European Commission - Speech Speech of First Vice-President Frans Timmermans at 'Prague European Summit' Conference Brussels, 13 November 2015 Thank you very much and my apologies to those who expected me here yesterday, but I had to go to the European Council to report on my visit to Turkey in the days before that. It is always a particular pleasure to be in Prague, which is, I think, one of the central places of our shared European history. Everything that went right and especially everything that went wrong took place in Prague in some way or form. Some of my favourite writers have Prague as the centre of their universe, mostly they wrote in German, but this has also been a multilingual city throughout history, and especially now. I will come to my speech in a moment but I was thinking on the way here about one writer, a German writer, who was a fierce opponent of the Nazi regime and who has written this big book about the First World War, All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque. Remarque also wrote a small book about the plight of refugees, German refugees, who fled the Nazi regime and went like ghosts in the whole of Europe, travelling from place to place, seeing where they could stay, choosing which country would be best for them. He describes this very precisely, saying for instance: in Austria police beat you up and you would only get to stay for a couple of days before they kick you out again. Whereas in Prague, you can stay for a few months, if you are friendly with the police they will give you a permit to stay for a few months and you can live a better life; so now I am swimming across the river to go to the Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia. If you read these books about the 1930s, so many parallel elements come to mind about the plight of refugees today, some of whom flee the same brutal sort of regime as Remarque did and others did in 1930s Germany. So, anyway, all this comes to mind when I am in Prague and perhaps I can use this first minute of my speech to encourage all of you who do not read to start reading, especially people like Roth, Remarque and Kafka, who have described a road that is far less removed from our world than we sometimes think. Anyway, when we took office as a Commission a year ago, we said that migration would be a challenge, but we did not know it would be a challenge to the level we are facing now. We also know that this migration crisis comes on the back of other crises we had to face, crises that have subsequently undermined our self-confidence as Europeans. I would start with the beginning of the terrorist attacks at the start of this millennium. After that the reaction by the Western world to these terrorist attacks also undermined our self-confidence in the sense that we later came to the conclusion that what was done in Iraq perhaps wasn’t the West’s finest hour to put it mildly, and it did undermine the confidence of our own people, in our own institutions and our political wisdom. Then we got the banking crisis. We got the economic crisis. Again, the institutions were challenged, the trust in institutions went down. Additionally, in all this time we had the terrorist threat all over Europe we had to cope with other challenges as well, and ongoing changes in our societies. And the migration crisis, the refugee crisis, is in a way the last element in what turns out to be a perfect storm for European cooperation. I want to say it in those clear terms, because I am worried about the state of Europe, but I am also worried about the future of our European project if we are not able to cope collectively with what is a collective challenge. The temptation on the national level to play to the fears of people is great. It is I think a well-known psychological phenomenon, that fear as a fuel for political rhetoric but also political activity is both very tempting and very dangerous. It is tempting because fear has the characteristic of going out and looking for information to justify itself. So people are afraid and mostly open to facts or elements that confirm that they are right to be afraid. And for politicians that is very tempting: “people are afraid, they look for the confirmation of their fear, let's cater to that, great fun, I'll be popular!” And I think you see that in almost all Member States of the European Union the politicians that cater to that fear increase in popularity. But, they can only do this free of charge, because there are other politicians who take their responsibilities seriously and try to find solutions. If everyone gave in to the temptation of fear politics, it would be the end of politics, because policy would be no longer possible and there would be a Hobbesian confrontation in Europe as we have known in our past – and I wish it would not repeat itself. If there is one lesson we have learnt in European integration over the last 60 years, it is that treaties, laws, are a better alternative to power and imposition. Replacing power struggles with a system based on the rule of law is fundamental to the way we want to continue our European construction. If we take that element out of it, we go back at best to a nineteenth century situation where European nations compete or face economic and military power, and at worst in a confrontational mode based on false ideological differences. One of my concerns, my worries, is that we believe too much that the European construction is indestructible. I am not going to say today that it is going to be destroyed, but it is not indestructible, nothing man-made is indestructible, everything that is being made can also be undone. The European project is no different, any political construction can be undone, but I think European construction merits to be supported, renovated, adapted if necessary, made more flexible if necessary. But it is essential for the future. I believe the biggest success of the European construction was the end of European divide. But it happened so quickly — I mean, in historical terms a quarter of century is the blink of an eye, and in that blink of an eye, what seemed unthinkable became a reality. I see many young people in this room for whom the Cold War means history. For me it is personal experience: I was trained as a soldier to fight the Warsaw pact. I remember as I was a student in France in the mid-1980s, at a conference comparable to this, a French general said that he was very worried that one day, Germany would be reunified and this Germany would be essentially neutral. But the Germans in the room stood up as one man, saying that the general was fantasizing, dreaming, there will be no Germany reunification, it is not possible, the world is as it is. It was in 1985. In history, what seems unthinkable before it happens, is later portrayed by the same people as unavoidable once it did happen. And so, that is why, with my personal experience in mind, I want to stay a strong advocate for the European project, because what is unthinkable – if we are not careful – might become reality. We need to defend this project. And the first line of defence of this project today is the issue of refugees. I was talking about the greatest success of the project which was the European reunification, the enlargement, but it happened so quickly and it was so far reaching that our people on both sides of what was previously a dividing line sometimes did not get enough time to digest this, to understand what the consequences are. And so today in the refugee crisis there are frictions and sometimes misunderstandings between East and West about how to provide solidarity in this crisis. Part of this can be explained by the fact that we had different histories in the twentieth century: and the differences in history define also the difference in attitudes towards what is foreign, what is different, what is new. There should be more understanding – it is not a justification! To say, we accept that Europe has a different history and therefore we cannot take refugees: that’s not a justification. But it is not a justification either in the West to disregard the difference in history. If we understand each other better, if we do not lose the capacity to understand and respect historic differences in our countries, if we know that we can come to terms with that, we can find solutions that everybody can support. I know for a fact and I’m absolutely convinced about this, that if we go down the road of every man and woman for himself or herself in the refugee crisis, this will not just affect the way we deal with migration and refugees, it will have a profound influence on all the other areas of European cooperation. So fixing this is a prerequisite for fixing other problems we have in Europe. And can we fix this? Of course we can fix this. Not in the sense that we can put an end to migration flows. Migration is part of the world today, is part of Europe today, and will be part of Europe today, tomorrow and the day after that.