I would like to thank you sincerely for the great honour that you are bestowing upon me today — for this wonderful ceremonious event. But on a day like today, I sense how my home region has stayed by me for all of these years — and just how much it has informed my life.
In short, strong nerves, patience and, above all, persistence — that is what I took from this time, and persistence is also — and this is something that I intend to talk about a little in my address today — perhaps the most important virtue for foreign policy, especially in our troubled times.
But before I get to politics, allow me to say a word or two from my everyday experience. I occasionally meet young people who want me to tell them exactly what they need to do in order to get onto the next rung of their career ladder.
Encounters, experiences and coincidences have guided me along my political path. And now I have been nominated as the grand coalition candidate for the office of Federal President — something which I genuinely considered to be the biggest possible surprise in my life. I had no idea that an even bigger surprise was in store, one that we are witnessing today. And that brings us to the topic of this lecture series, Culture of Conflict — Conflict of Cultures. Not only that, Westphalia even stands as an example of how to resolve conflicts.
I recently gave the keynote speech at the Biennial Meeting of German Historians. And what do you think I talked about — about the Peace of Westphalia, of course! Today, Westphalia is not a conflict region, but rather a model of conflict resolution. But, Prof. And now the elections in the US, whose impact on international affairs we can barely even begin to conceive. In the s, people still used to say that globalisation would turn the world into a village. Distances would shrink while our knowledge about what is happening on the other side of the globe would grow.
