On October 24 former President of Latvia Vaira Vike-Freiberga delivered the second annual Christopher J. Makins Lecture at the House of Sweden in Washington, DC. The event was organized by the Atlantic Council of the United States. Dr. Vike-Freiberga was introduced by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski as “a symbol of the New Europe,” noting the parallels between her own amazing journey and that of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe who suffered under Communist tyranny. The former president of Latvia expressed her gratitude to NATO and the EU for their acceptance of Latvia as an equal partner. She emphasized the need for constant transformation of these institutions along the themes of engagement, openness, and readiness. During the question and answer session, Dr. Vike-Freiberga was asked about her views on resolution of the situation in Kosovo, about how to achieve greater solidarity within NATO regarding the strengthening of democracy in Afghanistan. The guests were interested in hearing the president’s view on forming closer cooperation between NATO and the EU. The lecture was very well-attended; participants included diplomats, experts in international affairs and security policy, as well as political analysts and media representatives. The Christopher J. Makins lecture series was created in 2005 to honor Christopher Makins, a diplomat and intellectual leader in the policy community who served as president of the Atlantic Council for six years before his untimely passing in January 2006. For more information on this particular event, please see the Atlantic Council website. Below please find a transcript of the speech: It’s truly a pleasure and an honor for me to be standing here today, on the occasion of this second Christopher Makins Lecture and to be following in such very big, large footsteps and such very large shoes as those of the person who was so kindly introducing me tonight. It’s a pleasure to be here in the House of Sweden. For a Latvian, it is a symbolically meaningful place to be, for there was a time when the largest city in the Swedish kingdom was not Stockholm, as you might have believed, but Riga, the city of my birth. And those were the days that Latvians long after remembered as the good old days of the Swedish kings. But things change, and they keep changing, and that is what my topic will be tonight: about change, about transformation, and about its impact on the common security of the Euro-Atlantic community, with particular emphasis and reference to NATO and the summit that was held in Riga last fall and the transition to the next one, to be held in Bucharest at the beginning of next year. We have seen in the last seventeen years the sort of changes in Europe that we had never expected to happen so quickly, I think – all of us who had been waiting for them most of our lives. And it’s my belief that even the very professional and the well-endowed secret services of a great many countries, whose job it was to keep abreast of developments , both overt and covert, in the former Soviet Union, were taken short by the speed with which the Soviet Union imploded and collapsed. That is a topic by itself, as to the reasons why it did so. We have defenders of the unique role of President Gorbachev in that process, who is often credited with the liberalization that allowed, among others, the three Baltic countries to regain their freedom. That is not how he is remembered in the Baltic countries, where people will quote any number of pronouncements of his where he violently opposed the idea of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania seceding from that union into which they had been forcefully included and regaining their independence. This independence had remained recognized de jure by most of the free world (certainly by the United States and its allies) – and the dream of this independence had remained in the hearts and minds of Latvians, both those who remained at home and those who fled to the West, becoming scattered to the four corners of the world, having chosen uncertainty with freedom over illusory security back home along with oppression under a totalitarian system. There were many who thought that by staying home they would be more secure – and I count my relatives among them – many who thought at the time of decision that it was too dangerous to leave on ships that were constantly being torpedoed, with corpses washed up on the shores of Latvia. For indeed many of those who ventured into the unknown did perish, including my little sister, who died within six weeks of leaving Latvia.. It was a perilous road that we chose, the road into the unknown, but it was equally perilous to remain behind. For my parents, it was a choice that was dictated by their inability to accept a system that they felt was built upon lies, on lies about history, on lies about the present, on lies about the future and about the situation into which Latvia had been brought under that new regime. These lies started with a total denial of the bloodthirsty and tyrannical aspects of the communist system and went on with a denial of the achievements, the great achievements that the three Baltic republics had managed in their brief period of independence between the two World Wars. My parents could not stomach the constant propaganda of a militantly atheistic and militantly “anti-bourgeois” regime, as they called it; that denigrated and denied all the values that my parents, their generation and the generations before them had been brought up with as being Christian values, as being humanistic values, as being European values. It was a very hard choice that people had to make. Leave everything behind and choose freedom and the unknown; remain within familiar surroundings; live under oppression and risk deportation to Siberia. For