Together with all our staff members, we wish you a peaceful, happy, and enriching year 2025.
The turn of the year marked the end of a historic year for CIFE: we celebrated our 70th birthday in 2024. We celebrated it with dignity and joy: First, with a large Alumni reunion in September in Nice, to which we welcomed around 200 Alumni; then, with an Anniversary Conference assembling distinguished academic experts, stakeholders, partners and former students, now working in Brussels and other capitals. Our President Herman Van Rompuy and the Director-General for Education, Youth and Sport, Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen, gave us the honor of delivering a keynote speech. We concluded our conference with a famous line from one of the founding fathers of European integration, Jean Monnet: "Nothing is possible without men, nothing is enduring without institutions".
These words should provide us with a guideline for the coming period: As an educational institution, we have the mission to shape young people who not only master practical skills, but are also able to think for themselves, who acquire values, know our own history and draw conclusions from it. Studying at CIFE is also somewhat a philosophy of life, as all our students share their year with individuals from other nations and cultures, learning to question themselves, to open up to new ideas, and to gain awareness of the complexity of our world. They should go out into the world as value-driven, educated, and critical persons, ready to take up responsibility.
"Nothing is enduring without institutions" - rarely has a sentence been truer than today, at a time when democratic institutions are under pressure and heavily attacked as seldom before. In times like these, institutions must prove their resilience, but they also need our support and commitment. Only in this way can we preserve the achievements that we call ours and that have so far protected us from repeating the mistakes of Europe's past. Let us remain vigilant before it is too late.
Matthias Waechter, Director General of CIFE