Address by the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow during his State Visit to Poland

Courtesy translation

Rector Magnificus, Dignitaries, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me address a particularly warm greeting to the young students and to all the attendees.

I would also like to extend a greeting to the faculty members and all the staff, to whom I also wish to express my appreciation for their daily commitment in the dissemination of knowledge.

It is with profound respect for your history that I thank the Rector Magnificus for this invitation to speak in this prestigious University.

Many eminent names have entered the gates of this University, the most long-established in Poland and among the most ancient in the world.

Alongside the name of President Duda, allow me to recall the names of some personalities that evoke the deep ties between our two Countries such as Nicolaus Copernicus and Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, who studied Philosophy precisely in this University when he was young. And again Wislawa Szymborska, who is very much loved in Italy where numerous initiatives are scheduled to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the poetess winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This University and the city that hosts it are an iconic place for Poland and not only Poland: they are a symbol for the whole of European culture.

It is a place that renders an image of a Europe that, through its national and institutional experiences, has given life to a common corpus of knowledge and values.

We have started to become conscious of this unifying spirit that embraces the whole continent precisely in universities such as the one in Cracow which were erected back in the Middle Ages, enabling that connective network that was defined as the “Republic of Letters”.

At the time, the Cracowian Academy was a beacon in the first European Res Publica in this part of Europe.

It is in the network of universities erected in the early centuries of the first Millennium – places that hosted and stimulated a lively intellectual, legal, and value-based debate – that took shape the image which is now projected onto institutions capable of embodying the European ideal.

Behind us lie centuries of tragedies in which European people fought each other.

Our own Nation was both witness and victim of this in its pursuit of independence and in the achievement of freedom. It preserves and expresses history.

And it was precisely this lesson drawn from history that, in the aftermath of World War II and not without opposition, gave an irresistible stimulus to the European integration project as we know it today.

All the way to its fulfillment after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and with the reunification of Western and Central-Eastern Europe.

However, before achieving this historical goal of European integration, the “dressed rehearsal” during World War II was held here, in Central-Eastern Europe: in Czechoslovakia and in Poland, with the aggression of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, the fruit of exacerbated nationalistic ideologies and lust for power.

The Katyn massacre at the beginning of the second world war is an eloquent page of history.

I have just paid tribute to a commemorative plaque nearby that celebrates the teachers at this University who were deported on 6 November 1939.

Yesterday I visited Birkenau, together with a group of youths from all parts of the world and with the Bucci sisters, two Italians who miraculously survived the horrors of that place when they were children.

Today is the 80^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

The memory of that barbarity remains unchanged in our minds and in our hearts.

I am grateful to Poland for its relentless commitment to preserve and spread the memory of what happened, for it to never happen again.

Italy too is committed to this cause.

We need to intensify our action, knowing that in the future we will gradually be able to rely less on the direct testimonies of what happened despite having to transmit and pass it down to the new generations.

To speak these words at a University, the temple of the transfer, development, and dissemination of knowledge, implicitly entrusts the responsibility of remembrance to you young people.

Dear students,

It is memory that nurtures knowledge that in turn converts us into fully conscious beings: you will certainly prove to be up to this task.

Liliana Segre, a survivor of the Holocaust and now a life-tenured member of the Senate of the Italian Republic and an incessant example of the meaning of commitment, warns us that “memory is the only vaccine against indifference”.

These words acquire new meaning if we think of what is occurring at only a short distance from here, at the present border of the European Union.

Nobody can remain indifferent in the face of the brutal aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, a sovereign, free, independent, and democratic Country whose population is subjected to targeted and criminal attacks that kill brutally by ruthlessly targeting civilian infrastructure with the aim of leaving the population to freeze and in the dark.

Today Europe is witnessing crimes that are the fruit of a renewed nationalistic exacerbation that presumes to violate borders and conquer territories, claiming the presence of population groups that belong to the same culture.

How can we avoid thinking of the events regarding Sudetenland and the populations of German origin who lived there and of the Munich Agreement that paved the way to World War II?

In the face of this senseless attempt to overturn the rules of international order, the European Union has shown to be able to react firmly and – with unity of intents – will continue to support Ukraine.

A support that can be expressed in a variety of ways and you and your University set an invaluable example.

