Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends of the Arenberg Foundation

The Arenberg Foundation, a completely independent foundation, welcomes you once again in these wonderful premises for another conference. Thank you for being here and this is a testimony of interest for a topic of major importance that concerns all of us.

Thank you very much to our great speakers who agreed to come and to talk about their areas of expertise in defense matters.

None of them has asked for a fee and the Arenberg Foundation has invited you because all of us believe that selfless citizen engagement can make a difference in democratic societies.

Most of us suffer from an overdose of information, many of us don’t know what to believe anymore and many of us lose their heads in their iphones or ipads, these wonderful tools that have much too often taken control of our lives.

Hence the importance of learning again to take time and to listen carefully to real people involved in the real world who are ready to share their first hand experiences.

Our thanks tonight go as well to two great soldiers with combat experience who have greatly contributed to make this conference very special, I name general Sir Adrian Bradshaw from UK and colonel Roger Housen from Belgium who is also a member of the scientific committee of the Arenberg Foundation.

Thank you to the team of the Arenberg Foundation, to our director Isabelle Vanden Hove as well as to Marie Deman, Lieve Bické, Guy Lernout, Erik Kuijpers for their help and support.

Thank you to Me Olivier Hamal, Alexandre Grosjean and the team of the Théâtre Galerie de la Reine for their hospitality.

Welcome to the president of the Arenberg Foundation, our former Prime Minister, Minister of State Mark Eyskens and to his fantastic wife Anne.

The Arenberg Foundation stands for:

• Promoting History and Culture in a truly European spirit because we believe that there is no alternative to the European Union if we still want to get a fair listening from the Great Powers
• Helping people to get ‘their brains’ back, meaning to learn again to think slowly and independently thanks to person to person contacts, reading and opening private archives to scientific research.
• Motivating citizens to get personally involved in civil society since strong civil societies produce strong political classes and weak civil societies produce weak political classes. I welcome here the maire of the Belgian city of Enghien, Marc Vanderstichelen, with whom we have partnered last year to start a European project potentially linking ten European countries bottom up at a grassroot level, at a level of committed citizens.

Our activities in many countries be it in Belgium, Holland, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, USA are properly documented on the website of the Foundation.

Once a year we try to reach out to a broader public. Last year, we referred about the Space, two years ago about Artificial Intelligence and earlier about International Trade, Energy supply, Russia, Terror and Cybernetics, armed resistance in East Europe between 1944 and 1956, about the German Mittelstand, about China, about the ruling classes in East Europe between 1918 and 2015 …

2025 has been a wake-up call for many Europeans that came to no surprise to me.

Between 2005 and 2015, I was teamed up with a great guy called Frank Lasch, a US army mechanic, a great American patriot, who started Azalea Charities, a Virginia based charity dedicated to help wounded American soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq and their families. For ten years, we regularly visited and supported them financially at the military hospital of Walter Reed in Washington D.C, in wards 54 and 57, at the Mologne House where they were trying to get their health back and at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.

To be a severely wounded soldier is a terrible ordeal – most of us have no idea what it really means – and we had very frank and open conversations with officers and soldiers in their hospital rooms.

Thereafter, I partnered with colonel Roger Housen and Ron Farina, an American Vietnam war veteran, to write three books about US veterans to thank them for keeping the PAX AMERICANA we enjoyed for so long at little expense for us, let’s be honest with ourselves. If you are interested, these books are still available at the Foundation.

Now the situation has finally changed and let’s look at a glass that is half full instead of complaining and bickering.

Personnally, I’m very optimistic but only if we pull our act together right now, although the medicine will be painful.

For the first time in 80 years, Europe has the opportunity, I would say the obligation, to stop dreaming on a rosy cloud from where it lectures the world and become adult and responsible, namely to talk the talk - this is already happening – but also and above all to walk the walk to avoid going from the back seat of the car in the car trunk without any influence left. If not, we are going to be forced to learn again what the word ‘Liberty’ really means.

Yes, “wir schaffen das” and where there is a will, there is a way, the Airbus project being a perfect example of what Europeans can achieve together if they decide to collaborate.

To be weak has never been a good idea : you are useless to your friends and you are despised by your enemies. If you are lagging behind with outdated weaponry systems, you become an easy prey and I remind you that in the last decade of the 19th century for instance, a few hundred Europeans could easily conquer large chunks of Africa. They had Maxim machine guns while their enemies were fighting with bows and arrows.

This is why the Arenberg Foundation is promoting History with such conviction because a people without a common narrative has no future. Indeed, how is it possible for a human community to stick together and make efforts and sacrifices if there is nothing to share in common any more ? Consumers don’t replace citizens and multiculturalism if not managed wisely can destroy human societies.

But the first step and probably the biggest challenge in our democratic societies where you can say too often everything and the opposite of everything without personal consequences is to try to inform the broad public in the best possible way, so people become aware of the real and long term issues, and this is the purpose of today’s exercise.

There will a questions and answers session at the end of the conference chaired by Colonel Roger Housen followed by a reception where all of you can ask more questions to the speakers.

I wish you an interesting afternoon.

Duke of Arenberg