Alpbach Panorama

AU G U ST 2 0 1 9

ALPBACH PANORAMA

Liberty & Security Essays by Ilija Trojanow, Sonja Puntscher Riekmann, Mathias Spielkamp and more When Alpbach became Artopia / Artists in Discourse / The Work of Lois Anvidalfarei

© Foto Watzek

A M AG A Z I N E O F T H E E U R O P E A N F O RUM A L P BAC H

W I T H M A N Y T HA N K S T O O U R PA RT N E R S

PRINCIPAL PARTNERS

EVENT PARTNERS

SEMINAR WEEK

TYROL DAYS

SCIENTIFIC AND NETWORK PARTNERS

POLITICAL AND LEGAL SYMPOSIA

Belfer Center, HARVARD Kennedy School Demos Helsinki foraus – Swiss Forum on Foreign Policy FES Regional Office for Cooperation and Peace in Europe Initiative Achtsames Österreich

FRA – European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights

HEALTH SYMPOSIUM

MOBILITY PARTNERS

ISD – Institute for Strategic Dialogue IWM – Institute for Human Sciences MSC – Munich Security Conference Political Academy The Innovation in Politics Institute

IOI – International Ombudsman Institute

University of Innsbruck

ECONOMIC SYMPOSIUM

TECHNOLOGY SYMPOSIUM

FINANCIAL MARKET SYMPOSIUM

Dear Readers!

TIMETABLE OF THE FORUM

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WHEN ALPBACH BECAME ARTOPIA

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ESSAY BY ILIJA TROJANOW

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ARTISTS IN DISCOURSE

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ESSAY BY PHILIPPE NARVAL

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ALWAYS SAY ‘ÅIBECKA’

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ESSAY BY MATHIAS SPIELKAMP

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HIKING SUGGESTIONS

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SCHOLARSHIP HOLDERS´ THOUGHTS

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ESSAY BY SONJA PUNTSCHER RIEKMANN

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ALPBACH IN MOTION

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ESSAY ON THE ARTIST LOIS ANVIDALFAREI

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ESSAY BY RICHARD STRAUB

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FORUM ALPBACH NETWORK

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THE ASSOCIATION

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USEFUL INFORMATION

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ALPBACH APP

Which events of 2019 will stay with us as having been especially positive or especially negative? Even if, as these lines are being written, nearly half the year is still to come.

That in 2019 the climate crisis ‘arrived’ in public awareness, especially among young people, could be one of the answers to that opening question. Another positive is that turnout for the European parliamentary elections was higher than ever before.

But that rulers outside and even within the EU are questioning democracy as the guarantor of civil rights and liberties is one of the year’s less glorious hallmarks, as is the fact that 2019 will enter the annals of history as the year of Brexit.

These and many other subjects will be discussed and analysed this year at Alpbach under the general topic of ‘Liberty and Security’.

But we’re not satisfied with simply describing problems; we want to find solutions too.

For How much liberty are we already depriving our children and grandchildren of if we keep acting as if we’re the last generation to live on our planet? And how much liberty do we want to sacrifice for a presumed gain in security? If, for example, borders within the EU continue to be policed despite the Schengen Agreement, even though the number of migrants has already fallen considerably.

Or if we keep refusing to carry out the necessary transformation of our economy and society and rob young people of their future in the process.

The European Forum Alpbach 2019 explores these and similar questions through 120 plenary sessions, breakout sessions and other exciting formats – including new ones such as the ‘On the Agenda’ debates during the Economic Symposium. Some of our almost 700 scholarship holders from 100 countries set off on an ‘Alpbach Learning Mission’ for the first time, and art and culture have a bigger role to play than ever before. The scope and density of the programme prevent us from doing it justice here. We therefore invite you to install the EFA app on your phone – it has all the information you need.

The major developments mentioned above also show that over the years, the European Forum Alpbach has chosen its special topics well. These include a focus on the best education for future generations, secondly sustainability, thirdly democracy, then civil and human rights, and not least European integration. Next year, incidentally, the European Forum Alpbach will be turning 75 – what would the Forum’s founders make of today’s Europe …?

But for now we’d like to thank you for your interest in what we’re doing here. We hope that the ‘Alpbach Panorama’, in both its printed and natural form in the mountains, brings you a great deal of pleasure and inspiration.

FRANZ FISCHLER, CASPAR EINEM, SONJA PUNTSCHER-RIEKMANN, CLAUS RAIDL Executive Board of the European Forum Alpbach PHILIPPE NARVAL Secretary General of the European Forum Alpbach

Find up-to-date information on the European Forum Alpbach App!

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SONJA JÖCHTL Managing Director of the Foundation European Forum Alpbach

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LIBERTY & SECURITY EUROPEAN FORUM ALPBACH 2019 SEMINAR WEEK, 14.-21.08.

ARTS AND CULTURE, 14.-30.08.

T YROL DAYS, 17.-18.08.

HEALTH SYMPOSIUM, 18.-20.08.

ARTISTS IN DISCOURSE, 21.08.

HIGHER EDUCATION FORUM, 21.08.

TECHNOLO GY SYM P OSI UM, 22.-24.08.

POLI TI CAL AND LEGAL SYM P OSI A , 24.-27.08.

ECONOMI C SYM P OSI UM, 27.-29.08.

FI NANCI AL M ARKET SYM P OSI UM, 29.-30.08.

ALP BACH EXTRA , 14.-30.08.

FORUM AL PBACH NE T WORK EVENTS, 14.-30.08.

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WHEN ALPBACH BECAME ARTOPIA A Whistle-stop Tour of the Forum´s History

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74 years ago, in August 1945, academics and students came to the Tyrolean village of Alpbach for the first time. They gathered together to discover, discuss and disseminate the ‘spirit of Europe’ across borders. While during this difficult period only around 80 lecturers and listeners took part, over the years the Forum has grown into an event with more than 5000 participants each year.

The idea for the ‘International Summer Seminars’ in Alpbach came from Otto Molden, a Viennese student, and Simon Moser, a philosophy lecturer from Tyrol. They put their plan into action in summer 1945 – from August 25 to September 10 to be precise. Those invited came from France, Germany, Switzerland, the USA and Austria. To make the meeting possible, the then governor of Tyrol, Karl Gruber, had provided the founders with 30,000 cigarettes: this hard currency was used to pay for the participants’ bed and board.

the patronage of Austrian universities – these enabled students and professors to keep the debate going throughout the year. The first meeting of this kind took place in 1946 at Innsbruck University.

Linz and Vienna soon followed this example – and particularly in Austria’s capital city, it was the so-called ‘Kraft Circle’ that became important. From 1949 to 1953 it was chaired by the philosopher Viktor Kraft – a member of the ‘Vienna Circle’ of the 1930s. Another name to attract attention within the College Society was the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who went on to teach in Berlin and Zürich, among others, and made a name for himself as a critic of the philosophy of science.

Improvisation formed the basis for the programme. The participants were divided into seven working groups, in which they discussed philosophical topics, government and law, antiquity and the present, modern literature, recent history and art. In 1949 the ‘Summer Seminars’ were renamed as the ‘European Forum’ – this also heralded a shift in the event’s focus. While initially academic discussion took centre stage, the programme in this ‘Village of Thinkers’ expanded rapidly. The ‘European Symposia’, for example, were established and principally involved representatives from politics, the economy and the cultural field. ‘College Societies’ were also founded under

Over the years, other famous figures have found their way to the village with its population of just 2600: here the psychiatrist Viktor von Weizsäcker debated with the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, while the philosopher Ernst Bloch shook hands with the physicist Werner Heisenberg. The philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Karl Popper also graced Alpbach with a visit. The latter’s idea of the ‘open society’ spread from Alpbach across Europe. Alpbach became a ‘window on

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Some of the illustrious participants of the Forum in the course of time: Erwin Schrödinger (left), Elisabeth Waltz-Urbancic (above) and Bruno Kreisky, Otto and Fritz Molden, Simon Moser (right)

in 1979. This included setting up a cable TV station with a range of two kilometres – Austria’s first private broadcaster. Artopia’s press officer was Helga Rabl-Stadler, the current president of the Salzburg Festival.

the world’ – émigrés who had been forced to flee from the Nazis and never wanted to set foot in Vienna again were happy to come to the Tyrolean Alps.

Nobel Prize winners have also taken part in the Forum, and continue to do so: James Buchanan (Economic Sciences), Sir John Eccles (Physiology and Medicine), Manfred Eigen (Chemistry), Friedrich A. Hayek (Economic Sciences), Werner K. Heisenberg (Physics), Konrad Lorenz (Physiology and Medicine), Erwin Schrödinger (Physics)… right up to Joseph Stiglitz (Economic Sciences), who attends the Forum in 2019 yet again. Other illustrious guests of the recent past include Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, and the artist Christo, known for his wrapped art installations.

For a long time – with only one interruption up until 1992 – Otto Molden shaped events in Alpbach as president. After this, the former Austrian ambassador to the Netherlands, Heinrich Pfusterschmid-Hardtenstein, took over this office. A native of Styria, he had been a student at the Forum as early as 1947. From 2000 to 2012, the presidency was held by the former minister and vice-chancellor Erhard Busek. Today’s president is Austria’s first EU commissioner, Franz Fischler. The post of his deputy is shared by former interior minister Caspar Einem, Sonja Puntscher-Riekmann, a professor of politics, and Claus Raidl, a long-time top manager and former president of the Austrian National Bank.

Alpbach and art: it could have its own chapter. From the outset, artists were invited to Alpbach – in keeping with the idea of an all-round education – and they often proved themselves active participants. Helmut Qualtinger, who as a satirist dissected 1950s Austria with precision, dressed up as a Soviet officer, disarmed the village police officer and even had him thrown in the local lock-up.

The graphic artist Paul Flora designed information signs. Renaissance man André Heller founded the artists’ free state of Artopia

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BERGE VON IDEEN DAMALS, HEUTE, MORGEN

INSTRUCTIONS FOR INTELLECTUAL SELF-DEFENCE A N E S S AY B Y I L I JA T R OJA N OW

«Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.»

ISAAC ASIMOV

ILIJA TROJANOW, Author, Translator and Publisher

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The greater the catastrophe becomes, the smaller the alternatives seem. ‘What catastrophe?’ you might reply. ‘We’re doing fine.’ To which I would reply that we become less capable of recognising threats the closer we draw to them. ‘Nonsense,’ you counter, ‘these days we’re hardly lacking in knowledge about what’s going on in the world.’ But is that really true? Or does this so-called ‘information’ help us close our eyes to reality? Nobody would seriously claim that it’s wise to destroy the environment, and yet this continues, and intensifies. There are only two possible explanations for this.

Either we are incapable of seeing the reality as it is, or we’re driving towards the abyss with our eyes open and the brakes off – hell, we’ve got our foot on the accelerator, too. (The number of new SUV registrations has boomed in the last years – according to a current study, one of the reasons given is that ‘I want to, before I’m not allowed to any more.’)

How we handle knowledge and awareness, in every shade including denial, is one of the decisive questions not only for the democratic process, but for our own welfare. And yet we don’t often think about it, and even more rarely do we practice possible techniques for individual intellectual self-defence. And why? We have to learn how to deal with information overkill and fake news, propaganda and manipulation, one-sidedness and uniformity, trolls and bots – and the earlier, the better. This is basic knowledge of every homo politicus – the photosynthesis that transforms separate individuals into a strong, living society.

Let’s start with the fact that we all too rarely find anything we haven’t searched for. Online algorithms boast that they can offer us tailored information, so closely fitting (‘superslim’) that we end up suffering from spiritual anorexia nervosa.

Unfortunately, we prefer to focus on information that reinforces our opinion, and pay far less attention to that which might place our views into question; so that most of us have stopped looking for information or approaches that might turn out to be challenging or provocative. The modern human being’s taste for comfort extends to our informational housekeeping. Biased news and misappropriated facts are our journalistic vacuum cleaners and washing machines.

To combat this wilful blindness, we should read our supposed ‘enemies’ carefully and allow for intellectual surprises and ambushes. That’s the only way we can break out of the self-made ghetto in which all our assumptions are loudly and daily reinforced. Sure, it’s more comfortable to be surrounded by like-minded people, but the outcome of this is that reason ends up being tailored according to our needs.

And because it fits so comfortably, we react with anger and aggression to anyone who tries to reclothe us.

From here, we soon find ourselves in that place where free thought is drowned in pint glasses. Mia san mia, as they say in Munich: either you’re for us or against us. You have to decide. And as soon as you choose a side, there’s no escape. You become the mouthpiece for a message. This spiritual self-mutilation is even praised as ‘identity’, or ‘belonging’: two words that unmask themselves of their own accord.

The first, ident, meaning ‘eternally constant’; the second based on an unflattering core understanding: being someone else’s property.

Making complex sense of events is hard work, but it’s always possible even in the most adverse conditions. I learned that from political prisoners who were shut up in camps and prisons for years, decades, in communist Bulgaria. Although they were only allowed to read those newspapers (if any at all) that were loyal to the party, they say that they were unusually well-informed because together they read between the lines, dismantled the dominant rhetoric, and were able to decode the hedging of the political facts. The outcome was worth the intense effort.

Our perception is too limited by nature for us to limit it yet further. In a famous US study, subjects were asked to count the number of passes in a basketball game (an exercise in concentration, given the breakneck pace of play). After one minute, they were asked whether they had noticed anything unusual. One out of two said no, and were astonished in the extreme to hear that, in the middle of it all, someone in a gorilla costume had run on to the court and stood there beating their chest before running away again. The gorilla was in view for a total of nine seconds

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while the attentive observers were counting passes. This discovery would be no surprise to magicians or to rulers. Misdirection has always been part of their repertoire.

So unreliable is our perception that it is downright absurd to insist on our own cognitive skills as the gold standard of truth, as many of us continue to do (‘I saw it with my own eyes’). Shouldn’t the knowledge of our own ignorance motivate us to understand perception as an interplay of many voices, one in which our own humble worldview, enriched by others, grows and becomes a great polyphonic choir?

