Strasbourg, 17 January 1995

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as you are aware, of course, since 1 January this year, France has held the presidency of the European Union.

[…]

I represent France, a country which is conscious of the threats surrounding it in this context, and which is well acquainted with the rivalry of languages. When I think of other peoples, however, which are equally deserving of respect, but whose languages are not as geographically widespread as French, which in turn is not as geographically widespread as some other languages, I wonder what will become of the soul, the means of expression of, for instance, Gaelic, Flemish or Dutch?

And, since I do not wish to appear to be referring only to the nations which are the smallest or weakest, because they are the least populous – and this is not a question of demography – I would say that in fact, if we really think about it, Italy, Germany and France are also under threat. Today, possibly only Anglo- American culture and Spanish culture are in a position to face up to these challenges. And, not withstanding my friendship for these countries, I would rather speak my own language than theirs.

Firstly, let us consider the audio-visual sector. Perhaps you think that I am being excessively partisan? I hope not. We are all conscious of the fact that in the audio-visual sector, awareness, imagination and knowledge are increasingly being shaped by images, and that there will be no Europe without European images. At a time when we are celebrating the centenary of the cinema, the most popular art form of the century has never been under greater threat in all our countries. In some of these countries, moreover, there is no longer a threat, because the film industry has already disappeared. Community assistance was unable to halt the decline. It was not able to encourage the creation of a genuine European audio-visual area or to provide our countries’ industries in this sector with an international dimension.

It is a matter of urgency to increase the appeal and promote the circulation of works produced within the European Union. I am not calling for protective measures.

Berlin, 4 December 2011

Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me begin on a personal note. When Sigmar Gabriel, Frank- Walter Steinmeier and my party asked me once again for a contribution, I recalled with pleasure that, 65 years ago today, I was kneeling on the floor with my wife, Loki, painting invitation posters for the SPD in the Neugraben district of Hamburg. But I must admit that at my age I am beyond good and evil in respect of any party politics. For a long time now my two major interests have been the tasks facing this country and the role it should play in the crucial arena of European integration.

I am pleased to share this lectern with Jens Stoltenberg from Norway who, in the midst of the profound misfortune his country has suffered, has provided us and all Europeans with a shining example of unwavering, constitutional, liberal and democratic leadership.

When you’re as old as I am, you have a natural tendency to take a long-term perspective – both backwards into history and forwards into the future, in which you place your hopes and your aspirations. That said, I nonetheless found it impossible to give a straightforward answer to a very simple question put to me just a few days ago by Wolfgang Thierse, who asked me when I thought Germany would finally become a normal country. I answered by saying that Germany would not be a “normal” country in the foreseeable future. Standing in the path to normality is the enormous and unique burden of our history. A further stumbling block is the economically and demographically dominant central position Germany occupies in the middle of our very small continent with its multitude of different nation states.

Which brings me to the heart of the complex subject matter I wish to address: Germany in, with and for Europe.

Motives and origins of European integration

Although a few of the 40-odd nation states in Europe – Italy, Greece and Germany, for example – were late in developing the national identity they have today, bloody wars have been fought time and again all over the continent.

2001

What is the role of culture in European Integration? Permanent and determining. Coherent European culture existed before European economic and political association, since the former depends on relationships between individuals, while the latter depends upon relationships between states, and individuals come together easier than states.

Europe's innovation – cultural pluralism – is victorious world-wide. It is a tendency parallel to the spread of philosophy of human rights, whose basis is a requirement to respect the human individual.

Europe's special quality is no plan, but rather something which already exists: a sensitive attraction to diversity, kept coherent by European humanism. This pluralist sensitivity penetrates to the details, all the way to the core of personality and to all of its momentary states. At the same time, it does not break with those fundamental principles, outgrowths of Judeo-Christian and antique-humanist traditions, which have been rationalized by European worldly thought since the Enlightenment. Europe’s special quality lies in the balance between the universal and the particular, the general and the specific, the shared and the individual.

What unites Europe? Is it only the community of economic interest? Ideologies were unable to unite the continent. Neither the nationalist-socialist nor the communist-socialist vision provided an appropriate basis for unification. Both were destructive fantasies, and both meant submission of the European people to the power centers of those two experiments. The crazy 20th century is now closed and, with it, the history of the two world wars and the shadow of a third. We are through with two ideological utopias, the nationalist and the communist. Both killed many and eventually succumbed. And what is there now? Is ideology absent?

