EUROPE AS ‘SOFT WAX’ ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON ON RECEIPT OF THE EUROPE OF THE EUROPEAN MED
1990 (SECTOR POLITICS) FROM THE ASSOCIATION OF EUROPEAN JOURNALISTS AT HET LOO PALACE, APELDOORN, THE NETHERLANDS
This award, by which you have honoured me - and through me the people of Ireland whom I represent - has prompted some reflections on our shared European heritage.
There's a wonderful moment in W.B. Yeat's Autobiographies when he speaks of his political apprenticeship in Ireland. It was the time of Parnell, of the start of the Gaelic League, of the beginnings of the Literary Movement. A conviction came over Yeats - so he tells us - that Ireland was, at that moment, "soft wax". That it was going to remain "soft wax" for some years to come. It's a marvellous image, and I put it before you today because it suggests the excitement of a unique historic moment. The moment when it seems that we can change things. When situations no longer seem fixed. When the unyielding, the durable, the intractable suddenly yields. When we put our hand to the door it opens.
This is the moment of "soft wax" in Europe. I think we all feel it. The acceleration of economic re-alignment, the coming down of physical and metaphysical barriers - both of which find a powerful symbol in the Berlin Wall - and the increased sense of equality and of community, these all mark the moment. But we need to mark it in other ways. We need to mark it in our hearts and our imaginations. We need to remember that wax does not stay soft for long: that shapes which are in the making right now will harden. That we need all our rigour, our questioning and our close attention to be equal to this moment.
We need to challenge our own ideas, every day, at every turn. We need to remember that euphoria and a sentimental optimism will serve us badly. If ever there was a time for vigilance, for challenges and questions, this is it. It certainly isn't a time to settle into complacent hopes for the future. So, far from indulging in definitions or conclusions here today, I want to contribute to what I believe is a vital and necessary debate about what this Europe as soft wax is and what it means.
The question I want to begin with is how do we go forward while learning the lessons of the past; how do we remain affirmative about the place and the time which is here and now, while being wary of easy answers. We are aware, of course, that the Maastricht Treaty makes express reference to the place of culture within the European Union. But if we are honest we know that culture is too complex to be shaped or defined in any treaty, and indeed it cannot - and should not - be constrained within any political grouping. So the awkward questions remain: how do we reconcile the past and present on this continent - and the marginal with the central?
The Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, when he was accepting the Nobel Prize, said something I think all of us are conscious of now as we confront the widening vista of reduced barriers and displaced divisions. "It is good", he said, "to be born in a small country where nature was on a human scale, where various languages and religions cohabited for centuries". As an Irish citizen and a European, Milosz speaks for me and, I suspect, for many people. But he goes on to say something more poignant and more interesting. "I have in mind", he continues, "Lithuania, a country of myths and of poetry. My family in the sixteenth century already spoke Polish, just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland English. So I am a Polish, not a Lithuanian poet".
Milosz's words remind us how complex is the mix and dispersal of the European identity. How painful its twists and turns, and yet how enriching each costly acquisition of identity is to the one which preceded it. I use his words because today, when the pace of change is quickening, we are invited to speak of the European heritage in a one-dimensional way. With the best will in the world, we have fallen into the habit of using 1992 and Europe almost as codes for an unchallenged optimism.
But in a time of bright promise and forward-looking perspective, we must remember that the heroes and heroines of the European experience are not even here to witness the extraordinary outcome of their ordeal and grace on this continent. They are the men and women who endured the extraordinary disruptions through which the European heritage established itself; who became - by survival and expression - its witnesses. And who remind us by their words and their remembrance, that identity is not a simple or clear statement of ownership or self-realisation. It is a mixture of heritage and experience, of tradition and improvisation. We are the same today. We bring to the new Europe its old perceptions. We bring to the collective challenge our particular skills and we are the better for it.
Let me quote the words of a great European - and do it in the Irish way by prefacing my quotation with the statement that he was not European at all! Albert Camus was in fact born in North Africa. In an essay written when he was only twenty-three - called "Summer in Algiers" - he makes a provocative and fascinating comment. "The opposite of a civilised people", he says, "is a creative people". And how tempting those words are to us, especially today. For all of us who come from the edges of Europe, from a country like Ireland - which essentially missed those great civilising waves of the Roman settlement and the Renaissance and the Romantic movement - there is a real temptation to explain away history by saying we were creative and they were civilised. But that is escapism. I think we can be both civilised and creative at the same time; we can be a community through our diversity. We can meet the new Europe with the strongest possible sense of individual heritage and separate achievements. And through the acceptance and celebration of what makes us distinct and formidable, we can strengthen our union through those very differences.
But we can do none of this if we don't realise that this particular moment in Europe requires much more from us than a sense of an exciting present. It requires that we reflect on the past as well. The European past is a powerful field of study. There can be few places where suffering and enrichment are so mixed up together; are so much part of one another's history. If we are to do justice to that past we have to first do justice to our own past, our own history. It always strikes me that James Joyce, when he leaves for Europe at the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, does not go to resign himself to a communal history. He is drawn by "the spell of arms and voices", by the excitements of a larger world, as many of us are. But he is quite clear that his responsibility is to "forge the uncreated conscience of my race".
Many of the consciences of Europe have been created by now. They have been forged in wars, in dispersals, as well as in the establishment of cultural treasure. They are an enormous resource. Their example reminds us that in order to be good Europeans - in order to work with the soft wax which is there in front of us - we must somehow remain imaginative individualists. By this I mean something very practical as well as idealistic. I genuinely believe that if we are to do justice to the great opportunity which confronts us - this great opening up of distances and vistas - we need to return to our own horizons.
