Speech by Prime Minister Edi Rama at the traditional meeting with members of the Diplomatic Corps ahead of the end-of-the-year holidays:
Honourable Excellencies!
Dear fellow ministers!
I am going to deliver my speech in English as I’ve always done.
While another year is coming to an end, we are here to celebrate the arrival of 2022 and renew our commitment to the international friendship. I am proud of many things this country represents and the many things we have accomplished so far; especially in the very tough last two years, when with your help we fought back after a devastating earthquake and we didn’t regress on what we had to achieve while facing a globally challenging pandemic.
Let me say that despite the ongoing difficulties we face as a country, but also beyond, I am confident that more will be done in the coming year.
The coming year is a crucial one for Albania as it prepares to occupy in January its seat as a non-permanent member of the Security Council of the United Nations, an institution that better than anyone embodies the spirit of both cooperation and responsibility that defines your daily work.
It is a historic opportunity for Albania, a country still carrying scars of decades of isolation and paranoia and hostility towards other nations, of entrenchment on its own ways and delusions about the motives of others.
The fact we are now able to join the Security Council alongside other countries that we no longer see as enemies to fight, but as allies with whom we want to build a better world shows just how far we have travelled.
But this historic opportunity also presents itself at a time of tremendous challenge, not just for my country, but also for all of yours, not just for Albania, but also for the Balkans, not just for the Balkans, but for Europe, not just for Europe, but for the world!
These are demanding times for all of us and the challenges we face sometimes seem greater than what we can cope with. Greater is also the need we have for each other, large and small, developed or developing countries, Westerners or Easterners, Northerners or Southerners.
As we navigate one crisis only to find ourselves, in another in what seems to have become a permanent state of emergency, it is essential that we do not let that state of emergency take hold of our minds.
It is vital that we do not retreat to isolation, suspicion of what is different from us, the fear of what we can’t control. Albania knows all too well what the cost of that isolation is. We have no lessons for the world, but one; the one we have learned it hardest way: no country can handle this alone!
The new challenges we face are increasingly unpredictable. They do not let themselves to the adaptation of solutions that have been already tried and tested in the past, to large nations imparting lessons to smaller ones. We are all new to these challenges, we are all in this together and we can learn from each other successes and failures. An injury suffered in the most remote corner of the planet, is a potential fatal blow to its core.
Its effects, as we have learned from the pandemic, are immediate everywhere. The consequences are lasting. The enemies we confront are increasingly invisible; Health emergencies, climate change, the anonymous power of disinformation fuelled by development of new technologies. But as we all confront all these invisible enemies, we must not become invisible to each other. We must revisit not just the basis of the social contract between governments and their citizens, but also what binds different governments with each other, to make sure that we don’t sacrifice the rights, but expand them and that we don’t diminish our commitment to values, but show that we really practice what we preach.
Governing a small country is hardly easier than governing a big one. Serving a large country has often been easier than serving a small one, as you ambassadors know better than anyone else. But in the world in which we live, leading large countries means increasing leading not just large countries, but humanity as a whole.
As we navigate together these challenges of the future, it is essential that large countries also adapt an enlarged point of view; the point of view of humanity as a whole. Facing large-scale global challenges, we are all frighteningly very small. But it is crucial that large countries do not become small in their hearts and in their minds, smaller in their attitude to other countries in their ability to tolerate the differences in the resources they need to find to cope with the unpredictable.
An infamous Albanian once said at the end of his New Year greeting: “This year has been harder than the last, but on the other hand it has been easier than the next to come.”
Some may find it as a plausible depiction of the current state of the world. I am not going to tell you who that Albanian is, but I can give you a clue, by telling you that he was a master of isolation, a master of manipulating fear and paranoia to cope with seemingly permanent emergencies.
We must never let our reflection on the future becomes hostage to that mentality. It is not about easier or harder years, but it is about responsible and irresponsible governments.
How large and small countries shape those responsibilities in the future, how they act or fail to act together on the face of uncertainty, will determine how their legacy among future generations of not this and that specific country, but future generations of the human kind if the humanity will be able to rise to the challenges.