the mass deportations, which had started on June 14, 1941, resumed with renewed violence after the end of the war and the second occupation of Latvia by the USSR. There were wave after wave of mass deportations, where people were simply picked up in the middle of the night according to a list made up beforehand according to orders from Moscow. The first requirement was to have a large number of people deported, the main aim being to sow terror among the population, to extinguish any resistance and to ascertain obedience to the system.. It took several years before resistance was extinguished, but there is no denying that terror does work, it does leave an effect. Terror does, in fact, manage to terrorize people. While terror can manage to control people’s speech and outer behavior, however, it cannot influence the deeper thoughts of their minds nor extinguish their hopes and ideals. This is what the system didn’t realize, hat in the three Baltic countries, the people had had a taste of independence and of freedom and for that reason the urge to recover it some day could not be extinguished. Thus for many years, artists and especially poets kept finding ways of hoodwinking the censors, of expressing thoughts that had to be read between the lines and that conveyed a pride in one’s heritage, a sense of one’s identity, a belief in human dignity and the rights of both individuals and nations of making their choices about how they would like to live and what basic principles and values they would like to follow. It is precisely because of their earlier experience of freedom that the three Baltic countries especially, among all the others that had been forcefully incorporated into the Soviet Union, were so eager and anxious to turn towards the West – a West which to which they had belonged since the Middle Ages, since the conquests of the Middle Ages, but that also had introduced them to the rest of the European world. They had a dream and a commitment to regaining their rightful place in a Europe no longer divided by artificial lines of separation and no longer split into spheres of influence, they wanted to become part of a Europe whole and free, they wanted to get in touch again with all the European nations from which they had been kept isolated behind the Iron Curtain for nearly half a century. The path that we followed since independence, and that of many other nations, has been one of transformation, of change, of reforms. And change is stressful, as psychologists will tell you, and reforms have social consequences that frequently are painful. It is not easy to switch from one system to another just in a matter of days or months or even years. It takes a tremendous amount of belief and faith in the reasons for doing so, a conviction that you’re doing the right thing, that all the efforts that you’re expending, the suffering that you have to go through, has a reason and a purpose, and that ultimately it’s going to be the right thing to do. It was particularly difficult for the older generation for whom the old system had provided a sort of security – a security in poverty, but also in equality; the ease of familiarity that came from long years of living under it and of not knowing anything else while being cut off from the world. But even they – and I have met many of them – realized that truly the time had come for a change. And the time of change that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union was one that heralded also a change in Western Europe, and I think that it inescapably also had echoes here in North America. In the United States and Canada, the many people from behind the Iron Curtain who had found refuge there and rebuilt their lives after the Second World War, had encouraged the governments, those of both the United States and Canada, to continue defending the rights to independence of the Baltic countries and the other captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe. The first steps that our nations took having been so difficult, it was helpful to have models to follow. We had to try, in a way, to leapfrog the development that Western Europe had been allowed by fate, by history, by circumstance to follow since the end of the Second World War. We had been denied it; they had been free to progress. They had found peace and prosperity and harmony, both under the security umbrella of the NATO alliance and within a community that started as a simple pragmatic steel-and-coal agreement between six nations and ultimately grew to 15 already strongly integrated European countries and that acted as a magnet to all those countries wishing to achieve that same peace, that same stability, the same harmony within society and with one’s neighbors as they had been able to achieve. And here, I think, was a historical moment, when difficult decisions had to be made by those nations already in the clubs, both of them – the European Union and NATO. Would they be ready to embrace these countries fully? Would they be ready to accept them as their equals? Would they be ready to bring them into these clubs that had formed over the years, which they had worked hard to build on a strong foundation of common values, of interaction over many, many years, of interaction among European countries as well as interaction across the ocean? Here were these nations to proceed, all of a sudden free of oppression, an unknown future before them, and looking for signposts, for indicators on how to find their way. We must remain eternally grateful to those nations that were “in the club” for understanding the importance of that crucial turn in history, for understanding the importance for these newly freed nations to find models, models for governance, models for implanting the rule of law, models of how to run democracies. Not ready-made models identical in all their