"Peace in Europe and in the world"

Speech by President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy at the International Peace Symposium  

Brussels, 4 November 2013 EUCO 222/13  
  
It is a great pleasure to open this International Peace Symposium today. I hope it will be a fruitful exchange of thoughts and practices, and of past examples to the service of a better future. I should like to share some reflections on "peace in Europe in the world", and the role politics can play.  

I fully agree with the approach taken by the organisers of this conference. A peace that is just a signature of a treaty between political leaders, between two war chiefs, cannot be sustainable. A lasting peace – even if it can start on paper – requires a deep transformation of societies as a whole; and this at the very moment these societies are in deep distress. The European experience is instructive indeed. Our Union is perhaps the most radical peace- building project in human history. 
As so many things in life, it resulted from a positive and a negative element. On the positive side: the Idea of Europe, as it has been cultivated during centuries by writers and philosophers, by statesmen and poets – a most generous idea.  
On the negative side: the ruins and ashes of two world wars, starting in 1914 and ending in 1945. As Prime Minister Peeters said," a period we will start commemorating next year, also because, here in Belgium, in terms of serving as battlefield, we know what we are talking about…." 

The earliest European projects – such as the Coal and Steel community from 1950 – were the encounter of these two: the positive and the negative, the Ideal and the Trauma (to use the term of your Symposium). And nobody should underestimate the second aspect. 

Sometimes Europeans have a tendency to give lessons; for sure, I, for one, hope that European integration can inspire other experiments of regional cooperation in the world. Yet we should not forget our post-war European peace was built on an unprecedented graveyard of about forty million killed Europeans in the Second World War alone. 
In terms of trauma, for the people on our continent, the first half of the 20th century probably was the worst ever, at least since the 14th-century disaster of the plague, the Black Death. (Or perhaps, for some countries, the worst since that other Thirty-Years War, the one that ended in 1648.) 

So if we Europeans want to explain the blessings of peace, we surely can, but only from a very humble position… We do not wish that anybody else, any region in the world, to live through such a trauma, before arriving at the conclusion that living peacefully together is by far the best option… 
Of course, peace might have come to our continent without the European Union. Maybe. We will never know. But it would never have been of the same quality. A lasting peace, not a frosty cease-fire.  

To me, what makes it so special, is reconciliation. In politics as in life, reconciliation is the most difficult thing. It goes beyond forgiving and forgetting, or simply turning the page. It is one of the key themes of your Symposium, and rightly so. 
In Europe, after the war, this need was felt not only by politicians, but as much by the citizens. In these days, for people Europe was a promise, it equalled hope. When Konrad Adenauer came to Paris to conclude the Coal and Steel Treaty, in 1951, one evening he found a gift waiting at his hotel. It was a war medal, une Croix de Guerre, that had belonged to a French soldier. His daughter, a young student, had left it with a little note for the Chancellor, as a gesture of reconciliation and hope. 

I told this story last year in Oslo, when the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize. And think of what France and Germany had gone through, and then take this step. Signing a Treaty of Friendship. Freundschaft, Amitié… These are moving words. Private words, not for treaties between nations. But the will to not let history repeat itself, to do something radically new, was so strong that new words had to be found. 
No doubt this political reconciliation had a deep impact on the way people perceived their neighbours. The French intellectual Dominique Moïsi once told in a lecture, that his father, an Auschwitz survivor, one morning back in 1963, declared at their breakfast table: "From today, we can eat German butter again." It was the day after the signature of the Elysée Treaty. So this beginning of a public friendship, was also the end of private bitterness…, no doubt in many households. 

Here lies the responsibility for politics: to break the doom of history, to open up a new perspective, to give people hope, the will to live together.  
Throughout it's 60-year old history, the European Union has helped to anchor that perspective of change, as a haven of prosperity and peace. It is true for Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and the other founders after 1945. It is true for Greece, Spain and Portugal after the end of their dictatorships. It is true for the former communist countries which joined after the end of the Cold War. And, most recently, it is true for the countries of former Yugoslavia. 

Only four months ago, Croatia became the 28th member state of the Union. At the same moment, Serbia became an official candidate country – a step made possible thanks to the improvement in its relations with Kosovo. The entry of the countries of the Western Balkans into the Union will seal an end to the last civil war in the long history of Europe – no more, no less.  

So to those who say that war is so far away in our past that peace cannot be a key issue in Europe anymore, that it does not appeal to the younger generations, I always answer: just go out there and ask the people there! And ask the young ones too! 

Of course, I am deeply aware that this is not the only story about Europe and our Union to tell, certainly not nowadays, and certainly not everywhere in Europe. We are slowly – too slowly – getting out of the worst economic crisis in two generations. Parents struggling to make ends meet, workers recently laid off, students who fear that, however hard they try, they won't get that first job: when they think about Europe, peace is not the first thing that comes to mind… And yet, and yet it remains our fundamental motive. 
Europe also strives to bring some of these hard-won lessons to the rest of the world. With our experience, of binding interests so tightly that war becomes materially impossible: not as a recipe, but as an inspiration. 
And also with actions. The European Union's foreign policy embodies this awareness of today's conference: that winning the peace is more than ending the war. That societies need to be mended.  

Europe is represented in crisis and conflict zones, by doctors and emergency staff, by agronomists and engineers, and also by magistrates, police officers and soldiers. They are all there to support the efforts of their local counterparts to stabilise a country, to restore order, the rule of law and a sense of justice, and to provide hope for the future. 
Despite the financial crisis at home, the European Union has launched no fewer than five new EU civilian or military missions in the last two years: to support reconstruction in Mali and South Sudan, and to restore security in the Sahel, on the borders of Libya and off the coast of Somalia. In the course of 2013 we have also renewed the mandates for operations in Afghanistan, Georgia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is all about building peace. 

We know that rebuilding a country, rebuilding a society, rebuilding trust, takes time. But we can do it. All is not bright, all is not rosy, yet if we look back 100 years, at the blessedly innocent year 1913, we see real progress.  
We have left behind us the battles of history between religions, nations, dynasties, ideologies. A hundred years on, we can look at our future with confidence, and self- confidence, even in these difficult economic times. The world is more open, more connected, it is safer, if still unpredictable. Science and scientific research can play an immensely positive role – and I hope this conference can identify new avenues for it to do so. 

Born in 1947, I am a post-war child. If some of you here, like myself, have grand-children, these children are the third generation who've only known peace in Europe. Each generation is responsible for peace in its time, and beyond. We may hold a different place in the world today, but we live in a better Europe and in a better world. That's why I'm ready to say: yes, humankind can make moral and political progress. That's why in these difficult years, I remain a man of hope.