Provost,
Professor Branch, my dear friend,
Ladies and gentlemen!

I am truly grateful for this, already second, opportunity to speak to you about Estonia here at the University of London. I still remember your warm interest towards Estonia - a country then virtually unknown in Britain - when I was here twelve years ago. Had I not at the time had the support of Professor Branch and his library - where, to my surprise, I also discovered books about Estonia I had never seen before - I would have felt myself almost like Livingstone at the meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. Dr. Livingstone, I must confess, is mentioned in nearly all of my Estonian-language books - only instead of Africa, the scene is laid in Siberia. Nowadays, when I meet the companions of my past travels, they still wink at me knowingly and address me with a sentence that was first said in Africa, and for the second time during our adventures in Kamchatka on the desolate Pacific coast: ''Doctor Livingstone, I presume?''

There is nothing more exciting than to address an unknown audience. This maybe has indeed been my profession. What do you and I have in common? Would it be polite to demonstrate my cufflinks, on which those sitting in the front row would recognise the three lions of the House of Windsor? And to explain then that the common past of our coats of arms has linked our histories already since 1030, when Estonians, in alliance with the King of England and Denmark, Canute defended the fortress of Tartu against Novgorod? Or should I point to the Bishop of Tartu - Dietrich III Damerow - who three and a half centuries later appealed to King Richard of England, asking him to take the Southern part of Estonia under his protection? Or should I point to the tradition of the learned Dominican brothers of Tallinn of completing their education at Oxford? With such historical anecdotes, quite a nice postal road could be paved between Estonia and England. When such work is done with devotion, as is customary for the Protestant Estonians, the result would also contain arguments explaining why the Estonians consider it so natural that their future lies in membership in both the European Union and NATO. When building this road, I would not be disturbed in the least by the minor detail that Britain is an island. Estonia is an island too. And maybe this is where I should start.

Estonia is an island in an ocean of Indo-European languages, an island that surfaced long before the ocean surrounding us became Indo-European. It is a very small island, with an area of only 45 000 square kilometres, and also with a small population of less than one and a half million. When saying the word ''island'', I mean almost exactly the same that you in Britain mean by the same term: splendid isolation. In the past millennium, all our communication with Europe took place by sea. This is the answer to the Estonians' most essential question, namely: why have we not drowned in the Indo-European ocean, how have we managed to maintain our identity? An island, as you know yourselves, unites two opposites: being an island, it is at the same time more open to the outside world than is a landlocked country. It is the opposite of a mausoleum or a museum. It is open to all external influences, but only to the extent that the navigation season, customs, curiosity and the market allow it to be. In this constant conflict of inclusive and exclusive qualities lies in my opinion the answer to the question how a culture so small in numbers can survive. When looking at the past centuries, I always remember the words of Norbert Wiener that I often repeat: ''We are not a materia that is eternal; we are structures that preserve themselves.'' In this simple sentence the emphasis is on the presumption that there is a certain balance between self-preservation and self-sacrifice. Everything that changes too quickly will break. Everything that is too conservative will stagnate. This is the historical experience of Estonia, and it contains nothing new for you except for the fact that even one of the smallest nations of Europe also has this experience, and that our experience is more than five thousand years old. Or maybe even more than ten thousand years, when considering the latest research of professor Richard Villems, a remarkable researcher in the field of historical genetics.

I have always been fascinated by the invisible mechanism that, like a skeleton, keeps together the identity of a culture. Professor Branch and I had a common friend, the late Finnish academician Matti Kuusi, who a long time ago published a book on the Finnish oral tradition with a paradoxical heading ''Unwritten Writings''. My two last expeditions took me to Western Siberia, the upper reaches of the river Amnya, a tributary of the Irtish, where we during two summers shot a film on the Ostyak bear feast. This is a ritual of five days, consisting of songs, dances and other activities, held to ask forgiveness from the killed bear, whose descendant this Finno-Ugric tribe considers itself to be. All these songs taken together had twice the volume of the Old Testament. It should also be mentioned that there as well everyday life starts only after the Great Flood, so that the unwritten literature of the Ostyaks and the written literature of the Old Testament must have a comparable age. How can an illiterate hunter or fisherman carry in his head a complete library, in addition to all his zoological, botanical, geographical, astronomical and meteorological knowledge? The answer is paradoxical: he does not carry a text with him like a pocketbook; he does not know the text by heart. He recreates it every time, with microscopic changes - On our second visit, we discovered that our camera from last summer had been included in the text. This is a nice example that can be followed from the Stone Age to the era of written literature. But will it be followed in the future?

I suppose that proceeding from here we can say that Estonia's culture and historical experience may contain something that is lacking in Europe. Thus, it is and will be a dialogue. Estonia needs Europe just as Europe needs Estonia. This may sound pretentious, like the arrogant self-justification of a small country. And yet it is not so. We should ask ourselves what were those factors that have pushed Europe, a peninsula poor in natural resources, to the top of the world economy, made it to the global driving locomotive? I believe that the answer lies in the large variety of different cultures on a comparatively small area. The variety of cultures, or in other words, the variety or diversity of attitudes and world views, has become the most powerful productive force of our time. Today, here, at the University of London, it would be appropriate to add: the speed of the changes in history depends on the amount of communications.

In this respect, too, Estonia is a convincing example. Thirty years ago, our art historian Helmi Üprus reached the conclusion that in the past millennium, the major stylistic trends of Western Europe took about twelve years to reach the Estonian peasant culture and to be reflected there in our own Estonian way. The way we started to make use of our historical experience after having restored our independence in 1991 is even more convincing. Imagine, for a moment, what it must have meant for an island like Estonia, situated ever since the times of Tacitus on the crossroads of the trade routes of Northern Europe, - what the Soviet Iron Curtain must have meant to us. Of the 3700 kilometers-long Estonian coastline less than 2% were accessible to us - and even that only by daylight. The rest of the coast was closed off by barbed wire, and on the other side of the barbed wire, all of the extensive coastal area was ploughed and raked through thoroughly once a month or once a week by the Soviet border guard. This was the inside of the iron curtain. For fifty years, we lived in absolute isolation from the open world, but - and this is what I consider extremely important - we were very well aware of this fact. After having regained our independence, we used our historical experience by investing first into the restoration of communications. Today, the density of the Internet in Estonia is greater than in France, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain or Greece, and greater than in any of the nations that we once called the Warsaw Pact countries, and which now again belong to Central Europe. More than ten per cent of the Estonian bank customers use Internet banking. And yesterday, it was the EBRD that asked me how we had managed that. I am not very sure whether my reply convinced the bankers when I said that above all, it was the will that mattered. In small nations, the will is more obvious than it is in large ones. In a small country, will is manifested quite in the same way as it is manifested in a family that has decided against a holiday in the South to build a new roof for their home instead. Here too, two factors should be pointed out: first, you should be convinced that the old roof is no good, and second, you must be convinced that there is no one else to build your roof for you. I suppose that here one should see our Protestant ethic, but also the greater transparency of a smaller state. This has proved attractive for foreign investors, and explains why Estonia is at the top of the list of Central European countries by investments per capita.

Will is, of course, part of the intricate concept that we call identity. The russification of the outskirts of the continuously expanding empire was one of the priorities of the foreign and domestic policies of both Imperial Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union. The consequences of these policies were twofold. First, the impoverishment of the interior provinces of Russia in comparison to the outskirts, where the Russian administration invested considerably more to promote an influx of Russian workers and thereby to achieve a majority Russian population. Second - in a paradoxical way, the russification policies of the 19th Century politicized the national movement in Estonia, which culminated with the enactment of the right of self-determination in 1918, and the successful defence of the proclaimed Republic against the Red Army. I believe that the development of higher education in the Estonian language was the foremost accomplishment of the Republic of Estonia before World War II. The teaching of physics, chemistry, microbiology, brain surgery, stellar astronomy in the Estonian language, using exact terminology, or in other words, the creation and utilisation of a fully modern academic metalanguage was an incredible accomplishment. I doubt whether we ourselves were really aware of its importance. After World War II the Estonian language regulation has been an example to many countries of the Developing World. Valter Tauli, a linguist who escaped to Uppsala, has written more thoroughly on the subject. I should also add that by the number of translations into the Estonian language, Estonia was in first place in Europe before World War II.

