Foreign Minister Wadephul at the Harbourfront Literature Festival: Opening remarks for the panel “Scenario – the future is at stake!”

I am delighted to be here this evening, and, as a matter of fact, this is my first time on this stage. Unlike the productions you would normally see here, this evening’s script is yet unwritten.  You have chosen to discuss the future tonight.  So nothing too ambitious, just one of humanity’s greatest questions. My 40th subscription anniversary has already given away the fact that some of what once lay in the future for me can now be considered history. Do you know what strikes me when I look back? The future, as it was for me then, existed only as a vague vision. Perhaps a hope, sometimes expectations and, on occasion, worries as well.  Nothing seemed truly inevitable and when we believed we knew what was coming that belief often enough proved to be an illusion. In retrospect, and indeed in the way history is written, the past is often portrayed as a straight line.  A chain of inevitable events that had to unfold exactly as they did.  Karl Schlögel would speak here of history as the simultaneity of events.  He calls this the symmetry of time and space.  History unfolds not as a sequence of dates but as a multitude of experiences made in particu...