Mr. President,
Ladies and gentleman,

Let me begin my presentation with an Estonian joke from the time of Soviet Occupation:

''Question: What is the largest country in the world?
Answer: Estonia, because its coastline is on the Baltic, its capital is Moscow and its population is in Siberia.''

Yesterday evening during the beautiful reception given by President Mark Edwards I asked him, what kind of audience I would be addressing to-day and what would the audience be interested to hear. It was professor Edwards' proposal to speak about modern Estonia, our goals, achievements and everyday life. This morning, expressing my deep gratitude for being elected a Honorary Doctor of Law of your College, I once again found myself speaking about Estonia's beautiful medieval capital Tallinn, her Hanseatic church spires and turrets, and felt myself guilty before the audience. Are we too deeply rooted in our past? Are we obsessed with our history at the expense of our future?

Perhaps this is a good starting point to tell you that Estonia has experienced something you haven't and that this experience has a value for the future and a value for all of us. I did not find a better word for this than ''the Killing of History.'' The Soviet occupation of my country began when the free world and the third world were facing the difficult task of global decolonization. Paradoxically, the Soviet Union was confronted with the conflicting need to perpetuate her colonial system within her borders and to fight the colonial systems outside her borders. The only strategy she could use was the destruction of national identities, which she intended to achieve through total russification, a complete suppression of both national history and national languages.

As always, it had an opposite result. The ''Killing of History'' gave in Estonia a tremendous boost to both our historical consciousness and to linguistics. Everything connected with the past became a value in itself. Small village museums spread up like mushrooms after an August rain. I remember visiting such a museum, a small barn belonging to a fisherman with old tools, newspapers, books and furniture. The owner was especially proud of a box of pre-war cigarettes and a box of pre-war matches. As a patriotic gesture I was allowed to smoke one of the cigarettes. It may sound as an anecdote to you, but it wasn't. It was something the fisherman felt he was obliged to do to preserve Estonia. I think this explains why in our modern political rhetoric we still exploit history to a degree unknown and forgotten in Europe.

In reality, Estonia is a modern country in the part of Europe that we call Baltoscandia, on the North-eastern shores of the Baltic sea, the Mediterranian of the North. We are one of the smallest countries in Europe, with a population of one million and a half and a territory of forty five thousand square kilometers. Being so small presents problems, but it has also a number of virtues we are only now becoming conscious of. You may have heard the saying of one of my Polish friends Adam Mičnik: it is quite easy to make a soup out of living fish, but no one knows how to make living fish out of fish soup. Well, Estonia has done it, and our success is partly due to our smallness, - and to our historical experience. A super tanker needs sixteen nautical miles to change her course. Estonia, on the contrary, is like an Eskimo kaiak, able to change her course on the spot. That explains our success in restructuring our economy and society from a colonial command economy to a modern free market economy and to an open society.

Over the last two years Estonia has become further integrated into the world economy. We produce and export chemicals, textiles, pulp and forestry products, information know-how, services. In Europe we rank first in the relationship of export to GDP. More than 60% of Estonia's total trade turnover is with European Union countries, and the EU share of total direct investments in Estonia's even higher than that. One of our remarkable successes is in the field of information technology. We are the leading country in Central Europe and among the EU member states only a little behind Great Britain. Last year we joined the World Trade Organisation and have now a voice in shaping the global economy policy, a game that some five years ago we could only watch from the sidelines.

In this context you will understand that we regard our two foreign policy priorities, namely a full membership is the European Union and in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, as being realistic and attainable. We have taken serious steps over the past year to increase our defence expenditure. I am talking here about raising our spending to reach two percent of our GDP, a level prescribed for NATO membership. This has not been an easy goal for the government to set, let alone to attain, either in a fiscal or a political sense. But during all the six Governments during my presidency, these two goals - the EU and NATO membership - have remained our priorities, and last year, in response to an appeal I made in the run-up to our parliamentary elections, political contenders of all stripes reached a consensus that defence policy is simply non-negotiable.

That, in short, is the portrait of Estonia entering our new century and our new millennium. It is an optimistic portrait, and widely applauded among our friends. I must confess I am not always happy with the compliments Estonia has duefully received. It reminds me of an upside-down picture of Robinson Crusoe: Estonia, emerging from the dark forest of the Soviet oppression, is applauded as an unexpected Friday, who surprises everyone with talents and skills attributed only to Robinson Crusoe. Perhaps this is the other reason why we are so attached to our history. Before World War II, Estonians were a friendly hardworking people with a lively national culture. We sent to our universities a much larger proportion of our population than was usual in Western Europe. We published the highest number of books per capita of all the countries in the world and had the highest rate of theatre-going. We were the world leaders in oil shale technology and a number of flying records were achieved on planes built by Estonian constructors. We knew it, and as true Finno-Ugrians, we did not care whether the rest of the world did. Now, living in the global village, we are facing totally new challenges: a small nation can survive the pressures of globalisation only on the condition that Europe and the world needs the survival of a small culture. Such arguments are not always understood by politicians. It is sometimes difficult to explain that Estonia needs Europe as much as Europe needs Estonia. One of my personal experiences from my expeditions to Siberia is that a forest will always survive a single tree, that simultaneously with the pressure of technological standardisation we will need much more counter-pressure of cultural diversity to achieve the moral balance Man has been hoping for in all cultures and religions from times immemorial. That, in my view, is the hope, the future and the role of small nations in our ever-changing world.

Thank you.

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