Of course, this can only happen if we don’t rush directly to judgment with only buzzwords for support. If every citizen had to wear on their forehead all the markers and attributes with which we label their respective views and convictions, we would be shocked at the sight of all the tattooed faces. The use of labels is the greatest label fraud of all.

An old Sanskrit proverb says that there’s no shortcut to salvation. But our bookshops are full of shortcut primers called guidebooks, which satisfy the dictates of efficiency by showing us how to reach a given objective with as little effort as possible. Pressure cookers of truth; immersion heaters of wisdom. But shortcuts are worth little if you want to achieve sustainable change, in society or in yourself. Years ago, on a boat in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, our skipper asked us if we wanted to take a shortcut. We agreed, and spent two days stuck in a bog. Since then, I’m allergic to the word ‘shortcut’. Shortcuts promise a reward at the expense of in-depth, immersive understanding. They mislead us, because the comfort they afford deprives us of the courage to ask questions and to think for ourselves.

Close your eyes and imagine that your most deeply-held belief is completely wrong. That’s not so improbable. Many people are religious, but it could be that God doesn’t exist. Many people are ready to scream and shout, rage and roar for their fatherland, but there are sound arguments to the effect that nations are a pure construct and that the world would be better off without them. And then think about what would be the best solution if you believed the

opposite to your conviction. For example: I am pretty sure that people are mostly good, but my wife, in contrast, is firmly convinced that people are bad through and through.

Being married to her, I have to think through her position. If ‘man is a wolf to man’, then to me it follows that there can be nothing worse or more senseless than the concentration of power in a single person, because that person will end up abusing the power they are given: an anthropological constant. Paradoxically, misanthropy gives rise even more strongly to the need to prevent the concentration of wealth and of power in any form. Thinking through other convictions can end up reinforcing your own conclusions.

And last, but not least: we must sharpen our sense of possibility. Today, those who say ‘we’re doing fine’ are by no means saying ‘we’re going to be fine’. We would rather romanticise the past than build a future with the resources of dreams, with the toolbox of utopia. As Musil once wrote: ‘The sense of possibility can be straightforwardly defined as the capacity to conceive of

everything that might equally well be, and to accord no more importance to that which is than to that which isn’t. We can see that the results of such a creative system can be remarkable, and regrettably they often reveal that which people admire as false and that which they forbid as permissible, or else both things as indifferent.’ Instead, we cling on to entirely outmoded social systems that rely on hierarchy, bureaucracy, efficiency, narrow objectives and cheap incentives. We must also learn to see that which is further from our own experience, from our own present day.

Then, we can daydream up concrete utopias and prepare them for future generations; then, we can overcome our momentary feeling of futility.

not punches and kicks, locks and throws, but the art of diverse, free and critical thought.

Only those who are aware of their own contradictions and passions can build an active grassroots democracy as committed, self-aware citizens.

If kicks have to be given, then please direct them at your own, comfortable (sedentary or self-optimised) behind.

ILIJA TROJANOW directs an Alpbach Learning Mission on Intellectual Self-Defence from August 14 to 30.

On August 25 he is on a panel with e.g. Bavaria´s Minister of the Interior Joachim Herrmann discussing ‘Less Freedom for More Security?’

I am told that Krav Maga – a modern, eclectic form of self-defence from Israel – is becoming very popular. Many people want to be armed against a potential ambush attack by the dangers of life (which, incidentally, has never been so safe in Central Europe as it is now!). It’s high time, everywhere, to offer courses in intellectual self-defence that teach

SMATRICS E-SHUTTLE ELEKTRISCH VON A NACH B SMATRICS, Österreichs führender Anbieter von E-Ladelösungen, ist offizieller Mobilitätspartner des Europäischen Forum Alpbach 2019 und stellt einen umweltfreundlichen elektrischen Shuttleservice für die Veranstaltung bereit.

Wir wünschen Ihnen energiegeladene Tage in Alpbach!

smatrics.com

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05.07.19 13:59

ARTISTS IN DISCOURSE What happens when, the first time they meet, artists of international calibre in Alpbach on August 21 start talking about their personal take on the topic of liberty and security? Especially when that dialogue involves various different ways of speaking to all the senses? ‘MEET’ opens up new worlds of ideas and images and puts the audience in the thick of it.

S TAT E M E N T B Y RU T H B E C K E R M A N N

Fear is a part of life. You’d have to be stupid not to feel it. But when did we become convinced - or do we convince ourselves? - that life is becoming ever more dangerous, and that safety measures are the cure: whether it’s knee pads for kindergarteners, certified toxin-free apples, CCTV in public spaces, or a wall around our country?

Whatever the case, the ground is fertile for populists to sow fear, creating new images of the enemy behind which lurk the old, archetypal ones: the Other, the Stranger. Of course, they claim to be the ones who can save us. Those who are afraid are ready to sacrifice freedom for security, even when the process ultimately leads to repression.

On this day, we set out to meet people who choose freedom, passion and rebellion in their work and in their lives, and who have opened the way to new connections. We’ll meet the photographer Elfie Semotan, equally at home in art as in advertising, in Vienna as in New York; the composer Georg Friedrich Haas and his wife, the American storyteller and BDSM educator Mollena Lee Williams-Haas, who together redefine work and sexuality; the Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi, whose work sheds provocative, humorous light on the Israel-Palestine conflict; and the German writer Max Czollek, whose essay ‘Desintegriert Euch!’ [Un-integrate yourselves!] takes a new perspective on our community life.

RUTH BECKERMANN

RUTH BECKERMANN HOSTS THIS YEAR’S EDITION OF ‚ARTISTS IN DISCOURSE‘

© Heribert Corn

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The Guests

RUTH BECKERMANN Ruth Beckermann was born in Vienna where she also spent her childhood. After her studies in journalism and history of art in Vienna, Tel Aviv and New York, she took her degree as Dr.phil in 1977 at the University of Vienna.

She since contributed as a journalist to several Austrian and Swiss magazines. In 1978 she (co-)founded the distribution company filmladen in which she was active for seven years. In this period Ruth Beckermann started to make films and to write books. Since 1985 she works as a writer and filmmaker.

Her film “The Dreamed Ones” was selected at many international festivals and won several awards. In 2018, Ruth Beckermann finished her latest film “The Waldheim Waltz” and won, among other prices, the Glashütte-Original Documentary Award of the Berlin International Film Festival.

© Peter-Andreas Hassiepen

MAX CZOLLEK Lives in Berlin, where he was born in 1987.

2012 he gained his diploma in political science at TU Berlin. 2016 he was awarded a doctorate at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Technische Universität Berlin. Since 2009 he is member of the poetry collective G13, which published books and organized lectures.

2013-2018 he was curator of the international project Babelsprech.International for the connection of the young German speaking and European lyric scene.

© Elfie Semotan (Selbstportrait), Polaroid, NYC, 2008

AVI MOGRABI

ELFIE SEMOTAN

Israeli filmmaker and video artist Avi Mograbi was born in 1956 in Tel Aviv.

He studied art and philosophy in Tel Aviv, where he lives today. After gathering his first experience assisting directors, his own filmmaking began in 1989. Since 1999 he also teaches documentary and experimental filmmaking at the University of Tel Aviv.

Avi Mograbi is not only considered Israel’s most important documentarist, but also – as a committed eyewitness of the Middle East conflict, an experimentalist, and avid reformist of cinematic language.

Graduated from Austrian Fashion School Of Design in 1960, then discovered photography in Paris, where she was modelling. Back to Vienna in 1969, she began working as a professional photographer, doing fashion, advertising and portraits, becoming Austria’s most famous photographer. She then worked on an international level for magazines such as Vogue, Elle, Esquire, Interview, ID, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, Marie Claire, The New Yorker and many more. Lives and works in New York, Vienna, and Jennersdorf (Austria).

MOLLENA LEE WILLIAMS-HAAS

GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS

Award-winning author, performer, Storyteller, internationally acclaimed public speaker and world-renowned lecturer on Alternative Sexuality. Born and raised in New York City, she started her professional acting career at the age of five. Her background includes a lifetime of training and involvement in the performing arts, which include spoken word, classical theatre, dance, performance art, and all manner of stagecraft.

Was born in Graz and has risen to become one of the most important Austrian composers internationally, felt limited by the established system of equal temperament. Notes shaded by microtonal deviations have therefore been determining factors in his compositions since the beginning of his career. Intensive experimentation with overtones has lent a new quality of radicalism to Haas’s sound and, as a result, his works make particularly high demands on their performers.

© Substantia Jones

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BAD COFFEE, GREAT SCIENCE AND EVERYWHERE A SPIRIT OF CURIOSITY R E F L E C T IO N S O N T H E A L P BAC H F O RUM SE M I NA R W E E K 2 0 1 9 P H I L I P P E NA RVA L

ALPBACH APP Find up-to-date information on the European Forum Alpbach App!

Do you feel that everything you learned at school has allowed you to thrive in your private and professional life? My guess is that this is probably not the case. Our traditional school system has been slow to adapt to the way society has changed, and the need for different skillsets to those for which our school system was originally conceived in the 19th century.

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Today, we seek literacy in science, languages and numeracy as before, but also proficiency in critical thinking, creativity and personality traits like persistence, social and cultural awareness and leadership. These are not even my own categories, but some of the key ‘21-century skills’ that the World Economic Forum in Davos, not a body traditionally identified for its revolutionary zeal, has developed in recent years.

While the stunning Alpine views, the friendly welcome from one of Europe‘s most beautiful villages and the intensely stimulating company of peers and teachers are incredible assets to our Seminar week, we do understand the availability of first-class coffee is in short supply. But while we are a long way from metropolitan hipster baristas making expert flat whites, we hope you can get your kicks from the heady atmosphere instead!

Others continue to talk about what should be done in education. We at the Alpbach Forum decided to walk the talk and transform our traditional scientific seminar week. After a couple of years of preparation and experimentation, we are launching a new type of educational programme at the Alpbach Forum this summer and we are very excited about it. So much so that I would be desperate to apply as a scholarship holder myself, if I weren’t so old.

And I‘m not the only one who is enthused about breaking new ground in Alpbach this summer. My colleagues Bernadette and Clara, as well as our board members Caspar, Franz, Howard and the many others who are involved in the preparations feel the same way. We all see Alpbach as a place of curious enquiry where change is welcome and not seen as a threat. If systems, communities and organisations want to thrive and live up to their mission, they need to be willing to continuously question their relevance and methods. Nothing is set in stone: if you have an idea, try to make it happen! To learn to embrace this entrepreneurial way of life, you need to practice, fall over and practice some more, just like a little child learning to walk. You need to learn how to deal with insecurities and the unexpected. We believe the creative arts can offer wonderful opportunities for experimenting with insecurities in a safe environment.

It is for this reason that we collaborate with the world’s best acting school and are proud to have RADA (Royal Academy

of Dramatic Art) actors and director Nona Shepphard back for the 7th year in a row.

Equally, we are proud to have Erwin Ortner with us, the founder and director of the world-renowned Arnold Schoenberg Choir, and many other great artists and scientists.

Besides being great fun, we believe that the tradition of choral singing can teach social skills (sometimes far more effectively than in theory), such as critical reflection and the ability to compromise. The arts are also a fantastic way to connect to your intuitive mind. We see intuition as a valuable tool on equal pairing with our rational mind, and an aspect of ourselves which we have come to neglect. As Albert Einstein once wrote ‘the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten about the gift’. Just like the science seminars, the artistic and skills-based seminars are firmly based on our belief in excellence. Excellence is what we expect from our participants as well.

Good enough is not enough for Alpbach! If you compete, compete with yourself or the self you were yesterday, thriving to become better with every attempt.

CRITICAL ENQUIRY

Striving towards excellence is also fundamental to science, which has been in the DNA of Alpbach since its foundation in 1945. So the mornings in Alpbach begin with great science, but (unfortunately) bad coffee. Whether you want to investigate the state of Quantum physics; the potentials and pitfalls of CRISPR/Cas9; or learning about the historic relationship between history and religion, we encourage you to dig into fields you know less and want to know more. The seminars are also an invitation to develop a better understanding of the scientific method of critical enquiry. In a world where everyone seems to have an opinion, but few have the facts, we believe this understanding of the basic principles of scientific method and analysis is absolutely paramount.

Thinking in silos is the downside of the 19th century version of scientific enquiry, and one which came to embed itself in our universities and institutions. All over the world these silos are breaking up: in Alpbach we want to encourage the flourishing of this exchange across disciplines.

To give this more structure and depth, we have created special seminars. The Alpbach Learning Missions will explore in depth questions of relevance, and are based on a project-based learning and interdisciplinary enquiry. Topic in this year’s mission include climate change, water resource management, non-communicable diseases like diabetes and obesity, as well as digital activism in the defence of democracy and exploring other methods of critical inquiry. Participants will first work on the fundamentals in each field and then commit to work together and to tackle challenging questions of relevance in the days that follow. The results and findings of the groups will take centre stage at the Alpbach Political and Legal Symposium, one of our flagship international events. They will also feed back into the networks of our science partners who co-programme our learning missions. Teamwork, a systemic approach and creativity will all be utterly crucial for success!

So this is how science, the arts and applied problem-oriented thinking will be core components of the Alpbach programme this summer. We are convinced that our programme will contribute to the rethinking of education in the 21st century. We are creating an open space where you can challenge the status quo in a constructive way. Nothing harms us more in times of change and transformation than a lack of perspective, the dominance of fear and a monotony of thinking that have become all too familiar in the past. The more diverse the ideas that can be generated by Alpbach the better.

And enduring slightly less than excellent coffee for a few days is a price worth paying.

