European New School Thinking 2019

This position paper, published by the European School of Governance in 2019, makes the case for a new European school of thought adequate to the challenges of the 21st century. Drawing on the centenary of two landmark intellectual experiments - the Bauhaus in Weimar and the New School for Social Research in New York, both founded in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War - the paper argues that transformative action requires transformative thinking. Paradigms shape practice, and practice reinforces paradigms; changing the world therefore demands returning to, and revising, the thinking that produced it. The paper positions the European School of Governance in the tradition of these two schools as a promoter, curator, and editor of European New School Thinking: a trans-disciplinary, praxis-oriented school of thought that integrates critical thinking and systemic insight. Invoking Niklas Luhmann's understanding of the arts as a societal system that reintroduces contingency and alternative possibilities of social design, the paper frames European diversity as an ecological and political resource. It calls for governance approaches that move beyond the shortcomings of Enlightenment individualism and naïve conceptions of self-organisation, returning responsibility for society to society itself. European New School Thinking is presented as an ongoing, iterative project of continuous improvement and innovation, one in which technological change serves as an accelerator of desirable cultural and political change, never as its driver.