Dear Rectors, Professors, Students, dear members of the Coimbra Group, ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, meine Damen und Herren, geachte dames en heren, muy estimados senoras y senores, prezados senhoras e senhores, signore e signori

Je suis très heureux d’être parmi vous à Cracovie, une ville magnifique que j’ai visitée à plusieurs reprises, la dernière fois à l’occasion du mariage d’un de mes amis très chers dont la famille est originaire de la région (en Polonais).

It is always a pleasure for me to be with Coimbra Group to award our Arenberg-Coimbra Group Prize to a deserving student of one of your distinguished universities. 

We are here to celebrate our 2019 Laureate, Ms Janeli Harjus from Tartu, who spent her 5-month Erasmus exchange at Aarhus  University in Denmark during the academic year 2017-18.

Our Prize has been federating the universities of the Coimbra Group around this common project since 2006, originally the idea of Professor Guido Langouche of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Minister of State Mark Eyskens, president of the Arenberg Foundation and former Belgian prime minister.

The Arenberg Foundation is a completely independent Think thank for History and is based in Enghien/Edingen, a small town close to Brussels in Belgium.

The aim  of the Arenberg Foundation is, in our own modest way, to contribute to the collective European cultural heritage, also by encouraging people to think for themselves, think “slowly”, think outside the box, but within a historical context, in the long term. We therefore use the Arenberg Foundation to promote History and Culture in a practical and efficient way.

Our vast archives there are open to the public:

• On Thursdays and Fridays upon appointment. The Arenberg archives are the biggest private archives in the former Low Countries (2.5 km of documents) and cover a thousand years of European history. 

We organize chamber music concerts: 

• For more than fifteen years, we have collaborated with our Japanese partner Joji Hattori in the Bernese Oberland; this year’s concert took place on March 2nd.

We organize seminars: 

• On September 18 and 19th, we’ll co-organize and co-sponsor the 9th Arenberg seminar for history in Antwerp where professors and PhD students are going to talk about Heraldic Hierarchies : “Identities, Status and State Intervention in Early Modern Heraldry”.

We publish books and/or help publishing books: 

• Last year, we published four books. This year, we are going to publish four books as well. 
  
  To give you an example, we are finalizing a book about “Armed resistance in East Europe between 1945 and 1960”, the result of our very successful seminar organized at the Karl-von-Vogelsang Institute in Vienna in 2017 where thirty young researchers and historians from many East European countries, also from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, discussed what happened in their countries during the dark days of Stalinism after the end of the second world war in West Europe. 
  
  We are hoping to organize similar projects concerning central and east Europe in the future to promote a better understanding of our respective histories.
  
  In November, we plan to present an important book in Vienna about “Das Haus Arenberg und die Habsburger Monarchie” in collaboration with the ‘Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Institut für Neuzeit – und Zeitgeschichtsforschung”, based on six years of hard work of twenty collaborators, mainly professors and archivists under the leadership of Dr William Godsey and Dr Veronika Hyden-Hanscho.
  
  Nous avons quinze projets de livre dans notre pipe line, parmi eux quatre projets de livre en partenariat avec l’Académie Français (Institut de France). Ces livres concernent la période révolutionnaire et couvrent les années 1789-1796. Nous avons également un projet d’écriture avec la Société des Bibliophiles François qui concerne l’histoire de la mode à l’époque de la Renaissance. 
  
  We have more than fifteen books in the pipeline, among them four potential books with the French Academy, Paris, about the French Revolution, another with the “Société des Bibliophiles François”, Paris, about the way of dressing in the late Renaissance, one more with the Georgetown University in Washington, D.C about the American wounded warriors and their caregivers and finally a project with the Vatican about the mechanisms of peace making in a historical perspective.

We organize old-timer rallies: 

• Next week, on 9-10 June 2019, we organize once more a two-day cultural old-timer rally, the Arenberg Trophy, with our partners, the Drones Club of Belgium and have plans to do the same in June 2021.
  
