Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

8 O viedo | C ampoamor T heatre | 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.”