PHILIPPE NARVAL is Secretary General of the European Forum Alpbach

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ALWAYS SAY ‘ÅIBECKA’ The Alpbach dialect is ‘conservative’ and sounds ‘soft’. That means it’s barely changed in the course of time. Even now, people meet up on ‘Erchtåg’ and buy ‘Mäaö’. And Franz Joseph himself lingers in local memory. © H E L L I N JA N KOWSK I , D I E P R E S SE

Against the traditional backdrop of Alpbach students of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London are showing their skills.

If you say ‘Alpbacher’, you’re not from Alpbach. The inhabitants of the Tyrolean mountain village are actually called ‘Åibeckarinna’, or ‘Åibecka’, also spelled ‘Oipbecka’. ‘Even in the neighbouring towns, you scarcely hear that any more,’ says David Gschösser. ‘ They call us Åipåcher or Ålpåcher.’ Gschösser, a research associate at the University of Innsbruck’s Tyrolean Dialect Archive, has dedicated himself to the dialect of his home town. Incidentally, its name, ‘Åibåch’, doesn’t come from the Alpbach river – which emerges from the nearby gorge – but once described the abundance of alpine pastures found here.

The roots of the Alpbach dialect lie in Middle Bavarian, which

arrived in the Alps from the big cities of Munich and Vienna, and which was also a formative influence in the area around Salzburg.

‘That’s why people in Innsbruck often think I’m from Salzburg,’ Gschösser says. But he doesn’t mind that. Anyway, the people of Innsbruck aren’t completely wrong, at least from an ecclesiastical point of view: the parish of Alpbach is located in the district of Kufstein, which belongs to the Archdiocese of Salzburg, along with 16 other deaneries. ‘The border is the Ziller – a right tributary of the river Inn. You can see it by the roofs of the church towers,’ says the linguist. ‘We have green roofs, but those on the other side are red.’

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2581 DIFFERENT DIALECTS

HOW DO YOU WRITE IN DIALECT?

Back to dialect. ‘Actually,’ says Gschösser, ‘we have 2581 different dialects in Alpbach.’ As many as there are inhabitants. ‘If you’re really precise about it, each of us has an own, completely individual way of talking – and not just in Alpbach.’ Of course, there are also local particularities. ‘But the boundaries are blurred, not clear.’

So, in Alpbach, people talk about ‘Hoiz’ (the standard German is Holz: wood) and ‘Müch’ (Milch: milk). ‘One valley over, it’s back to Holz and Milch again.’ More examples: ‘We don’t say we’re experiencing ein kaltes Wetter [cold weather], but “‚a kåids Weda.”’

Talking about the weather might seem simple enough, but kitchen vocabulary requires rather more verbal acrobatics if you want to mimic the dialect. ‘We bake with “Mäaö,”’ Gschösser says, meaning Mehl (flour). Linguistics research divides the Tyrolean dialects into four variants. In the early middle ages, the Alemanni shaped language development in Ausserfern (Reutte district), while the Slavs stopped in East Tyrol and made their own impression. In the rest of Tyrol, however, dialects emerged that were rooted in the Bavarian and Romance languages. The latter can be found in the Alpbach area to this day. ‘There are placenames that are still pronounced with the stress at the end, like Mareit, which we pronounce “Maráit,”’ Gschösser says.

As Gschösser tells us, many Alpbachers only started to think about how to write their dialect down when mobile phones found their way into the village of thinkers. ‘The field post my grandmother received from my grandfather was written in standard German. Even my mother wouldn’t have dreamed of writing a letter in dialect. Only with text messaging did the spoken word become written.’

But long before that, people had some fixed ideas about the Alpbachers, some of which remain to this day. For instance, the inhabitants of Alpbach are held to be ‘wunnåa’. The standard German equivalent would be wunderlich, which means that we are supposed to be very curious people. Apparently, the locals are also rather small in stature. An unpleasant joke still makes the rounds to the effect that ‘if they’re over four feet, they can’t be from Alpbach.’ Another anecdote dates back to Franz Joseph I. ‘At the opening of the Zillertal railway, some Alpbachers were apparently presented to the Emperor as “Alpböcker”, because the person making the introduction tried to sound more elegant.’ Gschösser says. ‘As a passionate hunter, he thought they were Alp-Böcke [Alpine mountain goats] and had the “goats” fed with hay.’ The derisive name ‘Alpböck’ persists.

THE TOP 30 DIALECT WORDS

THE FURTHER WEST, THE HARDER THE SOUND

arneascht früher Aungglos Brille becköreiten rodeln boassln hageln

boatn warten

duckn Kopf einziehen durmisch schwindelig

eppas etwas foamasn frühstücken

gfahla gefährlich

go sei fertig sein ha? was?

heisln spielen

hoagaschtn reden

iwanachtig unausgeschlafen Janga Jacke kod jetzt kropfitzn rülpsen loa da Gott Danke lonnan unterwegs sein marendn nachmittags jausnen neinan vormittags jausnen

Oipbecka/Åibecka Alpbacher

Pfoad Hemd Rock Sakko stad still trochtn denken

uvadonks unabsichtlich wunnoa neugieriger Mensch zupf di hau ab

When the Romans eventually came to occupy large parts of the Tyrol, they brought vulgar Latin with them. ‘In the sixth century, Latin got mixed in with the early German vocabulary of the Bavarians, who settled in the Tyrolean Inn Valley,’ Gschösser tells us. Over decades and centuries, the individual regions again developed their own characteristics. Since then, the rule of thumb is: the further west you go, the harder the sound – even beyond the borders of Austria.

‘If “Knödl” [dumplings] are on the lunch menu in Imst, in Innsbruck it’s “Cknödl”, and in Alpbach “Knedl”, until finally you’re served “Gneel” in Vienna. In the West you call a girl a “Gitsche”, while in Alpbach the much softer “Dinnl” is used.’

This phenomenon was already described by Jacob Grimm in the nineteenth century. ‘Experience shows that mountain air makes sounds sharp and rough, while flat terrain makes them soft and fatuous.’ He doesn’t mean fatuous in the sense of stupid, but in the sense of insipid, soft and weak. ‘Language is always influenced by the geographic structure of a given region,’ Gschösser says.

You can see that, for example, in Innsbruck, which is exposed to a lively influx of languages due to its position as a tourist city and transport hub. The Alpbach dialect is much more conservative.

‘That’s because we’re in a valley.’

Because it’s so cut off, some ‘special terms’ can persist. If an Alpbacher means gestern (yesterday), he says ‘nacht’ (night). ‘The ancient Germanic tribes counted the days in nights,’ Gschösser explains.

Last year (vergangenes Jahr) is ‘feascht’ for short, while ‘Tuesday’ (Dienstag) lurks behind the word ‘Erchtåg’. If you only arrange to meet on ‘Pfinztåg’, you have until Thursday (Donnerstag) to get ready.

19

For when you want to talk about the old days.

In case you’ve misplaced your specs.

The Alpbach winter is good for sledging.

Hopefully, the Forum participants won’t have to weather a hailstorm!

If you have to wait, do it with coffee in the Congress Centre.

If someone shouts ‘Duck’, just do it!

Dr. Bruno Bletzacher is always on call if you feel dizzy.

There’s always something.

If you want to start the day with a hearty breakfast The mountains around Alpbach can be dangerous.

You’ll get bonus points for readiness.

Even with this guide, you might still have questions.

The verb ‘to play’ has nothing to do with the famous Wiener Häusl.

You’ll have plenty of chances to talk at the workshops.

Up too late at the Waschkuchl?

Always have a jacket handy Get a move on – the time is now!

Never burp in polite company.

A polite thank you never hurts.

Out and about and off the beaten path.

An afternoon snack keeps energy levels up … … and so does a morning snack – take your time!

Practice your pronunciation before you try this on the locals.

Every man should pack a nice shirt … … and a sports jacket to go with it.

Just be still and let your mind wander.

Alpbach isn’t called the ‘village of thinkers’ for nothing.

Accidents happen!

Journalists are known to be curious.

Hopefully, nobody will tell you to get lost!

MIND THE ALGORITHM A N E S S AY B Y M AT H IA S SP I E L KA M P

The question of whether automation benefits or damages us citizens is primarily a political one.

No one should let themselves be told that only those who have studied mathematics or computer science can take part in the discussion.

20

The fact that these processes have been attracting more attention – and scepticism – in recent years lies chiefly in the claims made by providers that they can develop and operate systems to make automated decisions. So called Artificial Intelligence is often mentioned in the same breath. It’s a very unfortunate choice of words.

For many people it creates the impression that there are processes at work comparable to human intelligence, but being carried out by machines instead. This isn’t the case. Rather, these are statistical processes which give an impression of producing results in a similar way to human thought processes. Yet just because a computer can beat a human at a game of chess doesn’t mean it has a purpose or possesses creativity or autonomy – all characteristics that make a human ‘human’ in the first place.

Imagine you’re looking for a job. The company you’re applying to tells you that the application process will be much easier if you give them the username and password to your personal email account.

That way, they can just analyse your emails and create a personality profile. No complicated questionnaires to fill out – they’re boring and much less reliable than analysing your emails, since these are harder to manipulate. Everybody wins: the company, because it gets a far more precise application profile and more suitable employees; you, because it’s less work for you to find a job that suits you; and the company offering the analysis, because by doing so it can make a lot of money.

When we came across this example during research for our report ‘Automating Society’, which took stock of automated decision-making processes in 12 EU countries, at first we were dumbfounded. There must be some mistake, we thought, and the assertion from the analysis company that no applicant had ever declined a request to access their email account wasn’t exactly reassuring. Supposedly, all this is entirely legal, even after the stringent data protection standards introduced by the European Union.

In order not to strengthen this false impression, we should instead be talking about systems that make automated or algorithmic (preliminary) decisions: ADM (automated decision-making) systems. Here human decisions are delegated to automated systems by transforming a model for decision-making, which has been developed by a human, into software so it can be implemented by a machine. For example, an automated car is equipped with a system capable of recognising and avoiding obstacles. That it should avoid obstacles has not been decided by the car or its computer system, but by the software developers. This also isn’t altered by the fact that increasingly, so-called ‘self-learning’ systems are being installed which, over time, get better and better at recognising obstacles.

The decision to avoid these obstacles rather than driving into them remains a human decision.

It’s cases like this that make people feel uneasy, fearful even: afraid of being spied on and monitored so that other people can form an opinion of them, yet without having any kind of control over this image any more; afraid of becoming the object of decisions made by systems whose functions they do not understand, cannot understand – partly because they’re so complex, partly because those using them reveal nothing about how they work or the purposes for which they’re being used.

What might seem like academic nit-picking has weighty social consequences: the responsibility for the effects of operating these systems always lies with people, not machines. Saying ‘That’s what the computer decided’ to justify an action can be an expression of helplessness but also the result of deliberate (false) representations made by those using it. Yet it’s still always wrong, for which reason we cannot allow people to use this justification to evade their responsibility.

This uneasiness is justified on the one hand but presents a problem on the other. After all, automated processes aren’t bad in and of themselves – on the contrary. Who wants to use paper and pencil instead of a spread sheet to do complex calculations on large sets of numbers? Who wants to manually filter their emails for the countless spam messages? And who wants to go back to catalogues of web pages they have to browse through like the Yellow Pages instead of just entering keywords into the search engine of their choice? These are just some examples of automated processes we use more or less consciously on a daily basis. Added to this come processes without which our society simply wouldn’t function: from the automated data transfer that constitutes the core of the Internet to automated electricity grid management, without which day-to-day life would come to a standstill. It’s not just that we’ve already been living in an automated world for a long time, we also benefit enormously from this automation.

Austria’s Job Service (the Arbeitsmarktservice, or AMS) is the best example here. A statistical model was developed which, on the basis of education, gender, previous employment, age, nationality and other criteria, would work out the chance of an unemployed person finding work again. It divided people into three categories: those with high, medium and low chances of finding a job. In concrete terms this meant that from 2020, people in the middle category would be given more support, while job seekers with high or low chances on the labour market would receive less support.

21

world. Entitled ‘Display of Information’, it requires each airline reservation system to provide to any person upon request the current criteria used by the system to classify flights, the weighting given to each criterion, and the specifications used by the programmers in constructing the algorithm.

The justification: resources for labour market policy should be used more efficiently and support for those seeking work should be more targeted. An objective which many would probably support when formulated in this general way. The problem: the weighting given to different factors corresponds to the status quo. For example, women with ‘care duties’ have a worse chance of finding a job than women without these duties or men with children, to whom the question of ‘care duties’ is never put in the first place.

If, however, this fact now becomes the basis for a model that helps determine a person’s future, then it reinforces this state of affairs.

It is astonishing to see what has happened in the 35 years since this law was passed. On the one hand, there has been the development of ever better systems for automating complex processes, systems which have and could have a huge effect on all our lives. Three examples: in the Netherlands, government authorities are attempting to identify ‘welfare fraudsters’ by combining data from different agencies and filtering it through an algorithm; in Denmark, the government wants to introduce a system that will take data about families and use it to work out which children are at risk of neglect; in Poland, those out of work have been either granted or denied help since 2014 on the basis of an automated classification system.

PERPETUATING AN EXISTING INJUSTICE Those who defend this as an objective reflection of reality have misunderstood its inherent social dynamite. The task of politics should be to create a fairer world where everyone can participate on an equal footing. At the AMS, the decision was taken to perpetuate an existing injustice and therefore reinforce it – a decision taken by humans, we might add. The algorithm developed for this purpose is really just a mechanism for implementing this political decision; it is for those who took that decision to justify and take responsibility for it.

On the other hand, regulation has not kept pace with developments.

Whereas in 1984 transparency was mandated for a commercial system purely for reasons of consumer protection, i.e. in order to determine whether people were being disadvantaged in their capacity as consumers, the AMS system and the examples above show that we have long been dealing with decisions that encroach on our rights to a far greater extent. Yet all too often we are denied any information whatsoever on who is operating these systems to what end; who has developed them with whom; which political and statistical models they are built on; and who is being affected in what way.

