Identifying, assessing, protecting, developing and creating Social Capital

As every year, there will be thousands of calls for peace at the end of this year. Depending on your point of view, peace then consists of submission to the victorious power, the conclusion of internationally guaranteed agreements or the freezing of an insoluble conflict.

However, if we look at centuries-old conflicts in which millions of people have died and which have not broken out again since the Second World War, peace there is based on something completely different: reconciliation.

The Germans have reconciled with the French, Belgians, Dutch, Poles, Czechs and Danes and abolished the borders. The Japanese are now on peaceful terms with the Chinese, the Koreans and other peoples they once cruelly enslaved. The Baltic states, whose change of alliances had led to millions of deaths, now live peacefully between Königsberg and Leningrad – to the surprise of many who thought there was a threat of war between the Baltic states and Russia in 2022,

It is therefore not absurd to prophesise: Peace in Gaza and the Middle East will only come through reconciliation. We therefore published a proposal for a Peace Railway connecting Alexandria in Egypt with Gaza, Haifa, Beirut and Latakia. And the brothers and sisters in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine will come together once Minsk,  Kyiv and Moscow are connected by train again.

No military, no agreement can create reconciliation.

Only the people.