Chair of the EuroSSIG Faculty, Meissen, August 1, 2026
20th Anniversary of EuroSSIG
Ladies and Gentleman, Faculty Members and Fellows
Meissen in Saxony! Isn´t it a quiet and pittoresque town from the middle ages? You have wine and procellain, you have small hills and the river Elbe, you can biking and hiking, boating and dining in one of the numerous wine cellars downtown. And if you walk uphill to the St. Afra monastery, you can learning about the future of the Internet.
Saxonians are peaceful people. Saxony was a great power in the middle ages, but it lost all its wars. Kings of Saxony were more interested in the glamour of live, than in the glory of victory. They build an opera house in Dresden and collected paintings: Raffael, Tizian, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Rubens, Rembrandt, Canaletto. When we had the founding meeting for the summer school in 2006 in Rathen the evening receiption took place at the Festung Königstein, the place where Böttger invented the Meissen procellain. Our entertainer told us numerous jokes about Saxony. On our way home I said to Milton Muller from the Georgia Tech in Atlanta: “Now you understand why Saxony lost all its wars”. My favorite joke about Saxoninas is from the year 1870, from the German-French war. A Prussian general stands before the soldiers and says: “Soldaten, Tomorrow we move to the frontline. We will have to fight. Man against man.” After a moment of silence, a soldier from Saxony raises his hand and asks: “Herr General, can you give me the name of my man? Perhaps I could find a peaceful solution.”
One year later, in 1871, 155 years ago, the Kingdom of Saxony was integrated into the new German Reich. Its leaders – Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II – did have a nationalistic agenda. It was Germany First. Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. It paved the way to World War I and proofed, what the French president Francoise Mitterand said 100 years later: «Nationalism, c´est la guerre». Nationalism means war.
But back to our peaceful Meissen and the summer school. 20 years of EuroSSIG, what an achievement. And all this would not have been possible without our General Manager, Sandra Hoferichter. Give her a big applause. This applause belongs also to the small team: Rainer, Carsten, Ayesha, to all faculty members and fellows. And first of all to all our sponsors. Starting with DENIC, a sponsor from the very first edition, ICANN, ISOC, RIPE NCC, Verisign, Afilias, PIR, Nic.at, Switch, Norid, SIDN, Google, many others and this year in particular Identiy Digital, the main sponsor of our 20 years celebrations. And Dirk Krischinowski with his unbelievable saga of the Dot-Berlin Domain.
EuroSSIG didn´t loose any war, we are place for cyberpeace. And indeed, EuroSSIG is a place for mutual understanding. We did have fellows from Croatia and Serbia, from Israel and Palestine, from Russia and Ukraine, from Iran and Saudi Arabia, from India and Pakistan, from China and Taiwan. When the fellows were here, they talked to each other and they understood each other. I remember a moment when we were in the wine restaurant Vinzenz Richter downtown, where we had our traditional song contest. A young lady from India did sing a lullaby from her childhood. The guy next to me, a young man from Pakistan, whispered in my ear: “We do have the same song”.
This was a moving moment. This is the message from our summer school to the world. If they can sing together, they can work together. And if the work together they can live in peace together. This is how EuroSSIG writes history.
We know from the history of revolutions that each revolution eats its children. Take the French revolution. The citizens of Paris wanted political and civil rights. But then Robespierre killed Danton. And ten years after they stormed the Bastille, they got Napoleon, a dictator. Take the Russian revolution. The workers of St. Petersburg wanted economic and social rights. But ten years after they stormed the Winterpalais, they got Stalin, a dictator, who killed his own comrade, Trotzki.
And now, what will happen with the information revolution? The mothers and fathers of the Internet are now grandmothers and grandfathers. Their grandchildren have the Internet commercialized and weaponized. How far this will go? Will we have soon an AI based killer robot as Cyberdictator in the Information Age? If you look around in our AI age, one can feel it on the fingertips: There is not only excitement around the new opportunities, there is also a growing fear.
But where fear is is also hope. Decades after the French and the Russian revolutions we got the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. And in 1966 we got the two UN Human Rights conventions on civil and political rights as well as on economic, social and cultural rights. It is now binding international law. And even if international law is broken again and again. It is on paper, it is recognized and can be used, at least for naming an shaming.
What is the hope now in the age of AI? Will the grandgrandchildren of the Internet find the light at the end of today´s dark digital tunnel? There are instrumets which can be hopefully used to find this light. We do have the Tunis Agenda and the SDGs. The IGF is now permanent. We do have the NetMundial Declaration with its principles like openness, transparency, accountability, inclusion, fairness, bottom up policy development and the multistakeholder approach. We do have the Sao Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines, the SPMGs, from 2024. We do have the Global Digital Compact, the AI Panel and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. And we do have a perspective towards 2035: WSIS +30.
When I was a teenager in the 1960s, our slogan against the Vietnam war was “Make Love, Not War“. The Vietnam war ended, we got the SALT treaties, the Helsinki Final Act, Perestroika and Glasnost in the Soviet Union and the peaceful revolution of 1989 which started in my hometown, Leipzig, not far from here. The Berlin Wall came down and there was a lot of hope for a new cyberdemocracy.
What should I say today and here in Meissen to the Internet Governance Leaders of tomorrow? My message is very simple: Make Cyberpeace, not Cyberwar.