Europe owes its success to respect for pluralism which recognized the mutual dependency of mankind and is able to bow before a child. European pluralism learns to accept and love people in their uniqueness.

This humanism takes into account our mortality and respects the dignity of the personal, single lifetime. The European faces death individually, with relatively little hedging, little hedging, little consolation of after-life, reincarnation, or being lifted to a place where we will partake of all manner of corporeal and spiritual joy.

Strasbourg, 8 March 1994

Mr. Chairman,

Members of Parliament,

I am most grateful to you for the honour of addressing the European Parliament, and I can scarcely think of a better way of using this opportunity than to try to answer three questions. First, why is the Czech Republic, which I represent here, requesting membership in the European Union? Secondly, why is it in the interest of all of Europe to expand the European Union? And thirdly, what, in my opinion, are the more general tasks confronting the European Union today?

Europe is a continent of extraordinary variety and diversity geographically, ethnically, nationally, culturally, economically and politically. Yet at the same time all its parts are and always have been so deeply linked by their destiny that this continent can accurately be described as a single albeit complex political entity. Anything crucial in any area of human endeavour occurring anywhere in Europe always has had both direct and indirect consequences for our continent as a whole. The history of Europe is, in fact, the history of a constant searching and reshaping of its internal structures and the relationship of its parts. Today, if we talk about a single European civilization or about common European values, history, traditions, and destiny, what we are referring to is more the fruit of this tendency toward integration than its cause.

From time immemorial, Europe has had something that can be called an inner order, consisting of a specific system of political relations that circumscribed it and tried in one way or another to institutionalize its natural interconnectedness. This European order, however, usually was established by violence. The more powerful simply imposed it upon those less powerful. In this sense, the endless series of wars in Europe can be understood as an expression of the constant effort to alter the status quo and replace one order with another. From the ancient Roman Empire, through the Holy Roman Empire, and down to the power systems created by the Congress of Vienna, the Treaty of Versailles and finally by Yalta all these were merely historical attempts to give European coexistence a certain set of game rules.

Paris, 5 September 1960

Q. Journalist No. 3

Mister President, could you enlighten us about the projects of European cooperation that you have recently presented to the German, Dutch and Italian leaders, and also tell us, if possible, what are your hopes and perspectives on the subject, taking into account what you know of the discussions that took place between Mister Macmillan and Chancellor Adenauer?

A. Charles de Gaulle

With the Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and others, in accordance with a perfectly defined policy observed by the government, we have as of late inaugurated a series of consultations with the heads of states and governments of Western European countries, more specifically, the ones in Europe we call “The Six”. However, this has not stopped us from seeing the British Prime Minister, and we do hope will not stop us from seeing him again occasionally, which will undoubtedly be a good opportunity.

Building Europe and uniting it is obviously something essential, but trivial to say. Why should this hearth of civilisation, of force, of reason and of prosperity choke under its own ashes? In such a case, we must only proceed following realities and not dreams. So what are the realities of Europe? What are the pillars on which we can build it? Honestly, they are the States. States that are indeed very different from one another, each with their own soul, history, language, troubles, glories, and ambitions. States are the only entities to have the right to command and the power to be obeyed. Believing that one can build something efficient to act and be approved by the peoples outside and above States is an illusion. Of course, while waiting to address the problem of Europe in its entirety and head on, it is true that we were able to establish certain agencies that are more or less extranational or supranational. These agencies have their technical value, but they do not have any authority, and therefore are not efficient politically. As long as nothing terrible happens, they can function without too much hassle. However, once dramatic circumstances occur such as a major problem to be solved, we see then that such high authority has nothing on the various national categories, and only States have any authority.

Vienna, 21 November 1959

I

It is by now a melancholy commonplace that no century had seen so much remorseless and continued slaughter of human beings by one another as our own. Compared with it, even the wars of religion and the Napoleonic campaigns seem local and humane. I am not qualified to undertake a general examination of the causes of hatred and strife in our time. I should like to direct attention to only one aspect of this situation. We live in an age in which political ideas, conceived by fanatical thinkers, some of them very little regarded in their won day, have had a more violently revolutionary influence on the human lives than at any time since the seventeenth century. I should like to discuss one group of such ideas, by which our own lives have been profoundly affected both for good and evil.

