Speeches

Speech by former Chancellor Dr Helmut KOHL

on the award of the gold medal 'Mérite Européen'
to Hans-Gert Poettering, Chairman of the EPP-ED Group,
in the European Parliament
Brussels, 6 June 2001

Madam President,
Mr Prodi,
Mr Juncker,
Mr Heiderscheid,
Mrs Braun-Moser,
Mr Martens,
and above all, my dear Hans-Gert Poettering !


Let me begin by congratulating you, my dear Mr Poettering, on this great honour. I did not have to think twice before accepting the invitation to come to Brussels. Hans-Gert Poettering was rightly awarded the gold medal 'Mérite Européen' for his commitment to the unification of the European peoples in freedom, peace and fraternity, an objective for which we have worked and fought for many decades.


1.
We are paying tribute to a man who has been committed to our common European ideal since his youth. Hans-Gert Poettering has been a Member of the European Parliament since the first direct elections in 1979, i.e. for more than two decades. At that time he was the youngest member of our group. He has chaired it for the past two years.

Mr Poettering, you have vigorously supported the accession of the new candidate countries, with a view to achieving a united Europe. This is reflected in your many contributions to debates and initiatives. When people sometimes asked you why you do all this, you would answer quite simply: 'One has to believe in Europe and work for it'. I thank you most particularly for that. I am very pleased and impressed by the very deliberate way you chose the path you followed, for you would also have had other political options.

Sadly, many of our contemporaries display a certain political and parliamentary arrogance and say that what happens in Berlin - like Bonn before it - is on a quite different level from, say, the activities of the European Parliament. Many of those who still believe that do not realise that they have become 'yesterday's men'.

You, Mr Poettering, had your finger on the pulse and took a wise decision. For Europe can only take real shape if its men and women act as its messenger from generation to generation. European policy cannot be made without a fundamental sense of mission.

I know people often praise the realists, i.e. the pragmatic politicians. I myself, like all of you who are my contemporaries, have found over the past 20 years that they were not proved right. Instead, it was the men of vision who managed to establish a proper coherence between real life and their great goals.

Dear friends, everything that was achieved in Europe after this terrible war and the barbarity of the Nazis was possible only because clear-sighted men were forging ahead regardless of setbacks. Some of them had believed in the idea of a union of European peoples since before the first world war.

It is something I never tire of saying. For we cannot allow a new generation to grow up without knowing that the idea of ensuring a lasting peace in Europe and avoiding war was alive even in the period between the two world wars. This idea was always the same: to bring together the peoples of Europe. Winston Churchill had also called for this in the great speech he gave in Zurich in 1946. Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer were visionaries. They came from a generation that had gone through the war and sworn: 'No war ever again!' They did not confine themselves to general formulas and splendid words. Instead, they resolved to take concrete action. And this certainly showed results!

There is much talk just now about Germany's role in European policy. There are many roads to success, but there was only one that made German unification possible and promoted European integration. If ever words have come true it is the statement I heard Konrad Adenauer make when I was young and which nobody believed, namely that German unification and European integration were two sides of the same coin. We have now seen the truth of this!

My dear Mr Poettering, it is splendid to see your strong and full support for this process. You speak a language the citizens understand, although you also manage to read the documents produced by the EU Commission and by President Romano Prodi, which is a feat in itself!

You are passionately involved in your work here in Brussels. At the same time your roots lie back in Germany. In your home town of Osnabrück you are district chairman of your party, something other MEPs might do well to emulate. Things might be easier in the Bundestag as also here in Brussels if the Members had spent some time working for their party at district level. District chairmen know about local politics.

Seeing through a regulation on raising municipal sewage prices may not bring much glory, but it is a useful and important experience, which can also be put to use in practical politics, in the European Parliament as in a national or regional parliament.
So let me offer you my warm thanks again, Mr Poettering, and wish you many more good and successful years and, above all, may God bless your work!

Some people think it is old-fashioned to speak of 'God's blessing'. I may not be known as a deeply religious man, yet life has taught me how important it is to have God's blessing, not least in Europe.


2.
The scale of the European debate is now such that there is no turning back, and this is not only because of developments over the past 15 years. The new generation is living in a totally different world, which brings them up against new psychological challenges and questions the old principles.

Anyone who has followed the current debates in the European Parliament about the beginning of life will know that we face far greater and more difficult challenges than harmonising taxes, however important that may be. I mention this question because the European People's Party attaches particular importance to such issues. We are now living in a society in which faith and the belief in values evidently play a less significant role than in the past. Things were different in the days of great men like Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman. When you stand by Robert Schuman's grave near Metz, you can feel that this is the resting place of a great politician and a good Christian.

We have achieved an enormous amount over the past decades. There is not the slightest reason for resignation today. We have advanced step by step. We should not forget that when we take a look back at history.

I am thinking here of the 1950 plan named after Robert Schuman, which marked the starting point for resolving the differences between Germany and France.

