Mr. President,
Members of the General Staff,
Members of Parliament and senators,
Friends,
I am very happy that the first foreign parliament in which
I have the honor to speak is the Polish Sejm. This is no mere
accident. It has special implications, and I assume you are aware
of them.
Allow me a brief personal introduction: This is my second
visit to Poland. I was here first as a student in 1957. It was
after your wellknown pazdziernik*, when your country
was alive with joyous hopes, which were so often and so bitterly
disappointed later on. At the time, I was fascinated by everything
Polish. I read Hlasko, Milosz, Herbert, Kolakowski, Brandys and
Adolf Rudnicki, who wrote about the Holocaust, antiSemitism and
the curse of our part of Europe. I saw Wajda's Kanal several
times, and I admired the freethinking Polish spirit and the heroism
that emanated from Polish culture. Somewhere in the depths of
my soul that heroism was closer to me than the eternal skepticism
and, at times, the cult of mediocrity and the underdog that so
frequently surfaces in Czech literature. At that time I was beginning
to write what were referred to as absurd plays, plays full of
skepticism, ridiculous horrors and subtly unhappy endings. Oddly
enough, however, my admiration for the Polish ethos did not clash
with my literary vision of the world.
Today thirty years later I am here for a second visit,
and moreover I come as the president of Czechoslovakia. This compels
me to ask the question: What has changed in those thirty years
in your country, in our country, and in our part of the world?
A great deal has changed. The most important change is
that the era in which hopes were periodically aroused and disappointed,
the merrygoround of eternal illusion and disillusion, the hellish
dance of freedom with death, has definitively come to an end.
For the first time it appears to be certain that democracy and
freedom, justice and national autonomy are winning, and that the
process taking us there is now irreversible. This certainty derives
chiefly from the fact that our efforts at selfliberation are not
isolated, surrounded by a sea of misunderstanding, but rather
flow together to form a single, common stream. The changes won
by the Polish nation despite all temporary setbacks, the important
changes in the Soviet Union, the attempt to create democratic
conditions in Hungary and the German Democratic Republic, followed
by our own peaceful revolution in Czechoslovakia, the heroic and
costly victory of the Romanians over the autocracy of Dracula,
and finally, the changes we are witnessing today in Bulgaria
all of this flows into a single river that no dam can stop.
The idea of manufacturing a paradise on earth did not
triumph, and it will be very difficult now for it ever to do so.
Such a notion could only feed the arrogant minds of those who
are persuaded that they understand everything, that there are
no longer any higher, mysterious institutions above them, and
that they can give directives to history. The idea of a paradise
on earth failed, and there will be many difficult periods ahead
of us; but what has triumphed is the realistic hope that together
we can return to Europe as free, independent and democratic nations.
That too is good. Who among us could have imagined anything
like it a mere twelve years ago?
Do you remember, Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron and Jan Litynski,
our first secret meeting on the CzechoslovakPolish border? At
the time we were all socalled dissidents, that is, people hounded
by the police, arrested, locked up, ridiculed. It's true that
we laughed at our guardians and we delighted in giving them the
slip, but if anyone had told us then that twelve years later we
would be members of parliament, ministers and presidents, we might
have laughed even louder.
And yet it happened.
The totalitarian systems of the Soviet Bloc are collapsing
and we, who did no more than say aloud what we thought and get
ourselves locked up for it, have suddenly found ourselves in prominent
political positions and now, for the most part, we can laugh only
when the television cameras are not trained upon us.
Our main role and now I am no longer speaking about my
Polish and Czechoslovak friends, but our entire nations is to
put our minds to what can be done with this freshly won freedom.
Before I try to say a few words about this, I must make a brief
aside.
The Czechoslovak revolution, which began with the beating
of students in November but otherwise unfolded surprisingly peacefully
and swiftly, has been called a gentle, kindly, peaceful, and amiable
revolution. Naturally, we are glad that there was so little bloodshed,
but this is all the more reason for us not to forget the peoples
who had to pay for their freedom with blood, and without whose
sacrifices we ourselves could scarcely have awakened to freedom
so quickly and, on the whole, so painlessly. In my New Year's
speech, I have already emphasized and I'm happy to repeat it
here that the Hungarians and the Poles bled for us. We are well
aware of this and will not forget it. In a certain sense, the
Romanians paid for our freedom too, even though their revolution
came after ours. We have no way of knowing whether the dark forces
in our country might not have found a way to counterattack had
they not been paralyzed by the Romanian example, which demonstrated
that the population was capable of courageously defending itself.