Our ideas about the ends of life are, in one essential respect, unlike, and indeed opposed to, those of our forefathers, at least those prevalent before the second half of the eighteenth century. According to these the world was a single, intelligible whole. It consisted of certain stable ingredients, material and spiritual; if they were not stable they were not real. All men possessed certain unchanging characteristics in common, called human nature. And although there existed obvious differences between individuals, cultures, nations the similarities between them were more extensive and important. The most important common characteristic was considered to be the possession of the faculty called reason, which enabled its possessor to perceive the truth, both theoretical and practical. The truth, it was assumed, was equally visible to all rational minds everywhere. This common nature made it not only necessary, but also reasonable, for human beings to attempt to communicate with each other, and to try to persuade one another of the truth of what they believed in; and, in extreme cased, to inflict compulsion upon others, on the assumption (made, for example, by Sarastro in the great fable of the age of reason, Mozart's Magic Flute) that if men obeyed orders (or were, if all else failed, forced to obey) they would, as a result of this, perceive the validity of what their educators or legislators or masters themselves knew to be true; they would follow this, and be wise and good and happy.

2006

When I began to think about what I wanted to say to you here today, my thoughts went back forty years to the time when I was at the Bocconi University in Milan. To tell the truth, it is hard to believe that it is so long since I was a student. Today, my thoughts are with the young people currently attending university, and above all with those, perhaps a considerable number, who are still unsure as to what to do after university, as to how they might combine necessity with freedom, the need to earn a living with their desire to serve a cause they believe in, and to be public-spirited in both the private and public spheres of their working lives.

I was drawn to the Bocconi as a result of my decision ‒ influenced in part by my reading of Luigi Einaudi's Il buongoverno ‒ to study economics, a discipline that could accommodate my disparate and vague interests and motivations: a scientific but at the same time a humanistic field, knowledge and action, polis and home.

I subsequently chose public service, and not research, business or politics. I say “chose” because my generation, as it entered the working world in the 1970s, really did have the possibility to choose; in this, we were exceptionally fortunate, perhaps the most fortunate generation of the past century. Italy, in its transition from a poor country of peasants and subsistence farmers, consumers of their own products, into a modern transformation economy, highly competitive in the nascent European market, created a wealth of jobs and opportunities for graduates and non graduates alike. The fears and resistance, strong in the industrial and academic worlds, of those who had warned that we were not strong enough to rise to the European challenge were belied. The politicians were more farsighted than the ruling class which often regarded them with arrogance, as it also does today.

I would like to talk to students about today's and tomorrow’s Europe and suggest that they take Europe as a point of reference both in their working lives, whatever profession or line of work they may enter, and in their lives as Italian citizens, irrespective of their political leanings: in short, as a professional, cultural, political and civil point of reference. This is the subject of my discourse.

On 1 January 2002, it seemed that the European project was complete. The euro had entered into circulation. The TV news showed the Minister of Finance withdrawing a few crisp new euro notes from a cash point, and that was that.

Few bothered to explain how and why there was a new currency. This was evidently unnecessary, because what Europe did, Europe did well; a superficial attitude on the part of the bureaucrats, politicians and intellectuals.

Around the turn of the century, though, the fact of Europe was still so self-evident that hardly anyone was talking about it. It was a background detail, part of the scenery. So self-evident and so out of sight that only specialists were truly interested in it.

But that time is certainly over. Europe has become controversial, and thus it is essential to talk and think about Europe once more. Countries, cultures, cities and political projects cannot advance unless the ideas that underlie them are developed, discussed, criticized, shared and supported.

Despite the urgent need, it has by no means become easier to talk about Europe. Much of the debate has degenerated into three topics that can be summarized as for or against migrants, for or against the euro and for or against centralized bureaucracy; but this is a dangerous oversimplification.

Europe is the continent that, like no other, has been able to translate the dreams and nightmares of humanity into reality.

Cities and landscapes, works of art, music and painting, the welfare state, the constitutional state and democracy: Europe has been able to polish each to perfection. But the downside of European history – genocide, war, exploitation and persecution – gives rise to constant tension when contemplating the present and the future. History offers many reasons to distrust Europeans at a fundamental level: ourselves, our motives and our political projects.

At the same time, our multi-coloured Europe has lived through a high summer of peace and prosperity for decades. Admittedly, there was a crisis in 2008, one that is still being felt. If we compare the standard of living among Europeans today with any other period in our thousands of years of history, though, we are enjoying an unprecedented degree of prosperity and freedom.

