Your Majesty,
Your Royal Highness,
Prime Minister,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Throughout my life I have held in high regard all those who joined internal Resistance movements during World War II and stood up to the preponderance of Nazi power. During my entire life I have asked myself whether - if I were confronted with the same situation as they were - I would be able to do what they did: to risk my life every day for the values I believe in. To me, Resistance fighters have always personified the highest standards of moral strength, courage and faithfulness of a human being to himself or herself - standards by which I have found myself permanently challenged. Thus, I think there is no need for me to stress how greatly honoured I am by the decoration I have received today. This medal commemorates the Geuzen, the first group of brave Dutch citizens who resisted evil, many paying for it with their lives. The Geuzen - like other Dutch Resistance fighters, members of the Resistance in my country and in all the other countries that were occupied by the Nazis, as well as German Resistance fighters - were not just accidental victims of despotism. They were well aware what they were risking, but nevertheless chose to go into battle, being deeply convinced that evil had to be combatted from the very beginning, regardless of what the odds were for the immediate success of their fight. It does not take that much of an effort to arrive at the philosophic conviction that resistance against evil is never pointless. But it is certainly not easy to put one's own life at stake to prove that conviction and not retreat from it even in the face of danger; in most cases, only a minority are able to take that course.
Thus, the significance of internal Resistance was not only in the tangible results achieved by their efforts to thwart the pernicious work of the Nazis. More importantly, the Resistance was a phenomenon that time and again restored standards, pointed out values that are worth fighting for under any circumstances, maintained the continuity of respect for those values and carried the torch of good through the dark night, so that those who lived to see the dawn would have something to turn to, something on which they could build a new life in freedom. Resistance fighters were first and foremost bearers of light, founding fathers of a better future. To me personally, their endeavour and the meaning it has had in the long run have always represented proof of the fact that the roots of a free, democratic and equitable society lie deep in the sphere of morality, that such a society would in fact be unthinkable without a moral anchor. I would even go as far as to say that if someone is prepared to risk his or her life in a fight whose outcome he or she cannot foresee, to risk it not for his or her own sake but for the benefit that such an action may possibly bring to posterity, for humankind and human values as such, his or her decision to do so emanates not from morality at the level of mere decency, but from morality as a metaphysical phenomenon.
In addition to that, Resistance against Nazism had another dimension. It would not have been possible without a sense of solidarity and togetherness among those who joined it, who more than once hazarded or sacrificed their own lives rather than expose their associates to detection, whose silence, maintained even in the course of cruel interrogations, many times saved their fellow fighters, who helped one another in many, often most risky ways. The Resistance was a truly authentic human community, growing out of the individual moral will of free human beings and based on the best human qualities. Man is a sociable animal, but there are different ways of associating. The most valuable type of human togetherness is an association based on a free decision by each of its members to work for certain universal human values, on their conscious sharing of commitment to these values and their determination to existentially vouch for them and to vouch for one another's vouching. Such an attitude arises from openness toward others, love for one's fellow humans, mutual respect and trust, solidarity. A solidarity of free human beings.
Nazism, too, had its conceptual roots in a certain kind of togetherness. That, however, was a togetherness of so-called tribesmen, people who were prepared to relinquish their own individual responsibility for the sake of a collectivist notion of unity of the blood and who let themselves be deluded by fanatic leaders hypnotizing them with the perverted idea that collective responsibility for the prosperity of their own tribe and for the expansion of its state justified any betrayal of the elementary moral feeling of the individual. People who are weak, who have no faith in themselves, or who doubt themselves and therefore need some sort of collective self-confirmation, those who prefer to dissolve in the anonymity of a crowd, where a leader does the thinking for them, to carrying the weight of their own responsible decision-making, who accept the identity of a pack rather than engage in the difficult process of seeking, building and defending their identity as individuals - such people made possible the emergence of Nazism in Europe. For that matter, Communist collectivism had a similar background. Both inevitably produced totalitarian systems that trampled the very foundations of humanity.
We can therefore say that the confrontation of the Resistance with Nazism was a confrontation of an authentic human togetherness with a perverted, degenerate, false one, a confrontation of the solidarity of responsible, moral beings capable of managing their own affairs with a horrible conspiracy of people who abandoned their individuality and exchanged their own responsibility for obedience to a fanatic leader seeking to appeal principally to one feature in them about which they had not decided themselves, that is, to their national affiliation.
We shall soon commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. This occasion will undoubtedly make us debate and reflect again and again on all aspects of that war as we try to ascertain what message it holds for us fifty years later.
I believe that the victory over Nazism meant, among other things, - at least for the western part of Europe - a victory of respect for the individual human being, for his or her individual rights and freedoms as well as individual responsibility. Thus, it was also a victory of the concept of authentic human togetherness over the destructive horror of another type of association, that of the collectivist togetherness of unfree humans who resigned their individual responsibility. It so happens that we shall observe the fiftieth anniversary of this victory at a time when the sinister historical role of Communist collectivism has been played out as well.
What the Resistance fighters, including the Geuzen, stood for prevailed and became the starting point for the construction of a democratic Europe and its unification on a civic basis. We owe it, among other things, to the sacrifice made by the Resistance that the values which the Resistance fighters were dying for have become the cornerstones of a new Europe and new European institutions. In this context, it is of particular significance that today's democratic Germany, as an important partner in and co-author of the process of European unification, is founded on these values as well.
While fifty years ago the Allies gained a victory over Germany, today we can well say that Germany has gained a victory over Germany - that is, the democratic and liberal Germany has triumphed over both the nationalist and the Communist Germanies.
We are entering an era when we all have to join forces in building a democratic Europe. In this era we - as nations - no longer divide ourselves according to who were the victors and who the vanquished back in the past. Now we all have the same path before us. If there is anything that stands in the way of our progress on that journey, it is but two dangerous phenomena. One is the newly reviving activity of those who would wish to raise the banner of national collectivism again in the new situation, and thus, again, go against the course of history as well as the interests of the individual human being. The other is weakness and indifference on the part of democrats and their reluctance to check the new nationalism, or signs thereof, in a timely and resolute fashion. The hesitation of the democratic community vis-à-vis the developments in the former Yugoslavia is the most visible example of the latter today.
I am confident that these obstacles, too, shall be gradually overcome. I believe that the moral strength, solidarity, profound responsibility for the fate of humankind and capability to resist evil from the very beginning, in the name of the fundamental values of humanity, manifested by all those who worked for domestic Resistance movements in different European countries during the war shall serve as a source of inspiration and strength as we continue to pursue the struggle for a democratic Europe.
I thank you for the Geuzenpenning, and also for the attention with which you have listened to these remarks.