  The purpose of these rallies is to bring people from different cultural and social backgrounds together to help building modestly “l’Europe d’en-bas, l’Europe des gens”, meaning a more democratic Europe.

We have set up four prize awards with competent partners: 

• We have organized two History Prizes since 1992, the Arenberg-Coimbra Group Prize since 2007 and the College of Europe Arenberg Prize since 2013. This fourth Prize promotes written essays about the living together of the people of Europe in a historical and comparative perspective. In this case, our partner is the College of Europe in Natolin, here in Poland.  Vice- rector of the College of Europe,  prof. Ewa Osniecka,  is member of our jury. Please do not hesitate to send us your applications for these Prizes. We are at your disposal to answer any questions you may have. 

We give medals:

• To people for their good work in the field of culture. On June 1st, at the occasion of the annual meeting of the Arenberg Foundation, we awarded our medal of merit to a young musician and to the curators of the Arenberg exhibition that took place in the Belgian city of Leuven between October 2018 and January 2019. 

We organize conferences and exhibitions: 

• On 20th of March, we organized a conference about “the geopolitics of energy” in the Belgian Senate and in collaboration with the Senate of Belgium and plan to do the same next year with another conference, the third one of its kind, about “the Russian Federation”, this time in collaboration with several Russian embassies, universities and foundations.
  
  Last year we collaborated with the Museum “M”, the City of Leuven, the University of Leuven, the Belgian National Archives and set up a large cultural exhibition about “Arenberg en Europa” to promote the European idea and our common destiny. Seventy thousand people visited the exhibition, quite a success. Wij waren echt blij met onze partners zo’on indrukwekkend resultaat te kunnen bereiken en hopen met hen ook projecten in de toekomst te kunnen realiseren.
  
  And we keep fighting for a public museum open to the general public.

Unsere heutige Preisträgerin heißt Janeli Harjus. Sie kommt aus der Universität von Tartu (Reval auf deutsch) und hat im akademischen Jahr 2017-2018 ein Semester an der Universität von Aarhus in Dänemark verbracht.

Janeli Harjus graduated from the master’s Programme of Baltic Sea Region Studies at the University of Tartu/Reval in June 2018 after having very successfully defended her thesis ‘Nordic-Baltic Perceptions of Shared Security”, supervised by PhD Eva Piirimae. 

During the two year MA programme in Tartu, she had the great opportunity to spend a semester abroad thru the Erasmus exchange programme and chose Aarhus University. She studied there from August 2017 to January 2018 and participated in their master’s programme in Political Science, an experience that was beneficial for developing, conducting research for and writing her thesis. 
The focal point of her thesis was thus the “Nordic and Baltic countries’ perceptions of shared security in the changed security environment after the year 2014”. 

Janeli Harjus examined the security environment from two perspectives, firstly regarding the countries’ affiliation to strategic aims of NATO as the key security actor in the region, and secondly regarding the Nordic-Baltic cooperation. 
 
“Having a first-hand experience in getting to know the Danish state and society has helped me understand the central research puzzle of my thesis a lot better, and hence conduct a deeper analysis and provide more accurate results. In order to work with perceptions, it is important to be able to see the “problematique” through the eyes of all actors. Having live in a Baltic state for the most of my life, gaining closer insight of a Nordic country was necessary to diversify my views on the region, and I believe it has helped me compose a well-balanced analysis on the topic.”

I heartily congratulate Janeli Harjus on this year’s Arenberg-Coimbra Group Prize and wish her a successful career based on her Erasmus exchange experience.

I would also like to join the selection committee in congratulating the other candidates, whose testimonials were additional excellent examples of the impact of their mobility experience and their academic qualities.

Este comentario seria a conclusao da minha breve intervençào de este dia.  Alla prossima volta con molto piacere per una nuova edizione del nostro premio Arenberg-Coimbra Group 2020 . Muchas gracias por su atención y paciencia.

Duc d’Arenberg
Cracovia, June 6th, 2019