77th Plenary Session of the Nordic Council

29 October 2025, Stockholm, Sweden

Speech by Theodoros Rousopoulos

President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe

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Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear colleagues and friends,

There is a misunderstanding that I often notice as I travel around Europe.

Perhaps this misunderstanding belongs mostly to the younger generation — to those who did not read much history when they were at school. 

A few days ago, in my homeland Greece, I began a speech with the same thought, and I would like to return to it today — in these three minutes of my greeting as the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, addressing the Nordic Council, an organisation that was founded just one year before ours and to which I have the honour of participating for a second consecutive year.

What is this misunderstanding? Let me explain. 

Because we have lived for almost eight decades in conditions of peace in Europe, we have come to think of peace as self-evident. Because we have always had the United States by our side, we have considered our alliance self-evident. And above all, we have assumed that this alliance was built on shared ideas and values of Western civilisation — not on economic interest, not on how high one side of the Atlantic would set tariffs on the other.

But, dear colleagues and friends, these eight decades of peace are only a parenthesis in history. And history — and here I speak not only as a politician but also as a historian — is not made of long periods of peace. It is made of long eras of tension, of wars, of injustice, interrupted only by rare moments of peace. 

What we are called upon to defend today are precisely the achievements of these eighty years after the Second World War — against those who once again bring back into history its most dreadful child: violence. Violence expressed through the power of weapons, the power of money, and the power that seeks to impose injustice in order to prevail.

I therefore greet your meeting today — a gathering that dares to discuss what some might consider outdated: principles, values, and human dignity.

But let us be clear: if we stop defending them, we will lose them. History is never written in our absence. It must be written with our participation, with our initiatives, and with our moral courage.

Europe must once again be present and leading — defending what was won through struggle and sacrifice, and what all converges towards one essential truth: to give dignity back to our peoples.

Thank you.