'We are all in the same boat'

The following comments were made about European and German unity by Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the award ceremony for this year's Konrad Adenauer Prize in Munich.

Europe needs an economically-strong Germany as a motor. With the reunification of our fatherland six years ago, and the return of the countries of middle, eastern and southeastern Europe to the family of nations, our continent today faces new challenges. But, at the same time, we are offered opportunities and prospects we would not even have dared dream of just a few years ago.

Nevertheless, we must remain vigilant. We have been forced to realize that, even with the end of the East-West conflict, hopes of lasting peace in the world have not been fulfilled. I need only mention the bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia.

We Germans would fail in our duty to history were we to lean back contentedly after achieving German unity. Konrad Adenauer's statement that German unity and European unification are two sides of one coin is still valid. For this reason, together with our friends and partners, we must render the unification of Europe irreversible. For us Germans, and for all Europeans, it is a veritable question of destiny. We are now being made to realize that we are all sitting in the same boat.

The great challenges we face force us to cooperate. They cannot be met solely in a nation-state on the part of individual countries. I am thinking not only of the fight against unemployment and of securing Europe's standing as an economic center in the face of rising international competition, but also of the need to improve protection of the environment and to take action against cross-border crime.

We must act together in all of these spheres. If we do not move forward now in matters of European unification, we shall, in the long term, jeopardize everything we have built up over many decades.

Rarely -- if ever -- do historic opportunities recur in short time frames. This could have been said, in fact, of German unification in 1990. We have the choice of either unifying Europe now or waiting. But no one can say if the opportunity will ever come again. What confronts us is both the completion of the work of European unification and the expansion of the European Union (EU). For me, it is an intolerable thought that Poland's western border could remain the EU's permanent eastern border.

In Germany, love of fatherland, love of freedom, patriotism and a sense of "Europeanism" must never again take separate paths. This is the conclusion we must draw from history. Identity derives not least from knowing and accepting one's history and origins.

Our history certainly contains dark and shameful chapters. But it also stands for democratic and peaceful traditions, which we are now taking up again in united Germany. We Germans have reason to be proud of our nation, to its contribution to the culture of humanity ... patriotism is always also a justified expression of being rooted in homeland and origins.

Only this is the source from which steadfastness and orientation flow, particularly in an increasingly confusing world. But the best service we can render our country is to work for the freedom of our people and the observance of the law. As love of freedom and fatherland belong together, so, in the future, patriotism and a European spirit must also be mutually complementary.

All over Europe, love of fatherland must be irreversibly linked to love of freedom and to respect for a neighbor's dignity. In his speech marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, Francois Mitterrand expressed this in the following words: "Europe we are building, but our fatherlands we love. Let us remain true to ourselves. Let us link the past with the future and this will enable us, in peace, to pass on the spirit of this commitment to those who come after us."

Let us, in this spirit, build a European order of peace so that we are able to continue into the 21st century living together in peace and freedom on our continent.