SALON LUITPOLD | Welches Europa brauchen wir? | Mit Gerald und Francesca Knaus

In the organizer's words:

A political miracle and how we protect it from its enemies with Gerald and Francesca Knaus

Anyone born in West Germany or Austria in 1950 had the extraordinary good fortune to experience 75 years of democratic peace in their own country. Will this also be the case for those people in Europe who were born in 2000 or 2025? Will we be able to secure a democratic peace in Berlin and Paris, Warsaw and Vienna, Vilnius and Kyiv? How many Europeans will still be able to take part in free elections in ten years' time? How many will have to fight in wars?

It is up to us - and whether we manage to defend a political miracle. To do so, however, we must also understand this miracle.

No one has as much to lose as the generation around the year 2000, should this miracle come to an end. No generation would pay as high a price as they would if the institutions that made this historically unique democratic peace possible were to fail or be destroyed: the European Union, NATO and the Council of Europe with its Human Rights Court.

Gerald Knaus is the founding director of the think tank European Stability Initiative (ESI). He advises governments and institutions on the rule of law, migration and human rights. He studied philosophy, politics and international relations in Oxford, Brussels and Bologna, and was an Associate Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has worked in Ukraine, Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina and now lives in Berlin.

Francesca Knaus was born in 2000 and grew up in Istanbul, Paris, Cambridge (USA) and Berlin. She studied European Studies in Amsterdam with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. She is co-founder of the European Debate Initiative (EDI), which won the European Citizens' Prize in 2021. She has been working on foreign policy and human rights in the German Bundestag since 2021.