Tuesday 11 April 2023
Amare Theater, The Hague

Exactly 75 years after the Congress of Europe took place in The Hague – where Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, Raymond Aron, Bertrand Russell, a young François Mitterrand, and other politicians and intellectuals sowed the seeds of what would become the European Union – and exactly 20 years after George Steiner’s famous Nexus Lecture The Idea of Europe, President Emmanuel Macron unfolded his ideas about the future of Europe in his Nexus Lecture.

Photos: Jan Reinier van der Vliet and Jelmer de Haas

Become a member Order The Idea of Europe

The Nexus Institute and the Nexus Lecture
The Nexus Lecture is an initiative of the Nexus Institute, Europe’s most prestigious independent organization for European humanism, founded in 1994 by Rob Riemen. It publishes the essayistic journal Nexus and organizes public conferences where a real exchange of ideas takes place between intellectuals, artists and decision makers. Among its guests were Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Patti Smith, Nobel Prize Laureates Olga Tokarczuk and Wole Soyinka, Alain Finkielkraut, Achille Mbembe, Ágnes Heller, José Manuel Barroso, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Amos Oz, Elif Shafak, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Nicolas Baverez, Sheikh Rached Ghannouchi, Abderrahmane Sissako, László Krasznahorkai, Susan Sontag, Jean Clair, Kishore Mahbubani, Prince Hassan of Jordan, Anne Applebaum, Cólm Tóibín, Nadine Labaki, Antonio Damasio, Sir Simon Rattle, Svetlana Tichanouskaya, and many others.

Previous Nexus Lectures have been delivered by Nobel Prize Laureates Mario Vargas Llosa, Amartya Sen and Sir Angus Deaton, and Margaret Atwood, Sonia Gandhi, George Steiner, Jürgen Habermas, Ismail Serageldin, Daniel Barenboim, Peter Sellars, Sir Simon Schama, Edward Said, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, President Richard von Weizsäcker, Garry Kasparov, Francis Fukuyama, Ai Weiwei, Richard Holbrooke, Adam Zagajewski, Michael Ignatieff, Philippe de Montebello, Avishai Margalit, Claudio Magris, Carlo Ginzburg, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, world famous cellist Janos Starker and Robert Hughes.