This speech was delivered during Salzburg Global's 75th Anniversary Weekend.
Good evening everyone, Salzburg Global Fellows from across the world, honored guests.
Please close your eyes for just a moment. Imagine the year is 1947. You and over 100 others have arrived in Salzburg from Europe and the United States for Salzburg Seminar number one. Seated among you are those who only recently were your enemies. Disease and malnutrition are rampant across the continent, making your journey and the organization of this gathering challenging at the extreme. The American student organizers have each brought with them a sack of flour as food supplies are scant; cots have been sourced from the Austrian army and food from care. Beds are arranged dormitory-style in the Schloss Gallery.
One of the three co-founders – Richard Campbell – has just heard an 11-minute speech by Secretary of State George C. Marshall given on June 5 at his Harvard University commencement, making the case for what came to be known as the Marshall Plan.
Just a month later, at Schloss Leopoldskron – in the library, next door – F.O. Matthiessen, a distinguished professor of literature and history and some would say the father of American studies – has just given the opening lecture.
“Our age has had no escape from an awareness of history,” Matthiessen said. “Much of that history has been hard and full of suffering. But now we have the luxury of an historical awareness of another sort, of an occasion not of anxiety but of promise.”
It was Matthiessen’s belief and that of the Seminar’s founders – Clemens Heller, Scott Elledge, and Richard Campbell – that Europe needed to be rebuilt not only physically and economically but intellectually and spiritually. It was incumbent on the young generation to re-establish dialogue to heal the wounds of war.
Now open your eyes. Seventy-five years have passed. Much has changed, and much remains the same.
More than 50,000 Salzburg Global Fellows have attended around 800 programs here. Salzburg Global Fellows are serving today as US Secretary of State, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, as members of central banks, high courts and legislatures around the world, and as leaders in business, education and civil society. Institutions and movements have been started here, and Salzburg Global Fellows attribute their Salzburg experience as contributing potently to who they have become. Yet we ask ourselves: “Is the optimism that a rules-based global order can enable economic competition to replace shooting wars any longer a view we can embrace?”
In March, we housed Ukrainian refugees here. Next month we gather a group to consider the role that civil society can play in the rebuilding of a European country once again devastated by war.
How does Salzburg Global contribute most in such a world?
A return to first principles may not be a bad place to start. Urged by our incoming president, Martin Weiss, we are emphasizing “peace and justice” as a central focus for our present and future work. As the Seminar’s founders understood well, without peace, little else is possible. Still, we recognize that security is not only geopolitical. Understanding that our planet is in peril and that collective action is essential to save it is as central a factor for peace and stability as resisting the use of armed force. In a crowded field of security conferences and think tanks, is this broader view of security where Salzburg Global might add the most?
Further, just as we helped develop and spread the concept of “one health” as a global strategy, our gatherings on “ending pandemics” and on nurturing effective health leaders remain of central importance for the future. Similarly, Salzburg Global has been active in the field of education since our founding.
In a world of artificial intelligence and revolutionary changes in the nature of work, we ask how can we prepare our children for lives of continuous learning, invention, and service? We also acknowledge and lead with conviction - especially post-COVID - the movement for social and emotional learning as a prerequisite for educational effectiveness. A priority of our Inspiring Leadership 75th-anniversary campaign is to endow an educational leadership center to anchor this work.
“Arts and Culture” also remains a central building block in our program. Creating a new program of residencies for artists, journalists, ethicists, and others will ensure that creativity thrives at the center of what we do here. What better way is there to celebrate the spirit of Max Reinhardt and of this creative community in which we reside?
With the forging of a new generation of leaders at the heart of our mission, we must take into account changing economic and political realities. Schloss Leopoldskron became in the Cold War a place where those on both sides of the Iron Curtain could meet and exchange ideas. As the world becomes more divided, we must be inclusive in our future approach if we aim to have influence.
This does not mean that we should sacrifice the aspirations of people everywhere to be free in matters of thought and access to information, nor to have a voice in determining one’s future. These aspirations have been bedrock at the Seminar since its founding, enshrined in the United Nations Charter, and should remain values we model and encourage across our work. Yet, Salzburg’s history of bringing ideological combatants together to seek common ground is every bit as important today as it was in 1947.
Salzburg Global Seminar brings much to addressing the enormous challenges that lie ahead. We have an approach and strengths complementary to, but very different from, academic centers, think tanks, and the watering holes of the rich and famous.
