The courage to be unfinished

On the 109th birthday of Bruno Kreisky

THE COURAGE OF THE UNFINISHED

Greeting:
Franz Vranitzky
Founding and Honorary President of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, former Federal Chancellor.

Pamela Rendi-Wagner
SPÖ Federal Party Chairwoman
in dialogue with
Rudolf Scholten
President of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue

In Bruno Kreisky's thinking and intentions, „the courage to leave things unfinished“ - as he himself put it - played a major role. This had nothing to do with hesitation or half-heartedness. On the contrary, the courage to leave things unfinished meant that ideologies and social structures were not a self-contained, final system for him and certainly not the final stage of history. It was a commitment to the new, to gradual reform, a commitment to the verifiability of political decisions in the sense of Karl Popper. And it was a demarcation against dogmatic or even totalitarian positions.
Every political and social system is unfinished and must remain unfinished. Because what people do can also be changed for the better by people. The freedom to do so must not be taken away from them.