Topic: Openning Ceremony

Openning Ceremony

Václav Havel
Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed friends,

I sincerely welcome you here, all important guests from home and abroad, and I would like to extend a special welcome to Sir Nicolas Winton, who during the war saved over 600 Czech children of Jewish origin. He—and this is interesting—never spoke about it and it was only recently that it came out. He will soon celebrate his 100th birthday!

Allow me to say a few words about the history of Forum 2000. Years ago when I began with my first visits to various countries on different continents I suddenly and urgently realized immense contradictions in the current world and great threats facing it. Eleven years ago we decided—together with Elie Wiesel and Yohei Sasakawa—to organize a conference and invite the representatives of different religions, various civilization spheres, different countries and different professions to discuss these issues. We of course thought that it would be one event only. Now we are experiencing the fact that it is taking place for the eleventh time in a row, which among other things proves the great seriousness of these issues and how many people think it is important to discuss them. The world will not change overnight by talking about it at conferences. Nevertheless, I believe that it is important because at the beginning there is always a word.

This year’s Forum 2000 conference theme is Freedom and Responsibility. What is the relation between freedom and responsibility? I think that freedom is what actually opens the space for responsibility and less responsibility in that space makes freedom more shallow.

What is responsibility really? Where does it come from? I thought about this many times over and I always arrived at the conclusion that responsibility is an answer to a certain challenge that comes to us from the world as a whole. Responsibility is therefore anchored somewhere very deep; it is behind everything.

Responsibility is our obligation which is, to a certain extent, a metaphysical one. It is a commitment to a special partner, to the memory of being, to a certain complexity of the world. It is our commitment to what gives meaning to everything that exists. This is how I personally feel, but maybe I am mistaken. Let this be one of the themes of this year’s Forum.


MESSAGE TO FORUM 2000 CONFERENCE

José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission

First of all, I would like to congratulate Václav Havel and his team for organizing this Forum 2000 conference. I very much regret that I am not able to come in person to listen to all the participant’s ideas over the coming three days. I particularly appreciate this year’s theme: Freedom and Responsibility. And what better event to debate this important concept than Forum 2000. As Václav Havel has often himself said, his conferences are not aimed at directly influencing immediate events, but to identify the threats through a free and responsible debate. Freedom is not something to take lightly, nor should it be taken for granted. Detach liberty from responsibilities that flow from it and our freedom is diminished. So I think that political leaders and journalists have a responsibility to avoid this easy political option, the populist option of making scapegoats for problems that we are all responsible for. Also, business and industrial leaders have corporate responsibilities they should honor when they gain the benefits of free and open markets. Also, the leaders in culture and art, writers, philosophers, and also religious leaders have a responsibility to defend freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of religion.

I would like to share with you the critical experience which contributed to defining my life as a European citizen and someone engaged very much in political life. I was a member of the Portuguese government through those most memorable events of 1989, which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and to the Velvet Revolution in the city where you meet today. And when I saw thousands and thousands of European citizens fighting for their freedom, I understood that political liberty was the goal, to join a free Europe was the inspiration. It was like what happened in Portugal some years before when we also had a democratic revolution. All my generation was greeting those moments with great emotion; we were looking at Prague and also thinking about Lisbon and the transition to democracy, and Europe, united and free Europe as our common inspiration. And when those thousands and thousands of people in the streets of Prague succeeded, I want to tell you that I very much shared their joy and victory. I believe that whenever people gain political freedom, it is a triumph for any free person in any part of the world. From those days, I tell you, Havel has become a political reference to me as to many people of my generation, in my country and in many other parts of Europe. He is indeed a symbol of freedom. We have always to remind ourselves that freedom and solidarity, along with democracy and the rule of law, are the core values on which our Europe has been built. But they are not just European values, they should be seen as universal values and they can never be taken for granted. They need to be permanently nurtured. I am sure this is what you will do during these next three days and I wish you a very full and fruitful debate. Thank you.

Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada
Mr. Havel, Distinguished Guests, Chers amis,
I would like to extend my greetings to the people of the Czech Republic and to President Havel who has invited me to join voices with you.
This is an amazing opportunity for us to take a step back together and to see the world in a broader perspective. I would like to begin with two lessons we can learn from the wisdom passed on to us by the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Let us listen to the genius of the peoples whose ancestors first inhabited the expanses of lakes and forests, mountains and plains, snow and ice that cover the vast Canadian landscape. According to an Inuit legend, in order to obtain enough food from the ocean to feed their families, fishers had to first pay tribute to Sedna, goddess of the sea. To not do so, or worse, to abuse her generosity, was to risk having the ocean unleash her fury on the unrepentant fishers. That is the first lesson: if we do not treat things with care and respect, they can turn against us.
Furthermore, in a number of legends, the crow becomes a child and brings light to the world. Or the coyote begins speaking with man and the moon. Or the wind in the leaves tells the traveler which path to take. Or the spirits of the dead are the stars that shine in the sky. What these legends are telling us is that all forms of life are interconnected, from the infinitely big to the infinitely small. That is the second lesson.
At the start of the third millennium, as borders are blurred and being redrawn, the wisdom of our elders rings out louder than ever. Because our horizons—which were for so long limited to the village, region, or country in which we lived—have now been expanded to the size of the world and require even greater solidarity. This unprecedented openness to the world requires us to work together to redefine the ties that bind us to one another and—as the indigenous peoples of the Americas believe—to redefine the ties that bind us to every form of life.
The extent of inequality in the world, the many assaults on nature, the withdrawal into one’s identity when faced with diversity and our obsession with security in light of the rise of all sorts of fundamentalism have all caused great anxiety.
Where is the world going? Where is the world going when the economy is considered an end in and of itself? When globalization benefits the rich while the world’s most vulnerable people are dismissed? When growth is based on wasting resources and is indifferent to its environmental consequences? When, in the name of progress, we force everyone to be a part of the same politico-economic order? When openness to other cultures becomes a pretext for the establishment of a “monoculture”, as Lévi-Strauss said?
In a world in which our fates are irrevocably linked, we should be very wary of leaning towards a commercial logic without any safeguards, one in which “everyone for himself” or “for his clan” would make the rules. We should be wary because today’s challenges affect the entire world. We have no choice but to expand our definition of civic responsibility. We have no choice but to enhance our sense of freedom and, I hope, our sense of fraternity. Our freedom should no longer be defined in terms of individual interests; it should include everyone’s interests. We must dare to dream of a freedom that would also be a global conscious.

Back in the 1940s, during the Second World War, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that the concept of freedom should mark the passage from individual to collective. She said that to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future. I think freedom is getting every woman and every man involved in building a better community and making it their responsibility.
Même dans les démocraties les plus évoluées, il faut constamment reconquérir la liberté par notre quête de sens, la réanimer par nos propres interrogations, la revitaliser par nos propres aspirations. Assumons pleinement ce pouvoir singulier que nous avons de penser le monde, de le questionner, de le redéfinir, d’en adoucir les assauts, d’en protéger les fragilités, d’en apaiser les douleurs et d’en multiplier les joies. C’est par cet engagement de tous les instants dans le monde et auprès du monde que réside notre plus grande chance d’« humaniser l’humanité », pour reprendre la belle expression de Hannah Arendt. Je dirais qu’il s’agit là d’une responsabilité collective.
Even in the most evolved democracies, we must constantly reconquer freedom in our search for meaning, revive it with our own questioning, and revitalize it through our own aspirations. Let us fully assume our singular power to shape the world, to question it, to redefine it, to soften the blows against it, to protect its fragility, to ease its pain and to increase its joy. Our greatest chance to “humanize humanity,” as Hannah Arendt put it, lies in this tireless commitment in the world and to the world. And I think it is a collective responsibility.

Milan Kundera—whom I am proud to quote here in Prague—said that the “unity of mankind means no escape for anyone anywhere.” It is impossible for us to escape the fact that we belong to the larger human family. On the contrary, we should celebrate how we live together, while respecting our differences, our points of view, and the meaning we give to existence. We should recognize all the experiences humanity has had thus far and learn from them.

Talk to young people, wherever you are, wherever they are. Ask them, for example, their opinion on the environment, and they will tell you in their own words how essential it is that we make this a global fight. Everywhere I have been as Canada’s Head of State—from Ottawa to the Arctic, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and all around the world to Haiti, Algeria, Mali, Ghana, South Africa, Morocco and Brazil—I have met remarkable young people. And they told me something very important. They told me that solidarity is a responsibility. That civic engagement is a promise for the future. That we must now include the entire world in our definition of community. And they define community in a new way, not in terms of ethnicity or even space, but in terms of common values.
Young people do not want to follow in our footsteps. In fact, they are one step ahead of us. They have grown up as communication technologies have evolved, and thus immediately became citizens of the world. They choose to focus on our solidarities rather than our differences. They know what is at stake here: our ability to build a new world together, a world in which each and every one of us can have a better life. A world in which we can find a way to change things for the better. A world in which one person’s freedom is part of everyone else’s responsibilities. A world in which—as the legends of the indigenous peoples of the Americas illustrate—every organism draws its strength and fullness from the life that surrounds it. A world that smiles on everyone and goes down in history as the most beautiful utopia that ever existed. And it is up to us to make that world a reality.
After all, as Aung San Suu Kyi said, it is our vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity that leads us to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and free from fear. May your discussions over the next few days bring us closer to that vision.
Thank you very much.