The first decade since 1991

—  The Peace Process in the Middle East
—  Unemployment and the Global Economy
—  North-South Dialogue and Development Cooperation
—  Human Rights
—  Europe since 1989

The Peace Process in the Middle East
The analysis and promotion of the peace process in the Middle East was one of the special concerns of the Bruno Kreisky Forum. U.S. Senator George McGovern, the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, and Harvard professor Everett Mendelsohn, as well as recognised Israeli and Palestinian authors, journalists and scholars, among them Amos Oz, Sari Nusseibeh, Ari Rath and Ziad Abu Zayyed, Amira Hass, Raji Sourani, and many others, have addressed this issue at the Forum.
Confidence building measures have been promoted by further activities, such as the “Middle East Youth Peace Forum”, from 1994 to 1999, the Kreisky Forum organised meetings to promote peace dialogue for youth from the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Austria. Austrian youngsters played the role of catalysts in these encounters.

Prince Hassan Bin Talal	F. Husseini	F. Vranitzky, Y. Arafat

Unemployment and the Global Economy
In the last decade, employment policy has increasingly become one of the key concerns of life in Europe. National radicalism and anxiety about the future result from competing for jobs. Since its establishment, the Kreisky Forum has published a variety of studies on this subject: a bilingual, German-English edition of "Documents On the World Summit for Social Development 1995" as well as "How to Create Jobs", a publication that addresses concrete economic strategies for creating new jobs. One of the highlights of the Forum’s activities in this field was a symposium on employment policy and social policy that was attended by Allan Larsson, General Director of the European Commission’s GD 5, Paavo Lipponen, Finland’s Prime Minister, as well as experts of the European Union, the OECD, and the International Labour Organisation.

T. Daschle	J. K. Galbraith	R. McNamara

North-South Dialogue and Development Cooperation
"The difficult problems of the developing countries, hunger, malnutrition, great poverty, serious payment and debt problems, constantly deteriorating 'terms of trade' are being aggravated by recession, unemployment and high inflation rates in the industrialised nations. This is the true reality of interdependence." (Bruno Kreisky was co-Chairman of the first global North-South-Summit in Cáncun 1981). Right from the beginning the Kreisky Forum organised conferences and lectures focussing on this subject, with participants like the later Nobel Prize Laureates Rigoberta Menchú and Wangari Maathai.

J. D. Wolfensohn	Boutrous Boutrous-Ghali, Representatives of the Canela	K. Kaunda	T. Mbeki

Human Rights
Since 1979 Development cooperation and human rights were among the Kreisky Forum’s other fields of concern. The Bruno Kreisky Prize for Outstanding Human Rights Achievements has been awarded on a biennial basis, in cooperation with the Bruno Kreisky Archive Foundation, to individuals or groups such as Nelson Mandela, Amnesty International and Franz Cardinal König. The then United Nations’ Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was present at the 1993 award ceremony.

D. Lessing	R. Menchú	F. Cardinal König, T. Petovar	M. Robinson

Europe since 1989
The Kreisky Forum’s third field of interest lay in the developments in Europe since 1989. Jacques Delors, then President of the EU-Commission, and Paul Kennedy, the renowned historian and author from Yale University, have addressed the consequences of the most important process in recent European history - integration - at Forum events. Integration, xenophobia, and transformation have become permanent issues of everyday life in Europe. The Kreisky Forum (with the support of the World Bank, among others) has initiated projects on the economic consequences of the enlargement of the European Union to include Central and Eastern European states as well as foreign investment in the region and Russia.

J. Delors	D. Vernet, H. Fischer	Europäische Herausforderungen

© GAB 06072006