We are all, whether a country or a human being, a product of our past, and what we learn from it; a product too of our character, and our ambitions.
I am a Prime Minister now. I developed from what I was to become what I am. I am the same person, doing different things.
I was an artist. I still like to paint and draw, I just have less time. But in politics too, I try to paint a canvas.
I visualize how I want our country to be, to feel, how I want it to change as the world changes around us.
I am not saying all Prime Ministers should be artists. Far from it. It is good if politics is a gathering of people who come from varied backgrounds.
From Reagan (actor) to Swedish Prime Minister (welder), the variety in experience is amazing.
And even when the variety in professional background is less striking, Margaret Thacher was a chemist, Angela Merkel a PhD in physical chemistry, their brush in the larger tableau is far from being similar, but both impressive.
I think the skills we have in one field may help or hinder in another, though in spite of all the artist in me is never still.
Once I met with someone who got really offended because I was drawing, while we were talking in my office.
Regular visitors are used to this. I do it all the time. I also doodle all over my daily agenda. My office table is somehow my atelier.
But the visitor who became offended at my drawing thought I didn’t care about what he was saying.
He said: “I came here, and I have a problem, so don’t draw while I’m talking to you.”
I apologized. I put down my pen. We discussed the issue he brought to me, and he left.
The next time I met with him, I remembered the offence he had taken, so I pushed my pot of pens to the outer edge of my desk, and I did not draw.
Yet still he was not happy. At the end he said: “I feel like you are not listening to me. You are looking at me, but you are not here.”
And I said: “You see! Allow me to draw if you want me to concentrate, if you want me to listen to you and be myself.”
The first time in my life that I entered a state building in Albania, was when I assumed a public office, when I became Minister of Culture.
It happened in a moment, in extraordinary circumstances. Life takes many turns, and this was not one I had expected, but that is a story for another day.
It was 1998, and as I settled into this new life, I imagined I buried the painter in me.
But then, two years later I stood for election as Mayor of Tirana, and I won. And I saw a city facing many challenges in front of so many expectations from my campaign.
That is when I felt my political impulse – the desire to offer people a better future – fused with my artistic impulse.
I oversaw a plan to splash brightly coloured paints on the drab and soulless buildings in the city main entrance road.
To me, it was art as political action with colors, not with words either with legislation.
When we painted the first building, by splashing a radiant orange on the somber gray, something unimaginable happened.
There was a traffic jam and a crowd of people gathered as if it were the location of some spectacular accident, or the sudden sighting of a visiting pop star.
He screeched that he would block the financing.
“But why?” I asked him.
“Because the colors you have ordered do not meet European standards,” he replied.
“Well,” I told him, “the surroundings do not meet European standards, even though this is not what we want, but we will choose the colors ourselves, because this is exactly what we want.
And if you do not let us continue with our work, I will hold a press conference right now, right in this road, and I will tell people that the old censors of the communist era have been reincarnated as EU finance officers.”
He was kind of troubled, and asked me for a compromise.
But I told him no, I’m sorry Monsieur, compromise in colors is always gray, and we have enough gray to last us a lifetime. So it’s time for change.
The greens and yellows and purples and oranges that we splashed around our formerly communist capital were not going to make people less hungry, or more prosperous.
But this first big act had to be something telling that the space they lived in was their space.
So these colours did make them feel better about the place where they lived.
It made them see possibilities in a space where there seemed to be no space. It made them see that change could come in different ways and spite of the city budget being zero comma something.
When I was spending most of my time as an artist, mainly in Paris, I was anti-politics, at least politics of the Albanian and Balkan kind. I think most artists are.
But it is through the years as mayor that I understood, and as Party Leader and Prime Minister I became quite sure that politics at its best is a worthy and meaningful activity, which makes the world a better place.
And art does the same, in different ways. I have been so happy to be in a position to bring the two together.
As an artist, as a politician, or as and artists & politician, I don’t just argue with EU bureaucrats. I once had an argument with a World Bank guy too.
When I told the World Bank Country director, many years ago, that I wanted them to finance new reception hall where citizens could engage with public services, as part of a campaign against corruption, they did not understand me. They were quite confused when I was telling that dignified public space would be a great contribution against corruption.
But people were waiting in long queues under sun and under rain, in order to get a certificate or just a simple answer from two tiny windows of two metal kiosks.