Maybe I can use a personal example here. One of the first things which concerned me when I was elected President of a modern European State, was something which might well appear contradictory to that office and the contemporary situation in which I came to it. Nevertheless, I began my Presidency determined to increase my fluency in the Irish Language. I spoke some but I want to speak more. I had the sense of a deep identity bound up with that language, which was Irish but also - although it may appear paradoxical - European.
To oidhreacht litriochta ag Gaeilge ata os cionn mile go leith bliain. Ta ceangal dluth ag Gaeilge na hEireann le Gaeilge na hAlban agus leis na teangacha Ceilteacha ar fad. Ta rian na Gaeilge fagtha freisin ar litriocht na scribhneoiri Eireannacha a scriobht as Bearla.
[The Irish language has a literary heritage that is over one and a half thousand years old. The Irish of Ireland is closely tied with the Gaelic of Scotland and with all the Celtic languages. Irish has also left its mark on the literature of Irish writers who have written in English.]
Perhaps my commitment to the Irish language is not so paradoxical when you look at it more closely. In George Thomson's book on the Blasket Islands off the South West coast of Ireland, called Island Home - which is concerned with that dense, powerful community of story-tellers and writers - he makes the point of how the intensely local speech of the islanders had deeper roots.
"Their conversation", he says , "electrified me. It was as though Homer had come alive. Its vitality was inexhaustible, yet it was rhythmical, alliterative. I realised that these gems falling from the lips of the people, so far from being novelties, were centuries old - they were what the language was made of. And returning to Homer, I read him in a new light.
I take this example of the local and the European because I am persuaded that the more we are true to those local treasures - many of them contradictory, complex, obtained at cost by history - the more European we will become. If George Thomson could find the resonance of an ancient and cental civilisation in the intensely creative community of these remote Blasket Islands, perched on the edge on an ocean where the next parish was Springfield, Massachusetts, then perhaps we can disprove Camus. We can after all be creative and civilised at the same time. Cicero, who was part of a civilization which defined this continent, quotes Themistocles as saying: "Teach me not the art of remembering but the art of forgetting, for I remember things I do not wish to remember but I cannot forget things I wish to forget". The fact is, that on this continent, at this time, we cannot afford to forget. We are to be citizens of Europe - to paraphrase Erasmus - but we are also citizens of a wider constituency of human conscience and human engagement. We cannot exempt ourselves from the debate which is going on - which extends far beyond Europe and which I think we can influence - about the balance, in our time, between the past and the present, between the regional and the central, between the developed and the developing world, between - to use Camus's phrase - the civilised and the creative. I don't think it matters so much what we call the opposing sides of this argument. I think it is all one debate.
But it is a painful debate. I think we should be clear about that. There are deeply held feelings and fears on both sides. The fact is that in the modern world the extraordinary movement of peoples, the onset of communications, the rapid growth of economic exchange and an almost surreal technological advance have brought us back, figuratively speaking, to where the West stood when printing was discovered. A new age is beginning. Not just of economic and political organisation, but of actual differences in perception: of truly momentous shifts in the way we perceive ourselves as human beings. For all the advantages and privileges of this moment, we would be foolish if we didn't recognise its main peril: that it has opened a huge rift between our present and our past, between the traditions which shaped all of us - which are dear to many of us - and the contemporary quicksand of images and identities, where almost nothing stands still long enough to become a tradition.
We can't walk away from this debate. It has a meaning for us all. It will shape the way we think about Europe; the way many other peoples think about Europe. As communication and bureaucracy draw our world together, we can see more clearly the treasures of individuality and distinctness. And when distinction and division cause misunderstanding, we realise the advantages of instant access and common interests. But it is not a smooth process. It's an anxious and untidy one. What I have tried to suggest here today is that the gap between those differences and that unity may be more illusory than real. But I don't think any of the interests on either side - those who fear losing individuality and those who fear being obstructed by it - I don't think any of these interests can be reassured until the debate has been fully aired.
In this area, it seems to me that the press have a powerful and constructive role. No politician, no Head of State can have a completely unshadowed view of the press. But no one can be blind to the enormous advantages of a contemporary debate, conducted in many languages, across many frontiers, engaging many cultures. And operating through the effective and instant access of daily editions and weekly journals. You are, after all, the gatekeepers of the images of contemporary life. The difficulty we all have - which you face every day - of fitting fragments of meaning into their past and present context is part of a process of understanding. And as we deal with those fragments we are forced to remember that this continent is layered with languages, signposts, cultures, memories. We will never unify them unless we honour their differences. We cannot honour those differences unless we support this debate which is so concerned with the past and present of this continent, with its central identity and its marginal distinctiveness.
Each community has a part to play in this vital debate. I think we in Ireland have something special to contribute. As an island people we have a poignant sense of the dangers of isolation. As a people who have shaped a literature and culture far out of proportion to our size and opportunity, we understand the need for communication. AS medieval scholars, our monks had a deep sensitivity to the wider Christian Europe. But we also know how precious are the limits and excellencies of the parish. "I have lived in important places/times when great events were decided', wrote one of our modern poets, Patrick Kavanagh. And he didn't mean the time of Munich or the Second World War, on the eve of which he wrote that poem. He meant the momentous events of a small local community.
I'm very aware that I haven't provided any answers here or offered any conclusions. I don't think there are any. But the dream of community - of the larger one learning from the excellencies of its constituent parts - that is certainly a powerful dream. It has taken hold of very many of us. After so much suffering, so much division on this continent, it is a wonderful outcome that the dream exists at all. In his book on the course of the Danube, Claudio Magris spoke of "the magic, secret word that throws open the prison of history". It is a tribute to so much that has been suffered and imagined on this ground that so many of us want that word to be Europe.