Toespraak EP-voorzitter Schulz over de waarden van de EU, de Nobelprijs en het herdenken van Utoya (en)

Ladies and gentlemen,

The EU is a fascinating project. It is a historical one. Look at the pictures here. If I take the example of my friend, Jose Manuel Durão Barroso i, you see him here with the Prime Minister of Turkey. I presume it was for the opening of the negotiations for Turkey's access to the European Union. But you see on the other side a young man of Portugal, in the uniform of the fascist youth in Portugal. And he as a young boy had to wear the same uniform in a dictatorship of Mr Salazar. And today he is the President, the freely-elected President of the European Commission. This is a fascinating development. It was in 1974. It's not 1949 or '47, it was '74. The European Union is a continuous project of deepening and developing democracy.

Other parts of the world are not democratic and therefore I use the opportunity to make an appeal to the Chinese government to let the Nobel Prize-winner, Liu Xiaobo, to come here to receive the Nobel Prize. I want to remind all of us that we have the privilege as Nobel Prize recipients on behalf of the European Union to be here. Other awarded people couldn't come and therefore an appeal from a democratic community to a dictatorship: release him and let him come to get the Prize here in Oslo.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the exhibition shows the European Union as it is, a fascinating project, as I said, a democracy, a transnational democracy. I am the President of 754 Members from 27 countries. And laws we adopt in the European Parliament are binding for 500 million citizens. And I want to communicate here publicly that I just suggested to the President of the Norwegian Parliament to open a link office of the Parliament of your country in my Parliament because the laws we adopt are in a great number also binding for Norway, so Norway should have an influence. If there are not yet elected Norwegian Members in the European Parliament, at least the Parliament could send us a civil servant to cooperate deeper and more with us.

You see it is an encouragement to be European. And this is not a one-way encouragement from a non-Member State of the European Union, Norway, and the Nobel Prize Committee to go ahead with European integration. Our answer is: come with us.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a chance for me to remind us that nothing is granted for ever. I was some days ago in Washington and at the entrance of the National Archives of the United States it is written: Past is Prologue. But the past is closed. It is a prologue to an open future. And we decide about the future. And when we decide about the future, we decide about the future of our children and their children. Is the future of our children as peaceful, as balanced as our life is today? Is the environment of our children still an environment they can live in? Climate change is not threatening us, it threatens more our children and their children. Past is Prologue. Our contemporary lives, what we are doing now, will be for our children, the past. And therefore it is the prologue of their lives. That's our responsibility.

I was today in Utöya. I thought what I have to say, privately, as a person, not on behalf of my Institution, what I have to say as one of the 500 million citizens of Europe about my feelings related to the Nobel Peace Prize. That was my wish to say it in Utöya. The spirit for which we were awarded. The spirit which was attacked by this gunman on Utöya: peace, respect, mutual understanding, solidarity across your nation, across the race to which you belong, across the colour of your skin, across your beliefs. To respect the individual rights of everybody. That human dignity is guaranteed because we are not all equal here, but we all have equal rights. That is the spirit of the European Union, that is the spirit of States and Nations who create across borders common institutions to prevent that what we have seen on the pictures of Dresden will never be repeated on our continent. But the demons who led to Dresden, to Coventry, to Auschwitz are still alive, as we saw on the island of Utöya. The European Union, with the structures we created - transnational governments, transnational parliaments, transnational institutions - has banned the demons of the 20th century. But we have banned them because the structures control them, keep them under control. If you destroy the structures and the institutions, the demons will be back faster than you believe. That's also a message from Utöya.

And therefore I was there also to pay homage to the victims and the relatives of the victims who paid a price because they believed that our values are the right values. And I want to honour, to conclude with this introduction to the exhibition, to thank you, the Norwegian people, your society, for reacting to this atrocity by saying that more democracy, more tolerance, more mutual respect was the right answer. And therefore you gave an example to the world, an example that you share the values of the European Union expressed in the exhibition here.

Thank you very much.