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this ceremony that encompasses so many hopes and promises. To extol the merits of the Laureates,
to compensate them for their efforts and to reflect on their lives and work is a particularly pleasant
and enriching experience for me.
The Award for International Cooperation has been bestowed on French magistrate Simone
Veil. Not only has she been President of the first European Parliament elected by universal suffrage,
but she has also carried out important missions within that Parliament.
She is also a member of France’s Constitutional Council and President of the Foundation for
the Memory of the Shoah (the Holocaust). In this capacity, she works to ensure that the atrocities
committed against so many millions of people and which she
herself was victim to when she was deported with her family to
Auschwitz are never forgotten. For informing the world of the
horror is the best way to combat it: because, as has been written,
when events experienced by somebody are of such a profound
and dramatic nature, recall and testimony become a duty, for if
life has succumbed to death, it is crucial for memory to come
out of its battle against oblivion victorious.
Simone Veil is convinced that the future belongs to those
who can remember and thereby avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. She maintains that
education for tolerance, teaching children of different cultures to live together and nations, with
their different religions and origins, to cooperate are fundamental to creating new generations of
women and men who refuse to repeat the horror.
Reaching the ideal, and here I quote her own words, of making Europe “a place of freedom,
peace and respect for man’s dignity” depends on these new generations. In a European Union
conceived as a model of peaceful coexistence and integration, Simone Veil’s positive attitude and
her Europeanism emanating faith are an encouragement to us all.
Europe also ties well into the world vision of Italian professor, political scientist and writer
Giovanni Sartori, our Laureate for Social Sciences, who has managed to confront the problems and
recent challenges that Western society is facing from an open, perceptive perspective. Giovanni
Sartori had the good fortune of being born in Florence, that small Tuscan paradise of beauty and
intelligence, and to whose tradition of thinkers he so rightly belongs.
Our world has become ever more complex and diverse, to such an extent that it is sometimes
incomprehensible to our way of thinking. We need the help of people who, like Sartori, are able
to guide us through the myriad doubts and grey areas towards understanding; people who can
hand us that Ariadne’s thread that frees us from the bewilderment that human contradictions and
limitations, cultural diversity and the pressing problems of our times have brought upon us. For, as
he himself has said, “nobody takes an interest in something he does not understand.”
Giovanni Sartori is a thinker who explores the world with a clarity of vision, and to whom
“nothing human is foreign to him”, as the classic saying goes. Controversial issues such as the
world’s overpopulation, immigration, multi-culturalism, new politics, democracy, technology, the
homo videns
—which are some of his major concerns— have been clarified by his intelligence and
his reflections.
Languages have been and will continue to be a key factor for peaceful coexistence and the
coming together of human beings, a vehicle for communication and the dissemination of culture
amongst the planet’s different peoples. One can understand, therefore, the excellence of the work
of the six European cultural institutes that the Award for Communication and Humanities has
been conferred upon this year: the Alliance Française, British Council, Goethe-Institut, Instituto
Camões, Instituto Cervantes and the Società Dante Alighieri.
Rarely have the merits of communicating and humanizing been merged so intelligently and yet
so practically. The languages that we human beings speak were made, we have been told so many
times, to unite rather than to separate or marginalize us, to facilitate mutual understanding and to
foster knowledge in order to broaden our culture and, in short, enrich our souls.
21
st
O
ctober
2005
“We thank
unesco
for their declaration
acknowledging the extraordinary contribution
of our Awards to mankind’s cultural heritage.”
