During the 1980s, Egypt and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) resolved to build the Bibliotheca Alexandrina with the same universal goals as the ancient one: a focal point for research, the advancement of knowledge and the open exchange of ideas. Today the Library stands as a monument to Hellenism and to Knowledge Dissemination. As a recognition of that fact, the entrance to the City of Alexandria, coming from the highway from Cairo, is marked with a welcome poster in Greek and Arabic while English and French are notably absent. The Library itself features an imposing statue of Alexander the Great. These small symbols epitomize the great affinities of Mediterranean civilizations whose philosophies are still relevant in the contemporary world.

In emulation, The New School of Athens aims at becoming a 21st century version of Plato’s ancient Academy. The original Platonic Academy, founded in 320 BC by Plato, went through a number of closures and revivals for many centuries until it was ultimately shut down by the Emperor Justinian in AD 529. In its almost nine hundred years of history, in the West, it remained the repository of philosophic thought, to the point that Alfred North Whitehead, the noted British philosopher once claimed that ‘all philosophy is but a footnote to Plato’ . Even after the final closure by Justinian, the Platonic Academy was partially resurrected in the Arab and Persian Worlds for many years, until it went back into hibernation in the 10th century. If a true contemporary revival is achieved with the New School of Athens, in Athens itself it would be the first time that this Phoenix would rise again in a two thousand three hundred years. An exalting possibility to say the least ! But the parallels with the Old School must go far beyond attractive optics. This is not a smoke and mirror operation but a genuine attempt to revive one of the most positive legacies of the Ancient World. There are many genuine family resemblances both in content and form.

• First, Plato himself studied ‘politics’ as a branch of philosophy. In its noblest form this discipline was seen, not in the pejorative connotations often associated with that term today, but as the wise management of the polis or city state. In its proposed modern form the NSOA would focus on cosmopolitics or the better management of Planet Earth faced with major global challenges. What is missing in globalization today is political architecture. Technological and economic globalization are now every day facts. The globalization of management structures and global governance is still in its infancy. NSOA would contribute to advance this needed and emerging new approach.

• Second, in keeping with the tradition of the original Academy it would also be a center of inter-ideological dialogue, a meeting place between opposing views of the world, a venue for dialectic encounters. We have identified three groups of actors, most relevant to the management of globalization : governments, corporations and civil society. NSOA aims at promoting ongoing dialogues between all three, seek common denominators and convergence and be a meeting place between the free market ideology of a Davos (World Economic Forum) and the humanistic ‘other’ globalization advocated by Porto Alegre (World Social Forum).

• Third, modern versions of the Socratic Method and other
innovative communication techniques will be tried. Today, there is excessive ‘conference fatigue.’ Conference take place every day, somewhere in the world. The same things are discussed again and again yet very little is achieved.
To mix metaphors, people continue to chatter away while Rome is burning. Through its conferences, NSOA aims at experimenting with new meetings technologies and transpose them on the internet. The Web will be the ultimate ally of NSOA the new Agora where minds meet over large distances.

• Fourth, NSOA must become a true School, not just a think + do tank, with a clear educational role. By teaching and training executives it will help create the conditions to make the world a much better place. The School will not necessarily follow the pattern of regular universities but choose, instead, a highly specialized niche to be defined later.

NSOA will have a physical location in Athens but will be a global organization of individuals and partner institutions. Its inspiration is Greek but its scope international. In that context it resembles the Olympic Games, an originally Hellenic idea which has gone global. The Games take place in different locations and involve athletes from everywhere, not just Greek athletes. Similarly the NSOA conferences and activities should also take place in different locations, but the physical headquarters should ideally remain in Athens.

NSOA’ prime valued added will be the creation of action plans. To be precise about this, it is important to pause and ask ourselves what exactly is an action plan. We believe there are three conditions which have to be met before we can say we have a true action plan.
(1) A To Do List
(2) A Clear Time-Table for execution
(3) An Attribution Of Responsibilities to realize these tasks (who should do what).


However an action plans must take into account the degrees of freedom of the Planner. If NSOA wished to stage a conference it can develop a full action plan in-house, with no problems at all, including tasks, timetable, cost and division of labor. However if NSOA wants to help resolve the issue of global warming, it does not hold all the cards and must obviously rely on others. It can produce a to do list and a time table but the movers and shakers of this world will have to execute it. It cannot assume powers and responsibilities it does not have. .
From this reasoning, comes the notion that the action plans produced by NSOA could rest on four types of contributions

NSOA could focus on producing a new generation of feasible solutions to the world’s problems based on becoming a think-tank of the second degree i.e. connecting the dots and picking up the best features of existing think-tanks. This is now entirely possible through the Internet which is a treasure house of ideas, insights, strategies and tactics. The connecting the dots function can be enhanced in the annual conferences using our innovative methodologies. Its think-tank functions will center on integrative studies and its do-tank responsibility will involve translation of these studies into meaningful action plans.
This entails identifying a new generation of promising solutions and developing and incubating them in the direction of implementable action, at least in the sense of a to-do list and a time-table.