A key part of that difference is seeking out not just decision-makers and powerful figures but new voices to the policy table … those who have been historically under-represented and whose ideas are needed to shape a better future.
In the early years of the Seminar, our staff traveled regularly to spread the word about our work and to meet and interview potential Fellows. In the present world, we have other tools to showcase what we do, and during the pandemic, we got much better in engaging rising leaders online.
But just as nothing takes the place of meeting and exchanging ideas face-to-face, new strategies may be needed to find and recruit those who can benefit most from what we offer and to prepare them to achieve outsized impact.
Building coalitions with groups on every continent who share our search for solutions and commitment to ethical leadership is a strategy worth greater emphasis. While it is a big, diverse world, establishing Salzburg Global Seminar as a singular place for rising leaders who want to make a difference is well worth fresh attention.
As we began planning for this special anniversary, and as I anticipated the close of my presidency, I wanted to answer better the questions, “What is different about Salzburg Global Seminar?” And “How is its impact felt in the world?”
At a Paris café last summer, I met up with Tim Ryback, the Seminar’s former Resident Director and today Head of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, which he founded here at Leopoldskron. We agreed that Tim would undertake a writing project that has evolved into “75 years in 12 vignettes” available for all of you in booklet form – a special issue of Clemens magazine, which we launched during our 70th anniversary year to honor our founder.
I would like to share some brief excerpts from four of these vignettes I find particularly powerful, but I encourage you to read them all. Each is tied to a room in the Schloss that figures prominently in the story.
“Sometimes, if you drop enough bombs, you can deliver democracy. It hasn’t worked in Afghanistan or Syria, or Iraq. It didn’t work in North Korea or Vietnam. But it succeeded in 1940s Europe. The shrapnel cuts in the paintings in the lakeside salon just off the Great Hall… attest to American determination to return democracy to Europe.
“Heller made a bold decision [at that first Salzburg Seminar]; he put the students who had until recently fought against each other in the dormitory together. A Dane, who had been ‘beaten senseless by Nazis’ admitted, ‘for the first time I can talk to a German or an Austrian as a human being.’
The Christian Science Monitor christened the Salzburg Seminar… a ‘Marshall Plan of the Mind’ and the Boston Globe ‘an intellectual Marshall Plan for Europe.’ The term made Clemens Heller bristle as he favored Europe taking control of its own destiny.
Clemens said as much, Ryback writes, when I saw him for the last time in spring 1997, at his residence in Switzerland. "'If there was anything we wanted to do,' the Seminar’s founding father told me, 'I would say it was to promote the idea of individual responsibility, the idea that the individual could make a difference.’" Clemens wanted to instill in Europeans a sense of personal agency and individual responsibility, and he said, ‘I believe this was at the core of what we sought to achieve.’”
To find out more, read our History Vignette.
On the first evening of Session 299, Transnational Law and Legal Institutions, US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor came to the podium to reflect on what promised to be one of the most controversial Supreme Court rulings since Roe v. Wade in 1973, which had established a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.
Justice Blackmun, who had written the Roe v. Wade decision, had presented in Salzburg to a packed house on “the anatomy of Roe v. Wade.” Now, three years later, in July 1992, Justice O’Connor was in Fellows Hall to discuss the recent Supreme Court case, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, that sought to overturn the 1973 landmark ruling.
The nine Justices, O’Connor told the Fellows, had been divided with four Justices seeking to uphold Roe v. Wade and five Justices seeking to reinstate a national ban on abortion.
“Then something remarkable happened,” O’Connor told the Fellows: “Dear Harry, I need to see you as soon as you have a few free moments,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote to Blackmun on April 24, 1992. “I want to tell you about some developments in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and at least some of what I say should come as welcome news.” Kennedy had changed his mind.
O’Connor said that as a woman, her position on Roe v. Wade was clear, but for Kennedy, as a man, a conservative, and as a devout Roman Catholic, the decision was more complex, personally and morally, but ultimately his belief in precedent prevailed.
“Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” Justice O’Connor wrote in the majority opinion.
In the years to come, Justice Kennedy became an annual presence at Salzburg Global, speaking on immigration, global citizenship, and freedom of speech, always with a smile and a pocket-size copy of the US constitution.
