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President of the Republic at the Ceremonial Dinner Hosted by the President of Latvia and Mrs Aina Ulmane in Riga
23.10.1996

Your Excellency Mr Guntis Ulmanis, President of the Republic of Latvia,
Dear Mrs Aina Ulmane,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen!

Thank you, Mr President, for your friendly words. We have felt the same friendliness and cordiality during the entire course of my state visit so far.

I would like to use a word that has even more weight for me. The word is NATURALNESS. It is with a matter-of-course naturalness that you have acquainted us with your life; it is with the same naturalness that we have expressed our opinion about it.

It is with a natural openness that we have compared our positions and attitudes.

By no means is it an atmosphere specific only to the current visit.

We are more than merely neighbours.

There are so many analogies in the history of our two countries; there is so much intertwining in our relations; our peoples have so many shared life stories.

73 years ago, Estonia and Latvia were the two countries that managed to overcome the hesitations that thwarted the formation of a grander Baltic Union consisting of five countries, and on the 1st of November 1923 four conventions were signed in Tallinn. In the style of those times, that day was dubbed ''the Estonian-Latvian wedding day''. The first grand diplomatic undertaking of the young sovereign countries three quarters of a century ago delineated issues that are equally significant for us today: security, border problems, trade. And - ethics. Namely, Latvia wanted to mark and recognize the assistance provided by Estonia in the War of Independence, so she allotted 30 million Estonian marks to help Estonian disabled soldiers and the families of those who had fallen for the freedom of Latvia.

Actions of our young states did not lack thrust or enthusiasm. Nor the idealism characteristic of the period. The idealism, however, was shackled by the bitter historical experience, by a look at the map, and by an early understanding that politics and altruism were two different things and that in the first place it was ourselves rather than anyone else that were moved by our smallness and youth.

Four years after ''the Estonian-Latvian wedding day'' Felix Cielens, the Latvian foreign minister, published a book titled ''The International Situation of the Baltic states...''. The author had dedicated it ''with deep reverence'', as he put it, to the first Estonian and Latvian foreign ministers, Jaan Poska and Zigfried Meierowitsh. At the very beginning of it the reader is sobered by an assertion that it is very difficult to conduct the policies of small nations when they are situated at the crossroads of the economic and political interests of great powers.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

All I wanted to do was to point out just a few factors of our very similar and often intertwining histories.

Thinking back to our joint activities, our joint aspirations, we can move even a lot farther back in time, and as a historian I would find a lot of professional pleasure in so doing.

But returning to the present: we can be content with our diplomats who have reached a decent solution for most of our border problems and signed important accords in the spheres of trade and transport.

A little more than a year ago, when reopening the Riga Opera, you, Mr President, spoke about the BALTIC POLITICAL CULTURE, about the need to shape and mould it. The past year has not been void of problems. Which means it has not been without debates. One form of debates is delivering monologues, and that is a genre which is usually fruitless. Baltic debates seek dialogue, sincerely and intensively, and therefore are bound to reach solutions. It is easy to speak of political culture when there are no issues open to debate. I am glad we can speak of the Baltic political culture as our actual political practice rather than an abstract ideal.

We do not sing in unison following the same score, but we make a good duet -- and as such we perform together with our third partner before Europe and the world, and we have very clearly made the contemporary world conscious of our determination to join the European Union and NATO. We see no other way to safeguard our democracy and freedom, to guarantee that democracy should become our natural condition, free of tensions and threats.

No doubt everything begins with ourselves. No integration will help us without an internal, inherent democracy. But the world today is, more than ever before, one of connections, and here we have made our choice.

The connections include those of life stories. We have a lot of mutually well- known and loved men and women of culture. Singers and instrumentalists have been united by the universal language of music, as have artists by the language of images, but even the difference of our spoken languages has not impeded a great mutual interest in literature, for there have always been enthusiastic people of several languages - translators from Latvian into Estonian and the other way round.

I would also like to reminisce about Rein Sepp, the late cultural philosopher, who lived the most fruitful decades of his life at Ipiki, near Valmiera, and it was here, in Latvia, that he translated into Estonian the ancient Scandinavian Eddas, the Song of the Nibelungs, Parzival and Beowulf. In his own science- fiction story ''The Last of the Recluses'' the protagonist states with a significant emphasis: ''I am a child of this ship.'' That means a child of all this wide world.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

By the last years of the century we have all learned to strictly distinguish between idealistic illusions and pragmatic reality.

And still I wish that now, on the threshold of the 21st century, we would time and again wake up to the consciousness that we all are children of this wide world. And that we all bear responsibility for it.

With this sentiment Estonia wishes Latvia success and happiness, well-calculated aims and vigour in the movement towards those aims.

I raise my glass and ask you all to raise yours in a toast to the Republic of Latvia, to President Ulmanis and his wife.

 

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