While it seems tempting to look at the present as a source of problems and at the future as the place for solutions - with the past oscillating between golden age and ‘never again’ - this approach is problematic and eventually it won’t take us very far.

Nicole Dewandre believes that we should rethink temporality in politics and policymaking to avoid ‘escaping into the future’ at the expense of reality. She will draw on Hannah Arendt’s approach to politics and her call to honour the present, somehow managing to make us reconnect with a love for the world, as difficult as it might seem to be nowadays. 

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Nicole Dewandre is visiting professor at the College of Europe, in Bruges and an invited researcher at the Centre de Théorie Politique of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her background spans physics engineering, economics, operations research and philosophy, with degrees from UC Louvain, ULB and UC Berkeley in the USA. She is also a Policy Fellow Alumni from the University of Cambridge. She has served for 40 years in the European Commission until stepping out in 2024. Here she’s held a variety of top roles and different portfolios, including research and industry, research & Innovation, science and societal issues, the digital transition, gender equality, sustainable development and strategic foresight. She has also developed a research project in the Joint Research Centre, based on a critical analysis of the language use in EU policy-making, deeply inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt.