Mr. President,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great honour for me to receive this prize today. I gratefully accept it, but above all I accept it on behalf of the Estonian people.

The Liberal International stands for convictions which I myself hold very dear. These are the principles of individual freedom and free enterprise, but also the principles of individual responsibility, of the responsibility of the state before its citizens and ultimately of our collective responsibility before our common Planet.

I believe that in Estonia and in Central and Eastern Europe in general we have made a lot of progress on the first two fronts: individual freedoms and the principle of free enterprise are well-established. Estonia after all is considered one of the most free economies in the world by Freedom House. However, while emphasizing individual rights we have neglected individual responsibility and the responsibility of the state before its citizens. To an extent this has been a logical development: we had to permit energies to run free to allow Estonia to recover from the Soviet command economy and from decades of political oppression. And I am very happy to say that Estonians made full use of this freedom.

Now however is the point where we have to remind ourselves that no man is an island. It is our common duty to give something back to the society of which we are all a part - and this duty is not limited to paying your taxes on time. We all have to chip in to make Estonia, to make Europe, to make the world a better place to live.

And this to me is the essence of liberalism: we do not need a super state to tell us what to do. What we do need is a common sense of the rights, but also of the responsibilities of the individual. Things have never worked particularly well when the state has come out and said that "you have to do this" or "you have to do that". Things do work well when there is a strong civic society where everyone takes an active part not because he or she is told to do so, but because he or she wants to do so. The freedom to choose, the freedom to work together.

Once again, Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen: thank you very much for awarding me this prize.

back | archive of speeches | main page