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Salzburg Global Senior Program Advisor, Edward Mortimer delivers lecture at Austrian Parliament on the value of diversity
Senior Program Advisor to Salzburg Global Seminar, Edward Mortimer delivered a lecture on ‘The Value of Diversity: How Best to Combine Human Rights and Peaceful Coexistence in 21st-Century Liberal Democracies’ at the Austrian Parliament, Vienna, September 1 2014.
Mortimer drew on his previous work to discuss the topic of diversity more extensively, citing a report for the Council of Europe on “Living Together: Combining Diversity and Freedom in 21st Century Europe”, as well as an Oxford essay on "Freedom in Diversity".
“The central idea of both these texts is that diversity is something to be cherished, not feared, but also something that needs to be carefully managed,” he addressed the Austrian Parliament.
The former chief speech writer and director of communications in the Executive Office to Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the United Nations then proposed ten public policy recommendations or lessons for society as a whole including citizenship, education, labour markets and the workplace and the participation of minorities in politics.
Mortimer ended his lecture by conceding that the value of diversity – particularly in 21st Century democracies “depends much more on convincing people of different cultures and beliefs that they actually need to live together, respecting each other’s rights and each other’s freedom. And they do – because, as Kofi Annan says on the last page of the book – ‘today, for better or worse, we are all living in one civilisation’”.
Download the full version of Edward Mortimer’s lecture at the Austrian Parliament