The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBA) has just published a volume of essays under the title of ‘Reclaiming Europe’.
Fridolin freudenfett, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Financially supported by the German Government, the volume contains more than 30 essays on Freedom, Democracy and Prosperity, including several written by Members of Academia Europaea (Olga Garaschuk MAE, Christoph Markschies MAE (President of BBA), Ole Petersen FRS ML MAE and Tarmo Soomere MAE).
The essay collection is primarily based on the conference Reclaiming Europe that took place in Gdansk, Poland last year. It had a major focus on Ukraine and its heroic fight against the brutal Russian invasion. Reclaiming the whole of Ukraine for Europe is an integral part of the overall crucial battle for European freedom and this is therefore also a dominant feature of the book that has now been published by BBA.
As emphasised in Ole Petersen’s essay Scientific freedom in a difficult world, we need to continuously defend the true European values of ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’, which have their origin in the French revolution and are, in fact, the motto of the modern French Republic. In Germany, scientific freedom (“Forschungsfreiheit”– freedom of research) is enshrined in the Basic Law. It is also protected in the EU as “a constituent part of academic freedom and scientific integrity in Europe”. In contrast, scientific freedom does not exist in major parts of the world, including Russia and its allies and, sadly, now also the US.
In his preface to the volume, the President of BBA, Christoph Markschies, states that the essays show “what Reclaiming Europe can mean – from deeply personal reflections on displacement to analyses of political developments, from the challenges of artificial intelligence to the ecological consequences of ongoing war.”
Read Reclaiming Europe.
Posted 5th September 2025. For more information contact aecardiffhub@cardiff.ac.uk
