The Forum Alpbach’s purpose for today and beyond is quite simple: The European Forum Alpbach is a space and place for the emergence of reflection and action. It brings together young people from Europe and from all over the world with the most innovative minds from politics, business, civil society, culture, and science to drive ideas for a strong and democratic Europe. With this diverse, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary community, the Forum influences key actors throughout the European continent to facilitate their learning and decisions.
The European Forum Alpbach brings together young people from Europe and from all over the world, leading scholars, thinkers, scientists, policy makers, business people and civil society actors to engage and contribute to this mission of shaping a stronger.
The Forum’s initiators agreed wholeheartedly on the foundations of their dream: the fight against Nazism and Communism, and the dream of democracy, freedom, peace and prosperity, as well as the nurturing of science and education. They agreed to meet in Alpbach for a couple of weeks each year to discuss the content of their dreams and to convert this content - if they found an agreement - into reality.
As is always the case, the founders of Alpbach discovered that in the pursuit of a common dream, opinions about how to make it come true, diverged – both content and procedurewise. Out of these discussions however grew a platform with a think tank populated by European intellectuals and doers, who had a profound influence on the shaping of Europe in the decades to come. Left or right was not the differentiator, but liberal and anti-liberal was.
The following decades brought about an astonishing development of the European integration project — politically and economically – and much more profoundly than the Forum Alpbach’s founders could have ever dreamed of. Several years after the first Forum Alpbach meeting — in 1958 — six countries founded the European Economic Communities with the goal of creating a common European market. When this task was completed, in 1992 a new treaty set the stage for the European Economic and Monetary Union, characterised by an everdeepening political integration. By the late 2000s the European Union had expanded to 28 states including 11 members of the former communist bloc. Such an achievement was probably far beyond the dreams of any Alpbach founder.