Dear countrymen!


Long ago, when lead was still available, people used to cast it to foretell what future the New Year might bring. Let us do without lead-casting today and ask soberly, as hundreds of generations have asked before us: where do we come from? Where are we going?

You know the answer as well as I do: we come from the era of Russian colonial supremacy, to make headway to the Estonian era of democracy. We are standing on the threshold, with our hand on the doorknob and with anxiety in our heart: progression has been slow, painful and difficult. It has involved distress and poverty for our countryfolk, want and cold for their toil and moil; it has dealt blows on our intellectuals, our scientists, universities, writers, artists and composers, who had carried the glistening star of Estonian identity through the decades of darkness.

Dear countrymen! Your anxiety is alive in my hear as well. I have never promised you fleshpots or milk and honey. And yet I want to recall tonight that anxiety is always born into this world with a twin brother whose name is hope. Shade never occurs without light, night is followed by day. No matter how meagre your supper tonight is, there is hope sitting at your table, and his features are already emerging in the dawnlight.

What is it that Estonia's hope feeds on? And what is it that overshadows it?

In a free and fair plebiscite, you adopted the Constitution, whose first Article is the most beautiful and glorious of anything I have ever read in Estonian: "Estonia is a sovereign and independent democratic republic where the highest state authority is vested in the people. Estonia“s soveriegnty and independence are interminable and inalienable."

What eclipses the joy of this glorious text?

Our Constitution came into force on the 3rd of July, almost half a year ago, but its influence on our everyday life, in other words the effect it exerts on the management of state affairs, on the moulding of a law-abiding state, on the measured distribution of rights and duties, on securing the division of powers - that effect, for the present, is too small not to cause anxiety. The principle of equilibrium of powers, upon which the entire life system of the democratic world is based, in Estonia still needs patient elucidation as well as protection from the Soviet way of thinking.

Hope feeds on the free and fair elections in September, which showed the world that you had chosen for Estonia a path to free Europe, a part and member of which we had been for the past eight centuries. At the same time, Estonia“s hope is eclipsed by the tardiness of privatisation and of the agrarian reform; by the delay of the mortgage law and hence the accruing uncertainty. We all wish to be just and honest. So we engage in dividing the cow this way and that way, until we end up finding that all there is left to divide is a hen.

Hope has fed on the red-introduction of the Estonian national currency, the kroon, which for six months has held out as steady as the Greenwich Meridian - if I may quote from my speech recently held in Brussels. The Estonian street scene has changed, shops are selling goods that you had never seen except in foreign magazines; but the people's purchasing power has sunk and the countryfolk are altogether hard pressed for money. What is good is people are getting an itch for work, for after a long while you can even buy something for your labour. A motley shop counter is the best propaganda for a free market economy, provided you have some money in you pocket. But money is on the decrease, since unemployment is spreading.

A difficult task rests on the legislator: to accelerate economic reforms so as to build up the people“s belief in their own strength, in their own power of initative, so every Estonian citizen could feel his rights and duties as a master.

During the outgoing year Estonia's statehood markers have become stronger. The right to self-determination, realised through the War of Liberation and the Peace Treaty of Tartu, has been carved in our Constitution. The reliability of Estonia as a sovereign state has increased. In spite of press allegations to the contrary, most governments of the world are aware that the Republic of Estonia does respect the civil rights of all its citizens and the human rights of all people as provided by international covenants of the United Nations and the Council of Europe.

In less than two months our State will be 75 years old. Estonia has been an open society ever since the Peace Treaty of Tartu, and will remain so. At the turn of year, on the eve of the jubilee year of the Republic of Estonia, my summary is brief. We are doing a long-distance run, and the churchbells about to chime in the New Year will mark the beginning of a new lap. We may be satisfied with the past year, provided that we are prepared to move forward at a better pace, straining our muscles sparingly, breathing deeply and steadily, keeping a check on our heartbeats.

Joining our efforts, being reasonably unanimous, we are capable of accomplishing an incredible lot. All our history has proved it.

With a view to this, I wish you all as the Estonian saying goes: more power to your elbow!

Happy New Year, dear countrymen!

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