Bundespräsident,
Professor Drechsler,
Mayor Eenmaa,
excellencies,
ladies and gentlemen!

On behalf of the Republic of Estonia I would like to welcome Bundespräsident Roman Hertzog in Estonia, in the capital of a future member state of the dynamically enlarging European Union. I would like to thank you, Bundespräsident, for having accepted my invitation and finding time during the busy pre-election spring to attend a conference in our historic Hanseatic city dedicated to the 750th anniversary of granting Lübeck Charter to Tallinn.

Nationals of the Republic of Estonia are aware of your work load, your speech held in Adlon, your vision of Germany's development, German position in the associated Europe. We would have understood you if your work load had made you give up the invitation. Your presence, Bundespräsident, contains more than just an expression of friendliness. Your presence is at least for me a confirmation, that you see an ancient model of the new Europe in the ancient Hanseatic relations and Lübeck Charter. Everything new is well forgotten old. I do not want to repeat banalities. I would like to say that we in Europe have an experience of a previous European Union. This previous union created a common legal area associating more than a hundred cities; it radiated something which in the current terminology of the European Union and NATO is called common values and radiated it far beyond its borders. Ladies and gentlemen, please, notice - it introduced to Estonia the notion of human rights in the specific way characteristic of its time. Allow me to intervene with my own opinion I would like to return to sometimes in future: the concept of human rights is as old and obvious as culture and just like culture it belongs to sleeping concepts which wake up for discussion only if the level of human rights in one region significantly differs from human rights of another region. Thus regions, associations of regions and continents function like connected vessels in physics. Herewith I admit that it is more a subject of historical anthropology than that of the history of law - unfortunately, first and foremost, unfortunately for the history of law itself; but here and today I do not want to dwell upon my doubt. Referring to the distant predecessor of the European Union I rank it among the series of analogies, maybe rank even first in the series of notions, as citizen and civic rights rooted themselves in Estonia through the Lübeck Charter. I call on comprehending history not selectively but in its entirety, in its width and depth. The notion of citizen has inevitably its reverse side as well: if there are prerequisites to differentiate a citizen as a legal category, it will be differentiated from someone else, this someone being a non-citizen. Herewith I would like to focus on Estonia. Citoyen, Citizen, Bürger have a remarkably similar development background in Europe: Bürger lives protected by Burg, a stronghold, walls of the stronghold, city walls. It is a powerful symbol: ''Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott'' wrote Martin Luther. The Estonian word citizen, Bürger derives from the notion Heim, home and in Finnish in community, society, nation. If I mentioned earlier that I saw a predecessor of the European Union in the Lübeck Charter and historic Hansa or being more precise - a predecessor of the enlargement into east, then now I would like to add that in my current comments I am mostly concerned with the limits of the Lübeck Charter in time and space. Not the condition but the process. We should value and definitely admire the vitality of the provisions of the Lübeck Charter: in the second half of the last century most of the Lübeck Charter was integrated into the Baltisches Provinzialrecht. It was in force until the occupation of the Republic of Estonia by the Red Army and destroyal of Estonia as an European rule of law in 1940. I would like to comment this figure with a joke. A couple of decades ago a conflict arose between two authorities of the occupation administration, the City of Tallinn and the Green Belt Forestry Agency on an issue who should maintain a small forested plot near Tallinn. Looking at the map I had a pleasant surprise as this characteristic conflict of Soviet bureaucracy is rooted in the medieval border disputes between the Lübeck Charter and the adjacent areas behind the city wall. Apparatchiki had no idea of the Lübeck Charter. I recall this joke only because it brings into the limelight a question whether the law by decree can replace one legal system with another just by a stroke of a pen? How extensive is the inertia of legal systems? How does the hidden mechanism of the inertia work?

2.