details, for the countries of Europe differ from each other in so many customs and concrete ways of running things, but models in terms of the same fundamental principles. The democratic nations have all been built on the same solid foundations: a belief in the rule of law, the rights of the individual as well as the rights of nations, large or small, to have their voice and to be heard, so that Germany and Luxembourg, for example, have an equal voice within the European Union. And it is not a matter of the larger and the stronger imposing their will on the weaker, as had been the case throughout Europe’s long and very bloody history. In that sense, the European Union was a real breakthrough in European history: the ability of France and Germany to make peace, they who had fought for territory, for land, for influence, for natural resources for the last three wars, and for centuries before that. It was a real breakthrough to form a community between nations that at various times in previous history had been bitter enemies and that had, as in the case of France and Britain, a Hundred Years’ War that actually lasted 116 years. Talk about resentment and enmity that could not be stopped for such a long time! That Europe that was ready to turn a page on past resentments and enmities, that Europe that had enjoyed democracy and freedom, now had a decision to make, a choice with far-reaching consequences: open its doors and make it possible for the newly freed nations to enter them and join their community, or close the doors and leave these nations forever outside to fend for themselves as best they may. If the choice was made not to accept them, there was a real possibility that they might fall under the influence of what had now become the Russian Federation, a country shorn of a great many territories that had been around its rim, but not shorn of its ambitions and of its desire for greatness nor for its thirst to be a determining power in the world and in world affairs. More specifically, the Russian Federation showed every intention of retaining its sway over the countries that had been formerly part of the Soviet Union against their will, regarding them quite openly as part of its spheres of influence. This meant that the Russian Federation actually wanted to keep the dividing lines that had been established by the USSR through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the pact between Hitler and Stalin, back in 1939, as an integral part of its foreign policy. The secret protocol of that pact, that had been denounced as immoral by the newly freed Russian Federation, a country at last freed from the tyranny of Communism, and hopefully open to democratic development, was thus in fact being revived and defended. and an integral part of its foreign policy. When I took office in 1999 and we started lobbying members of NATO about Latvia’s accession to the Alliance , one of the arguments heard at that time was the following: it was very doubtful whether NATO should enlarge at all because, after all, it had been created during the Cold War. It had been created as a collective defense against the threat of the Soviet Union as a nuclear power, but also against its threat as a country with an ideology which was completely alien and contrary to the values held in the Western world. The Soviet Union had openly preached world revolution and the desire to submit as many countries as possible i to that same system, through a process of revolution analogous to the one that tsarist Russia had done through in 1917. But now that the Soviet Union was no more, what need was there for enlarging NATO? The decisions taken at that time truly were historic, although not all politicians from the West were ready to act or to act quickly. They did have their doubts, and we had to work very hard, all those waiting at the door, to do two things. First, to try and convince our future partners, hopefully, of the wisdom of taking such a step, of the wisdom of creating a Europe whole, free and united, no longer divided but united under the same purpose and based on the same values. But at the same time, we had to do an awful lot of homework and make all these efforts I mentioned to come up to scratch, to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with others who had had decades to develop what we now had to do in a few short years. And in that sense, both institutions – NATO as well as the European Union -were extremely helpful in giving us guidelines and criteria as to what we should achieve. For NATO, it wasn’t just a matter of building up our armed forces, which in the case of Latvia, for instance, were nonexistent at the time when we regained our independence. It was not until 1994-1995 when finally, with the help of America, we managed to get some 80,000 former Red Army troops evacuated from our territory. We had to start our armed forces and defense system absolutely from zero, from scratch. In addition to establishing our own defense capability, what NATO asked of us was to do so on the basis of democratic principles and the rule of law. Fortunately for us, these requirements were very much the same in a general sense than those of the European Union, with the difference that the European Union went into much more detail in its requirements for harmonizing our legislation and answering to countless extremely concrete regulations. The European Union would tell us whether cucumbers could be curved or straight. (Laughter.) It would tell us that chicken coops that had been recently bought in chicken farms and were 27 centimeters in height wouldn’t do for Europe; they had to be 29 centimeters high. (Laughter.) They had to be scrapped and large sums of money spent by various farms to abide by these standards. The European Union is no joke for a candidate country. There are 31 or 32 chapters that