Twaalf leeuwen in Granada

In Western countries today we consider other cultures and people often as a threat. We have the tendency to believe that our system and our values are the only possible right ones. In the past we were often victims of political ideologies like fascism and communism, which gave us a limited view of reality, today it is mainly our fear and selfishness that create a comparable limited scope. But less open and respectful communication with other people leads to a lesser chance to influence and understand each other and only hardens our points of view. Besides, the extremist segment in certain groups determines more and more our opinion about the whole group and our politics towards them. In the Western world, the result of this development is a growing nationalism and intolerance. Nationalism that emphasizes and even to constructs differences between people.

Obsessed with hypes

Two years ago, when I spoke to you at the opening of the Academic Year 2006 – 2007, I emphasized the necessity of preparing our students for responsible positions in our society, realizing that most of them will have a leading and exemplary position in their future lifes in one or another way. Through the education, that we offer them, we are basically building tomorrow’s world by preparing tomorrow’s leaders.

I also emphasized several trends in our society, which can be called negative or dangerous. I stipulated that especially on those points we have to ensure that our students, when they take their positions as leaders in our society, are able to recognize them and cope with those tendencies. Among those risks are the lack of understanding of the very complex reality of our world, the strong tendency to be materialistic in a very selfish way, the strong nationalistic tendencies and the lack of long-term vision especially in business and politics.

I combined that with the fact, that media and society are obsessed by hypes and short term issues. At the same time our world is threatened by very serious global problems: a fast growing population, a shortage of energy and a shortage of food, severe pollution, the greenhouse effect, as well as by serious ideological and religious differences. All this, combined with a strong economic growth in vast parts on our earth, requires an approach of problems and challenges that stays far away from hypes and is aware of the enormous international interdependencies.

Other cultures a threat?

We as a university, want our students to be able to steer our society away from those threats, out of the risky zone. Some of the risky tendencies I mentioned were and are the result of a feeble analysis of our society today. Many people live and act by the day without overseeing what’s going on. And living by the day, we don’t see history and future. Without seeing the future and without a long-term vision on what has to be done, steering is impossible. This means that we have to educate our people to be tolerant, analytical, internationally oriented, altruistic, visionary, wise and curious. Those qualities require a wider scope of education than just a good basic program in the professional field. It requires real academic education. I will come back to that.

In Western countries today we consider other cultures and people often as a threat. We have the tendency to believe that our system and our values are the only possible right ones. In the past we were often victims of political ideologies like fascism and communism, which gave us a limited view of reality, today it is mainly our fear and selfishness that create a comparable limited scope. But less open and respectful communication with other people leads to a lesser chance to influence and understand each other and only hardens our points of view. Besides, the extremist segment in certain groups determines more and more our opinion about the whole group and our politics towards them. In the Western world, the result of this development is a growing nationalism and intolerance. Nationalism that emphasizes and even to constructs differences between people.

For Europe this means that the discussion about the future of Europe is dominated by the idea that the national states in Europe are more important than our continent and the world order. This nationalism also suggests that strong and self-centred states can be the building blocks for our future.

A Dutch disease

Let’s look at The Netherlands for a minute. Parties with strong nationalistic sentiments and a strong aversion to foreigners, are popular. The party “Proud of the Netherlands” is one example. What exactly that party is proud of is not clear yet and the leader of the party presents herself mostly as a microphone of the people saying, “Tell me what I have to think”. But there is no thinking “out of the Dutch box” anywhere in that party.

Then there is the PVV, a party that has decided that it’s main mission is to be xenophobic and to turn Islam to its personal enemy. I will show that this opinion about Islam in genera, is based of an extreme lack of understanding our own history, continent and civilisation. Even parties, which seem to have an international scope by ideology, like the Socialistische Partij (Socialist Party) in the Netherlands, promote strong anti-European sentiments.

If you combine those parties and look at the polls, you see that roughly one third of the Dutch population could vote for those parties at the next elections. This result means not only dramatic changes for the traditional parties, but also has as a consequence that some more established parties move in the direction of those newcomers with the idea that the electorate is moving in that direction. This is not only a Dutch disease, but can be seen in almost every Western state, including the leading ones.

The French 19th century philosopher Renan once said, that being a nation is the best way to look wrongly at your own history and to make sure that you have an inaccurate view of the world. In his view a nationalistic vision on world and history have basically two political aims: unite the population behind the government/party and show a positive image to the rest of the world. But because of that, this nationalism is simplistic, selective, complacent and driven by self-interest and this leads to intolerance and narrow-mindedness.