In short, although no one gave us any direct help in our
revolution which is a genuine historical novelty in our country
we know that without the long years of struggle by the Poles,
without the efforts of the nations in the Soviet Union to liberate
themselves, without the memories of the German uprising of 1953
and the Hungarian revolt in 1956, our freshly won freedom and
the relative ease with which it was all carried off, would be
hard to imagine.
We also know, of course, that the Polish Solidarity movement,
led by Lech Walesa, was the first to find a peaceful and effective
way to offer continuous resistance to the totalitarian system.
Nor will we forget that it was you, the Polish Senate and the
Sejm, who were the first in the summer of last year to condemn
the shameful invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Allow me therefore to use this occasion to thank you and
the entire Polish nation.
I promised to offer some brief thoughts on the tasks that
the new situation has placed before us.
There are many of them.
First of all, we must take advantage of the fact that
after many long years and decades, the prospect of a genuine friendship
between our nations now lies before us. Ancient conflicts, rivalries,
animosities are covered over by the common experience of totalitarianism.
The socalled "druzba" that formal and stagemanaged
demonstration of friendship within the framework of the Warsaw
Pact and Comecon is vanishing along with the totalitarian systems.
Along with them, the covert, quiet and malicious incitement of
nationalistic and selfish tendencies carried out in the spirit
of "divide and conquer" -- is vanishing as well.
The years of similar destinies and struggles for similar
ideals ought therefore to be assessed in the light of genuine
friendship and mutual respect; that is, precisely in the spirit
that dominated the years during which secret independent literature
was smuggled in rucksacks across our common mountain ranges, an
activity that ultimately led to the autumn Festival of Independent
Czechoslovak Culture in Wroclaw, which was such a marvelous success,
mainly thanks to the tireless members of the PolishCzechoslovak
Solidarity Committee led by Zbyszek Janas and Mirek Jasinski.
Unintentionally, this became one of the prologues to our Czechoslovak
revolution.
This authentic friendship based on a proper understanding
of the destiny imposed upon both our countries, on the common
lessons it taught us, and above all on the common ideals that
now unite us should ultimately inform a proper coordination of
our policies in a process we both refer to as "the return
to Europe." We should also coordinate our efforts as best
we can with Hungary where I and my co-workers are going tomorrow
and with other nations in our part of Europe.
We should not compete with each other to gain admission
into the various European organizations. On the contrary, we should
assist each other in the same spirit of solidarity with which,
in darker days, you protested against our persecution as we did
against yours.
It is too early to predict what institutional forms our
coordination in Eastern and Central Europe will take. Western
Europe is considerably ahead of us in the integrating processes,
and if each of us were to return to Europe separately, it could
take a great deal longer and would be far more complex a process
than if we proceed in a coordinated fashion. This concerns not
only economics; it concerns everything, including disarmament
talks.
Very soon, I would like to invite various representatives
of the state and the public from Poland and Hungary, perhaps with
observers from other Central European countries, to a meeting
in the Bratislava Castle, where we could spend a day quietly talking
about these matters. Perhaps this would again make us somewhat
wiser.
One way or the other, one thing is certain: For the first
time in history, we have a real opportunity to fill the great
political vacuum that appeared in Central Europe after the collapse
of the Hapsburg Empire with something genuinely meaningful. We
have an opportunity to transform Central Europe from what has
been a mainly historical and spiritual phenomenon into a political
phenomenon. We have an opportunity to take this wreath of European
states so recently colonized by the Soviet Union and now attempting
to build a relationship with the nations of the Soviet Union based
on equality and fashion it into a special body. Then we can approach
the richer nations of Western Europe, not as poor failures or
helpless, recently amnestied prisoners, but as countries that
can make a genuine contribution. What we have to offer are spiritual
and moral impulses, courageous peace initiatives, under-exploited
creative potential, and the special ethos created by our freshly
won freedom. We can offer the inspiration to consider swift and
daring solutions.
We have awakened, and now we must arouse those in the
West who have slept through our awakening. The more coordinated
our approach, the better we will be able to achieve our ends.