Jean Monnet, the real inventor of this plan, wanted to denationalise coal and steel in the heart of Europe. The aim was to control coal and steel production - which at the time was fundamental to the conduct of war - in order to safeguard peace in Europe for the future.

It proved to be a long road from the Franco-German cooperation treaty that Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer signed in Rheims in 1963 to the European Union and the Amsterdam and Maastricht Treaties. But it culminated in success.

The European People's Party and its sister party helped write this success story. They always advanced boldly, guided by their vision of a united Europe.

It is important that we keep reminding the countries of Europe of the part the European People's Party played in this process. We should certainly not claim to have done it all by ourselves. We simply want to ensure that others do not distort the historical truth. For the politicians who are currently in power in Berlin are now loudly proclaiming the views of those whom they used to personally oppose.

There were many occasions when we had to fight off the fainthearted and the fearful. Jean-Claude Juncker, Jacques Santer and many others supported us in these efforts. We struggled on from one EU summit to another. It was rather like the dancing procession in Echternach: two steps forward, one step back. In the end, however, we did make progress. That is why there is no reason whatsoever for any form of scepticism.


3.
It is only a few weeks to the introduction of the new currency. To all those supposed economic experts who have been and sometimes still are going around day after day predicting the death of this currency I can only say the following, speaking from a German point of view: anyone who was around 50 years ago, when the German mark first saw the light of day, knows that this kind of scepticism goes back a long way. When the then President of the Bank Deutscher Länder, Wilhelm Vocke, met the President of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1949 to discuss the newly created German mark, he was reproached in these charming terms: 'You are nothing, you have nothing, and nothing will come of it.' But something did come of it: the German mark!

With the introduction of the euro, there will be no going back in the process of European integration. Some people might not like to hear this, but I do not believe that we would have advanced so far with European integration without the introduction of the euro. No doubt we will still have a great many difficulties ahead of us, but nobody can risk opting out for national reasons now.

Now that I am 'retired' I can say what I like, which is wonderful. So let me predict that the City of London will also move to the euro. I really wonder who will stay out once the City adopts it. Against this background, it is very important that you make it plain again and again during your European Parliament activities that the transition to this new currency is chiefly a question of psychological adjustment.

Naturally, we will have to overcome a whole range of national prejudices once we have a common currency. As a German I know exactly what this means.

The euro is a means of payment; above all, however, it is a means of identification, or rather it is part of the identification with Europe. Believe me, in 10 or 15 years' time - some of the younger members will still be around then - when the EPP Group remembers this evening, the euro will no longer be up for discussion because it will have been taken for granted.


4.
If we want European integration to be a success, we will also have to encourage the enlargement of the European Union. So I would cordially ask you all to endorse the enlargement of Europe, indeed the reunification of Europe.

I was head of government long enough to become familiar with the everyday problems, with the behaviour of the press and with the difficulties of my own party. I can quite understand people now asking whether enlargement really is that important and whether it would not be better to wait a while until matters improve. Let me sound a warning note: there will not be a better time!

There will always be people somewhere who turn up at elections and look for scapegoats, which of course are far easier to find outside national politics, for instance in Brussels or Strasbourg. As you all know, this favourite ploy of national politics is no substitute for real politics.

Like many others - all of you, I hope - I swore 10 years ago to unite Europe again. So we must not confine ourselves to welcoming the fall of the Iron Curtain while feeling we can wait before we actually enlarge the Union. We have a huge, moral responsibility here! It is not the fault of anybody in Poland, in Hungary, in the Czech Republic, in Slovenia or elsewhere that they lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain. We should never forget that they are Europeans. Without these countries the European spirit would be inconceivable.

It is difficult enough for them to adjust to the European Union. Our political leaders need to act now! They must change people's mindset. If we take political decisions to help other parts of Europe to help themselves, we will have to make sacrifices.

In this situation, it is of course possible to score political points at home by setting oneself up as a great national patriot and advancing one's own interests, while remaining indifferent to those of others. In fact, it is much easier to discuss development aid in a remote part of the world than to offer long-established European peoples quite concrete aid. Admittedly, not every country behaves this way. I do, however, often still hear the argument: 'After all, we pay most!' That is true. Yet we also benefit most, not just in material terms but above all in terms of peace.

Dear friends, the distance from my Berlin office to the German-Polish border is exactly 83 km. The Federal Republic of Germany has more and longer borders than any other EU country. We are not living on an island. We are not separated from our neighbours by a Channel. That is why it was never very easy for us to define the position of Europe from a distance. We were always part of Europe, whether we wanted it or not. That is why it is so important that we follow this road together.

For the rest, I believe that we will win over precisely that younger generation of voters who are quite definitely for Europe and who see this as a new challenge. This 'Internet generation' has already understood that peace and freedom largely depend on European unity. It has understood that we are all part of a European culture and that Prague and Krakow, to give only two examples, are major European cities.

