Subject of Previous Essay Competitions
- 2011-2012: “Si vous désirez la sympathie des masses, vous devez leur dire les choses les plus stupides et les plus crues.” (Adolf Hitler) – La connaissance du passé permet-elle d’éviter la répétition de la violence et des crimes?
- 2010-2011: À votre avis, pour quelle(s) raison(s) des extrémismes montent-ils en puissance en Europe?
- 2009-2010: How do you conceive your role as a citizen, with the rights and duties it entails?
- 2008-2009: "Yes we can" (Barack Obama)
- 2007-2008: "What constitutes a nation is not speaking the same language or belonging to a shared ethnographic group, but having done great things together in the past and wanting to do so again in the future" (Ernest Renan (1823-1892))
- 2006-2007: You have just taken part for the first time in democratic elections, or will soon be called on to do so. Voting at elections in Belgium is both a right and a compulsory duty. What do you think about that? Does the obligation infringe your freedom?
- 2005-2006: Is public opinion manufactured by the media, or do the media simply reflect public opinion?
- 2004-2005: "The Nazi period was proof that people can be cultivated without being civilized" (a quotation from Ernest Vinurel’s book Rive de cendre)
- 2003-2004: "Mercy which compromises with tyranny is barbarous" (Robespierre - Speech on the judgment of Louis XVI, given before the Convention on December 28, 1792)
- 2002-2003: "Men put up too many walls and don’t build enough bridges" (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
- 2001-2002: Are wars provoked for political, economic, social, cultural, religious or other reasons?
- 2000-2001: "Tolerance is weakness, not strength" (Günther Grass)
- 1999-2000: Socio-economic inequalities do more to create forms of exclusion than the ways of life linked to ethnic or philosophical differences.
- 1998-1999: The policy of exclusion is bound to lead to infamy, because it denies the other’s status as a human being. That being so, how do you conceive your role as a citizen?
- 1997-1998: Our society is again caught up in a whirlwind of violence. Are we moving toward a dual society? Is there an ideal society to which you would be prepared to commit yourself?
- 1996-1997: How do you envisage the future of this country?
- How do you think that the rights and duties of citizens should be conceived?
- What do you think of certain recent calls which could lead to anonymous denunciations?
- Do those calls encourage you to make comparisons with Nazism and other totalitarian systems?
- 1995-1996: Are the humanist traditions of justice and equality and their most recent achievements in the process of disappearing? Three factors are combining to make them disappear:
- 1) The invasion of ways of living and communicating and of economic models which make money and the power money gives the goal of life.
- 2) The emergence of all kinds of fundamentalism and fanaticism.
- 3) Uncontrolled chaos in the destabilized Eastern countries, where capital and competitiveness are taking root and the human being is forgotten.
What do these factors suggest to you? What spirit of resistance should inspire us, and what types of solidarity should we build to resist those factors? - 1994-1995: "No freedom for the enemies of freedom" (Saint-Just)
- 1993-1994: Reflections on violence
- 1992-1993: What is man?
- 1991-1992: Freedom through nationalism? The year 2000: where are we going? What do you want?
- 1990-1991: Public-spiritedness
- 1989-1990: Democracy: what has become of our human rights?
- 1988-1989: "The right to judgment" (according to Spinoza)
- 1987-1988:
- 1° What to think about the crucial problem of preserving historical memory?
- 2° Responsibility does not mean subjecting man to the obligation to reply.
- 3° A threshold of tolerance for accepting the other’s differences?
- 1986-1987: Recent history and totalitarianism
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