If we are thinking of ways to synchronize or coordinate
our steps on the road to Europe, we must naturally be clear about
what ought to be at the end of that road. In other words, what
kind of Europe are we really heading toward?
The general ideal is perhaps clear to all of us: We wish
to belong to a Europe that is an amicable community of independent
nations and democratic states, a Europe that is stabilized, not
divided into blocs and pacts, a Europe that does not need to be
defended by superpowers because it is capable of defending itself,
of building its own security system.
There is hope that the Soviet Union in the interests
of good relations with its former satellites will gradually withdraw
its troops from our territories. The appropriate negotiations
are already under way, and they will sooner or later lead to success.
I believe that the Helsinki process provides us with a
rather good starting point. If it were to be accelerated and intensified
along with various disarmament negotiations and unilateral disarmament
initiatives it may grow in time into something that would serve
the function of a peace conference or a peace treaty to make a
definitive end to the Second World War, as well as to the Cold
War and the artificial division of Europe that grew out of the
Second World War. Then both military alliances could be dissolved,
and the process of panEuropean integration could be finally set
in motion.
So far, Europe remains divided. Germany, too, is divided.
These are two sides of the same coin. It is hard to imagine an
undivided Europe containing a divided Germany, just as it is hard
to imagine a united Germany in a divided Europe. Obviously then,
both unification processes should take place at the same time
and as quickly as possible.
Thus one of the keys to a peaceful Europe lies at its
very center in Germany. The Germans have done much for all of
us. It was they who began to tear down the wall that separated
us from the ideal we longed for, the ideal of a Europe without
any iron curtains or barbed-wire fences.
Shortly after being elected president, aware of the current
significance that the German question has for all of us, and aware
at the same time that without peace in Germany none of us will
live in peace, I spent several hours in both German states to
determine how the Germans themselves see their situation and the
situation in Europe and, at the same time, to stress how closely
the future destiny of us all is linked with the future destiny
of Germany.
I was favorably impressed. Reasonable people in both German
states want the same thing we all want: a peaceful evolution toward
a democratic and peaceful Europe.
I believe this is also good news for you, who sacrificed
many more human lives in the Second World War than we did, and
are therefore justifiably less trusting of the Germans than I
am even though, for the most part, they are now only the descendants
of the generation who murdered your people.
Yet I cannot hide the fact that many of my Czechoslovak
compatriots are less trusting than I am, and it was for them,
too, that I went first to Germany. I resolved to try within the
bounds of my modest possibilities to spread trust in today's
distrustful world.
On the subject of Germany, it is my pleasant duty to assure
you that democratic Czechoslovakia also considers the border on
the Oder and the Neisse rivers as final and inviolable.
In general, I believe that borders in the future Europe
should become less and less important, that people should be able
to move freely from one country to another, and that this should
be true, first of all, of our common border.
What should not flow across our borders is toxic smoke,
sulphur and acid clouds, whether it be from Stonava or Turoszow.
There are, however, walls more dangerous than those that
divide Europe. There are walls that divide individual people from
one another, and there are walls that divide our own souls. It
is against these walls above all that I would like to struggle,
and this concerns mainly my own country.
The most dangerous enemies of a good cause today are no
longer the dark forces of totalitarianism, with its hostile and
plotting mafias, but our own bad qualities. My presidential program,
therefore, is to bring into politics a sense of culture, of moral
responsibility, of humanity, of humility and respect for the fact
that there is something higher above us, that our behavior is
not lost in the black hole of time but is written down and evaluated
somewhere, that we have neither the right nor the reason to think
that we understand everything and have license to do anything
we wish.
I think that Poles, with your strong religiousness, embodied
in the marvelous personality of the Pope you have given to the
world, can have a special understanding of this modest presidential
intention of mine.
Thirty years ago I spent two weeks on the north coast.
Today I find myself in Warsaw, the courageous heart of
Poland.
I would be glad if this meant that not only I personally,
but above all the movements and the ideas I represent, are considerably
closer today to the Polish heart.
I thank you for your attention.
JESZCZE POLSKA NIE ZGINELA!**
* Pazdziernik - October. In October 1956, strikes and riots brought
about changes in the government and a temporary political liberalization.
** POLAND HAS NOT YET PERISHED! The first line of the Polish National
Anthem.
Edited by Paul Wilson