What we do know and how we relay to each other will determine whether next year and the years to come will be easier or harder, better or worse. Our actions now decide what happens not just to my country, but also to all of yours, to all of us together as citizens of different nations you all here represent, but most importantly, as citizens of the world that we have the responsibility to improve.
We are here to celebrate and my wish for the New Year is that as just we celebrate here, simply as human beings, we also cooperate further, simply as human beings.
Wining a third record mandate did not make me feel unbeatable, but more humbled than ever towards the people of Albania, who lent me and my party their trust, while rightly expecting more from us.
Let me confess here personally that the victory was bitter sweet. I felt we hadn’t done enough to heal divisions in a country still haunted by the past, when the messenger had to be killed before the message could be heard and where the political opponent is still seen not as an adversary to engage, but as an enemy to destroy.
After such a landslide victory I am haunted more than ever by the powerlessness of power in making fast progress to modernize a country that wasted so many decades through dictatorship and then anarchy, absolute poverty and then corruption, one-party rule and then bad governance.
When I contemplate the infernal speed of time in office vis-à-vis the humanly possible speed of changing the country, I feel uneasy. I know that the pace of change can never be fast enough to match the whirlwind of decades of aspirations grown from frustrated desires.
Take the EU. We did whatever it took, again and again, to get the green light to the next step and, again and again, we were let down by forces beyond our control. It is a fact of life and while we continue to do whatever it takes to make Albania every year more credible, more functioning, more EU-like democratic state, time flies and the frustration among Albanians grows.
Take justice reform. We did whatever it took to start a judicial reform after 25 years of failure. We did it with an unwavering commitment, while taking all the political risks in a hostile and sometimes even dangerous environment facing opposition even within our former coalition. We promised people a new justice system that brings fairness to all is finally on its way and I still firmly believe that it is. But it takes time, much more time than the time that mercilessly flies while results come just too slowly for the people of this country that have waited endlessly to live in a country, where everyone is equal before the law. It takes patience, much more than this nation has left, while the usual suspects of the past have the guts to still issue grotesque threats with pitchforks or comebacks in the name of sovereignty, dignity and purity.
Take the fight against corruption. It takes political will and, yes, we have it. It takes reforms all over the board and, yes, we have embarked on all of them. It certainly takes modernization and, yes, we are working incessantly for it. Nevertheless, it takes first and foremost an independent and fully functioning justice system, while what we can do so far as we wait for its benefits to materialize is to take advantage of digitalization and new technologies that can help the developing countries leap from one era to another just in few years. But it can hardly be enough to relieve people from their growing impatience and frustration, despite the indisputable changes that we continue to make.
Take the further upgrades of health care, education, public administration too. We did more in eight years than decades, but how it can be enough while the world we live in is so interconnected and Albanians are so intertwined with the world that the government is bound to be compared with the neighbouring European Union, where health care and education systems, public administration have been built long before Albania was a state.
Take inequality and social justice. We did a lot, but still a lot more remains to be done.
And I won’t go on. I did not mean to present you with a litany of complaints nor with an outcry for sympathy with my reflections on a search for the lost time, but this is the end of another year after all, so if not now, when.
Having to lead the country for a third unprecedented mandate is an honour and a privilege that I am the first Albanian to have. To me, this means something so important and so obliging towards the people of this country, that I can’t find a word to express and I am committed to give all myself to pay it back as much as it is humanly possible.
In the coming days, I will launch a new initiative of the government to open a new page of interaction between us, the government, and the people, regardless of their political affiliation.
These are very challenging times and we have to act all together like citizens of Albania, like fathers, mothers and children, like brothers and sisters, like people that want to give their best to their country, like humans that want the best for such a beautiful portion of earth that we are blessed to call home.
The future we all want cannot be built just with our convictions and the freedom to express them, but also through our will to listen more to each other and work more closely together, despite our differences.
If it seems too much easier said than done when it comes to party politics, it should not be as difficult when it comes to involvement of ordinary people in the common decisions we have to make. And, who knows? In the run, it might help in the decisions between the political parties too.
Let me conclude by wishing that the New Year will be for Albanians the year of listening to each other primarily as humans, of related to each other as people with a limited time on earth, as beings whose lives go too quickly to waste it and destroying each other as enemies as opposed to building together a shared future for their children. Thank you!