In a novel written at the turn of the 20th century entitled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum introduced a thoughtprovoking character: the Cowardly Lion, whose despondent image was immortalised in the film of 1939. The feline joins the quest of the heroine for a mysterious wizard, in the hope of retrieving his lost courage. Could it be that the European Union fits this archetype of the reluctant hero, who is required to face the present by first coming to grips with his own past?

This metaphor comes to mind for the European Union, because in addition to its explicit value of peace, it also has an unexpressed anti-value: a shyness about anything that resembles either power or brilliance, which borders on self-denial. This can be observed in many of its exterior signs: from the carefully cultivated absence of charismatic leaders (apparently, some unwritten rule requires them to look like sun-deprived bookworms), to the punctilious equal weight that it gives to its twenty-four languages (even though it is public knowledge that an Anglo-European pidgin is used for most conversations and internal memos). Not to mention the European anthem, a splendid composition by Beethoven played against type, turned into a pompous lullaby that would make a football player cringe; and finally the Euro banknotes, uncannily lifeless because they are forbidden to feature a human being. Another characteristic of the current European Union is its obsession with its own sickness and the imminence of its death – especially today with the accumulated onslaught of the sovereign debts, Brexit, the refugee crisis, and terrorist attacks.

Why Peace?

But first of all, why peace? In fact, Title I of the Treaty on European Union (Art. 3) gives it an even higher status than a value, since it is stated as the aim of this institution (“The Union's aim is to promote peace, its values and the well-being of its peoples.”) There is good reason, since the European construction was hardly born on a bed of roses. In May 1945, the criminal Nazi Reich had been crushed, and Germany militarily occupied by the Allies of the Second World War.

During the opening days of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, activists from a group called the Gay Folks’ Movement cunningly beamed their logo onto the facade of the Russian embassy in Berlin. This visible act of solidarity was in response to a lengthy campaign by Russian and transnational activists that voiced concerns about Russia's draconian state ban on gay “propaganda.” So was Google's home page, which depicted various winter sports in the bright rainbow colors commonly associated with the LGBT movement. Beneath the design, Google quoted statements on human rights and anti-discrimination from the Olympic charter. Acts like these, which make the LGBT norm publicly visible, have gained unparalleled momentum in recent years. And more and more frequently, prominent figures across the globe, including a British diving star (Tom Daley), an Icelandic prime minister (Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir), a Latvian foreign minister (Edgars Rinkēvičs), and a Polish Catholic priest (Krzystof Charamsa), are coming out. The notable actor Wentworth Miller came out in 2013 by referencing his Russian heritage while declining to take part in the annual St. Petersburg film festival. “I cannot in good conscience participate in a celebratory occasion,” he wrote, “hosted by a country where people like myself are being systematically denied their basic right to live and love openly” (Miller 2013). Shortly afterward, the retired German soccer professional Thomas Hitzlsperger came out, saying that he did so because “gay football players so far don't exist officially” (Agence France Presse 2014). The attention Hitzlsperger's coming out attracted in Europe suggests that he has indeed helped to lift the veil of silence he decried. By September 2014, following campaigns by various LGBT rights organizations, the International Olympic Committee added non-discrimination based on sexual orientation to the Olympic charter. The addition sent a strong signal to potential host countries that have laws discriminating against LGBT people. As the visibility of the transnational LGBT community grows, it reshapes our understanding, and indeed our imaginations, about the place of LGBT people in international society.

This book has explored the effect of this increasing visibility on state and societal recognition of LGBT people across states in the European region.

When the late Polish president and former then-mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczyński, banned marches for LGBT equality in 2004 and 2005, LGBT organizations began organizing to hold the event illegally and generating press by contacting international authorities and media outlets. What was unique about the Parada Równości (Equality March) of June 11, 2005, compared to similar gay pride events in major cities where LGBT visibility had become common, was that a transnational group of activists organized the event from both Poland and neighboring Germany. Many of these activists were expatriate Poles who used resources made available to them in Berlin. Prominent European politicians were among the roughly 5,000 illegal marchers who took to the streets of Warsaw that day to demand the right of assembly for sexual minorities in Poland, and more than one-third of the marchers came from foreign contexts (interview no. 125). According to Tomasz Bączkowski, the activist who organized the march:

The illegal march provided the political opportunity to link the social situation of Polish sexual minorities to Poland's recent accession to the EU through the frames of democratic values and human rights. Many activists remember it as one of the most important public assemblies for the rights of LGBT Poles and as a turning point for Polish LGBT activism.