The problems involved in EU enlargement, especially in terms of employment policy, will be soluble. For instance, if reasonable transitional periods are set, it should be possible to avoid any mistakes in future. I was there when the European Community took the decision about herring fishing, which led to the 'no' vote in Norway. This could have been avoided. I think it was a serious mistake for this northern European country not to have become a member of the EC.


5.
We can only live together if the big and small states cooperate on a basis of equal rights. I am giving you this message specifically as a German. If you begin by weighting big and small countries differently, you will have to start by defining what big and small actually mean. One yardstick is, of course, the number of inhabitants and economic strength. If we only operate on the basis of numbers, however, and leave out all the other factors, we might as well stop right there. François Mitterrand observed a very clear rule: quality first, then quantity.

Austria is a good example here. It is one of the smaller European Union states. Culturally, however, it is one of the world leaders! So I would never dream of measuring Austria's importance in the EU by population size alone. Unfortunately, that is what my successor appears to be doing. His charm simply seems to be rather less European.

I gave this example because I think it is important for our European People's Party to confirm that it still believes in the validity of quality over quantity. If we do that, it will not matter too much if we sometimes argue heatedly among ourselves.

I always saw it as an important basic principle of our dealings with one another in Europe that I would not expect anything of my friend and neighbour that they could not expect of me. This most important lesson that life has taught me applies very much to European politics.


6.
We are now faced with the question of the follow-up to Nice. The headline aim of the Treaty submitted in December 2000 was to provide for the enlargement of the European Union by the end of 2002. As we all know, the Heads of Government did not achieve the aims they set themselves. Nice was not a huge success. Nevertheless, I see no reason to give up hope.

Building the European house is an evolutionary process. So we cannot expect this Treaty to be perfect. Nor are the Amsterdam and Maastricht Treaties perfect.

I do not believe that the media-friendly proposal put forward by my successor at the SPD party conference in autumn 2001 will help turn the Commission into a strong executive and the Council into a European second chamber, a chamber of states. Anyone who wants a genuinely open debate - which we urgently need - must know that party conference decisions are not necessarily a good basis for open debate.

In fact I have always thought it was very sensible to sign common European initiatives with several names. And it was always fine by me for the German name to come last. People still knew that the German name had a certain significance. So I do not believe that going it alone in this way would achieve much.

Any statement or vote that carries a heavy weight of prestige with it - with particular reference to national prestige - will make it more difficult to take an urgently needed decision.

We need to talk with and trust one another, discussing any outstanding questions properly. That may be a laborious process; but it is the way to make progress.

We still face the serious task of improving the decision-making processes in the Council. In Nice, the quotas required for achieving qualified majorities were raised unnecessarily and the procedure was made more complex. That has weakened the Council's ability to decide. Unfortunately, the unanimity principle is to be retained in no less than 72 cases. They include entire policy areas, such as foreign and security policy, internal security and the fight against organised crime.

The citizens are particularly worried about combating crime. I do not want to paint a horror picture here; but international crime is hugely on the increase. That is why the fight against international crime is a pressing task, together with the important questions of foreign and security policy. You, my friends, have a chance at this moment to give it new impetus.

We as the CDU/CSU should do our utmost within the European People's Party to support our group here in Brussels and in Strasbourg. Let us not be swayed by opinion polls that supposedly show that elections cannot be won just now on the theme of Europe. In the same way, viewing figures for German television do not automatically reflect the cultural standard of the Germans. There are always certain differences. This applies not only to Germany but to many other countries too.

7.
Shortly before he died, François Mitterrand briefly addressed you in Strasbourg. I quote from that speech again and again, because it was his last one and in a sense, therefore, his last testament. 'Nationalism is war!', he declared. He was right. The nationalism of the 19th century cannot overcome the challenges of the 21st century. That is why European integration is the most effective insurance against a relapse into the unholy chauvinism of the last century.

In 1989/1990 there was great joy and exuberance in Europe with the fall of the Iron Curtain, German unification and European integration. If anyone had told me that during the same decade we would witness killing and bloodshed in former Yugoslavia I would not have believed it.

Similarly, in the 1920s, following the Locarno Treaty for which Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann were rightly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, people did not believe there could ever be another conflict between Germans and French.

I know that history does not simply repeat itself. But I want to leave you with a final warning: however many national tasks you have to tackle, do not ever lose your enthusiasm for Europe. Much remains to be done, thinking only of preparations for the next summits. Set your sights high, so that we in Europe can continue to consolidate peace, freedom, fraternity and justice, in the spirit of the award to Mr Poettering.

Seen in those terms, an award bestowed on a deserving friend is an incentive. Much of what we have set in motion has gone well; in some cases it could have gone better. In some cases we did not succeed at all. One thing is certain, however: the people who live in Germany today have never had greater opportunities. So let us jointly complete the work we have begun!