Allow me to recall that since the very beginning of the conflict you have welcomed here more than one thousand refugees, making available not only spaces, but also your time and your knowledge, offering them legal and psychological assistance and training to assure them the dignity that others wanted to rob them of.

A show of effort and solidarity that was repeated throughout the Polish territory, where more than one and a half million Ukrainian refugees have found shelter, as in many other States of the European Union, thus giving proof of their capacity to act.

Today we must all work to preserve the value of this unity.

It is a commodity that must absolutely be safeguarded.

To successfully overcome the serious consequences of the persisting conflict – from the explosion of migration phenomena to growing economic and social inequalities and energy and food insecurity – is the challenge that Europeans are called upon to meet.

We need to lucidly understand that the aim of defending peace among nations, tackling the global risks that affect the whole world – a mission from which we are now guiltily distracted by Russia’s raging warfare – primarily means to spurn the temptation to fragment the solidarity among free Countries that is enshrined in the experience of the Atlantic Alliance and of the European Union.

European and Euro-Atlantic security are indivisible concepts if we are to be able to defend ourselves jointly and with determination and to ensure and develop Europe’s democratic and social model.

How can we achieve this unity?

Jean Monnet, one of the inspirers of the European unification process, reminded us – as we all know – that Europe would be built in a period of crisis and that it would result from the solutions that it would be capable of giving to solve those crises.

So, every day is a test bench for us.

But it would be entirely inappropriate to think of Europe as the fruit of an exhausting race to tackle problems dictated by others, in an international scenario decided by others.

In other terms, the need to turn Europe into a key player is not adequately met by the vision of the Union as a temporary and varying sum of national moods and interests and therefore, by definition, perennially unstable.

Of assistance, in this respect, is another indication, this time by Robert Schuman who believed that the European process “will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity”.

Meaning thereby that this is the process that gives shape to an identity of values and a commonality of fate that involve the people who enliven it through the fully democratic process in which European citizens are key players.

After all, Europe was born out of a great project of peace, as a vision of development capable of overcoming historically contrasting stands, such as between Germany and France.

We now need an equally wise and firm vision.

In the early 1950s wanting to share energy resources in the European Coal and Steel Community must have seemed to be visionary to many people and instead it came into being, thus kicking off the construction of Europe after the setback suffered with the shelving of the European Defence Community.

The European Union is first of all a community of values that sees the refusal of war as a conflict settlement tool, and respect for the Rule of Law, democracy, dialogue, social cohesion and giving youths prospects of self-realization as its founding principles.

For all this, Europe belongs to its citizens.

It is a model of success pursued as an ideal goal in other continents.

Partaking in this project means sharing its founding values and, with a spirit of solidarity and responsibility, making a daily commitment to uphold the rights sanctioned in the Charter of Values of the European Union.

Dear students,

this too is a task that is certainly not unknown to you.

The Polish Culture has been an example of modernity and courage.

To mind comes Maria Salomea Sklodowska, born in Warsaw over 150 years ago and better known internationally as Marie Curie, the first woman in history to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

Ms. Sklodowska moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She was a European citizen capable of following in the steps of the clerici vagantes – an ante litteram experience of the Erasmus generation – and apply it to women.

At the time, this Polish scientist demolished stereotypes and prejudices and achieved results that were unimaginable before her, thus paving the way for all the young women who took the same path after her, also at the cost of personal sacrifices and attacks.

Marie Sklodowska Curie used to say that “the way of progress is neither swift nor easy” but it is our task to make sure that the way remains open for all those who will want to take that road.

The European Union is questioning itself on this historic phase – firstly through the Conference on the Future of the Union, which must be assured a positive outcome – and on the best tools to defend our democracies and thereby the future of young Europeans.

We look at Europe as a large community of free women and men who, together, can forge their own destiny.

We look at how to materialize the prospect of the European Union’s strategic autonomy, capable of assuring a dissuasive deterrence, knowing that this means further strengthening – and not weakening – our alliances, which is the point of strength of our defence system.

I am thinking of the relations between the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance and of those with the United States which, in the security crisis that our continent is undergoing, have sided with Ukraine and with their allies.

After all, if the amounts earmarked to reinforce the defence system by single EU Countries (which, taken together, greatly exceed those of possible competitors), were factored together, they would become an unbeatable driving force, also to the advantage of the Atlantic Alliance.