It is the blindness to the politics at the heart of many automated processes that provokes justified criticism. For the risks have long been known. When, for example, in 1957 IBM began to develop the Semi-Automated Business Research Environment, SABRE, in order to sell tickets for flights operated by American Airlines, it wouldn’t be at all naïve to assume it had a worthy aim in mind: to improve what had always been a very cumbersome and error-prone reservation process for the airline and its customers. Over the following 25 years however, American Airlines realised that the system might have other uses. When several other airlines also began using SABRE, American Airlines started to manipulate the system so that its flights would be favoured above those of other airlines. Travellers were no longer offered the cheapest ticket but the one that American Airlines wanted to sell. In a US congressional hearing, American Airlines president Robert L. Crandall was unmoved by accusations of having acted unfairly: ‘The preferential display of our flights, and the corresponding increase in our market share, is the competitive raison d’être for having created the system in the first place.’

INFORMATION IS BEING DENIED IN MANY COUNTRIES The algorithm for the Dutch system is kept secret; even after filing a freedom of information request, a network of Dutch civil society organisations received no information from the government. At which point the network instituted legal proceedings, which are still on-going. In Denmark, work by investigative journalists gave rise to mass protests from the population, with the result that the government delayed launching the programme in late 2018 indefinitely. And in Poland, civil society organisations had to resort to legal proceedings to gain further information so they could understand what was going on – and then voice fierce criticism. Yet only when the Polish Federal Audit Office also picked apart the system not only for being inefficient but also for discriminating against certain social groups, including single mothers and people with disabilities, and the Constitutional Court ruled that the legal foundation for data processing was insufficient, did the government decide to discontinue using the system at the end of 2019.

In their seminal paper ‘Auditing Algorithms’, Christian Sandvig and his co-authors dubbed this perspective ‘Crandall’s Complaint’: why should you build and operate an expensive algorithm if you couldn’t bias it in your favour? The US government took a different view to Robert Crandall and in 1984 passed a now little-known regulation, widely regarded as the first legal regulation of algorithms in the

22

All this is correct. Therefore we must be clear that transparency alone is not the cure. But it is a vital precondition for using automated systems in a democracy. Only when we know why they’re being used – simply to save money, or is a problem so complex it seems that it can’t be solved any other way? – what their purpose is, who is affected by them in what way, who has developed them – a government authority on its own, or with the help of a commercial company, or the company on its own – and on what assumptions they’re based will we be able to decide. Decide whether we agree that the system be used for the stated purpose – or whether some decisions, for example on imprisonment, should never be left to automation. If we agree in general, we want to be able to decide how much information about the system’s workings we need in order to trust that it’s working in the way it should. And if we deem it appropriate that the code is revealed to government authorities, for example, then a company wishing to sell or operate such a system must submit to this. It can then be examined in what’s known as an ‘in camera’ process by experts who are sworn to secrecy.

And when we’re sufficiently familiar with the workings, we have to decide what kind of control and oversight we consider adequate, and what kind of opportunities to object we need, in order to avoid becoming the powerless objects of automated processes.

THE NEED FOR A REGULATORY FRAMEWORK As a start, these demands form the foundations for regulatory frameworks, which we need to develop in order to operate automated decision-making systems in such a way that they strengthen the common good, and in order to prevent them from undermining it – by excluding or disadvantaging certain groups of people while a small number of companies skim the profit off the top.

MATTHIAS SPIELKAMP

And finally: the question of whether automation benefits or damages our societies, benefits or damages us citizens, is chiefly a political question. No one, therefore, should let themselves be told that only those who have studied maths or computer science can take part in the discussion. It’s a discussion for mainstream society. For even if it hadn’t turned out to be the case that the Finnish firm, which claimed to create personality profiles on the basis of private emails, never actually had any customers and simply wanted to profit from the hype around so-called Artificial Intelligence – as many firms are currently doing – the question of whether what it was offering was legitimate or not was never a question of technology.

It is a threat to democracy and the rule of law when processes with far-reaching consequences for individuals and society are kept secret.

Yet demands for greater transparency are often countered with three arguments. 1: such processes are usually protected as trade secrets by the firms who developed them. 2: it is neither necessary nor sufficient to disclose an algorithm – unnecessary, since its function can also be described without publishing the code and, in any case, what matters is the outcome, not the process; insufficient, since not only the algorithm but the data it works with is a decisive factor and the process can undergo dynamic changes, in particular when self-learning technologies are at play. 3: transparency alone is useless because it results neither in people being no longer at the mercy of a system nor gives them the chance to object or claim restitution, e.g. through the payment of damages.

MATTHIAS SPIELKAMP is founder and executive director of AlgorithmWatch, a non-profit advocacy and research organisation focusing on consequences of algorithmic decision making (ADM) based in Berlin. He takes part in the breakout session ‘When Machines Judge People’ at the Forum on August 26.

23

HIKING SUGGESTIONS IN

LAKE BERGLSTEIN Difficulty: Distance: Duration: Ascent: Descent:

easy 4.3 km 1.30 h 155 m 155 m

A simple hike which can be extended by a walk around the lake.

Lake Berglstein 713

Mosen

Seen

Start

Stra

Near to Alpbach lies Lake Berglstein. At 713m above sea level, the romantic lake is located between Kramsach and Breitenbach in the southern foothills of Voldöppberg mountain in the Brandenberg Alps. It is surrounded by woodlands and reed beds and on one of its shores, a restaurant welcomes guests to its sunny terrace. You can drive up to the lake then hike around it on foot. Or, for those feeling more athletic, it can also be reached via the trail from Lake Reintal (the ‘Panoramaweg’ from the ‘Reintalersee-Ost’ car park). The ‘Leichter Lernen Wanderweg’, as this stretch is known, features twelve panels designed to improve your capacity to learn and concentrate. Both routes are suitable for families and less experienced hikers.

ße

Kramsach Parkplatz Halbinsel Reintaler Lake

Camping Seehof

Inn

24

N AND AROUND ALPBACH © WIENER ZEITUNG

WIEDERSBERGER HORN Views of the Zillertal and Kitzbüheler Alps

Alpbacher Landesstraße Alpbach

Wildschönau

Start

The Wiedersberger Horn in the Alpbach Valley rises to 2,127m with a summit that is easy to reach. A cable car from Wildschönau that carries you over picturesque Alpine pastures makes the route to the top considerably shorter. From the top station of the Wiedersbergerhorn Cable Car the ground rises 252m to the nearby summit, where you can enjoy views of the Zillertal and Kitzbühel Alps, Lake Achen and the sweep of the Inntal Valley. This is a gentle hike of around 3km.

For sections near the summit secured by steel ropes, there are easy alternative routes suitable for younger children and less experienced hikers. The path back to the top station follows the ‘Panoramaweg A40’, either to the north or south of the summit. 30 minutes should be allowed for this section. And if younger members of the party still have energy to spare, there’s fun to be had on the slides at the playground near the cable car.

Inneralpbach

Luderstein 1,825 m

Wiedersberger Horn 2,127 m

Difficulty: Distance: Duration: Ascent: Descent:

easy 4.0 km 1.30 h 195 m 196 m

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HaltungsĂźbung Nr. 20

Neugierig bleiben.

Eine leichte, beinahe kinderleichte HaltungsĂźbung ist gleichzeitig eine der wichtigsten: neugierig bleiben. Wenn Sie das jeden Tag Ăźben, machen Sie es irgendwann automatisch. Wir sprechen da aus Erfahrung. derStandard.at

Der Haltung gewidmet.

Freiheit versus Sicherheit?

Sind Freiheit und Sicherheit wirklich gegensätzliche Positionen? Bedingen sie einander nicht eher Sind in gegenseitiger sieht das Verhältnis von Bedingen eigener Freiheit zu jener der Freiheit und Wechselwirkung?

Sicherheit wirklichWie gegensätzliche Positionen? sie einander nicht anderen aus?

Wie steht es um die Gerechtigkeit, in der die Freiheit als Pflicht und Recht fußt?

Und eher in gegenseitiger Wechselwirkung? Wie sieht das Verhältnis von eigener Freiheit zu jener der wieviel Sicherheit brauchen wir,Gerechtigkeit, um frei zu sein?

Als die Qualitätsmedium beschäftigen solche anderen aus?

Wie steht es um die in der Freiheit als Pflicht und Rechtuns fußt?

Und Fragen um brauchen unserer besonderen für die Gesellschaft gerecht uns zu werden. wievieltäglich, Sicherheit wir, um frei Verantwortung zu sein? Als Qualitätsmedium beschäftigen solche Frei inGesellschaft den Inhalten,gerecht sicher inzuder Form.

Fragen täglich, um unserer besonderen Verantwortung für die werden. in den seit Inhalten, in der Form.

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«The Luxury of Engaging with Topics Simply out of Intellectual Curiosity»

SCHOLARSHI THOUGHTS & E

DA M I TA P R E S SL

I’m a journalist, so a lot of my day-to-day work involves reacting to whatever is currently happening and the news that comes in.

My job is to sort through a never-ending stream of information, pick out the important pieces and place them in context. Donald Trump will send out a tweet with twelve exclamation marks threatening Iran, and I have to decide whether it’s relevant enough to report on. Parliament will pass a law, and I have to think about how to break it down into a one-minute news segment so that everyone who watches my show will be able to understand it. Any journalist will tell you that our work happens at a very fast pace.

My news show airs twice daily; I have limited time to prepare and as soon as one show is ready, I begin planning for the next one.

I try to set aside an hour a day for active, targeted learning and reading, but more often than not, this simply doesn’t happen. And while I love my job with all my heart, I do sometimes miss the luxury of engaging with topics just for the sake of it, for hours on end; not with the ultimate goal of communicating the gist of something to a broad audience but simply out of intellectual curiosity. You may think I’m weird for saying this but I used to love writing essays and term papers.

If you’re a student and you get to do that on a regular basis, try and find some joy in it, or at least know that somewhere out there is someone a little bit jealous of you (hint: it’s me). Once you start working full-time, the opportunities to ponder a single, often very theoretical question in the depth allowed for by university studies will become rarer and rarer.

This is why I’m so excited to be in Alpbach this summer. We all get to spend almost three weeks together learning about things we knew nothing about and expanding our knowledge on topics we’re familiar with. We get to meet bright minds from all over the world, many of whom will have completely different backgrounds and biographies to our own, and we get to benefit from their perspectives and insights. And, judging by the timetable of events, we also get a lot of snacks, which is always a bonus.

There’s barely a subject area that the lectures, discussions and input sessions in Alpbach do not cover. From the European Union to press freedom, from patient rights to climate change, we’ll be immersing ourselves in those big questions and issues which touch our everyday lives at every turn, but which we rarely pause to consider for longer than the time it takes to read a newspaper article or a few pages of a book. I’m absolutely certain I’ll return home with more than one idea for a story scribbled in my journal, and I know I’ll come back to my job and look at many of the events that take place around us every day in a slightly different light, with greater background knowledge, more awareness and a better understanding of the nuances involved.

I expect my time in Alpbach to be challenging, even taxing at times. Luckily, the organisers had the foresight to make provisions for this.

It speaks to the openness of everyone involved – and their understanding of mental health, emotional literacy and holistic well-being – that the forum offers several input sessions on mindfulness as well as meditation practice.

28

I truly believe these topics are just as relevant to the future of humanity as artificial intelligence or cybersecurity, and I’m looking forward to unwinding at the meditation sessions after the long days of intellectual engagement.

Finally, if you see me around during these three weeks please do come say hi. The most riveting lectures and discussions grow in value when you process them in conversation with someone whose thoughts and perspectives are different from your own. And while I look forward to the technical insights and informative input, it’s the prospect of forging new friendships that thrills me the most.

DAMITA PRESSL is a young journalist and event host based in Vienna. As she is still under 30, she is eligible for a scholarship for the Forum, and was also awarded one.

Damita currently hosts the news show on krone.at as well as talks with a range of politicians, officials and experts. She has previously written e.g. for the Austrian daily ‘Die Presse’ and VICE. Damita holds Masters degrees in Psychology from University College London and Journalism from FH Wien.

She is fluent in English, French and German as well as proficient in Spanish and Romanian.

IP HOLDERS´ EXPECTATIONS «I want to transcend those artificial boxes called ‘disciplines’!»

M AT E J VO DA

MATEJ VODA is a student at Central European University in Budapest and Vienna. He has also studied at University College London and Charles University in Prague. Previously, he was an intern at the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum in Berlin, the EU section of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Prague-based Association of International Affairs, and the Euractiv Prague office.

In his free time, he enjoys quality cheese, football and Russian literature. Every New Year’s Eve, he promises himself that he will finally travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok over the summer, only to realise a couple of months later that he is poor and can’t afford it.

Over the past couple of years, I have been hearing that we are in one state of crisis or on the verge of another. So, I guess what I would like to get out of Alpbach is just a bit of hope going into 2020.

Let’s start with the technology symposium.

I have to admit that it’s easy to feel a bit queasy about the way technology has affected and will affect the way we live. In hindsight, this could also just be all the recently binge-

watched episodes of the Netflix show Black Mirror talking. Anyway, I suppose it would be nice to hear about the opportunities offered

by AI, digitization and robotics to help us solve some of the challenges faced by civil societies worldwide.

On a slightly more serious note, I am also hoping to attend ‘Artists in Discourse’ hosted by Ruth Beckermann. Her movie ‘Waldheim Waltz’ was an absolute masterpiece. She managed to reconstruct the famous Waldheim affair with so much impact. The movie was powerful because of Beckermann’s personal take on the events, including her commentary and the footage she had shot herself. ‘Artists in Discourse’ promises to do something similar, with artists sharing their personal takes on liberty and security, allowing the audience to open up new perspectives in the process.

