Dear fellow countrymen in Estonia and in the outer world!

Today I am wishing a happy New Year to you from Paslepa, Noarootsi. I love this place for two reasons. First, it is from here, from amid these wretched sandy fields that my mother came. These parts have always been poor, with meagre crops and devastating storms. Whatever has come from here has come of man's handiwork and of man's intellect. Just like all over Estonia. Except that on these barren lands here you have a sharper sensation of the Estonian skill and Estonian pride than you would in the comic bustle of the capital city.

And the other reason is this here is Estonia's horizon. Free and open. What awaits us beyond the horizon? The poet Juhan Liiv once declared, ''I saw Estonia yesterday.'' He had the right to say so. Myself and you, dear countrymen, we have the right and the duty to see Estonia all the time and everywhere. Unless we do so, we will let ourselves get bogged down and let the slum pollute our soul. I feel reluctant to speak about the question raised the other day about who represents Estonia off her capital. Estonia has to represent herself everywhere - or else we are no state! It means we must not get tired of being a state whose existence is evident to every citizen and every other state in the world.

What a worrying Estonia looks like, anyone can see by their purse. What a worriless Estonia looks like, you can find in gossip columns. But should you wish to check if a tired Estonia exists, don't be afraid to look at yourself in the mirror. Surely you don't want to see there what you actually don't want to be and mustn't be. We did not get tired under the occupations. All the less may we get tired under the independence we ourselves have established, for which there is ever so much more to be learned. Time and again we are reminded by the watchful world, as well as by our own growing strictness towards ourselves, how much homework we have left undone. Every such time an exacting schoolmaster will give us a poor mark for work undone, and he is right, for no one is likely to trust an Estonia of under-achievers.

The outgoing year has opened a door to us for negotiations to become partners in the European Union. This is high, and I would add stable, credit to our constitutional system of government. But we cannot attach this credit to our breast like a decoration: we have to put it to work in such a way as to enable us to become part of Europe rather than a frequenter of it. I mean the Europe of the new millennium. Thus it is also our responsibility to think what kind of Estonia we want to see in the year 2005. That year a century will have passed since the movement of Young Estonia. Members of Young Estonia wished we should become Europeans. Let us regard this as a call for self-determination in the 80th jubilee year of our state: for simultaneously being Europeans while being Estonians. This does not mean deprivation of self or fusion, but the reaching of a state of balance. Balance is the very art of politics today, which now has become a reality. It is something that has been dreamt about for centuries. Referring to Jaan Tõnisson, I would like to recall Victor Hugo, who prophesied to a roar of laughter in the parliament in the middle of lastcentury, ''A day will come when - all the nations of the Continent, preserving their differences and multi-coloured characters, will assemble into a superior unity, a European fraternity. A day will come when the United States and Europe will be seen reaching each other a hand across the seas.'' When Jaan Tõnisson was writing his ''Idea of a European Federation'', a large part of Europe had already been ruined. Thus we have to do with Jaan Tõnisson's precept to us as he writes that a united Europe and the freedom of people ''can come into consideration only on the condition that the European nations will unite on the basis of earnest equality of rights and the rule of law.'' I said a little while ago that balance is the art of today's politics, and I will add now that the apothecaries' scales of politics can be maintained in balance even by a single grain of sand of the size of Estonia, or Latvia, or Lithuania. This is just the kind of balance that will help prevent the reduction of united Europe to a row of ethnic ghettos or a file of ethnic tower blocks in precast panel states.

To what extent have we fulfilled the dreams of our spiritual predecessors?

We do have our debts, which will shift into the new year. Regrettably so. Pensions. Health. The Estonian family. The administrative order. And above all the educational system. Having an inadequate system of education, we will not be able to redeem either the first or the second or the third debt. And first of all we have to take a look far beyond the horizon and be sure to know what kind of education Estonia will need in 2010 and in 2015 when the children of today finish school and graduate from university. I hope the year-long brainstorming by the Academic Council furthers our cause closer to a solution. The Republic of Estonia cannot expect to be comforted by teacher Laur: ''If you can't manage two exercises, do just one!'' And I yearn for a time when the phrase ''honest Estonian work'' will come into use again. Because education is skill and skill is education. So what I'm talking about is the need for an educated Estonian, one who is able to leap like a tiger yet will prevent the rise of a tigerish society. Therefore it should come as no surprise if social problems become issues of the day in the Republic of Estonia during the next years. After all, the state is a balancer between the individuals and the world, or else we would still live gregariously.

Somebody may shrug: what can I do about it? Allow me, dear fellow countrymen, to answer in the jubilee year of the Republic of Estonia as follows:

Estonia is simultaneously a whole and a part. As a country, as the Republic of Estonia, she is a whole. And she is a part, an inseparable part, of Europe and the world. Each part, no matter what its measurements, affects the whole. Just like each resident of Estonia affects the Estonian state as a whole, Estonia affects Europe and the world as a whole. Again and again I emphasize the role of an individual in the formation of the whole. In the formation of a hard-working, honest, stable, democratic, educated, cheerful Estonia. And only through constant involvement - in the parish, in the county, in the country, in Europe, in the world - can we remain our own selves.

I thank everybody who have remembered Estonia. I join you in your thoughts of those who have perished and are no longer with us. I also think of those who are not at home at this hour but are on their jobs. And I wish all of us, both those who continue and those who will join us, a lovely New Year in an untiring Estonia. Being here at the Paslepa junction of leaden cloud and sea, I wish you a year full of sunshine, dear people. We have coped even in more rotten circumstances, haven't we, so now there's no doubt!

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