Toespraak minister Timmermans bij de opening van Leiden University College in Den Haag

Toespraak | 01-11-2013

If one can get used to the idea that Volvo is actually not a Swedish but a Chinese car, if one can get used to the idea that Mini Cars are no longer British but German, if one can get used to the idea that a young lady from Scotland here speaks with an American accent… Then at some stage I’m sure we’ll get used to the idea that Leiden University College is actually in The Hague.

And I know that for The Hague it is an important investment in it’s position as a city that has so much to offer in the international field. It is now renowned across the world as the legal capital, and it has the ambition to be more for all of it’s citizens, not just the privileged citizens we see here today. But through these privileged citizens (we can) also reach the rest of The Hague’s population as some of them really need this stimulus? and the prospoured realization? of knowledge and openess to the rest of the world.

And I would urge everyone to take that responsibility. Also when you are here as a student you can do something for this community that is invaluable. And please don’t hesitate to do that during your time here in The Hague. I think The Hague will be very grateful for that, and everybody you’ll meet will be very grateful for that.

I say this because the World is changing rapidly. The Hague is changing rapidly. I came here first in the 1970’s with my father when he had to be at the Foreign Ministry. It was not there yet. It was elsewhere in the city. The Hague was a very closed city. A city of civil servants. And if you look at The Hague now it is an international city and it is becoming increasingly an inspiring city to people from all over the world.

I was born in a city called Maastricht in the south. And my friend, Wiel Arets, the architect of this building… His name is Wiel Arets, for those people from Limburg who don’t know how to pronounce his name. He (who) is one of the most inspiring architects The Netherlands have, and he (who) has done again a great job here. He knows that the city he lived in, Maastricht, changed fundamentally because of the university coming there. And I believe that the campus here in The Hague will also change The Hague as a city. The university of Maastricht was built in the region I was born, which was a coal mine region. It had a problem because the coal mines were closed, so instead of building the university in the region where the coal mines were closed, they built it in Maastricht. But anyway, let’s not be unkind to Maastricht for that. At least the university of Maastricht is actually in Maastricht.

Some 27 years ago I received my university degree. The graduation ceremony took place at the university of Nijmegen, in Nijmegen. And the crowd was not unlike today. A room full of young people with great hopes for the future. The main difference was the decor and the furnishing. Congratulations Wiel and all your people: You have done a great great job.

Sitting in the front row that day was my grandfather, Cor Heijnis. He was 76 at the time, but you could easily mistake him for a man of 90, or even older. He was sitting there in his suit and with his walking stick, weathered by forty years of hard graft in the coal mines of Limburg, breathing heavily, his lungs destroyed by coal dust. But he was grinning from ear to ear, proud as a peacock of his eldest grandson. For him this was a crowning moment, a triumph of his own ideals. His own father had taken him out of school at 14 and sent him off to work.

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But he clung to his ideals, fighting a lifelong battle against the absurd notion that if you’re born poor you’ll remain poor. Every blast he ignited in the mine smoothed the path I would later walk down. He always encouraged me to stay inquisitive and savour the knowledge he’d been denied.

To my grandfather, gathering knowledge and ultimately going to university were inextricably linked with the social-democratic ideal he fostered. The ideal that you can rise above poverty. He hoped that one day the working class would be able to educate their own Bachelors of Science. Knowledge as power.

I strongly believe that this traditional social-democratic ideal has been achieved. But at the same time, we must concede that a very fundamental paradigm shift is taking place in our world. One which, frankly, I believe we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around.

The message used to be clear: knowledge is power – increase your knowledge, increase your power. But is this still true today, in our information society? Doesn’t the opposite often ring true? The more knowledge we acquire, the more agitated and powerless we feel?

That’s something we experience in our personal lives. Perhaps not everyone here, but talk to the people in The Hague that usually don’t come to universities and you feel their pain in trying to cope with all the information they’re getting.

All day, every day, we read about other people’s successes on Facebook or Twitter. By the way, you can follow me on Facebook if you like. We’re blasted with information about everything under the sun – the gruesome scenes in Syria, the joyful images from Tahrir Square, your former neighbour’s baby, the government shutdown in the US, your high school sweetheart’s new job, and then – wham – back to the floods in Manila, the epic storm of last week or the passing away of Lou Reed.

We witness the news as it happens, and are left asking ourselves helplessly ‘Why? Who? How? Where?’

And at the same time we feel left out or alone: ‘Where does all this leave me? Do I still matter? Is there any way left for me to influence what happens in the world, or should I just give up, overwhelmed and powerless?’

My generation learnt to search for information and knowledge. With that went organising, analysing and drawing conclusions. But my youngest children’s generation may never have to actively search for knowledge. Searching today is something you do with your fingertips, on your smartphone. And in the blink of an eye, you’ve found what you need. I wonder what this will mean long-term for our memory.

But your smartphone will not organise, analyse and classify for you. Above all, the information your smartphone finds is abundant. It comes from Wikipedia, from friends on social networks, from shady websites with exotic theories, from websites that tell you the pain in your abdomen is probably as lethal as it is rare, from all kinds of news sources – some more reliable than others – from people with their own political agenda and from harmless hobbyists. Sometimes the internet is more medieval in terms of fabulation, in terms of myths, in terms of nonsense you can find.

Today, information is no longer a scarce commodity. In fact, there’s more information out there than we can cope with on a daily basis.

