Nicolas Schmit, Discours à l'occasion du 18e Forum économique à Krynica

With Bronislaw Geremek we all have lost a friend talking to whom was an immensely enriching and fascinating experience.

He was a man of strong convictions but he also had this quite rare gift of listening to his interlocutors, were they experienced policitians or young students eager to debate with him.

At the same time as we have lost a friend, Europe has lost an outstanding personality, an historian who had lived through European history, from his exceptional knowledge of the Middle Ages to the tragedies of the 20th century and finally to the liberation and unification of Europe.

He believed in Europe because he was more than anybody aquainted with our common European roots. Therefore it was quite natural for him to consider the division of our continent as a very provisional one, a blink in a long common history.

This vision, based on an extraordinary knowledge of European culture, made out of him this decided actor at a critical moment of European History: this unique occasion to reconquer for Poland her freedom and her dignity and by that to put an end to a totalitarian system which had precisely divided Europe.

With Bronislaw Geremek, Europe has also lost one of its best advocates, a man strongly attached to a European idea that also comes to us from the Middle Ages. Co-author of a recently published book called "Visions of Europe", he saw the project of the European unification above all as a project of a civilisation based on values.

I vividly remember the speech he gave last December in Schengen, at the time of the accession of the new Member States, and among them Poland, to this area of free movement. He mentioned this feeling of belonging to a territory, a culture, an area to which free movement has given a whole new sense. He described this feeling of freedom which the Polish, Czech, Hungarian… citizens discovered when they became beneficiaries of one of the most beautiful rights that Europe has created. He also reminded us that this right had to be extended to all European nations and specifically to the young people. He, the recipient of the Charlemagne Prize in 1998, when he was the Foreign Minister of Poland, knew how to talk about the European dream. Geremek had the power to make us dream again about Europe, a Europe founded on freedom and solidarity, like the name of the trade union which has contributed so much to the reunification of our continent. In this sense, we may regret today that he couldn’t become the first President of the European Parliament of this new Europe.

Commemorating this outstanding European today, also means to reflect on his legacy. His political thouhgts, his actions in the different functions he has exercised, do not only allow us to better understand the past, they should also enlighten us to better perceive what is happening today and might happen tomorrow: History is going fast nowadays and certainly the advice, the guidance, the clairevoyance of Bronislaw Geremek would be much needed at this very juncture. Geremek was an optimist, but he never believed that we were heading after the collapse of communism to the end of history, meaning that peace, freedom and the respect of the rights of all nations would be, by themselves, guaranteed forever.

We have been reminded very recently that power politics is not a category of thinking or acting which has disappeared from our continent. However this should not prevent us from building a relation of interdependency and partnership with all our neighbours and partners.

A partnership in the 21st century cannot go together with a return to powerpolitics of the 19th or 20th century. We cannot accept a policy inspired either by the Congress of Vienna nor Yalta. A Europe off free, independant and sovereign nations - a major achievement of the 20th century cannot be organised, at the beginning of this century, on the basis of zones of influence. The concept of "limited sovereignty", even if it is slightly adapted belongs to the past.

Europe has now experienced that its political weight is not fatally negligible, if and only if the Union is capable of becoming a credible international actor which means that it is able to speak and act out of a strong internal solidarity. In his last articles Geremek pleaded for a strong unified and Europe united in solidarity. Therefore he was advocating very much in favour of the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty.

Because our world is much more dangerous and the political equilibrium much more fragile than many of us had assumed, we have to convince our peoples that the European integration has to be pushed forward. We need the dialogue with our partners including Russia. But this dialogue should be conducted by a European Union speaking with one voice, defending the values we are committed to.

This is certainly part of the legacy of Bronislaw Geremek.