor had to, observe, like those who could and had to do so, the long processions of prisoners who crossed Europe from every country, in fact forming a single European funeral cortege. Those of us who were born after the Second World War have not been confronted with tragic choices, whether individual or collective. We did not have to say either yes or no; we were able to bask in the glow of the post-war, having been spared such tragic choices.
I grew up in the Cold War environment in which the world, it seems, was easier to understand. There were those who were with us and those who were against us. We did not know why we liked those who were with us, but we knew that we had to bear hatred towards the others. We knew that the threat was coming from the other side, and those on the other side believed that the threat was coming from our side. How many lost opportunities! How much time was lost in Europe as a result of those foolish analyses during the immediate post-war era.
Let us rejoice, today, at no longer having to refer to the uncompromising logic of the Cold War and at being able to make peace between the two halves of Europe.
I often think about the wise men of Europe, such as Churchill – doubtless because I myself am not one of them. In 1947, when the first congress of the European Movement met at the Hague, giving birth to the idea of creating the Council of Europe in the face of the refusal by the Soviet Union to allow the other countries of Central and Eastern Europe to take part either in the Marshall Plan or in the creation of the Council of Europe, the great Churchill declared with his own prophetic offering: ‘We are beginning in the West a job which we will complete in the East.’ Ladies and gentlemen, let us take pride in having achieved that.
I recall the words of Victor Hugo who, in 1949, wrote: ‘A day will come in Europe when the only field of battle will be minds opening up to ideas; a day will come in Europe when the bullets and the bombs will be replaced by votes.’ Let us take pride in having achieved that today.
Let us take pride in being able to say this to the European Parliament, the elected representative of the people of Europe, whose Members are the heirs of those who were able to say no when no needed to be said, and of those who were able to say yes when yes was the only remaining option. Let us show our gratitude towards those who said no when no needed to be said and let us take pride in all those who, today, are saying yes to a great Europe, and to a Europe that has seen its history and its geography reconciled. Let us take pride in those who do not wish for Europe to become a free trade area, and let us take pride in those who, like us and like millions of others, believe that Europe is a complex continent that deserves more than a free trade area. Let us take pride in the Europe built by those who were there before us, and let us conduct ourselves in a manner becoming of their heirs.
Remembering 8 May 1945 is an act that stimulates our collective memory. It is extremely significant when first-hand memories and first-hand experience of the war and its immediate aftermath – real-life knowledge with a host of personal experiences and noble feelings – are about to become part of history, with all that history entails in terms of distance and supposedly objective interpretations with regard to memories. Today, the first-hand witnesses of this dreadful period of European history are leaving this world behind. It is moving to witness Russian war veterans on their lorries in Red Square and the long procession of people who went to war for themselves and for us, and whom today can no longer walk. We, on the other hand, all know what they are walking towards. The duty of remembrance is a profound duty.
For the men and women of my generation, the act of remembering not only means remembering with restraint but also with a great deal of gratitude. Above all, gratitude must be shown to our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generation who, upon returning from the battlefields and concentration camps, and once freed from the prisons, had every reason to give in and do nothing but bemoan their fate. Instead, they rebuilt Europe and made Europe the finest continent in existence. Let us show our gratitude for the extraordinary achievements of a generation of men and women who had no choice but to go to war, and who wanted to make peace!
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In remembering and in feeling this profound duty of remembrance, we must also speak the truth. For Europe, 8 May 1945 was a day of liberation.
8 May 1945 was also a day of defeat. By this, though, I mean the defeat of fascism and of National Socialism, as well as the end of democratic capitulation in the face of the terrible events that had taken place since 1933. Above all, however, it was also a day of liberation for Germany."@en1
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"pax libertatis,"1
"pax sovietika"1
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