you have to go through; you have to negotiate and you have to comply in every way. And if you don’t comply, the answer is very simple: these are the rules of the club. If you want to join the club, you jolly well have to comply with them, and if you don’t comply, then bye-bye. You stay outside. And that’s certainly a strong inducement for those who do wish to enter. And they always kept telling us, well, you do have a choice; you do have the choice of not doing it. So sometimes, I guess, with gritted teeth but nevertheless with determination to do it, to do it right, we went through all the steps, negotiated the 32 different chapters, and the year 2004 then marked the two accessions, the one to NATO and the one to the European Union. And from then on our world was changed. I remember the day when the NATO flag went up in front of the old castle of Riga, a castle started in the 13th century by the Crusaders, torn down throughout various phases of history and rebuilt again. There was a crowd assembled there. I saw men, women, and children with tears in their eyes. And one old man approached me with his grandson in his arms and he said, Madame President, this is the happiest day of my life because now I can die content with the thought that my children and grandchildren will never have to go through what I experienced as a deportee to Siberia, and that I experienced as somebody who survived and returned, but still continued to be repressed for the rest of my days. This is why, because of these emotional moments, that we, the new members of both NATO and the European Union, we feel so strongly about the open-door policy of both of these institutions. We have seen from our own experience how important it is to have guidelines, to have interaction, to have debate, to have assistance, in order to catch up, to leapfrog decades of development in a few short years. And I think our success, the success story of these small countries – Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania – the success of all the others, Central and European nations, is an indication of how much can be done to change and to transform, if there is a will and a determination in the hearts of the population, if they are ready to make sacrifices, and if they have friends who care for them and believe in them and help them along the way, just as we did throughout these travails. We feel very strongly that those countries that are still beyond the pale, those countries where the population longs for a different way of life but, for a variety of reasons, they have not managed to reach that level which we have achieved, that they, too, should be given a chance. They should be assisted, encouraged, and certainly their wishes should be primordial, and not those of anybody else. When I started my lobbying on behalf of Latvia, I often heard an argument, mostly from journalists, but also from a few politicians: How dare you even dream of joining NATO when you are situated where you are, right on the border with the Russian Federation, and we know that the Russian Federation hates NATO? They think it’s obsolete, that it should have disappeared with the Warsaw Pact. It should not exist, as President Putin has told me personally. He considered NATO an irrelevancy, an anachronism, something that had no reason for being. Why would anybody wish to join it? But most of all, it would make Russia very unhappy if we did. And I have always said – and it’s a sad thing, but I have had to repeat it over and over again: what are you really saying, when you say, you can’t become members because it will make Russia unhappy? What is it you’re really saying? Are you saying that there are entire nations, people and populations, that there are millions of people who have been put on this Earth for no other purpose than to make Russia happy? Put that way, you realize how absurd such a requirement is. Just think of a country the size of Russia, such an enormous country with enormous natural resources(resources whose price keeps climbing through the sky from year to year), a country with a long history and traditions and culture, a country full of extremely talented people, who, hopefully will be able someday to make it a truly great country in every proper sense of the word. Do the people of such a country really need Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Georgia, Ukraine, to live only for the sole purpose of making them happy? Isn’t that an insult to the Russian people - to claim that they can’t do it alone, that they need our help? A hundred and thirty-five million Russians need 1.1 million Estonians and 2.3 million Latvians to make them happy? It doesn’t make sense. I think they can make themselves happy. They should. They should work at it and they should try. There’s an argument also about encirclement and danger to Russia from countries such as Georgia (or Ukraine, for that matter) establishing closer integration with transatlantic defense structures, with NATO. There are arguments that the membership action plan should not be given to Georgia, and guess what the argument is: It would not make Russia happy. In fact, it would make them very unhappy. The same arguments against hold in that case, as well. What we would like to see is countries like Ukraine achieving political stability. We would like to see them achieve social harmony and social peace. We would like their populations to have a fruitful dialogue among the different parts of the country with a different history and different traditions – the kind of dialogue that allowed bitter enemies like France and Germany to come together for what was the beginnings of the European Union. It can be done among formerly bitter enemies. Surely it can be done within the same country, even within different ethnic groups, even within populations of different pasts. I’m convinced