But, with courage and foresight, we need to overcome the contradiction between, on the one hand, wanting to aim for a solid European defence framework without succeeding, on the other hand, to overcome the diffidence of those who hesitate to move forward along the road to integration. The one cannot exist without the other.

An albeit convenient framework of economic cooperation can never be sufficient to mutually assure security; it requires the solidity of a fully fledged community of shared values.

While we make progress along this road, the confidence in ourselves and in the values inspiring us must induce us to develop expressions of peace that refuse to surrender to and be enslaved by the logic of war and conflict.

What must prevail is international law, respect for the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of States, and dialogue in controversies.

In Europe, right now, two wars are simultaneously underway at different but tightly interconnected levels: the one which sees Ukraine’s territorial integrity attacked by the Russian Federation and a war of values, in which at stake are all the elements that characterise the modern-day Western experience, starting with freedom.

The two battle fields often overlap. This also happened in World War II.

We could say that, in Europe, history is always contemporary.

Our memory necessarily runs to a city, Gdansk, which twice marked the history of Poland in the 20^th century: with the “white plan” of 1939, when the city was attacked by the Nazi regime, and with the launch, from the Shipyards, of the process of disavowal of the Communist regime that started in 1988.

“To die for Gdansk?” was the question going around Europe on the eve of World War II. The consequences of these doubts are well known.

How can we build peace, realise a system respectful of the rights of every State, capable of spreading positive values of cooperation, as it has occurred across decades with the EU and NATO, organisations that have projected security by assuring stability and development?

Poland is an excellent witness of these processes: it headed the one that led to freeing numerous Central and Eastern European Countries from the Soviet yoke.

We must share values on which the community can build its future.

John Paul II launched the slogan “from the Union of Lublin to the European Union”, which is the sculptural representation of that “return to Europe” that Poland succeeded to rightfully achieve through the accession process to the EU institutions.

That process was supported by the conviction that the “return to Europe” fully expressed the Polish identity after the long journey under the dominion of the communist Soviet Union and the suffering and the struggle of the Polish people to reunite with the other peoples of Europe. The individual rights that had been trampled by the communist regime were thus brought back home.

In the now distant 2004, the accession to the European Union of Poland and of the other Central and Eastern European Countries completed a first step in the history-making unification of our continent.

It is a virtuous circle generated by reforms, growth and accession prospects that worked.

Today, new European accession prospects are precious for our neighbouring States which see their entrance in the EU as a reason of hope and strength to claim justice, rights, peace and to expand the circle of Countries that attest their adhesion to the value of the rights of individuals and populations.

It is the awareness of the evocative and transformational power of the European accession prospect that led us to take the history-making decision to grant the status of candidate Countries to Kyiv and Chisinau, whose populations must know that Europe won’t leave them alone to face the challenges facing them.

The swift conclusion of the accession process of our Balkan neighbours, which initiated their accession to the Union many years ago, is a goal that the Italian Republic fully supports, to fulfil their aspirations and to not yield dangerous space to the action of forces that are hostile to the values of coexistence; spaces that are liable to be corrosive of democratic systems.

It is a step that must be taken without delay, a step that is essential to avoid creating dangerous instabilities in the continent.

Moreover, the European Union has played a valuable role on the other front that marks the borders of the Continent, namely the Mediterranean and Africa.

The attention focused years ago on the rise of Islamic terrorism now yields to a negligent and dangerous distraction.

The issue of the Mediterranean border does not only concern the bordering European Countries.

The goal of a more fruitful and solid partnership between the European Union and the African Union is a forward-looking option, capable of pre-empting tensions and contributing to the cause of peace.

Rector Magnificus, Authorities, Professors, dear students,

numerous are the partnerships finalized every day with Italian Universities.

These exchanges fortify mutual knowledge and understanding and a common vision of the future and are the driving force to achieve it.

I am convinced that you, young people of the Jagiellonian University, and the youths of the whole world will succeed to find extraordinary resources on which to ground common action.

I wish you all to keep intact your courage as well as the fearlessness and generosity that you have shown in this difficult year and to unwaveringly open all the doors that you will find on your path towards a future of peace.

Good Luck!