Mister President of the Republic of Finland,
Excellencies,
Dear guests and organisers of the seminar,

Today' seminar was inspired by the first mentioning of Estonians, the Aestii of the past, in Chapter 45 in the ''Germania'' by Tacitus, the Roman historian. I repeat - this is what inspired a seminar where also Martti Ahtisaari, President of the Republic of Finland, and the present speaker participate. I would also like to add that I have discussed the subject twenty-five years ago, in my book ''Silver White''. At that time, in a very different political climate, I first and foremost tried to convince the readers that Estonians do have their own identity, their own history, which is part of the history of Europe. It was not just the present day of Europe that the totalitarian regime severed by iron curtain - it was Europe as a whole, which means that the iron curtain cut apart both the past and the future of Europe.

And this is whence the principal theme of our seminar proceeds. If we want a united Europe, we must understand the integrity of Europe. President Ahtisaari and I will not consider the antique literature, but the future of Europe. And future, whatever it may bring us, is safe and sound and predictable only when it is based on a solid and objective foundation. The national consciousness of the Estonians - which is the idea of the Estonian history - is of questionable value. Estonians tend to relate to their past in a masochist way. We prefer to cry into each other's sleeve that our history has been nothing but long and dull servitude of seven hundred years. This was poignant rhetoric of the past-century Estonian politicians, meant to wake the Estonian people to political action. For reasons that I have no time to deliberate here, the end and the means in this old slogan have changed their places today. The other day, speaking on a security conference in Madrid, I discovered the seven hundred years of servitude of Spain. I am talking of course, about the most prolific intertwining of the Islamic and the Christian cultures, which brought the rich Greek and Roman cultural heritage to the barbaric Europe. For the Spanish people, this means no longer servitude today. I would like to continue with five comments on the subject ''by the will of Tacitus''.

Comment I

Man only records facts and events he thinks to be noteworthy, worthy of perpetuation. Facts and events he deems necessary to record. 1900 years ago, in the year 98, the Roman politician Tacitus deemed it necessary to record Estonia and to describe the people of Estonia, Aestiorum gentes, their customs, clothing and their unfamiliar language. This tells us that the North, including Estonia, was important enough for Rome at the time. Hence we may conclude that this was not where the union of Estonia and Europe begun - by that time, this process has already acquired the intensity that made recording a must. The centre of European culture and European economy - or Central Europe - had had contacts with the Northern regions already at the time when Pytheas made his journeys which could well have reached the coasts of our Saaremaa. All this bespeaks of meridianic contacts in those days already. Unfortunately, it is only now that we are ready to speak of these contacts again.

Comment II

For reasons well-known to historians, East-West contacts have been rather prevalent in the historical time. In a sense, this is understandable: thinking of the era when the Great Age of the Arabian geographers begun and when what we now call latitudes were called climates. And this would mean that the East-West contacts - however friendly or hostile, however fruitful of inhibiting - were contacts within the same climatic zone. This is probably one of the reasons why East-West contacts were easier to establish - they did not extend the limits of climatic zones. And climatic zones also delineated zones of culture - to the extent that the bond between man and environment, nature and human culture has significance.

Comment III

And yet the fact that East-West movements have been prevalent in numbers in the Mediterranean zone of the Central Europe, leads to the assumption that the meridianic contacts orthogonal to them, being much more troublesome, could also have been much more productive, crossing several different zones and cultures and various resources of nature and human visions of the world. There was more tension in the North-South power lines. The North was, for a long time, Europe's supplier of furs and amber. Estonia was the northernmost agricultural region in the world. In Central Europe, Spain and Italy, the Livonian kiln-dried and smoke-seasoned and infection free grain became famous. Unlike the European grain, it retained germinative capacity for years. Maybe this should be seen as Estonia's greatest contribution to the common culture of Europe: In lean years, Estonia provided the seed grain for Europe. Tacitus did not discover the Nordic Dimension of Europe. He was the first chronicler of the already functioning dimension.

Comment IV

The economically and culturally uniting role of the Mediterranean Sea in the South is also characteristic to the Baltic Sea or the Mediterranean of the North. The Baltic Sea was put to most excellent use as a regional means of communication already at the time of the Hanseatic League. Now, the Baltic Sea is re-assuming its natural position as an internal waterway of the European Union, as internal sea of the European Union.

One of the reasons why the mediaeval Europe functioned in East-West direction was the states' striving to sea. A country without sea border could not exist. This was changed during the Cold War when air transport added another dimension to the previously two-dimensional world. Today, we no longer know landlocked states that have no access to sea. Thus, the reasons that caused conflicts during the Middle Ages and later, when countries have sought access to sea, without which the body of state was unable to exist, have been eliminated.

Comment V

In today's three-dimensional, converging and shrinking world, the meridianic contacts have finally assumed their proper position beside the East-West communication. They are, in fact, just as self-evident and relevant for the normal functioning of the world, but were suppressed by the geopolitical arguments of the total confrontation between East and West during the Cold War period. We here, for instance, are linked by a meridian that extends from the Helsinki Observatory to the old meridian mark used by Struve on the field of the Simuna Rectory, or the Tartu Observatory, and goes on to Istanbul, to the Strait of Bosporus. This is the line of contact between the European Union and Russia. And thus we have reached the concept of the Nordic Dimension, initiated by my colleague Martti Ahtisaari already four years ago, when he also spoke of it in his speech at Tartu University. Today, Europe is a composition of countries and regions where governmental and grassroot-level contacts intertwine. The countries situated along this meridian have recently engaged in arranging their relations with Russia (and vice versa): of late, Norway has sought opportunities of co-operation in the Kola-Murmansk direction, and Finland actively represents to EU concept of the Nordic Dimension. ''During our tenure of the EU Presidency in autumn 1999, Finland will push vigorously for the development of EU policy on Russia,'' President Ahtisaari confirmed a month ago in St. Petersburg. The priorities of the Estonian foreign policy can also be seen in the objective of co-operation both on governmental and regional level, enhancing regional security and stability - accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the European Union, who this week opened the actual accession negotiations with Estonia. The contacts with our neighbouring regions in Russia are also important, we are interested in initiatives ensuring security and stability on all levels and in all directions along all latitudes and longitudes.

Thus, the developments in our countries situated along the North-South meridian confirm that Europe has the aspiration and the need to advance relations with the adjacent regions of Russia. In some respects, this position resembles the ''near abroad'' theory familiar from the recent political rhetoric of Russia, which by now has been reversed with a friendly smile. It is in our interest to have a stable and democratic Russia prospering behind our border. And it is our duty to support this development as much as it is in our might. This would probably summarise the idea of the Nordic Dimension of Europe.

The idea that was, however briefly, first outlined in ''Germania'' by Tacitus.

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