00:17President Metzola, dear Roberta, President von der Leyen, dear Ursula,
00:29Honourable Members of the European Parliament, Distinguished Colleagues,
00:35Thank you for granting me the honour of addressing you at the beginning of this decisive session.
00:44I shall speak to you today about the way in which our response to the current geopolitical rupture
00:56must include a new dimension.
01:01But first of all, I should like to refer to something older,
01:07something which considerably predates EU-Canada relations
01:13because the depth of our bonds, those which unite us, cannot be measured by trade.
01:21Or, what is written in treaties, alone, our bonds are deeply rooted in our lands.
01:31In the heart of Germany, above Weimar, there is a wooded ridge called Ettersberg.
01:39And for decades, Goethe walked, thought, and wrote there.
01:44An oak on that ridge came to bear his name,
01:47a living monument to the highest ideals of European culture.
01:53As the 20th century turned dark, that same oak became trapped behind the barbed wire of Buchenwald,
02:00a silent witness to humanity's deepest moral failure.
02:06Goethe understood that ideals must be fought for,
02:10that values do not defend themselves.
02:13Indeed, at the end of Faust, the old man's last vision
02:19is of a free people on free ground.
02:34Freedom and life must be earned every single day.
02:44Every day.
02:51Every day, not once in 1945, or 1956, or 1989.
02:57Every day, including this one.
03:02Freedom was gained thanks to the heroism of the European wartime resistance.
03:12It was nurtured by the founders of the European coal and steel community
03:17in the aftermath of war.
03:21It was fostered by the creation of the European community.
03:27It was preserved by the establishment of the European Union,
03:32and it was developed thanks to the European Union's enlargement
03:39after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
03:40The values embodied by that Goethe oak have also endured,
03:45in part because the ideals that flourished beneath its branches
03:50also crossed the Atlantic.
03:55In 1917, amidst the devastation of the Battle of Vimy Ridge,
04:00a young Canadian lieutenant named Leslie Miller
04:03gathered a handful of acorns from the shattered European landscape.
04:07He carried them home and planted them in Canadian soil near Milken, Ontario,
04:14where they grew into a majestic forest.
04:17A century later,
04:19a profound circle of renewal was completed
04:22because grafts from Leslie Miller's Canadian oaks
04:27were repatriated to France
04:29and replanted on the same Vimy Ridge where they had been born.
04:33— Thank you.
Comments