Ladies and Gentlemen, jurists observe specific years, concrete numbers of paragraphs, precise wordings. The conference dedicated to the 750th anniversary of granting the Lübeck Charter to Tallinn provides an opportunity to inquire whether jurisprudence - like any other science led to perfection does not confuse cause and result. Was Tallinn born from the Lübeck Charter? Or was the Lübeck Charter, figuratively speaking, born in Tallinn? Can we - no: do we want to distinguish cause from result? Each country, each city, each career-driven official is stuck with a biblical temptation to say: before me ''... the Erth was a formless wode, there was darkness over the deep with a devine wind sweeping over the waters. '' It sounds beautiful but it is not true. Neither is there truth in the following sentence: "Let there be light!''. It is not true and cannot be true that transition from a legal system to another is comparable to going from one room to another, groping for the switch near the door to lit a chandelier. Leaving aside arctic regions, the Carolingian Europe had no more prerequisites for founding settlements as they were there already - with their economic background, arable lands and adjacent areas (Mark), with their communication ways and definitely with their markets as well as their sets of legal norms. I have always been attracted to the romantic temptation of jurists to visualise the foundation of a city as a clearly dated political will of a powerful ruler: Let there be a city here! Troy, Rome, Cologne, Sliaswits, Tallinn-Reval, Novgorod, even New Amsterdam or New York and St. Petersburg, especially St. Petersburg, lived their daily busy lives long before they were entered onto a map under one or another name. The path of a hunter or a fisherman crossed the path of another tribe in the Bronze or Iron Age. It was just a matter of time to have a first shelter at the crossroads. It was just the matter of roads and centuries for the shelter, the thatched roof, the fisherman's house to develop into Paris or Tallinn or Novgorod. Cities are not born from Charters, Charters are born from cities. A market, Frühstadt and a city are born from a conflict of two or more conflicting interests which finally recede to a common interest and knot into local common law. Let's evaluate the Lübeck Charter from this point of view and ask what is the most significant conclusion of the current conference. President, ladies and gentlemen, I answer myself: I value most the speed the Lübeck Charter spread at and rooted itself for centuries in the Baltic Sea region. Northern-Europe led by Tallinn was ripe to acknowledge the Lübeck Charter. The catalyst and integrator was the Baltic Sea itself, the axe of our life which I have often referred to as the Nordic Mediterranean Sea. I think that this experience allows us to have as optimistic an attitude to the transition into the legal space of the European Union. The history will always govern the future.

3.

An American friend of mine said that Estonia and Israel have something in common: both are nations of the word. To my surprise my friend was correct. In Northern Europe where literacy is younger than in Western Europe, the word - and the notion ''word'', please, notice, is used here in singular - the word has preserved its pre-inflation value and weight. In March 1969 I was shooting for a documentary an illiterate Syryenian Komi hunter Ivan Popov. He was used to talking mostly to his dog. He told to me: ''the word is very powerful''. In Estonia contrary to Germany the word is still a significant source of history, the main carrier of our historical identity. The Lübeck Charter is, first and foremost, municipal Charter. We could ask ourselves whether it did not work only within the city walls, on the small island inside Tallinn city borders?

Definitely it was like that pro forma. But the powerful and continuous radiation of the Charter across the country has shaped the Estonian way of thinking and values anyway, maybe even stronger than in Western Europe. It could be explained by the oral tradition which still played a significant role in Estonia in the last century. Estonians still use an evaluation which I cannot translate into any language - nagu kord ja kohus - observing order and obligation. Kord means here more than Ordnung, order and kohus more than Geriht, trial. If something has to be done or decided, this phrase expresses particularity, if something has been done, decided or built well, it expresses recognition. I add a couple of proverbs ''kohus on kolm päeva vanem kui maailm'' - an obligation is three days older than the world or ''kord annab korrale sooja'' - order is fed by order. Concluding my comments with the above example, I wanted to touch upon only one conclusion. Pro forma they sound strange to a Lübeck ear as they carry the Estonian identity. The subject matter is understandable to all Europeans as they express European common values, European ethical values, European common legal area. The national of the Republic of Estonia was able to preserve and maintain them throughout the toughest times. Hence the confidence in looking forward to the European Union.

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