Twelve lions

Ladies and gentlemen, if you visit the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, and walk into what is probably the most beautiful part of that complex, the Court of the Lions, you are at the heart of one of the most famous and refined civilisations that ever existed in Europe. When you look better at the architecture of this court, built by the Nasrid Kings, you can see the amalgamation of three cultures. In the first place, of course, the overwhelming beauty of the Moorish architecture and craftsmanship. But the grand design of the court is inspired by Christian monasteries. Different than in traditional Moorish palaces this court has a surrounding gallery inspired by the way galleries were used in monasteries to surround their inner gardens. Next to this Christian influence there is a fountain in the middle, which is supported by twelve lions. This fountain was a gift of the Jewish community of Granada and the lions represent the twelve tribes of Israel. So, in the centre of power of one of the most famous Islamic cultural hot spots in history, we find a combination of the three great religions of the Book. The court in itself is a symbol of tolerance, admiration and respect towards the three cultures in a way that is hard to find today.

This refined cultural centre and other Islamic centres of those days in the Middle East, offered a tremendous treasure of science, scholarship, and refined craftsmanship, poetry, music and food. This beautiful culture survived 500 years before it collapsed under the strong force of the Catholic Reconquista. We hardly seem to realise how important that culture was for the foundation of European Humanism and later the Enlightment. Many opinion leaders obviously don’t know European history very well and their opinions of the Islam are limited and foggy. That is true for many Islamic people as well, by the way. Too bad all that fog, because the fog makes many things look spooky.

In the period that the Nasrid dynasty comes to its end, and partly induced by that civilisation, humanism gets a steady foothold in Europe. This was strongly inspired by Muslim philosophers, who together with Jewish and Christian scholars were studying Jewish, Muslim and Christian literature in Toledo and other major tolerant scientific centres. Literature and scientific writings were translated from and into Arab, Latin and Hebrew and spread over the world of those days. A new approach to Europe comes to life.

State borders or narrow mindedness do not limit scientists and leading people of Europe in those days. They travel wherever the culture, the brightness of people, the intellectual inspiration brings them. They are open minded, not complacent, not intolerant and not nationalistic. Their work led in the long run to strong criticism on the thinking of that world and on the way the Church was controlling the acceptability of new insights in the world. Intellectuals and artists like Erasmus, Gallilei, Thomas More and Allegri are witnesses of that quarrel. Those years, those tensions and that heritage also gave an enormous boost to the development of science in the Western world.

But we have to realise, that humanism embraced two vital elements: on the one hand ratio and on the other hand the concept of eternal values. The intellectuals I mentioned were also very religious people. In their thinking, ratio and values belong together, because ratio alone leads easily to the totalitarian unscrupulous machinery of a “Brave new world”, while only values easily lead to ideological and merciless fanaticism. Keeping a subtle balance between ratio and values was considered, and of course still is, essential. When we are educating our youngsters to be the right leaders of the future we have a special task to teach and show them these two sides of the human condition: not just knowledge, but also a value system, that will make them well balanced leaders in a very complex world. This is true for every academic education and it is true for their jobs to come whether it is in business, in government or in academia and everything in between.

It means, especially for a university with our identity, that we have to build this knowledge of our European cultural heritage into our programs. Not as an unavoidable burden, but as one of the most important parts of academic education.

Melting pot

All those concepts were born in a Europe with relatively open borders, curious people and hardly a state concept. Many of those intellectual leaders never thought in terms of nation and mostly not in terms of race or religion. They were just looking for inspiration, progress and wisdom. It is that culture that made Europe what it is today and creates such enormously strong connections between the buildings and the culture on this whole continent from Athens to Vilnius, from Stockholm to London, from Warsaw to Amsterdam, from Berlin to Madrid, from Vienna to Rome and from Paris to Prague. That unity of cultural foundation and that enormous melting pot of ideas and creativity, of art and tolerance, are still available for us and for the rest of the world to enjoy and to work with.

Europe’s history had of course its black pages as well. It is most important that we realise those were black pages and are embarrassed about it. But at the same time they warns us. People need more than wealth and freedom. Too much individual freedom without vivid transnational social structures didn’t and doesn’t really appeal to people in the long run. A limited scope of life and of your personal world and interests, make and made people think that fascism and communism or today’s religious fanaticism and blunt nationalism are a more exciting. That is even more dangerous if we have to deal internationally with scarcity of very vital goods; a scarcity that will hit our world hard and soon.

Europe has always been relatively well balanced on this point after going through many phases, peaks and valleys. This history delivered us, for example, a tolerant and refined form of Islam, a well-balanced humanism, a beautiful and challenging Christian culture, a well-developed legal system, great wealth and power, a caring welfare state and a living democracy. These are treasures of continental Europe even if they had their difficult periods and require constant fine-tuning and steering.

But the only way to enjoy these treasures and to avoid the failures, is to embrace Europe and see its beauty and communality. We are looking at enormous possibilities and ideas on our continent, invented by people at moments, that openness, curiosity and tolerance were ruling. Let’s give that opportunity to our young people and to a society, that offers us the possibility to do our research and education.