Sticking with the topic of the power of images and art, I definitely want to attend the seminar ‘Visual Culture: Images of Power and the Power of Images’ with Noit Banai from the University of Vienna. As somebody who studies political science, I feel that, when we examine discourse, we focus too much on what has been said instead of analysing what has been shown to us.

After all, in the age of internet and social media, texts usually come with images. In this respect, I always look forward to transcending those artificial modernity boxes called

29

‘disciplines’ with which we have become all too familiar through our studies.

Jumping to all matters political, I will hopefully restore some of the faith in policy-makers and politicians that has been severely damaged by studying in Hungary over the course of the last year. This might already start by attending the official opening of the political symposium with Alexander Van der Bellen. Equally unmissable are the keynote

by Ban Ki-Moon, former Secretary General of the UN, and the conversation with former Austrian president Heinz Fischer on the topic of ‘Promoting the SDGs in Europe with a Global Mindset’. Among other great events, I plan to check out the talk on the recent development in the arms trade: ‘International Arms Trade Regulations: A Call for Action’, or a conversation on another topic close to my heart: ‘The Struggle for the Rule of Law: Is the EU Fighting or Losing the Battle?’

In between the talks and discussions, I want to enjoy the fresh Alpine air: the main reason I applied to Alpbach in the first place. A couple of mindfulness hikes should definitely cut it. And, who knows, maybe the oxygen will come with some food for thought as well.

All in all, I am sure it is going to be loads of fun. Hope to meet you on a hike or somewhere else, throughout Alpbach and beyond!

REFLECTIONS: LIBERTY & SECURITY A N E S S AY B Y S O N JA P U N T S C H E R R I E K M A N N

SONJA PUNTSCHER RIEKMANN

Liberty and Security form an odd couple, the expansion of one being apparently to the detriment of the other.

Since the rise of modern liberalism balancing the two concepts and pertinent political actions has been the paramount challenge.

However, the founding thinkers of liberal theory have aimed at arguing liberty and security as dialectical notions: They indeed considered the integrity of the body and mind of the individual and the respect for his or her property as the starting point. Thus, John Locke defined the individual’s ‘property of the self’ as the very basis of liberty. He saw the emerging modern state first and foremost as guarantor of such ‘property’ and the autonomy deriving thereof. Whereas the line between constitutionally anchored freedoms and the encroachment of the state on them in the

name of security remained precarious, in the course of the last 250 years liberalism became the normative beacon of Western culture, politics and economics. It was, though, neither a linear nor ubiquitous phenomenon.

Liberalism saw ups and downs and even its complete obliteration in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. The bouncing back of liberalism post 1945 in Western and post 1989 in the Eastern Europe led many to believe that liberal democracy and market economy had become the only game in town. And that on the wings of globalisation it would

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pervade the whole world. Bolstered by many examples of opening hitherto closed societies such optimism was echoed by Fukuyama’s statement of the ‘end of history’.

How come that in the 21st century we are witnesses of new closures everywhere, also in the West? How come that in Europe as the cradle and battlefield of liberal thinking we are confronted with examples of backsliding of seemingly unshakable freedom rights as well as of phenomena of nationalist or even racist closing in? Who or what is the midwife

of current new waves of political illiberalism, economic protectionism and the obsession with security at the detriment of liberty?

When and why did we give up on striking a fair balance between liberty and security?

Is the West really experiencing the retreat of liberalism as presaged by Edward Luce and others? Have Westerners been much too complacent in their belief to live in the best of all worlds and ignoring that in other regions it was not the ‘end of history’ but rather classical old history driven by harsh inequality, instability, civil strife and war that would not be simply overcome by beneficial globalisation? And have Westerners been blind to the reverberations of globalisation onto their own societies in which traditional security thinking is challenged by outside competition, migration or even violent rupture? Has the liberal West forgotten its own credo of liberalism and neglected to secure its cultural and social bases?

Liberty and Security is the general topic of the European Alpbach Forum 2019. While the preceding paragraphs serve as a rough diagnosis of current developments, causes and driving forces, the Forum also aims at delivering new perspectives and orientations.

The Forum pays tribute to Karl Popper as one of its founding fathers in the aftermath of the great catastrophe of the 20th century, i.e. totalitarianism, the Shoah and WW II, and to his constant plea for the open society.

Thus, the Forum will give equal attention to pertinent topics from a philosophical, political and socio-economic perspective.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIBERTY AND SECURITY Remarkably, modern liberal thinking has its roots in times of deep insecurity. Hobbes and Locke lived in 17th century England that was torn by revolution, civil war, and authoritarian regime. But the ‘century of fear’ gave birth to a new political philosophy: of civil rights and of controlled government, finally of the ‘the king in parliament’. From there on we see a host of (political) philosophers aiming at the justification of liberty and security for humans conceived as citizens who are no longer simply subjects of a given polity and its rulers but agents of their lives. While in Europe the quest for liberty has its roots in

Greek and Roman antiquity, modernity eventually conceives liberty as universal value.

Without indulging in all varieties of liberal philosophy from Locke to Montesquieu and Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville to Kant and Hegel to the ordo- and neo-liberalist thinkers of the 20th century up to John Rawls, we deem it urgent to give thinkers of liberalism an arena in which to present their work, their normative grounding of liberty and security in the age of globalism and with regard to the problems this phenomenon generates.

Can we under the conditions of 21st century global capitalism still build on Locke’s idea of the individual holding the ‘property of the self’? Despite the flourishing of modern psychology and therapy, individuals today seem to struggle with the loss of their self, with being overwhelmed by complexity, with the loss of influence, with feelings of insecurity or even superfluousness in a context of open borders. It was Hannah Arendt in her work on totalitarianism to stress that ‘superfluousness’ is the most dangerous sentiment for modern individuals. While many are already in constant fear of redundancy on traditional labour markets, the impact of AI which is meant to replace some functions altogether will be even more disruptive.

If these arguments were true, is there any way out? What are today’s normative and practice oriented justifications to uphold the idea of the free individual without which liberalism becomes an empty shell? What is the liberal response to migration, thus to different cultures, religions and worldviews, in a context in which fear seems to prevail?

How do we gauge the impact of digitization enabling also new forms of control and manipulation or of AI on the individual and thus on liberalism? How do we avail ourselves of the chances of technological innovations and how do we assess ethical limits to them? Do these new conditions still allow for upholding the principle of recognition of all individuals as equals in term of fundamental freedom rights without which Human and Fundamental Rights Charters become obsolete?

Last but not least: who are the guarantors of these rights once new political and economic elites revoked the democratic-republican ‘contract’ that had become the charter of liberalism after 1945?

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THE POLITICS OF LIBERTY AND SECURITY Democracy is the political pledge of liberty and security. It is the form of rule that draws its legitimacy from the consent of the ruled defined as equals enjoying freedom rights, but also fulfilling republican duties. Citizens have equal rights to vote and are equal before the law. Politics is contained in a system of checks and balances between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. This has become the conditio sine qua non for a state to call itself liberal.

Liberty as much as security is regulated by laws, whereas the rule of law has become the epitome of liberal systems. However, laws remain subject to change through democratic process. Democracy is the most humane form of rule because it is capable to cope with diverse interests, to find compromise between interests and to change according to new conditions. For democracy to thrive, the respect for unalienable fundamental and minority rights, acceptance of democratic procedure and majority rule by all citizens is essential. However, to ensure such acceptance the right to control the rulers and hold them accountable, the possibility for the opposition to voice other preferences and positions and eventually to form an alternative government, hence the openness of the process allowing for different outcomes, are paramount. Last but not least, democracy rests on relative equality of citizens also with regard to socio-economic conditions. Deep inequality is a threat to liberal democracy. Aristotle was the first to remind us of this, whereas modern liberals like T.H.Marshall put the issue front and centre in their work. Free speech is a useless right, so Marshall argued in the 1950s, if citizens are not put in the condition to form an opinion and to raise their voice.

Hence, social security, health provisions and education are vital to citizenship. Education was the centrepiece of liberalism in the work of John Stuart Mill and social market economy in that of ordo-liberals.

Yet, since several decades this framework shows growing fractures. While equal social security has never been a priority in the US, it turned into a bone of contention also in European liberal societies. Today it is stylized as major hindrance to economic growth in a capitalist system, where every state competes

with others on a global scale. In the European Union, whose integration process hinges on the four freedoms of goods, capital, services and persons, such freedoms are increasingly perceived as threat rather than opportunity.

Or they are seen as an opportunity only to some and a threat to many. The financial and ensuing post 2008 fiscal crisis as well as the migrant movements into the EU have exacerbated these sentiments. While in a number of states and regions growing parts of society experience real loss of income and precarious jobs, open borders and free movement are accused as main culprits. Moreover, the losers of this development are shedding their trust in the system of representative democracy and claim to be heard directly or vote for populist parties pledging to represent their interest without compromise. Brexit is perhaps the most striking example of this return to the ‘will of the people’. But populism has become a general feature of liberal democracies some of which are turning into illiberal ones, as populist leaders reduce democracy to (more or less fair) elections and win majorities on the promise of more (social) security, while they gradually dismantle the system of checks and balances to impose their solutions without constitutional or other restrictions.

Even if we note little capacity or no will of European leaders to handle these issues at the European level, we raise the following questions: If democracy is to remain the foundation of European integration, even the precondition for membership, what can the EU do to ensure respect for its principles? And if democracy rests on specific social foundations, what could be incentives for Europeans to engage in a debate about social Europe and European solidarity?

THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY AND SECURITY Economic liberalism and neoliberalism in particular theorized entrepreneurship as a central force of society. Constructive or disruptive, entrepreneurial decisions based on technological innovation are seen as the main drivers of growth and prosperity, but also, for better or for worse, of societal and environmental change. As Foucault has it, with the industrial revolution the market becomes the ‘place of truth’. After the deep

disruptions created by the first wave of globalisation and international competition up to 1913, the Great Depression, the rise of Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, and two World Wars, a new consensus balancing liberal market economy and social security emerged in Western Europe. It framed the political economic thinking throughout post war reconstruction up to the 1970s. Those years were called the ‘trente glorieuses’ as they conveyed hope, that the political, social and economic conflicts of the past were finally overcome. In the shadow of the alternative system of Communism to which parts of the Western Left openly or latently payed tribute up to the 1980s, compromises were forged between conservatives and socialists. The demise of Communism as well as new globalism eroded the ground for such compromise building and thwarted the institutional arrangements between capital and labour. While most Western elites were bad predictors of the breakdown of the Soviet Empire, Reagan, Thatcher and their think tanks started in the 1970s to re-frame the agenda in a neo-liberal discourse and to fight the institutional set-up that had given trade unions an equal standing. Continental Europe followed suit if at a much lower pace that however was accelerated by EU enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe and the return to globalization with the rise of Asian Tigers and China. A new mantra began to surface: To be globally competitive old securities have to go at least for next generations, but also for those retiring. A paradigm of the ‘trente glorieuses’, Sweden is today described as a state with fast growing inequality. In regard to taxing and spending states are competing with each other also within the EU. Some governments see political illiberalism as a means to achieve competitiveness.

At the same time this development engenders a number of paradoxes: first, a new economic protectionism is on the rise, ironically driven by the current US leadership. While it does so in the name of reviving old industries and hence securing jobs and income of those who were left behind, it also uses protectionism as a geopolitical weapon; second, multilateral trade institutions such as the WTO are circumvented to the advantage of Preferential Trade Agreements (however difficult their ratification may be); third, in the EU, despite seven decades of successful

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integration of markets, governments shun the reality of internal economic and financial interdependence and seek renationalisation of control over national political economy, while they appear incapable of joining forces to state European interests on a global level, let alone in their transatlantic relations. While it might be too early to assess the ultimate impact of this development, we should raise the following questions: Is global market economy coming to an end and morphing into new mercantilism? Who will be the winners and who the losers of this process?

Can closure actually deliver social security also in the medium- and long run? Moreover, what will closure entail not only for the socalled West but also for other regions of the world? For Europe relations with Russia and other neighbors, but also Asia, the Middle East and in particular Africa are of vital interest. So how are these relations to be shaped to be fruitful for both sides? How is the socio-economic stability of African states to be achieved which is seen as a solution to the migratory push? Within the EU: If open markets and the gradual implementation of the four freedoms were the tool to construct a peaceful Union, what troubles will we be courting by curtailing the single market?

However, if open markets come at the price of enhancing social insecurity, what are the hurdles to construct an open social space where citizens regain security, recognition of their dignity and thus the ‘property of their self’? Instead of decrying that ‘ever closer union’ is a pledge of the past, could it not be enhanced by the furthering of democracy and solidarity, thus of an open society capable of common problem definition and resolution?

SONJA PUNTSCHER RIEKMANN, Professor of Political Theory and European Politics at the University of Salzburg as well as academic director of the Salzburg Centre of European Union Studies; Vice President of the European Forum Alpbach

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ALPBACH IN MOTION …and other Professional Programmes and Summer Schools during the European Forum Alpbach

Read more at: www.alpbach.org/en/campus

ALPBACH APP Find up-to-date information on the European Forum Alpbach App!

You can’t make the economy of tomorrow work with the tools of the past. That’s why the European Forum Alpbach has launched a summit for the next generation business leaders to get together in a solution-focused dialogue around much-needed changes for the European economic system.

Alpbach in Motion (AiM) connects committed people from various business backgrounds – from start-ups, small and medium-sized enterprises, social enterprises and the creative industries. As an incubator for new leadership, Alpbach in Motion aims to encourage its young leaders to bring change and new ways of acting into their industries and networks.

CONNECTING THE NEXT GENERATION OF DECISION-MAKERS A combination of thematic input from internationally renowned speakers with managerial excellence is mixed with an innovative collaborative reflection concept. Alpbach in Motion dares to as ‘the big questions’. The group members bring new insights back into their fields of work and get exclusive offers for expert meetings throughout the year.