that it can be done and that it will be done, and on that day, of course, it will be entirely up to the Ukrainian people to decide. Do they feel, in their heart of hearts, that their historical ties with Russia are primordial and that they wish to maintain a special partnership with the Russian Federation? That is entirely possible, and it would be their free choice. Or do they wish, as President Yushchenko and supporters of the Orange Revolution have been saying, (and saying forcefully), that they would wish for Ukraine to follow the same path that the Baltic countries had followed; to turn itself towards the West where its traditions lie, as well as important parts of its history – its close history with Poland? Is it the desire of its people to be part of a modern Europe that is open to the world, that is open to collaboration with the North American continent? That too, could be their free choice. In this context about collaboration, just a few words about the old and new Europe: The friendship that the former communist countries feel for the United States is one largely of gratitude for the unfailing stance that the United States has taken over the decades in standing up and speaking up for the rights of the captive nations. The United States have done so, I think, longer and louder than a number of countries in Europe, such as France, for example, where historical traditions split the political spectrum into very sharp divisions between the left and the right. We have to remember that the left, which is the left of the intellectuals, of the thinkers, of the very pride of France and French culture, came, way back in the 1930s, under the influence of a very clever man by the name of Willi Munzenberg, who established a powerful network of agents and fellow travelers among the opinion makers of that time. Many of the talented writers and intellectuals of that time became passionately convinced that communism was the royal way to progress for humanity. They believed that a continuation of what the ideals of the French Revolution had done for the rights of the people, for the rights of the individual, was being successfully carried out in the Soviet Union; They saw Stalin as their hero, as the embodiment of everything that they held dear. That tradition among the French intelligentsia has left its mark. It has left its mark in that split in France, which is often very deep, between the left and the right – (a right which, in the ’30s, was just as far right and truly fascist as the left was far left and Stalinist), but the ideological gap remains very deep between the modern right and the modern left as well. This is something that has had an effect on the internal coherence of NATO as well. France has not always been as ready as other countries to engage militarily in NATO, or to do so in the same way as the other partners. There’s a possibility that this may change under President Sarkozy. I think it would be all to the good, for the good of France and for the good of the rest of the allies. Right now, we are in a period of historical change again. And the NATO that was created to protect countries and keep them safe in the Cold War period, the NATO that helped so many countries like mine to achieve freedom, democracy, and increasing prosperity in spite of various difficulties, that NATO has to change again. It has to consider how far it will extend its security umbrella. It has to consider how close a collaboration and through what mechanisms it will continue to have with countries that have declared themselves neutral, like Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Austria. How will it collaborate with countries that have already engaged in common military action with NATO forces, countries very far away, like New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, and Japan? And how will it engage other countries in between, in what sort of manner, in what sort of way? My feeling is that whatever the concrete mechanisms chosen, engagement should be the word. Openness should be the byword. Readiness to accept and to encourage is the only way to ensure a safer future for us all. The fight against terrorism and extremism is only one part of this overall outreach. I think that apart from military strength and the ability to react militarily, we have to have an outreach between civilizations, between religions. We need to have a deeper understanding of what it is that pushes people into positions of sacrificing their lives for causes that seem so illusory to the rest of us. There’s a great deal to be done, but I think that it can be done by all of us working together and finding as many supporters and partners and friends as we can. I don’t think that we can afford to turn our backs on anybody, large or small, near or far, if they show the same readiness to stand up for the same values that we hold dear and that we wish to live by. It’s not easy to do in a world divided in so many ways, between north and south, between rich and poor; in a world of violent confrontation between people of different religious convictions, with radically differing concepts of ethics, and of what constitutes morality and decency. But we have no choice. We do have to do it. And I hope that bodies such as this distinguished audience here, that you with your efforts and your commitment and your convictions, your ability to convince your elected leaders, your ability to engage in dialogue with many partners across the world, that you too will do your part. Be you elected officials or private citizens, I think that every one of us can help. Every one of us can make a difference. And I wish you all in your future endeavors the satisfaction that you – you personally – have done all that you could to make this world a better place for all of us to live. I wish you well. Thank you very much.