The reply to their requests was met by a voice coming from this dark hole, and, on the other hand, a mysterious hand coming out to take their documents while searching through old documents for the bribe.
The system was working for the corrpution not for the people who, if they wanted to skip the queue, had to pay a bribe.
We could change the invisible clerks within the kiosks, every week, but we could not change this corrupt practice.
Thankfully I persuaded the World Bank to fund this idea.
We removed the kiosks.
We built the bright new public space of reception hall that made people, Tirana citizens, think they had traveled abroad when they entered to make their requests.
We created an online system of control and so speeded up all the processes.
We put the citizen first, and not the clerks.
And we proved something which is very healthy, it’s not about genes. It’s not about some being with a high conscience and some others having not a conscience at all.
For example we cannot imagine an Albanian immigrant in Germany driving without a seatbelt, but I’ve seen Germany Embassy people in Albania doing so. It’s not about genes. It’s about environment and respect.
It’s about a system and partnership.
So now, as Prime Minister, I am once again trying to improve the environment in which people go about their daily lives.
We are once again bringing down illegally constructed buildings. We are once again trying to put art and culture at the heart of our economic and social renaissance. And to make culture part of our governance, and our ongoing project is to transform the council of ministers building in a mixed use: first floor for culture, second floor for governance.
And this I know: that just as politics can be a force for bad, so it can be a force for good; and at its very best it can be transforming for the world.
As art can, because art compasses unrest for change, whilst it is about understanding, as Kafka once said.
Artists must strive to interpret the world and all the change that happens within it. So must politicians.
Artists are providers of hope. So must be politicians.
How often, down through the years, have we heard political leaders talking about the need to ‘focus on the big picture’?
What is the big picture? It is the vision we have of the world. What does the vision constitute?
It is made of the big bold strokes that combine to deliver the change we need for the world.
What does the artist have in mind as he paints a picture? He has in mind the vision of the finished work.
So today, as a leader of my country, I have a vision in my mind of a country that is more modern, a country whose people are more prosperous, a country whose public services serve the people, and not those who run them.
I know what it feels like. And through my leadership, and the decisions we now make, I am trying to turn that vision into reality.
This is the big picture. It is trying to grasp the right moment, to create a space that it never existed before.
Think about it, and you will find a lot of examples in world history.
The creators of the European Union are rightly down in history as people who had vision and the ability to make it become real.
We can see them as the painters of a great tableau of nations and histories and peoples, who put their own and their countries’ narrow interests to the service of a greater ideal.
And another part of my big picture is of a new Balkans. A peaceful prosperous Balkans.
Now that surely would be a space such as never existed before.
But think: this year we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War, a war which sparked in the Balkans, to spread across continents heralding death and suffering hard to imagine for our generation. And this year, 2014 we have the first year of peace in every border of our region as never before
And I come to you, here today, in the same week as I became the first Albanian Prime Minister in more than 60 years to visit Serbia.
A peaceful prosperous Balkans. A strong Albania, as part of a strong European union. These are big bold strokes that I long to make part of our big picture.
It is a vision that inspires me, inspires me to work day and night to make it happen.
And these two parts of the same vision hang together.
A peaceful prosperous Balkans will be good for the EU just as the EU – despite the occasional over zealous bureaucrat – is good for the Balkans.
Think of the forces that have led to the scarring of Europe. Racism, nationalism, xenophobia … together we can beat them.
Together we can create the space for a multiplicity of cultures, beliefs and identities to live side by side.
And here is where my life as a painter and my life as a politician diverge.
When I do a painting, or I doodle on my agenda, there comes a point where it is done. The job is finished.
But in politics, the picture is never fully completed. The person trying to paint it never has complete control of where the brush may lead.
But still we must hold on to the vision, and persevere.
And when people say, as far too often they do, that politics can never bring change, I say they are wrong. It can, and it does.
But of course we know that just as politics can deliver change, so politics can hamper change. Just as politics can bring peace between peoples, so it can bring conflict.
Every step of the way, we face choices. Just like the artist. This colour or that; this brush or that. This space or that space. What is the picture we are trying to paint?
And if ever any of you come to Albania, and you come to see me in my office, and you notice me doodling, please do not be offended, as that man once was.
It is part of who I am. The hand that moves freely, creating a space where there appears to be none, that is not a bad way to think of how we make progress.