The group is led by a mentor who guides through 35 varied and unanticipated hours, supported by facilitators for group-work sessions. The working process can be enriched with inputs from experts offering personal and professional insights. Tomáš Sedlácek, Jeffrey Sachs, Charles Handy and Bernie

Roth, among others, have stimulated the minds of AiM so far.

The meaningful exchange between the experts and the group is a key ingredient for inspiration.

Our high-level professionals dare listeners to enter discussions and/or rethink their current views.The intellectually challenging work of the group is interspersed by pleasant hikes through the beautiful landscape of the Alps.

The walks help to decelerate and also serve for spontaneous breakouts into group-work sessions along the trail.

AiM is one of the programmes under the ‘Alpbach Campus’ umbrella. All the programmes are aimed at addressing the complex tasks faced in daily professional and academic life using state-of-the-art methods

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such as peer-learning, mentoring and case studies. This year, the offer comprises also make_shift, a course about the necessary leadership skills to embrace future markets and game changing opportunities arising out of technological disruption, the climate crisis and human behaviour. The yearly offered Summer School on Entrepreneurship shows participants the way to successfully commercialise their ideas by guiding them through the process of protecting their ideas, investigating and pinpointing the market, raising finance, building teams and selling their ideas. For the first time, Alpbach Campus also comprises a leadership programme on foundation management (held in German).

Langeweile gehört sich nicht.

Die wahren Abenteuer sind im Club.

Der Ö1 Club bietet mehr als 20.000 Kultur­ veranstaltungen jährlich zum ermäßigten Preis.

Mehr zu Ihren Ö1 Club­Vorteilen: oe1.ORF.at

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A RT A N D C U LT U R E I N A L P BAC H

UNDER CONSTRUCTION: CONDITIO HUMANA Attention! Please come into the construction site!

Scaffolding leads directly into the Congress Centrum Alpbach. Above it hover six larger-than-life figures, bowed and tilted and truly alive. The Ladin sculptor Lois Anvidalfarei situates his creations directly and unavoidably within a system of tensions in the here and now, in dialogue between ephemeral delicacy and the gravitational force: whether you see them as safe or trapped, depending on your point of view, the universal dimension is evident.

LOIS ANVIDALFAREI AU T O R : P H I L I P P E DAV E R IO

Lois Anvidalfarei was born on January 26, 1962 in Alto Adige, South Tyrol. From 1976 to 1981 he attended the State Art School in Ortisei in Val Gardena. In 1983 he began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he received his decisive influence as a draftsman and sculptor through the encounter with the work and person of Prof. Joannis Avramidis. After completing his studies, Lois Anvidalfarei returned to his home in 1989. In Alto Adige, he manages the farm he inherited and works as a freelance sculptor.

Š Foto Watzek

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There was once a Europe where mountains did not divide peoples but brought them together. In those crossroads made up of parallel valleys that touched one another in unexpected deviations on the hilltops, cultures mingled as much as the languages that served as their vehicles. Conflict sometimes strangled hopes, but trade and exchanges often stimulated new ones. Above all, however, though harsh and always hostile in winter, nature was gentle in the warm seasons and predominated perennially in an existence that followed its flow. The rhythm of the seasons generated the rhythm of life itself, leading mankind to long fantasies in summer and endless winter reveries around fires and in the warmth of stalls. This was the Alpine world until the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern states, a vast and sheltered island above the din of the conflict raging on the plains. And this past saw the accumulation of arcane feelings preserved in seclusion like mysteries buried in glaciers.

This is the secret of Lois Anvidalfarei. He brings formidable feelings and distant sensations back into the modern consciousness and goes his way in harmony with the everydaylife allowed to flow like the seasons in that part of the world up there. Mixed with Alpine fragrances, the scent of highland clover hay slowly permeates and impregnates the plaster of his sculptures. Or perhaps this is only the impression of a privileged wayfarer so fortunate as to see them in the grange above the stalls.

Nothing bucolic will contaminate the works, however, nothing rustic.

The matter is far more serious. That boundless space and limpid air bring a very different kind of rapture.It is the human being that confronts the dimension of nature and the heavens. It is the human being that confronts the metaphysics of the divine. And by doing so it reveals its own dimension, which is physical, throbbing and alive, one of sufferance far more than suffering. A parallel experiment was carried out back at the beginning of the 20th century by Alberto Giacometti in his studio at Bondo in Val Bregaglia. The behavioural analogies are very moving: the same studio in a wooden grange, the same application and mental concentration, but results that are fortunately very different. And Giacometti had been preceded

in another equally poetic edifice by Segantini in his collaboration with the Milanese Bugatti family on the threshold of the Engadin valley.

Always intriguing, the anthropological investigation of artists’ behaviour makes it possible to read their works in terms other than the exclusively linguistic ones that art criticism and history often demand. According to an old French proverb, ‘on est quelqu’un quand on est de quelque part’: you are someone when you are from somewhere. And the immensely intriguing game of art in the act of creation, contemporary by definition, permits this kind of investigation. The German word for this art is far more telling than its Latin counterparts. Not merely Gegenwart, contemporaneity understood as an objectual value of common time, but the far more existential term Zeitgenosse, something accompanying our era. Anvidalfarei is a companion of the tormented era that western mankind is going through. And it is the Zeitgenosse that keeps watch up there amidst fertile land, glorious mountains and almost tangible skies. Contact with the supreme appears far more immediate there than people toiling on the plains can imagine.

This supreme cosmos is constantly and ineluctably juxtaposed with the earthly image. Living man is there, tortured, suffering, plagued by relentless physicality. And an element that the mountains alone can enhance comes into play here, as the contrast between human physicality and the mighty boundlessness of nature generates vertigo in the depths of the soul. This dizziness has spared none of the artists who have dared to accept the challenge. Ferdinand Hodler sought salvation in total symbolism, in a narrative of improbably slender bodies writhing in sudden hallucinations. Giovanni Segantini found exaltation in citations of eastern thought, brought from deepest India to live again on the snows with a mixture of ideas about life and death, sin and purity. Alberto Giacometti probed the solitude of his walking figures like a visual interpretation of Hermann Hesse’s poetic conception of loneliness as a necessary part of the human condition: All feelings that only the immensity of space can arouse.

«How strange it is to walk in the fog. Every bush and tree is alone, no tree sees another, each is on its own…»

Lois Anvidalfarei responds to Hesse’s nihilism and the Symbolist metaphysics of Hodler and Segantini with the conviction of a faith equally rooted in the mountains, in rock, ice, bright alpine sunshine and meadows with countless flowers. This is the reason for some of his painful crucifixions, which colour every subsequent allusion to the human body. Always present is the covert feeling that the Word has become flesh. Every one of his bodies, male and female, and every one of his drawings bears a message of content, perhaps tolerated and certainly accepted suffering.

© Foto Watzek

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© Foto Watzek

Or perhaps the secret is even easier to reveal. It is in the very practice of sculpture that the germ of redemption lies. Sculpture is the closest of all the arts to work in the fields. It requires labour and a strong physique for its execution. This at least is the formative law of Anvidalfarei’s sculpture, which grows on certain platforms that look like wagons, which demands the constant application of his own worker’s body on the bodies he works. It is sculpture alone of the major arts that requires a rich array of tools for its execution. Sculpture alone requires a workshop. But perhaps there is something else too.

Michelangelo drew an apparently clear distinction between sculpture that involves adding material, what is still known in German as Plastik, and the sculpture of subtraction.For a Neoplatonist, the supreme application was obviously the latter. All you had to do in order to find the form deposited by the idea in the material was remove everything superfluous. This second type is what Germans call the work of the Bildhauer, the hewer of images: as clear and dear to the Neoplatonist as it is distant from the present case. It is as far away from Giacometti as it is from Anvidalfarei. The craft of the Bildhauer in their part of the world is already regularly practiced by stonecutters and carvers, and hence by carvers of wooden decorations.

The noble craft up there is not that of the great Florentine master.

They are perhaps primitive priests of a still older rite. They mould the earth as their ancestors did to form steatopygic statues, taking the creator’s place in the creation of their atavistic divinities. Vincenzo Cardarelli, the poet of Tarquinia, regarded the ancient Etruscans as bakers capable of fashioning bodies for eternity with the skill of their fingertips. Giacometti returned obsessively to the Etruscan statuette in the museum at Volterra, the one Gabriele d’Annunzio called The Evening Shadow. Giacometti may not have known this, but most probably did.

The bodies of Etruscan sarcophaguses, the ones that await the end of time in all their powerful, human physicality in the tombs and museum of Tarquinia, return in Anvidalfarei’swork. Anvidalfarei may not know this, but most probably does. Like Giacometti in all probability, Anvidalfarei is congenitally far away from Neoplatonism. The mountain does not envisage the lofty cavern of ideas. The mountain is already in itself idea and ideal, idealist and idealistic. The mountain demands effort and sublimation; the mountain constantly demands the use of the senses for knowledge.

We cannot know what Aristotle thought of the Alpine mountains, and the subject may have mattered little to him, but mountain life unquestionably leads to Aristotelian gnosis, to knowledge through the understanding and investigation of the senses. In the mountains, losing your senses means losing your way, and losing your way means losing your life. The mountain requires sculptors to be Aristotelian and mould with their fingers.

At the same time, however, every mountain is a Mount Olympus or Sinai. The gods or God are up there. And in the inevitable confrontation, substantially immanent in the praxisof the days that flow by, the relationship with the heights, and sometimes with the All-Highest in the high cloud of mystery encircling the peaks or in the clear sky, is sublimated in the dialogue between the physicality of doing, existing and suffering, and the exaltation of the supreme.

‘Lois Anvidalfarei’, Philippe Daverio, Skira 2013, p. 195-197.

Translated from Italian into English by Paul Metcalfe.

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IT IS AT THE HIGHER SYSTEM LEVELS THAT THE GREATEST PRIZES BECKON A N E S S AY B Y R IC HA R D S T R AU B

Peter Drucker always insisted that his concern for management emerged from what he christened the discipline of social ecology. By that the founder of modern management, as Forbes once called him, referred to his preoccupation with the evolving relationship between people and societal institutions. For Drucker, social ecology differed from the biological variety in comprising a new, man-made community of organisations and institutions. And Drucker endowed it with a practical aim: to craft a balance between continuity on one side and change and innovation on the other. By spotting emerging trends, he proposed, managers could act on and deploy these forces in the interests of the wider society.

In his use of the biological metaphor, Drucker as usual was ahead of his time. But that was before the full advent of digital technology, which is now reshaping, resizing, and thickening before our eyes the networks that compose the ecology we operate in today. Interacting in complicated, non-linear, hard-to-predict ways, those forces are stretching the ecology in unexpected directions and dimensions.

Writing in McKinsey Quarterly in 2017, complexity scientist Brian Arthur described what he saw as a hidden semi-autonomous ‘second economy’, powered by an external algorithmic intelligence, that is steadily encroaching on the physical economy and the jobs it provides.

As we struggle to make sense of these developments, the concepts of ecology and ecosystems can be helpful in a number of ways. First, they give us a new means of understanding the life

(or eco) cycle of organisations. For example, an ecological perspective may throw light on processes of corporate crisis and transformation.

Why are corporate life-cycles shrinking? Why does renewal so often have to pass through a period of failure or crisis? In reverse, Apple’s early grasp of the ecosystem concept surely helps to account for its astonishing return from a position of insignificance not only to dominate the PC industry but become the largest and most valuable company in the world.

NO ENGINEERED MACHINES Secondly, the biological metaphor opens up new avenues for fundamentally rethinking the vexed relationships between organisations, markets, society and the planet – the economy, as someone put it, is a fully-owned subsidiary of the environment. Ecology calls into question the mechanistic, Newtonian assumptions that have long dominated economics and management.

In an ecological view, organisations regain their long-suppressed identity as evolving human organisms, rather than engineered machines.

Long ignored, evolutionary science is also making a case to be heard. The implications for management education, research and development are profound.

The first essential in this new world is to establish what the concepts actually mean. In a premonitory 1993 article for Harvard Business Review, entitled ‘Predators and Prey: A New

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Ecology of Competition’, James Moore notes that ‘A business ecosystem, like its biological counterpart, gradually moves from a random collection of elements to a more structured community... Business ecosystems condense out of the original swirl of capital, customer interest, and talent generated by a new innovation, just as successful species spring from the natural resources of sunlight, water, and soil nutrients’.

In McKinsey’s more modern formulation, an ecosystem is ‘a complex network of interconnected businesses that depend on and feed on each other to deliver value for their customers, to the end users, and their key stakeholders’.

Taking it further, in a February 2019 article for MIT Sloan Management Review Frontiers, John Fuller, Michael Jacobides and Martin Reeves speak of ‘multi-entity groups of companies not belonging to a single organization’ involving networks of shifting, semi-permanent relationships, linked by flows of data, services, and money. The relationships combine aspects of competition and collaboration, often involving complementarity between different products and capabilities (for instance, smartphones and apps).

Finally, as the same authors note, in ecosystems players ‘coevolve as they redefine their capabilities and relations to others over time’. Clusters, groups of partly competing, partly complementary small firms in the same geographical region and industry, may have been the first identifiable proto-ecosystems. Apple’s IOS app community (now a multibillion business on its own) showed

how fast an ecosystem could scale from a digitally-enabled platform, paving the way for many others. Now boundaries are becoming more porous all the time. Mobility, in which cars are one small on-demand component of the business of getting people from A to B, or C to X, is a much-discussed current example, along with health, education and other services that fulfill the ‘jobs to be done’ of individuals and organisations. Over time, McKinsey predicts that traditional industries and value chains will fuse into a dozen or so ‘multitrillion-dollar-large ecosystems with a few large orchestrators, big winners, and a huge shift of wealth and value creation’.

