Esteemed Chair of the Meeting,
Your Excellencies,
Dear participants at the conference:

We all would like to hope that the year of 1997 has dramatically altered the world or is altering it. We wish to believe that at long last we will succeed in building up a Europe where the next door neighbour will not be one's deadly enemy.

However, the fact that we are holding a conference here about the crucial importance of goodneighbourly relations implies that we are not as yet convinced in the feasibility of such a world. And it is no wonder - in view of the sad experience of our respective countries and nations in this century.

Nevertheless I am very glad that it is the Eastern Europe that displays today excellent examples of goodwill - regardless of all wounds inflicted in the WWII, despite the need to adjust oneself to new borders, in spite of the altered demographic situation. Hungary and Romania, Poland and the Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Germany, Lithuania and Poland, and still more countries have fixed their new relations also with treaties and agreements. The Baltic states and Russia have at least expressed their will to achieve that end.

I will underline once more: Estonia wishes to build our co-operation with Russia on three main principles. First: the co-operation must be based upon mutual benefit. Secondly: the co-operation must be based on international law. Third: the co-operation must rest on long-term prospects.

The goodneighbourly relations are underpinned by trust. Trust will appear when one can be sure that the other parties' benchmarks are the same values, the same credo. Freedom of speech and free development of civil society in the wider meaning is one of these integral components of democracy that many of us have had to learn or to relearn. Estonia was much helped in that process by Open Estonia Foundation set up by George Soros. In Belarus the similar foundation has by now been forced to wind up its activity. We regard that as a deplorable fact. Without recognising the supremacy of democracy there are no grounds for crossfrontier trust to appear, there is no guarantee for security and stability.

Characteristic for the current world are powerful integration processes. There is nothing fundamentally novel in that. What is new is that in today's integration it is possible for one to retain one's identity, it is possible to withhold from violence. The today's world can respect and must respect the free will of the countries of the world to belong to just such international communities that befit the given nation's history and cultural heritage.

Estonia stands today at the starting point of the process that will embed us, via the European Union, in the environment logically inherent to us. It is this context that will convey to our relations with our close neighbours and the neighbours of those neighbours an immense potential, being the catalyst in economical relations with other regions. It is this context that has been the driving force also for fostering close ties between Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, on the way of formation of Baltic economic area. Estonia considers it important that the European Union should embrace the whole Baltic region as soon as possible.

European Union is the increasingly stronger common denominator for many delegates having gathered in Vilnius. Estonia welcomes the ongoing nature of that process.

However I would like to emphasise that the overwhelming positive developments in the post-cold-war world have already moulded totally new relations here on the shore of the Northern Mediterranean. Links of Estonia with Finland, Sweden and Denmark do not mean only the declaration of common principles and mutually beneficial trade; they have long ago reached the grass roots level, they have become vast in their diversity. I would here also like to refer to meaningful co-operation in the Baltic Sea Council.

At the same time, the choices of these countries for ensuring their security are very different. On the coast of the Baltic Sea that diversity has never damaged goodneighborly relations between e.g. Norway, the member of NATO and the neutral Finland. Everybody must be left the right to determine its own relation with security organisations. Estonia has made its choice - we wish to join the transatlantic security structure that has kept pace with the time, for which the outdated decade-old trite views are no longer pertinent.

The security increasing process in the region of the Baltic Sea is just this process with its various developments and stages. It is like a river having its beginning and mouth as well as numerous tributaries. Unfortunately the law of nature that all drops of water are ultimately on their way to the sea does not hold true here. We cannot trust our security to the laws of nature. Not even if we philosophically see the inevitability of democracy, the future of the world as a democratic future. Undoubtedly this is the way it is but it does not mean standing fatalistically aside.

We share this understanding when gathering here.

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