No. 6. (19/03/2004)
Speech by Major General Winfried Dunkel, Deputy Director of the George C. Marshall European Center*
Thank you very much Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentleman. It's a great pleasure to be in Hungary again. Today I'm here as the German Deputy-director of the Marshall Center. I will be talking about what we can offer you so to speak budget free for your country. We are a German- American partnership. Our name, Marshall Center is the name of a program and as with the Marshall Plan USA helped Europe to be rebuilt, after the World War II. , the Marshall Center tries to give intellectual investment in people in order to develop this country here in Europe as a stable continent where security cooperation takes part, and where we practice partnership among one another.
So on the occasion of the 10 th anniversary which we had in June of this year we welcomed Donald Rumsfeld as well as Peter Struck as well and 10 other ministers defense and high representatives of defense, from all the EAPC country in Garmisch Partenkirchen to celebrate the success we have achieved so far. This is a map of the participating countries. The 45 countries of the EAPC we serve, the location is in Garmisch that's south to Munich, we are very glad that the center is in Germany. There're three reasons, one is the students which come from these countries, are introduced to Germany, to a country with a huge historical burden and they learn what Germany means today. They may readjust the picture of modern Germany while they're studying there. Secondly, they have a chance of meeting people. This is a great opportunity for both sides to understand people is thinking in a state that after 60 years ago developed into a democracy, how the people think today about it. And thirdly, we are an example, so to speak, a model and students come and get the idea that if the Germans can do it, so can we. So I think this was also an inspiration to have that institution in Garmisch P. We offer a strategic investment in people. We give people the future elits there are an opportunity to develop their own thoughts. By comparison, we don't teach what they have to think, but we teach how they should think. By comparing differing views of the students within the classroom by getting new ideas from professors of faculty members from teachers from around the world which we get here.
So the Marshall Center is here to support you. What are we offering? We do have 3 major programs. We organize 24 conferences per year, we also offer workshops, short courses, seminars, we're output oriented that means the countries request some kind of seminars on a certain topic from us, and we want to have a result after that. So people coming to us work during that week. We give them an input at the beginning we discuss it, and then we go through the week, and at the end we want to discuss a national security strategy for instance. Which we have given input to many countries of the new democracies on the past where we created a basis for them to write the strategy. So we deal with actual political topics in that respect. The normal way is that the government writes a letter to the American and German ambassador in the hosting country requesting a program like this and this letter comes to us and we look into it in detail. So let's switch to the resident programs. We have an international faculty here, not only from Germany and US, there are 30 professors some of whom come from Austria, France, the United Kingdom, the other countries are selected we put it on the internet, and we get many applicants. We do have three elements by the way these are the professors we have in addition we bring in high ranking officials from around the world and the 3'rd type of faculty are the students because they bring in their experience, so this is very fruitful. These are the programs we are doing. We used to have 370 resident students per year, now we do have 600. If we follow the request of countries we could increase much more, but we have our limits. Our priority is the junior level, the leader's course; at he top it's a 9 weeks course for students at the level of the major, captain, equivalent of the civilian sector young people who're at the beginning of their career.
So that's why we have put main effort into this field. The second level is the executive program, that's a level for colonel or leutenant colonel mainly; we started it in 1993 and we added another one which in 98; we have a junior course, and we have a senior course which is a 10-day-course for MP's, ambassadors, deputy ministers of defense and general officers. We will deal with 2 topics next year: terrorism, and the whole conference will concentrate on all aspects of it, and the other conference is on European integration, something similar to what we had here but in the broader aspect of policy making and not only the military field. We do have language courses which we've offer to people from Bosnia, Serbia who are not capable of commanding in English or German or Russian, these are the 3 languages we teach. You have to speak one of the three languages in order to get to the Marshall Center. We do have a counter terrorism program, a 5-week-course, where we bring together people who work in that field. We want to share the experience, we want to create and build up a network so that people can communicate with one another, and solve problems when they need somebody in a different system in a different country. We also organize trips, one trip to Brussels-Berlin, to visit the international institutions, European institutions in Brussels, and then one to the USA to study the policy making process in Washington. Almost everything is related to our main task, to security issues. We have 3000 graduate students, a few countries are represented by 200 students, Hungary sent 71. This is in the middle of it somewhere I'm grateful to offer you this view today because the next slide will show you that the full rate for Hungary after NATO accession has fallen to 57% the places we offer you. And we do not have an answer to that.
I'm grateful for being able to share this view with you, and would like to express that there're opportunities which have not been used to the possible extent. How do you get to the Marshall Center? In close cooperation with the German and US Embassies, the two ambassadors inform the government, and list the places available for the various courses, and ask the government officials to come back to the American Embassy who then put it through the channels which end up at the Marshall Center. We work with NATO very closely, we visit the US and the German Embassy in the respective capitals in order to develop this communication process and we also tell our host countries that we want a larger number of participants with different backgrounds. When we set off in 93 we mainly worked with old male military, in 93 those were the elits in those countries. Now at our latest leader's course with 95 participants the average age was 33 years, 42% of the people civilians and 30% women. This is the ratio we look at. We have an Alumni network. If we were only there in order to provide training it wouldn't be sufficient because the second even more important role of the MC is to stay in touch with people who had been to Marshall Center creating a worldwide network, where you can go to, where you can share your experience, where you can make enquiries so our Alumni get an access code to a web page of the Marshall Center, where we have 67 thousand articles and more than 6000 books so when you work in the security sector you just click on the relevant portal of whatever you need you get there. You can read all the newspapers of the world free. We do publications, periodicals, and Marshall Center papers. (You can publish with us. We'll do it for you free). We do have an alumni association one of which has been done is Hungary also in 2001 14 alumni organization, and 10 more in forming in the process of being formed.
The content of security has widened much beyond military security. All segments of society feel the impact of security. That means all segments of policy making should come and see the MC. We don't just want to get people from the ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Minister of Defense all other ministries that are related with security should be there. What we ask you is to expend the framework. People working at the administration of the Parliament for instance are very important to us or those who work in economics or finance or border guards or interior, those are people who deal with security issues.
Finally a brief summary of MC. I am very grateful to have this opportunity, because I reach important people, people who have an influence on sending out ambassadors for your country to the Marshall Center. And reaching the discussion there among people bringing Hungary's view to bear on others, and that is costs free. So I may encourage you for the future to use the places we offer to you as an investment into young people who will change the course of this country over the next decade. Thank you.
* The 8th annual autumn NATO conference was held in Budapest on 27 November 2003, organized by the Parliament's Office for Foreign Relations. The title of the conference was The Transformation of the Atlantic Alliance in the Age of Global Threats.