Since we are not the movers and shakers we have to convince the powers that be as to the desirability of the proposed strategies and how they can be implemented. This is the advocacy role. To achieve it we need the help of strong ambassadors who have international clout. These could include former heads of state, opinion leaders, senior businessmen. In addition, advocacy could imply sustained partnership with more influential groups such as the OECD, IMF, World Bank, European Union, well know international CEO and leaders of Civil Society. We could initiate a sort of a ping-pong relationship whereby we send them good ideas and incubate some of their proposed solutions etc.

The NSOA should have at its score “School of Global Issues” which must be seen as a do-tank item. By teaching and training present and future leaders we will further advance the incubator and advocacy role of NSOA.
In its first phase, the School will address its teaching and training to executives in the private and public sectors on topics related to the management of global challenges. The faculty, at this stage is not likely to be permanently Athens based but will come in from all over the world. The teaching could range from a two day crash seminar to a month-long more extended seminar. Details will be forthcoming later.

This is also a do-item par excellence. The work of the NSOA must not just be elitist. It must include via the internet and other methods, the world community. It must welcome and promote citizen participation. Only by seeking the alliance of democratic entities can true change be envisioned. The strength of Civil Society will attest to that. The Internet makes possible something which was unavailable to the Ancient Athenians : distance-independent sustained intellectual communication. Therefore novel forms of interactive and deliberative democracy can now be envisioned and implemented.

Some people may ask : is what NSOA is trying to do not already being done elsewhere? Are we replicating existing initiatives? After all, there is Davos and a Porto Alegre, dozens of business schools and political departments in universities and a plethora of private and public think tanks. Why a new initiative?

To this objection we have two answers. First why should one adopt a “monopoly” model in the world of ideas ? If someone, somewhere in the world is studying climate change, should everyone else abandon that topic and wait for the results coming from that lone institution? Should there be one
newspaper in the world, one computer manufacturer, one car
rental company ? Obviously not. If the same problems and challenges are studied by different institutions, the diversity of results will enrich not impoverish the discourse.

To invoke the need for a monopoly here is as absurd as claiming that you should cancel your New Year’s Party because I am already having one at my place. Competition is good. Intellectual competition is best and we must beware attempts at imposing single thought dictatorships.

Second, even if each individual component of what NSOA is planning were to be found somewhere in the world, it is our judgment that the combination of components is completely original. To our knowledge, no other group combines process innovations (inter-ideological dialogue and innovative conferences) with an action oriented approach to cosmopolitics. If that is not the case, where are the other New Schools of Athens ?

In this connection I must confess my admiration for what I call the Apple Corporation Model. In the nineteen eighties, Apple under the leadership of Steve Jobs introduced the GUI interface (graphic user interface, a very convivial way of communicating with a computer, with windows menu and mice). After a false start with the Lisa it revolutionized the computer industry with the Macintosh. Microsoft paid Apple the supreme compliment by imitating the GUI interface with Windows 95, 98 XP etc. abandoning the cumbersome and unwieldy MS DOS. In 2003 Apple introduced the iPod a personal music player which has since become a cultural icon and a category all in itself like ‘Frigidaire’ for refrigerators and at one time ‘Xerox’ for phocopying machines. In 2007 it introduced the iPhone which once again is in the process of transforming yet another industry, in this case mobile telephony.

The point is that, in none of the three cases, the Macintosh in the eighties, the iPod in 2003 and the iPhone in 2007 was Apple the true inventor. It was the innovator. The mouse and the graphic user interface were invented elsewhere but adopted and refined by Apple. The iPod was born, at a time when MP3 personal music players were already becoming ubiquitous. The iPhone principal features could be found before its introduction in the products of other manufacturers such as Samsung, HTC and Nokia. But Apple came in and may sweep the market or, at the very least, inspire the copy cats.

How then did Apple succeed ? In my view by two elements : first by concentrating on the combination of features, seen singly in other products but not so well meshed together in a seamless whole. The whole is much bigger than the sum of its parts. Second, the products are all characterized by an engaging user friendliness which makes them a joy to work with rather than a chore. Two critical success factors who may be details but are nevertheless decisive

Applied to NSOA, the combinatorial potential plus a participant-friendliness at our conferences is our strategy for success. For the moment we are pioneers. If others join us in this new vision of a better world, so much the better.