The Salzburg Global Seminar – Supreme Court connection continues, with the court providing a regular venue for our annual Cutler Lecture - named for longtime Seminar Board Chairman Lloyd Cutler. Over the past 10 years, more than 500 “Cutler Fellows” have also participated in a program on public and private international law held at the US Institute for Peace in Washington, DC.
With support from the International Bar Association and the Cutler Center endowment, a new “rising lawyers network” is launching next year to connect public-service-minded lawyers in Europe, the US, and other regions of the world.
To find out more, read our History Vignette.
Schloss Leopoldskron was global long before Salzburg Global Seminar called it home. But the Seminar’s global aspirations were apparent from its earliest years. The first Fellow from Japan – Rikutaro Fukuda - attended Session 17, American Poetry and Prose. The first Fellow from China, Yueh-Tseng Feng, attended Session 18, Political Science and American Politics, the following month.
The 1970s saw the first Fellows come from Central America and Africa, with a concerted effort to recruit Middle Eastern Fellows bringing Israelis and Arabs together with regularity.
In April 1993, Session 301, Japan, Europe and North America: Toward a G-3 World, included faculty and Fellows from China, Japan, Korea, and perhaps most notably, a Fellow from Vietnam.
Given the vestiges of the US engagement in Vietnam, it was an important development to have Nguyen Xuan Phong – Acting Director of the Americas department in the Foreign Ministry in Hanoi – in attendance.
Phong had been given a single task – convince the United States to drop economic sanctions against Hanoi. He was now attending the Seminar to better understand American foreign policy in a global context. For the previous two years, Phong had accompanied Senator John Kerry on helicopter trips across the country on a mission to recover the remains of US servicemen missing in action.
In January 1994, Kerry reported to the US Senate and recommended “turning away from a policy of retribution to one of engagement with the Vietnamese.” A strong supporter of the Prime Minister’s reform policies, Salzburg Global Fellow Phong was named Vietnam’s consul general in San Francisco.
To find out more, read our History Vignette.
Mark Smolinski, a former director at the US Center for Disease Control, attended a 2007 program on the Global Nexus of Animal and Public Health. Afterward, he launched with other participants a new NGO – Ending Pandemics.
In 2019 he returned with another who’s who group of scientists and doctors for a program on Finding Outbreaks Faster: Metrics for One Health Surveillance.
These programs were a continuation of high-level sessions on the spread of deadly viruses starting in February 1988 with Session 266, AIDS: Confronting an Epidemic – which was one of the first international discussions of the aids crisis as a social and political rather than purely a medical issue.
Smolinski used the Salzburg programs to build consensus on necessary measures and protocols. In November 2018, the first meeting was convened, and the “Salzburg Metrics” were adopted by the WHO.
Very soon after the Smolinski programs and almost 40 years since the start of the AIDS epidemic, a new disease was about to make the interspecies leap and spread internationally, its symptoms including fever, coughing, fatigue, and the loss of taste and smell. As we now know, millions have died from this disease internationally despite heroic efforts to develop and deliver vaccines.
From this work and ongoing programs on strengthening health leadership, Salzburg Global has positioned itself to be a force in connecting social and political factors with detection and treatment of global disease.
To find out more, read our History Vignette.
While in exile in the United States during World War Two, Max Reinhardt wrote in a letter to his wife, Helen Thimig, reflecting on his years at Schloss Leopoldskron: “I have lived in Leopoldskron for 18 years, truly lived, and I have brought it to life. I have lived every room, every table, every chair, every light, and every picture. It has been the harvest of my life’s work.”
Well, I am no Max Reinhardt and am a steward not an owner of Schloss Leopoldskron. But having had the privilege of residing here for 18 years and overseeing efforts to restore the estate to its prior glory, I understand very personally the magic of this place.
I will miss it terribly, but I will have the privilege of returning that Reinhardt did not. As a member for life of the Salzburg Global Seminar family, this place for me, like for you and thousands of Salzburg Global Fellows across the world, will remain “home” in a very special sense.
We celebrate 75 years tonight but, even more, we celebrate a timeless place like no other, a place where informed by the past and by enduring principles, the future will unfold and where a new generation will strive to shape a better world.
So it was at our founding, so it will be forever more. Thanks to all of you for loving the idea and ideals of this Salzburg Global Seminar. I am proud to be a Salzburg Global Fellow.
Thanks to you for allowing me the opportunity of leading this extraordinary institution. I will remain yours in the Fellowship of this global family, this force for good.