FOR EVERY WINNER THERE IS A LOSER Yet man-made business ecosystems bring threats as well as opportunities. Ecologies never settle in permanent equilibrium. As in all major shifts, for every winner there is a loser. Whether natural or social, ecologies can develop pathologies, take unexpected directions, or even coilapse. We have no choice but to manage them as best we can; and in the case of man-made ones, how they are managed – to minimise the bads and maximise the goods – raises important ethical considerations. Some of the emerging dangers are already evident.

The network effects that underpin developing ecosystems to the benefit both consumers and producers drive a self-reinforcing winner-takesall dynamic that has already resulted in a few huge firms dominating swathes of the digital economy. Powerful networks can be and have been used to manipulate users for political or financial ends, and to reinforce inequalities.

Unanticipated consequences are the rule rather than the exception. The ecological lens tells us that an entity that can’t stop growing at the expense of others is a cancer that eventually kills the larger system it is part of. Could the same lens help us to develop smart regulation that would manage network effects without throwing the baby out with the bathwater – allowing the rapid scaling that is intrinsic to its value at the same time as preserving and promoting the vibrancy of ecosystem diversity?

What does all this mean for the practice of management in the 21st century? As we have noted, management theory and practice have long been based on a mechanistic view of

the economy peopled by utility-maximising individuals working for profit-maximising companies – human robots operating within organisational machines. Yet one of the laws of ecology is that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and all debts eventually have to be paid.

Human beings with their emotions, aspirations, dreams and idiosyncrasies do not take kindly to being treated as cogs in a machine; the price paid at organisation level is disengagement, distrust and poor performance, at the level of the individual in stress, unhappiness and unfulfilled potential. After all, humans are ecosystems, too, with their proper place within the overall ecology. The rationalist dream of a truly scientific management is surely dead.

Recall Drucker’s definition of management as a ‘liberal art’ – a far cry from the dry technocratic discipline of management research and education.

What applies at individual level also holds good as we move up the systems ladder. This is unfamiliar and challenging territory for most managers. Yet it is at the higher system levels that the greatest prizes beckon. For example, an economy will function better as a system if incentives, regulations and the social technology of management are aligned with the interests of the broader society – which is manifestly not the case when the stock-market ecology in which large corporations operate is oriented wholly to shareholders at the expense of other stakeholders. More tangibly, much attention these days focuses on the idea of innovation ecosystems, conceptualised as a kind of man-made evolutionary process.

Fast-growing, constantly evolving net giants such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Alibaba and Tencent embody this idea. Yet ‘analogue’ and manufacturing firms are also learning to play on the terrain, leveraging brand and reputation assets to pivot towards ecosystems-based opportunities. Apple, Haier, BMW and others are good examples. As in a natural ecology, mid-sized and smaller firms can profitably create their own unique niches within the larger ones, using specialisation and deep skills to outflank the data-based, algorithmic brute force of the giants. At regional level, Silicon Valley is the ur-innovation ecosystem that every country would like to emulate, with varying success. But the examples of Shenzen in China and Tel Aviv in Israel show that epicentres for innovation can be nurtured in very different environments. ‘Smart city’

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initiatives to improve the lives of citizens are springing up everywhere.

Understanding and building the capabilities to direct these new entities is a novel, multidimensional challenge for management. As Christian Sarkar and Philip Kottler note in their article ‘The Innovation Ecosystem’ (The Marketing Journal, April 2019), when crucial decisions for your company’s future are being taken in arenas far distant from your own offices and boardrooms, and you will need to access capabilities from outside your business and even your own industry, Drucker’s assertion that ‘Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you’, takes on a new significance.

What will be needed is an unprecedented coordination across all the social stakeholders – an ecosystem in itself, in which the Drucker Forum will certainly play its part. Partners will also be required in university economics departments and business schools that are willing to meet the enormous creative and intellectual challenge that exploration of these new areas (and, just as important, abandonment of old ones that have outlived their purpose) will provide. We can’t expect regulators and bureaucrats to save the world by veto. We will of course need their judicious intervention from time to time. But as never before it will be up to innovators and explorers in all our major institutions – business, universities, governments and civil society – to be the primary architects and builders of an inclusive, diverse social ecology that provides an environment for every human element of the ecosystem to flourish in, not just a few.

RICHARD STRAUB is the founder and president of the Global Peter Drucker Forum (www.druckerforum.org) as well as a regular lecturer at the European Forum Alpbach.

5Ganz Österreich.

A1 baut das 5Giganetz – die beste Kombination aus größtem Glasfasernetz und schnellster 5G Technologie.

Österreich kann alles.

Wir bauen das Netz, das alles möglich macht – das A1 5Giganetz.

Mit diesem Standard der Zukunft wird ganz Österreich zum Standort der Zukunft und profitiert von grenzenlosen Möglichkeiten für alle.

Du kannst alles. #ConnectLife

We would like to thank the partners of the 2019 scholarship programme for their support.

Get involved! www.alpbach.org/talent MAIN BENEFACTORS

BENEFACTORS

CONTRIBUTORS

A1 Telekom Austria AG Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research Austrian Red Cross

The Boston Consulting Group Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Vienna (MA7) Finnish Cultural Foundation

Gesellschaft Österreich Ungarn KAUTE Foundation Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation Mercuri Urval

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Karoly Pataki Raiffeisen Bank International AG Raiffeisen banka a.d. Beograd Rupp AG

Renée Schroeder Specific-Group Austria GmbH Stadtakademie der ÖVP Wien VP Bank Stiftung

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FORUM ALPBACH NETWORK 15 20 10

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23 29

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The time spent together at EFA connects former scholarship holders for many years to come and across national borders.

A clear expression of this connection are the 35 alumni associations in 26 different countries, which are also responsible for organising hugely successful scholarship programmes. More at https://forum.alpbach.network 44

Forum Alpbach Network 1.

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Initiative Group Alpbach Albania (AL) Initiative Group Alpbach Armenia (ARM) Club Alpbach Belgrade (SRB) Club Alpbach Brussels (B) Club Alpbach Bulgaria (BG) Club Alpbach Burgenland (A) Club Alpbach Croatia (HR) Czech & Slovak Club Alpbach (CZ / SK) Club Alpbach Georgia (GE) Club Alpbach Germany (D) Club Alpbach Greece (GR) Initiative Group Alpbach Kosovo (KS) Kyiv Initiative Group Alpbach (UA) Club Alpbach Liechtenstein (LI) Club Alpbach London (GB) Club Alpbach Lower Austria (A) Lviv Initiative Group Alpbach (UA) Club Alpbach North Macedonia (MK)

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Club Alpbach Montenegro (MNE) Club Alpbach Netherlands (NL) Initiative Group Alpbach Romania (R) Club Alpbach Russia (RUS) Club Alpbach Salzburg (A) Initiative Group Alpbach Sarajevo (BIH) Club Alpbach Senza Confini (A/SLO/I) Club Alpbach Styria (A) Club Alpbach South Tyrol/Alto Adige (I) Club Alpbach Sweden (SWE) Club Alpbach Switzerland (CH) Club Alpbach Tyrol (A) Club Alpbach Trentino (I) Club Alpbach Turkey (TUR) Club Alpbach Upper Austria (A) Club Alpbach Vorarlberg (A) Initiative Group Alpbach Vienna (A)

In places where there is not yet an Alpbach Club, our ambassadors promote our cause. This is particularly the case in countries outside Europe – for example in Brazil, India and Ethiopia.

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F O RUM A L P BAC H N E T WO R K

FORUM ALPBACH: THE BONUS TRACK So, dear reader, either you’re about to come to Alpbach, you’ve already attended the 2019 Forum, or – the best case! – you’re there right now. In all likelihood, your Alpbach experience will involve attending some sessions, meeting interesting people and, hopefully, enjoying the programme put together by the EFA Association’s organisational team over the last year. But that’s not the whole story. A speakers’ competition, concerts, open spaces, speakers’ corner … all these happen during the Forum, too. A ‘bonus track’, if you like.

As well as being enriching, fun, creative events, these are also all organised by the FAN Committee made up of former Alpbach scholarship holders: committed people who didn’t want their Alpbach experience to end after just one summer. Every year, the FAN Committee is formed by one or two clubs from the Forum Alpbach Network (see p.

44). This year, it’s Club Alpbach South Tyrol/ Alto Adige and Club Alpbach London who are joining forces.

This combination is not as unlikely as it may seem. On the contrary, it is the most

obvious one! The Forum’s general theme, ‘Liberty and Security’, is particularly relevant for members of both clubs. Londoners are heading towards an insecure post-Brexit era while, in the last years, the actions of right-wing populists in Austria and Italy have repeatedly reminded South Tyroleans that they are living in a border region where open borders are not just a given.

That’s why the FAN Committee decided to devote its own events to a special topic, ‘Challenging Borders’, which is highly relevant for both clubs while at the same time implicitly part of the broader theme of the Forum.

Under this heading, the Committee aims to identify, question and redefine borders.

Political borders, geographical borders, physical, social, sexual, and technological borders. This can only be done if people engage and discuss these things. The Committee provides the environment needed for reflection, discussion and input from those who may not be experts, but have taken a critically informed stand.

47

The core events of 2019 are a series of Open Spaces. Scholarship holders, EFA participants and experts are invited to come together and discuss salient topics, questions that have been left open in panel discussions, and issues that they feel are missing from the EFA programme. The Open Spaces take place on August 19 at 6:30 pm, August 24 at 10 am and on August 29 at 10 am. Another centrepiece of the program is the aforementioned Speaker’s Night, which takes place on August 26 at 8:30 pm in the Congress Centre: As in recent years, the Club of Alpbachers living in the Austrian province of Styria is hosting a speech competition, where scholarship holders compete for the verdict of a jury of renowned experts in the arts, politics and science. On August 22 at 2pm you are invited to Agree to Disagree, where participants are paired on the basis of their opinions on important topics covered at the Forum. The goal is to first maximize disagreement within each pair, and then to invite the selected pairs to discuss and engage with one another’s opinions. More detailed information on these and other events are given in the EFA app.

Another aim of this year’s FAN Committee is to activate the creative potential of the hundreds of scholarship holders from almost 100 countries. In 2018, a group of scholarship holders gave a concert at St. Oswald’s church in Alpbach. At EFA 2019, scholarship holders can participate in a choir-seminar held by Erwin Ortner, founder and artistic director of the famous Arnold Schönberg choir. Not only that, the Committee assures continuous musical activity throughout the entire Forum, and brings the musical talent of the scholarship holders onto the stage, too: a concert will be held on August

29 at 8.45pm at St. Oswald’s church. And of course, as every year, the International Evening on August 20 will also showcase the scholars’ talent.

A third key concept of this year’s FAN Committee program is self-organisation. The London and South Tyrol clubs support scholarship holders in organizing events under their own steam. These can be fireside talks but also workshops, where skilled scholarship holders share their skills with all who are interested, including Forum participants.

The intention is for the program to con-

ALPBACH APP Find up-to-date information on the European Forum Alpbach App!

A photo gallery illustrating some of the Forum Alpbach Network´s events held in the last couple of years: a soccer game, an early morning hike, Speakers´ night...

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stantly evolve and find its definitive form at the Forum itself. All updates and newly organised events are displayed in the App! But the FAN Committee can also be contacted directly, by email: fan.committee@gmail. com, or in person: you will see the members of the FAN committee around the Forum.

The team members are Valentin Wiesner, Lynne Sakr, Luis Widmann, Julia Sandrini, Toni Widmann, Vincent Straub, Flora Böwing and Peter Klager.

F O RUM A L P BAC H N E T WO R K

ALPBACH APP Find up-to-date information on the European Forum Alpbach App!

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T H E N O N - P R O F I T A S S O C IAT IO N A N D T H E N O N - P R O F I T F O U N DAT IO N U N D E R P R I VAT E L AW

EUROPEAN FORUM ALPBACH The first European Forum Alpbach took place in 1945 as the ‘International College Weeks’.

Founded in 1948 as a non-profit association based in Vienna, it acts independently of any ideology, religion or political party. The association only functions thanks to the vast number of people who, with the exception of the organisation team, all give their time voluntarily to the Forum Alpbach. They have contributed to making the European Forum Alpbach one of the most important interdisciplinary dialogue platforms in Europe for science, politics, economics and culture today.

