ZEI Discussion Paper C 283 / 2024
Europäische Integration aus historischer Erfahrung. Ein Zeitzeugengespräch mit Michael Gehler - Wilhelm Haferkamp
This interview takes place within the framework of the contemporary witness interviews "European Integration from Historical Experience", which attempts to record all former commissioners from Germany in interview form. In the case of already deceased commissioners, the conversations were reconstructed retrospectively on the basis of their contemporary interviews, publications, writings and works. In the footnotes to the answers, the year of the statement is given in brackets, so that a historical classification is possible. The answers have been taken over tel quel as they were in the original.
ZEI Discussion Paper C 284 / 2024
Die Ambivalenz des Fortschritts. Freiheit unter globalen Bedingungen weiterdenken - Ludger Kühnhardt
ZEI Director Prof. Dr. Ludger Kühnhardt looks back on his inaugural lecture at the University of Bonn in 1987. The lecture was about political thinking in the southern hemisphere. In the spirit of the time, his analysis was cautiously optimistic with regard to the perspective of a gradual universalization of Western-based political norms. The silent recapture of power by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2021 and the aggressive Russian war of vengeance against Ukraine in 2022 demonstrated the ambivalence of the concept of progress in all its sharpness. Kühnhardt recalls the analyzes of his doctoral supervisor Karl Dietrich Bracher on the refractions in the modern concept of progress. Kühnhardt, shortly before his retirement, sees enormous challenges for the concept of progress and freedom as developed in Western civilization during the age of enlightenment. He pleads for maintaining the idea of human dignity against all old cultural doubts and new ideologies as the unalterable standard for a humane world.