Erstellt am: 19. 4. 2011 - 12:09 Uhr
A Brave New World
Schloss Leopoldskron, a US-owned 18th palace on the outskirts of Salzburg, is a grandiose location and it was hosting a seminar with a very grandiose name: "Global Citizenship; At Home (and?) in the World". Under its high ceilings of rococo stucco, a select group of US students were discussing ways to make our shared world a "better place".
The lakeside castle, with spectacular views over the Unterberg, Salzburg's landmark mountain, has been devoted to this sort of worthy debate since 1947, when a non-profit project, now running under the name of the Salzburg Global Seminar, was founded by three young and idealistic graduates from the elite US University Harvard. The trio, including Austrian-born Clemens Heller, set up the project to promote the sort of "intellectual debate" that would promote cross-cultural understanding.
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The choice of setting is not insignificant. Schloss Leopoldkron's history is blighted with intolerance. It was originally built by a Catholic Prince-Archbishop called Leopold Anton Freiherr von Firmian, who became infamous for exiling 20,000 Protestants in 1731. At the time of the Anschluss in 1938, the Nazis seized the palace, after its rightful owner the Salzburg Festival founder Max Reinhardt fled the country and the anti-Semitic madness that had engulfed it. He'd never see the castle that he had lovingly restored, again, dying in US exile in 1943, but his widow Helene Thimig regained possession of the property after the War and allowed the Harvard graduates to use the grounds for what is basically a peace project.
As the years have passed its focus has changed from healing the wounds of the Second World War to hosting rapprochement during the Cold War to now tackling the issues of a shrinking and globalised world.
As I arrived, the students, all from Miami and almost all either 1st or 2nd generation immigrants to the USA, were in the conference room discussing the UN millennium goals. Luis, who is doing volunteer work at a hospital as he aims to be doctor, was giving a talk on the causes of child mortality in Chad and Nigeria. Another student pointed out that universal education could be achieved for half the money Americans spent annually on ice-cream. Pricilla, who is a member of the Model United Nations and aims to be a member of the US congress, was decrying the slow development of national disaster prone Papua New Guinea. A guest from the real UN had visited to deliver a lecture of misconceptions about Islam.
These weren't the sorts of students I have been used to meeting. They were so bright, so fresh, so clean shaven and well dressed and so very, very earnest. Everyone I spoke to said they wanted to change the world, thought they could change the world and, indeed, had a responsibility to do their bit to change the world. Alexandra, a 20 year old journalism student whose family is from Cuba, told me that she had benefitted massively from the 10 day Global seminar and discussions of global citizenry: "The truth is that before this experience here in Salzburg I was very close-minded and I didn’t know half the things I learned here. I have a different perspective now about the world. I have a different perspective about my role as a citizen of this world."
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But what is a global citizen? The phrase sounds trite – the sort of thing you'd hear on one of those nauseating CNN adverts.
"A global citizen is basically someone who is aware of what is happening around the world", Alexandra says, "Number one is simply knowing, number two is thinking of things you can do from your home to reach out to the rest of the world, and number three is actually doing it." Vincent from Venezuela says he was sure that most of the group in Salzburg would end up becoming leaders of their generation and said, "I really want to get to the point where I can do something for my community – not just my local community but my national community and the international community. That's why we're here."
This sort of positivism can make Europeans uneasy. We tend to prize self irony and expect a healthy dose of skepticism. Such bluntly stated ambition scares us: It tempts us to think of Graham Greene's naive anti-hero of the Quiet American, Alden Pyle, with his big books and good intentions and his absorption in "the Dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West" and his disastrous determination "to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world." Or to think of the Bush Administration making aid to the Ugandan government dependent on promoting the neo-con belief in abstinence as the focus of its fight against HIV.
But it is much easier to be cynical than it is to be fair. Jochen Fried, the director of education at the Salzburg Global Seminar, admits the term global citizen can sound aloof but that for many of the students it is an almost instinctive notion. Many had grown up outside the US with various cultural backgrounds and had moved across borders, being compelled to assimilate different cultures. Only about half of the students on the course were US citizens. "They can relate to having more than one sense of belonging."
When the project's co-founder Richard Campbell praised "the favorable living conditions" of the seminar's location he could have won prizes for understatement. As well as the stucco there's a massive fire-place and a Venetian room complete with handcrafted gold wall panels and mirrors. But despite the plush surroundings and the smart clothes, these were not students from privileged backgrounds, just ambitious visitors from the land of "Yes We Can" on an all expenses paid trip to expand their horizons. Most of them held down jobs while they studied.
The students are "terribly thirsty and hungry to have meaning and value in their lives," says Fried. He says the notion of global citizenship, although broad, "fits their ambition of being not just good students but also becoming able to make a difference in the world in which they are living."
The remnants of my own scepticism of the project finally evaporated over dinner (no alcohol, just apple juice) as I chatted to Yamel, who emigrated from Cuba in 2005. Always short of small talk on these occasions, I asked him if he played baseball. He told me he wished he had time, but he was working as an insurance broker during the day to support his pharmacy studies. And this, just 5 years after he arrived in Miami after a difficult voyage with very little English.
All of the students around the table enthused about the importance of education, education, education. And they bubbled with self-criticism, vowing to read more. Journalism student Natalie, who described the group as "leaders of the future", said that her younger generation had a "duty" to reach beyond the sort of information fed to them by the traditional media: "We have to learn more", she insisted.
I hadn't met such love of education or fervor for self-betterment, since I lived in Africa. In spite of the bombastic title of that seminar, such positive energy is very hard to disdain.
Much money was being invested in these students - and not just for this week in a Salzburg castle. This was the new multi-ethnic generation that could help break the affluent WASPs’ strangle-hold on elite life.
A week in an American-owned 18th century Archbishop's palace might not give the students a very accurate picture of European life, but Jochen Fried suggested it might prevent them feeling intimidated when they advance to the next stage of the academic career and meet the rich kids in the Ivory League universities. These things shouldn't matter, but they do.
The program is also a project in transatlantic understanding. The prominent US writer Robert Kagan famously opined that "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus", but that sort of thinking isn’t resonating with a new generation growing up in an ever more connected world.
Even after a short-period abroad, it seems, the seeds of even short cultural exchange can bear fruit. Journalism student Natalie said she and her fellow students had been briefly disorientated but then impressed by the complex recycling system at the airport – apparently recycling is a rarity in Miami – and that an engineering student who had attended the seminar last year had been so infected by European ecological thinking that he has spend the past year bugging his classmates to help him.
She also suggested that Europeans might show more interest in the real America, not just the country portrayed on their cinema screens: "We went to Salzburg University and I asked him what he knew about Americans. He said he’d seen Bowling for Columbine."
It’s clear we all still have a lot left to learn about each other.