European history passes through Dublin and Ireland today in the celebrations to mark the European Union's biggest enlargement. Eight of the 10 new member-states were in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War.
Today's events are a decisive moment in transcending the history which gave rise to that division of the continent. Ireland's role as EU president gives us the honour of hosting heads of state and government from our 24 partners. We have a great deal to learn from the newcomers. Our history is like their's in so many respects that this can be seen as a democratic homecoming as well as the beginning of a journey together.
It is appropriate to have these celebrations on May Day. For millennia it has marked the beginning of summer. Within the international labour movement it became a day of protest and solidarity from the 1880s, following the execution of innocent trade union protesters in Chicago after a bomb killed several policemen during a demonstration. The day was appropriated in official state ceremonies organised by communist regimes during the Cold War. In recent years it has been marked politically by new movements protesting about the effects of imbalanced and exploitative globalisation policies and, increasingly, by those who say another kind of Europe is possible.
For most of the new EU member-states, today's events represent a final liberation from that Soviet and communist tyranny - even though they have exchanged incorporation in one form of international union for another. The central difference is that the EU is a voluntary union of states whose equality is legally recognised, an especially crucial guarantee for the smaller ones which are from today an even greater majority of its membership. Their accession is the product of prolonged and deep-seated negotiations concerning every facet of their political and economic systems. By these means they have modernised and reconfigured their societies. It has been an unbalanced process, in which they have had to adapt to external norms. Now that they are full members they will be able to assert and express themselves as equals.
They join a union committed to values of peace, democracy, solidarity and market society about to be incorporated in a new constitutional treaty. Enlargement has been the greatest achievement of the EU's foreign policy, bringing peaceful transformation to most of Europe at a time when the Balkan wars pointed up the danger of different outcomes. The EU has become Europe's predominant institution and must now adapt itself to a greater world role.
In Dublin and elsewhere today there will be demonstrations. If they are conducted peacefully they will respect and express the common European values inscribed in the EU as well as May Day traditions. These values and traditions must also be respected by those responsible for security and policing. It would be a great shame if violence should mar such an historic day.