Former Czech president Václav Havel delivered a speech to the European Parliament on November 11 in which he reminisced about political changes 20 years ago and spoke of his wish for the European Union  

The President of the European Parliament, former Polish prime minister Jerzy Buzek, welcomed Havel into Parliament, describing him as "a friend to all those fighting for freedom and human rights wherever they do not exist".  

Buzek stressed that "communism was overthrown by ordinary people: writers, workers, academics; millions of people behind the Iron Curtain who never gave in to oppression" and said "Vaclav Havel was, and remains, a hero to them all".

Havel later addressed the Parliament about the changes 20 years ago. "No one was completely prepared for such a rapid collapse of the Iron Curtain," he said, acknowledging that the new democracies of central and eastern Europe had caused the EU some "headaches".
He said this was understandable because "a democratic political culture cannot be created or renewed overnight". But the alternative to embracing these countries would have been worse, in terms of potential instability for the whole continent, he argued.  

Addressing the issue of identity, Havel said that "the fact that I feel myself to be a European doesn’t mean that I stop being a Czech. On the contrary: as a Czech I am also a European. I tend to say somewhat poetically that Europe is the 'homeland of our homelands' ".

Havel added that The EU, seen from a distance, could seem a remote and bureaucratic body. He believed "the EU should place greater and more evident stress on the things that are truly of foremost importance, namely its spiritual foundations and values". Havel said that "Schiller’s Ode to Joy should cease to be for us and our descendants simply a poem celebrating friendship among people and be transformed instead into a powerful symbol of our common striving for a more humane world".