How Europe did it

This is the fundamental concept of the university; older than today’s system of states it can be characterized by trans-national curiosity and cooperation and the constant striving for knowledge and wisdom. The concept of the university as we know it today is a product of that same Europe of the 1200’s, by the way. Today’s world is not ruled or led by those European dreams, though. The leading and upcoming powers of today’s world are mostly led by the concept of the so-called American dream. And this is even true for our European Brussels, that does not spends energy to promote a European dream or vision, but works hard on telling us whether our wooden shoes meet the standards of acceptable working gear.

In my opening of the academic year of two years ago, I already mentioned the fact that the short term interests of investors and CEO’s and the total focus on short term winnings and profits is taking over and is showing the weaknesses of today’s leading ideology. We notice again today the enormous drawbacks to which that concept can lead and what damage a lack of long term and sustainable social and business concepts will do to the world. At the same time we have to realize that the fast economic development needed for countries like China and India, (and many other developing countries to come) asks for the Anglo-Saxon approach.

If you visit India and China today, however, you see more and more hesitation about that uncompromising and strong economic growth, because it ends up for a big part in the pockets of a few and because it ruins the social structure of those countries. Over there you hear a serious interest in how Europe did it. Europe realised a very comfortable living standard for its population and seems to be able to embrace new members in our community like countries from the Mediterranean and in Central Europe without fundamentally disturbing our economy or ruining our social system. It does not mean that we don’t have constant discussions, but we are on the move constantly.

Fit for our times

At the same time there are many in Europe who are in love with the Aglo-Saxon approach, but there is an increasing consciousness that there is more possible than the one-way road to money and power politics. In the NRC newspaper of May 14th of this year, Ben Knapen, former member of our supervisory board, writes an article under the headline “Perverse Anglo-Saxon”. In that article he explains how the steep income development of CEO’s and investors in this world is fundamentally disturbing society, and in the first place in the US. He explains that a system in which one percent of the population in a democracy like the US can own 40% of the assets of that country, is far too wrong to be sustainable. If too many people stay behind and become losers, the centre of the system will collapse. He also concludes that Europe should turn around as quick as it can from the road that leads with certain delay to the route the Anglo-Saxon world has gone, because it is a road to the abyss.

It also means that we should rediscover Europe and offer a system and a cultural concept to the world that might have lost ground, but can still be recovered and can offer one of the more sustainable concepts to manage our earth and mankind into the future. It requires wisdom and self-esteem to do this. This is not just a question of studying history and the roots of our culture, how necessary this is as well. We also have to look forward and work hard on concepts, which embrace traditional European qualities, but are made fit for our times and our challenges as well.

The European network of universities, that we are part of, is based on the idea, that we want to influence the European agenda and offer new modern concepts for our continent. Many of our excellent research programs fit very well in this approach. Our scholars and their interdisciplinary achievements in the areas of the functioning of markets, pension and ageing policy, intercultural dialogue, European values, security and victimology, law and technology, the downside of today’s banking system, a sustainable future, the psychological side of the medical work, the understanding of people’s economic behaviour etc. etc. prove this good fit every day. They effectively answer these challenges of today and tomorrow in a way that will be coloured by the experiences of this continent. That academic work is more difficult than looking back and dreaming about our past. We have to know our past because it teaches us a lot and tells us why we are who we are.

But it is only the first step of the solution of today’s problems. Therin lies the biggest challenge for a university that functions under the banner of understanding society. It is very important, that the international, mostly European, approach of our universities is also embraced by government. Therefore, Europe has to be an open playing field and everybody has to be welcome to work with us. If we want to use all available resources, if we want to be leading and if we want to have real universities, this has financial consequences too. Political discussions about “The Dutch dimes are for the Dutch” like in de Telegraaf newspaper and in some nationalistic parties, are counterproductive.

The next 80 years

If we want to achieve this, we have to become real Europeans: open minded and anti-nationalistic. Europe has a lot to offer if we realise that we are one continent, one colourful culture and one people. History proves us what’s possible. We are able to live with all our different colours, our different approaches and our very nice cultural dialects all belonging to one cultural language built on a history, that teaches us so much.

This Europe has to be taught to our young people, because we believe in this foundation of the human culture, in humanism and its Christian roots and in a tolerant and democratic society. A society, where the big value systems of the world can co-exist peacefully and respectfully. It would be a shame if we would not be able to work like that today.

This big challenge – for our strategy for the future, for our research programs, our European cooperation and for our educational programs – lies ahead of us. If we see it and grab it, this can offer us an enormous inspiration for the next 80 years. And with that strong wish, ladies and gentleman, I open another exciting academic year.