Estimates as to how much information there is on the internet vary, but everyone agrees that it’s somewhere between unfathomable and impossible to grasp—YouTube reportedly has videos that no one – apart from the uploader – has ever seen - and I think that’s a blessing - and the collection of these videos also grows incredibly exponentially day by day.

It’s not just the amount of information that’s growing, but also the number of sources: in a world of networks, central information hubs fed by universities, government ministries or the offices of the newspaper business are becoming less dominant. Valuable knowledge may appear from anywhere these days.

We’re drowning in a sea of information. So how are we supposed to process it all?

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The enormity of that challenge can fill us with fear. Fear of losing track, fear of losing control, of being unable to fit it all into a comprehensive story that we live by. Where’s our storyline? Shortly before his death, British historian Tony Judt wrote in Ill Fares the Land, and I quote:

‘We have entered an age of fear […]. Fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of our daily life.’ Unquote.

But perhaps most important, according to Judt, is the, and I quote again:

‘fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have also lost control, to forces beyond their reach.’ Unquote.

It sounds all too familiar. We can’t easily allay all our fears, but as Judt rightly points out, a sense of being in control would at least be something.

It’s all about control – about how we actually cope with this information overload. That’s an issue I’ve been pondering not only personally but also in my role as minister. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs plays a role in promoting knowledge, paying for endowed professors to lecture one day a week at the universities of Utrecht, Groningen and Maastricht. In Utrecht, Groningen en Maastricht.

That’s quite a traditional way of processing knowledge, one that my grandfather would recognise. But the Ministry is involved in new forms of knowledge too. We explore the opportunities Big Data holds in store.

One example is a project being carried out with The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies. Through data mining, we’re looking at whether it’s possible to analyse emerging countries’ word use in order to better predict their priorities. In other words, if we do some serious data crunching to identify key words that come up again and again in a country’s policy, will it throw up useful knowledge? I think it might. It’s a challenge to the universities as well. Students could do that easily.

I won’t encourage you to find a career in the UN system. The UN is studying how big data can be used for humanitarian aid in the wake of major disasters. By studying patterns in communication between people, we can learn a lot about how they are responding and how we can help.

New techniques to analyse Big Data have my attention because it represents a fresh attempt to harvest useful knowledge from copious and seemingly unmanageable amounts of information: using the abundance of data for new ways of understanding, analysing and classifying. Of course, we have to be aware of the flipside. Data can be biased, and if you don’t ask the right questions, it’s easy to draw the wrong conclusions. Data is a peculiar resource, and our greatest challenge is to understand, fathom and organise it. That’s no easy task.

You invited me here this afternoon to talk about ‘Global Challenges’. Now, you may think I’ve taken too much liberty in interpreting this request. But I believe that in a world where information is lapping at our door, being able to make sense of it is by far the biggest challenge. That will make us more confident and less afraid of the information we are bombarded with all day long. It’s so interesting to see when I travel to other parts of the world that the fear which is so much part of our Western society is completely absent in Asian and other societies. And why are these people optimistic? Because they have a feeling that everything is to gain whilst in our society people have the fear there’s everything to lose. And that’s a completely different attitude towards life. If we don’t get people back in the position that they do believe they have a lot to gain, they will not be able to open up to this incredible amount of information that needs to be analyzed and used to good effect.

A society that has learnt how to organise information will be in a better position to share information and reach new heights. In other words: in today’s world, achieving an even spread of knowledge, power and income on a global scale is no longer a matter of acquiring information but of organising, analysing and classifying it.

That’s how we’ve dealt with it before.

That’s a challenge for us all, no matter what your political persuasion. But as a social democrat, and as the grandson of Cor Heijnis, a miner from Heerlen, it’s a challenge I’m eager to take on.

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Expanding our knowledge is no longer enough. It’s all about creating order out of chaos. If we can do that, we can keep working on what, for me, is the key goal: using knowledge to keep my grandfather’s dream alive in the 21st century everyone and everywhere on this globe.

That, ladies and gentlemen, in my view, is the ‘global challenge’ of our time.

As far as your contribution to this challenge goes: all the facilities are in place, so if we don’t succeed it won’t be down to this new building. What will make all the difference, then, is what you yourself do with the means and opportunities at your disposal.

I challenge you, every single one of you, the youngest generation. No generation has been healthier, no generation has more power, no generation has ever been in such a position to actually change the world. You can. You can never be too idealistic.

Never lose your idealism, never get rid of that, always keep it close at heart. Because if you keep it close at heart, you can actually change this world. And you can form quick alliances with people who have no idea how they can change their own environment and change the world.

You have this at the tips of your finger. You can do this, I'm sure you can. I want to be your ally, I want to come back here before the year to talk about this, to look at concrete issues, to look at global challenges we all face.

More concrete: I want you to look it up on the internet. I want you to see what you can find in terms of people who can teach you stuff that you can put into practice in The Hague and elsewhere in the world.

I want you to do this, because in this paradigm change of scene now, in these huge global changes we all have to face, Europe, the West has a huge contribution to make. Who is going to face the challenge in the Mediterranean? Who is going to prevent people from continuing to drown in the Mediterranean trying to find a better life for themselves and their children?

You are. We all are. And we need applied knowledge. We need more knowledge, we need more analysis to make this happen. I am confident we can. And today is a good start. This college can help in The Hague, in interacting with international organizations and embassy's representatives, and I'm sure that within a generation you will create a new world, that is better than today that will reflect the ideals we cherish today and I wish you every success with that.

Thank you very much.