AUB President Fadlo R. Khuri Talk by Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl on the Middle East from the Presidency Perspective October 1, 2018

I tried to do a quick—certainly not exhaustive—online search on “European foreign ministers who speak Arabic” and only one name came up: Dr. Karin Kneissl of Austria. I’m sure Dr. Kneissl can confirm whether she regularly conducts conversations with her counterparts at the European Union HQ in Brussels fi-l lugha al-arabiya as their lingua franca, but I somehow doubt it. She grew up in Jordan where her father was a pilot and her mother was cabin crew, and she studied law and Arab studies at the University of , among other international institutions, included the University of Amman and a Fulbright scholarship to Georgetown.

After obtaining her PhD in international law, with her thesis on borders between belligerent states in the Middle East—yes, we have one or two of those—she joined the Austrian diplomatic service in 1990. Since 1998, Karin Kneissl has worked as an independent lecturer in the areas of international law, Middle Eastern history, and the energy market, including at our sister institution l’Université Saint-Joseph. During these years, she has also establishing herself as an authoritative, sometimes provocative, but always free- thinking commentator and journalist on her areas of expertise in both the English- and German-language media.

She was appointed as Austria Federal Minister for Europe, Integration and Foreign Affairs in December 2017, since when has emerged as a powerful voice for reason, pluralism, and transparency, in a European political arena that—like the country of my birth, the United States—seems to be falling deeper into the grip of evidence-free epistemological tribalism and fingers-in-the-ears, adolescent name-calling.

Dr. Kneissl was appointed, as an independent, to her ministerial portfolio by the , often described as the “far-right, nationalist” Freedom Party of Austria, but she herself defies political pigeonholing. Like all European politicians, she has grappled with the challenge of international migration, which was brought into such stark and tragic focus on the coastlines and border crossings of Europe during the summer 2015 refugee crisis. Her prescription has been not to build more and higher walls—as a certain president wants to across the Atlantic—but to engage in more consultation with the countries in the Middle East and North Africa to address the reality that 60 million young people in our region cannot expect to find employment here. The global income gap, and the urge, if not the expediency, to migrate by legal or illegal means will only grow, unless countries of the global south can make their own societies more liveable, and more economically and environmentally sustainable, so that our young people have a reason to stay, rather than to leave.

I have said many times that the American University of Beirut bears a heavy weight of responsibility in this struggle, through education, transformative research, service to the health and wellbeing of our communities, and by graduating students determined to make a difference. We need help from all our partners, whether in corridors of power in Europe, in sister universities in the global south, or the free media, as we saw last week with our collaboration with Annahar newspaper to breathe life back into Lebanon, through dialogue in the realms of politics, economics, education, health, and culture.

So we receive Dr. Kneissl warmly into our community today, a free-thinking scholar into our community of scholars, a difference-maker to a community of difference-makers, with a dream and a plan to bring about a more secure and prosperous future. Dr. Kneissl, welcome.