FRANZ FISCHLER President

CASPAR EINEM

SONJA PUNTSCHER RIEKMANN

CLAUS J. RAIDL

Vice President

Vice President

Vice President

Honorary Presidents

Council

Scientific Advisory Board

Peter C. Aichelburg, Martin Bernhofer, Jürgen Busch, Verena Ehold, Friedrich Gleissner, Erich Gornik, Ivo Greiter, Wolfgang Habermayer, Michael Haider, Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger, Günter Hillebrand, Herwig Hösele, Michael Ikrath, Beatrix Karl, Wolfgang Knoll, Georg Kopetz, Friedrich Korkisch, Kathryn List, Johann Luif, Ulrike Lunacek, Christian Macek, Bernhard Marckhgott, Thomas Mayr-Harting, Beate Meinl-Reisinger, Patricia Mussi-Mailer, Dieter Natlacen, Ewald Nowotny, Johannes Ortner, Klaus Poier, Filip Radunovic, Reingard Rauch, Wolfgang Renner, Verena Ringler, Walter Rothensteiner, Sabine Schindler, Peter M. Schmidhuber, Christoph Schneider, Rainer Schrems, Matthias Strolz, Alexandra Terzic-Auer

Brigitte Bach, Gerald Bast, Walter E. Feichtinger, Ulrike Felt, Fatima Ferreira‑Briza, Eva Flicker, Elisabeth Freismuth, Martin H. Gerzabek, Markus Hengstschläger, Martin Kocher, Sabine Ladstätter, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Wolfgang Lutz, Irmgard Marboe, Tilmann Märk, Gerd Müller, Christa Neuper, Manfred Nowak, Helga Nowotny, Peter Purgathofer, Miriam Rehm, Kirsten Rüther, Christoph Schneider, Margit Schratzenstaller‑Altzinger, Renée Schroeder, Franz Schuh, Stefan Thurner, Susanne Weigelin‑Schwiedrzik

Erhard Busek, Heinrich Pfusterschmid‑Hardtenstein

Steering Committee Executive Board, Michaela Fritz, Benjamin Monsorno (FAN), Shalini Randeria, Lisa Charlotte Sonnberger (FAN), Manfred Url (Financial Officer), Werner Wutscher

Auditors Günther Schrems, Max Kothbauer

Arbitration Board Waldemar Hummer, Michael Neider, Katharina Scherke, Matthias Strolz

Secretary General Philippe Narval

Chief Operating Officer of the Association Charlotte Steenbergen

Board of the Non-Profit Foundation Franz Fischler, Ingrid Hamm, Werner Wutscher, Howard Williamson (co-opted)

Managing Director of the Foundation Sonja Jöchtl

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Corresponding members of the Scientific Advisory Board Petar Bojanić, Paul Dujardin, Pascale Ehrenfreund, Irene Giner‑Reichl, Hermann Hauser, John‑Dylan Haynes, Sabine Junginger, Hedwig‑ Josefine Kaiser, Lisa Kaltenegger, Jan Kickert, Wilhelm Krull, Burton Lee, Konrad Paul Liessmann, Nathalie Loiseau, Dominik Markl, Thomas Mayr‑ Harting, Jürgen Mlynek, Berthold Molden, Patrizia Isabelle Nanz, Friedrich B. Prinz, Michael Reiterer, David Rejeski, Stephan Schmidt‑Wulffen, Nona Shepphard, Elisabeth Wehling, Howard Williamson, Ruth Wodak, Klaus Zeyringer

Forum Alpbach Network Board Lisa Sonnberger (Chairwoman), Florian Altendorfer, José Magnaye, Benjamin Monsorno, Lisa Plattner, Sophie Rendl, Raphael Wurm

Forum Alpbach Network Committee Valentin Wiesner (Co-Chair), Toni Widmann (Co-Chair), Flora Böwing, Peter Klager, Lynne Sakr, Julia Sandrini, Vincent Straub, Luis Widmann

Permanent Office

Communications/Photographers

Philippe Narval (Secretary General), Sonja Jöchtl (Managing Director Foundation), Charlotte Steenbergen (Chief Operating Officer), Martina Albrecht, Martin Anderl, Marina Bartoletti (Intern), Sarah Fazekas, Christina Fuchs, Fruzsina Herbert, Bettina Hirzinger, Hannah Kickert, Nadine Kremsner, Olexandr Kuzmenko, Christine Maass, Franz Mailer, Sarah Matysek, Cornelia Mayrbäurl, Katharina Okulski, Benedikt Osl (Intern), Elly Püls, Alexandra Reichinger (Intern), Clara Rindler‑Schantl (Intern), Magdalena Rostkowska‑Müllner, Elisabeth Schack, Katharina Schwab (Intern), Christiane Schwaiger, Floria Springer, Paul Stolberg, Annamária Toth, Franziska Werkner, Andrea Windegger (Intern), Bernadette Zimmermann

Cornelia Mayrbäurl (Head), Bogdan Baraghin, Johanna Hirzberger, Matthias Humer, Noel Kriznik, Andrei Pungovschi, Jannik Rakusa, George Tsiklauri, Matteo Vigetti, Ira Yeroshko

Interpreters Ingrid Kurz (Head), Verena Brinda, Tanja Christen, Elisabeth Frank‑Grossebner, Susanne Gold, Stefanie Göstl, Elisabeth Hambrusch, Sandra Kess, Jill Kreuer, Julia Lindsey, Julia Oslansky, Tamara Paludo, Laura Scheifinger, Karlheinz Spitzl, Verena Tomasik, Alexandra Travljanin, Alexander Zigo

Drivers

Front Desk Simon Kostenzer, Magdalena Posch, Jasmin Praschberger, Elisabeth Prosser, Leonie Sommer

Mathias Berghammer, Barbara Hatheier, Martin Loinger, Tobias Loinger, Benjamin Walder, Fabio Weinzettel

Hosts/Volunteers

Technical Office Franz Mailer (Head), Alexander Paget (Head Art), Xavier Bavajee, Noah Bavajee, Ivo Friedl, Andreas Gembaczka, Kaspar Glattfelder, Robert Hofer, Martin Johaim, Paul Kuglitsch, Olexandr Kuzmenko, Max Naske, Sebastian Oberauer, Lukas Prosser, Klaus Schiller, Moritz Schuschnigg, Thomas Zechner, Stefan Ziesemer

Bettina Brunner, Lea Egle, Nikolaus Freytag, Agnes Fuchs, Uri Klempner, Lia Knote, Marina König, Katharina Larch, Theresa Margreiter, Christina Margreiter, Sofia Moser, Matthäus Oberbucher, Eva Louisa Ostermaier, Timna Pichler, Jakob Roniger, Martin Sarret, Viktoria Schneider, Shekib Serajzada, Jakob Wagner, Ramin Yaqobi, Masihullah Zafar, Tobias Zsilavecz

Childcare Nour Barakeh, Nora Gutwenger, Chiara Jaquet, Hannelore Martin, Simone Martin

Advisory Committees Health Symposium

Tyrol Days

Political Symposium

Clemens Auer, Alena Buyx, Amin El‑Heliebi, Karl Forstner, Michaela Fritz, Julian M. Hadschieff, Hedwig J. Kaiser, Robert Körbler, Michael Landau, Philippe Narval, Sigrid Pilz, Josef Probst, Viktoria Stein, Christa Wirthumer‑ Hoche, Johannes Zschocke

Andreas Altmann, Matthias Fink, Franz Fischler, Wolfgang Fleischhacker, Martin Kubat, Simon Lochmann, Paolo Lugli, Tilmann Märk, Roland Psenner, Veronica Rungger, Julia Sandrini, Ulrike Tanzer, Ulrike Tappeiner, Francesca Valentini, Jens Woelk, Giuseppe Zorzi

Almina Bešic, Erhard Busek, Vedran Džihic, Walter Feichtinger, Franz Fischler, Ulrike Guérot, Pavel Kabat, Kilian Kleinschmidt, Gerald Knaus, Alexander Marschik, Thomas Mayr‑Harting, Emilia Pasquier, Sonja Puntscher Riekmann, Shalini Randeria, Verena Ringler

Legal Symposium

Economic Symposium

Financial Market Symposium

Sonja Barnreiter, Maria Berger, Ludwig Bittner, Tamara Ehs, Caspar Einem, Michael Enzinger, Michael Holoubek, Martin Kreutner, Brigitte Loderbauer, Klaus Poier, Alexander Somek, Michael Somlyay, Richard Soyer, Verica Trstenjak, Eva Tscherner, Alma Zadić

Christoph Badelt, Wolfgang Eichert, Anna Handschuh, Martin Kocher, Georg Kopetz, Bernhard Marckhgott, Philippe Narval, Claus J. Raidl, Emanuel Riccabona, Franz Schellhorn, Christa Schlager, Christoph Schneider, Agnes Streissler‑Führer

Willi Hemetsberger, Sonja Jöchtl, Christian Niedermüller, Jeffrey Owens, Claus J. Raidl, Franz Rudorfer, Christoph Schmidinger, Agnes Streissler‑Führer, Gertrude Tumpel‑Gugerell

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We carry Austria in our hearts.

Right to your seat.

The kind of service Austrians are known for. On the ground and in the air. #FeelsLikeAustrian

WER HEUTE DIE RICHTIGEN ZIELE HAT, KANN MORGEN ALLES ERREICHEN.

Offizieller Mobilitätspartner des Europäischen Forums Alpbach

O F F I Z I E L L E R M O B I L I TÄT S PA R T N E R D E S E U R O PÄ I S C H E N F O R U M S A L P B AC H

OFFIZIELLER MOBILITÄTSPARTNER

oebb.at

OFFIZIELLER MOBILITÄTSPARTNER

TAXI SERVICES Collective Taxi Service 1: Breitenbach, Kramsach, Münster, Radfeld, Rattenberg, Strass Should your accommodation be situated in Breitenbach, Kramsach, Münster, Radfeld, Rattenberg or Strass, you can take advantage of the free collection taxi service to and from Brixlegg train station, as well as the bus lines 4074 and 4115. From Brixlegg, please take any bus that goes to Alpbach. Please report your travel request at least 45 minutes before the bus departure time in Brixlegg via +43 676 711 17 19 (Taxi Team).

PUBLIC TRANSPORT

Gratlspitz (3 km

Postalm

me Ge

€

Hotel Böglerhof

Spar €

Jakober

Hotel Alphof

Gasthof Rossmoos (2 km)

Congress Centrum Alpbach

Kirche

Alte Feuerwehrhütte

The local company Taxi Moser offers reduced rates to participants of the European Forum Alpbach: +43 5336 5616, g-moser@tirol.co

)

Pfa rrh of ulh ind äusl eam t

Collective Taxi Service 2: Reith If your accommodation in Reith is far away from a bus stop, you can use our free collective taxi service to the Reith-Dorfmitte (Reith mid-town) stop. Please report your travel request at least 45 minutes before the bus departure time via +43 5336 56160 or +43 664 315 2300 (Taxi Moser).

Sch

Hotel Post

Bischoferalm (3,3 km)

Flo's Restaurant

In addition to the regular bus lines 4074 and 4115, a free transfer is running several times daily on the route Brixlegg-Reith-AlpbachInneralpbach and Jenbach-Strass-BrixleggReith-Alpbach-Inneralpbach to and from the Congress Centre Alpbach in cooperation with the ÖBB. The journey with all bus lines is free of charge with your accommodation reservation confirmation or with the Alpbachtal Seenland Card. For more information on public transport in Tyrol visit Transport Consortium Tyrol at www.vvt.at

Flexible Shared Taxi In addition to the free offers, you have the option of using a shared taxi from or to Alpbach. Please report your travel request at least 45 minutes before the desired departure time via +43 5336 56160 or +43 664 315 2300. You will be picked up/brought to your accommodation. In order to offer a cheaper price compared to the regular taxi fare, the ride is carried out as a shared taxi. The exact pick-up time will be communicated to you when registering for the ride.

Volksschule

Berghof

Feuerwehrhaus

Hotel Alpbacherhof

Hauptschule/Spielplatz

Talstation Wiedersbergerhorn (2 km) Galerie Schmidt (7,7 km) Fussballplatz 0

90

Festhütte Inneralpbach (3 km)

54 150

300 m

ACCESS BADGE

SOCIAL MEDIA #efa19

The access badge received upon registration entitles you to participate in the events of the European Forum Alpbach 2019 during the indicated period. The badge has to be carried visibly and is not transferable.

Please return the badge to the registration desk upon your departure, so that we can ensure its environmentally-friendly re-use.

We invite you to use your social networks to share your impressions of the European Forum Alpbach. Please follow us on Twitter: @forumalpbach, #efa19; Facebook: /forumalpbach; Flickr: European Forum Alpbach; Instagram: /forumalpbach

CHILD-CARE FOR CHILDREN AGED 2 TO 7 August 14 to 30, 9am to 7pm – Kindergarten Alpbach We provide professional child care during the European Forum Alpbach. Professional nursery teachers will look after the children during the programme hours of the Forum, offering a broad range of activities and providing books, pencils as well as board games, stilts and water colours. Please be aware that the child-care will be closed for an hour during lunch time. Children must be picked up for the break.

Head of child care: Kristina Mandl, +43 699 11 18 52 66 / kristina.mandl@gmail.com

VENUES AND TRANSLATION Plenary sessions take place in the Congress Centrum Alpbach. The breakout sessions are held either in the Congress Centrum Alpbach or the Secondary School (Hauptschule). Most plenary sessions taking place in the Erwin-Schrödinger-Saal and Elisabeth-Herz-Kremenak-Saal are translated simultaneously into English and German.

Earphones and receivers can be obtained at the door – please hand them back after the session. Our special thanks go to the interpreters who, out of their affinity to the Forum, kindly forego their usual fee and instead translate for a small daily compensation. Information about the language of each plenary session can be found online, through our app.

FAQ For further information regarding your stay in Alpbach, please see www.alpbach.org/faq

APP In cooperation with Superevent the European Forum Alpbach offers a programme-app for smartphones (Android and iPhone) which allows you to receive all programme information and updates on your mobile phone. To download the app open your App Store and look for ‘Forum Alpbach’ by Superevent.

GREEN MEETING ALPBACH Green Meeting Alpbach is a project initiated by the European Forum Alpbach and the Congress Centrum Alpbach, in order to make our events more sustainable and ecologically responsible. As a result of this commitment, the European Forum Alpbach was the first conference organiser ever to be awarded the Austrian ecolabel for Green Meetings.

WEB / LIVESTREAM Livestreaming from the Congress Centrum Alpbach is available at www.alpbach.org Programme: www.alpbach.org/daily

CONTACT The congress office is located next to the registration desk at: Congress Centrum Alpbach, 6236 Alpbach 246, Tyrol, Austria T +43 1 718 17 11-0, F +43 1 718 17 01

INTERNET ACCESS Free WLAN is available in the Congress Centrum Alpbach, the Primary School (Volksschule) and the Secondary School (Hauptschule).

Publisher: European Forum Alpbach Non-Profit Association Franz-Josefs-Kai 13/10, 1010 Vienna, Austria

Photos: Bogdan Baraghin, Philipp Naderer, Maria Noisternig, Andrei Pungovschi, Luiza Puiu, Laurent Ziegler, Foto Watzek Translations: Kirsty Jane Falconer, Joanna White

Design: WHY. Studio Production: Gerin Druck GmbH, Wolkersdorf Paper: Lenzing Desistar (Der blaue Engel, Nordic Swan)

ALPBACH APP Find up-to-date information on the European Forum Alpbach App!

www.alpbach.org