When compared to the times of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Russification policy was more brutal, but also more primitive. I had just begun my university studies when the occupying powers discussed the substitution of the Latin alphabet with the Cyrillic - a change that was in fact already completed in Moldova. You understand, obvioulsy, that the paradoxic effect of such pressure was the strengthening of the Estonian national identity - Finno-Ugric studies, ethnography, even archaeology influenced our music, literature, visual arts and theatre to a much greater extent than in England or any other normal country. The situation was similar to a steam boiler heated up to the extreme. What does it mean: to the extreme? As soon as we had eliminated Soviet power and its censorship, the Estonian market was flooded - not with dissident literature but with dictionaries. In the Estonian history, you find no decade so abundant with dictionaries than the years 1990-2000. Hence, I have the daring to conclude the following: the smaller a culture is in numbers and the more vulnerable it is, the more it is aware of its mother tongue as the main bearer of its identity. Hence, the Estonians' attitude towards the European Union: the EU is a necessity, as it is the lesser of two evils. But it must not be a United States of Europe, but a united Europe of states. The strength of the European Union depends on the strength of the identity of its member states and their regions.

Finally, let me turn to history again and mention a fact that is connected to the occupation of Estonia by the Red Army on June 17, 1940. The operations were led by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's emissary, who was already at the top of the Soviet hierarchy and coined the term ''enemy nations'', which draws a sinister parallel between him and Alfred Rosenberg. To recruit Quislings in Estonia, Zhdanov hinted that in the future, Estonia was to become a ''people's democracy'', a protectorate like Mongolia or Tannu-Tuva, with its own flag, currency and postal stamps. Some leftist intellectuals were indeed hoodwinked and got to enjoy the position of a Prime Minister or Foreign Minister for a week or two. Thereafter, Estonia was promptly engulfed by the Soviet Union.

This was Stalin's fatal mistake. First, Estonia started to determine its identity through a negation, which meant: everything that comes from Moscow is hostile to Estonia. Thus, in Estonia there were never any grounds for what the history calls DDR-patriotism; instead, there was an incredible amount of anecdotes and folklore about the rulers of the Kremlin. Second - through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the virus of independence and democracy found its way inside the iron curtain. As any virus, it was latent until with changing circumstances it started to multiply, forced the Soviet leadership to publicly accept the existence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and put the totalitarian system face-to-face with problems whose weight in the end forced the system to crumble.

Also this is the historical experience of a small country.

I believe Estonia carries within itself many questions and some answers.

First. In the twenty-first century, Estonia has begun to shape its new identity. We are no longer the homogenous country that we used to be before the war, when the German and Swedish minorities had been part of our past for a thousand years, and also most of the Russians were refugees who had fled to Estonia to escape religious persecution in Russia. They were all loyal to Estonia and struggled for Estonian independence, often defending it against their own compatriots. Their ties to Estonia were stronger than the links with their mother tongue. The situation in Estonia after the collapse of the Soviet system was completely different: Russians, who had recently settled in Estonia, constituted more than a quarter of our population. The mutual distrust was, on the Estonian side, accompanied by the historical justice, and often also by the justified distrust of the former military. Estonia's economic success and the rule of law indeed proved to be a strong confirmation for our Russians of Estonia's good will. I believe that Estonia can set an example to the European Union, showing how a small purposeful nation can overcome the inheritance of the past and integrate to the Estonian citizenry our minority, who are at present discovering Europe with a mixture of joy and amazement.

Second. We have teamed our own history to the cart of our accession negotiations with the European Union. We see an example in the historic Hansa - and we have also the coat of arms of London on the façade of the House of Blackheads in Tallinn - and know that the efficiency of this historic union was above all based on a legal system. Law and the welfare of citizens have a central position in our historical experience, and the accession negotiations just give a modern form to these values.

Third. I have talked a lot about language and the power of words, and would like to do this once again to conclude this presentation. The transition from the world of unwritten literature to the world of written literature is an immensely high threshold. I might say that as soon as the word has been written down, culture is one step closer to immortality. And yet the use of the written word is becoming more and more rare in modern culture. The flow of information that reaches us through images is gaining power. Words are becoming merely a voiced ornament for the image that, unlike words, reaches the human mind within a moment.

Will the new century mean a farewell to written words?

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