Kjell Torbiorn; European Manadarin, Professor oh, and, er former pop star
This evening I went to the Rose Blanche in the Grand Place to deliver a speech at a ‘causerie‘ for the students of the Strasbourg campus of Syracuse University. My good friend, Kjell Torbiorn, is a professor of European politics there and, indeed, has written a first-rate book about Europe’s economic and political evolution (and not just about the European Union). He and I met at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 1985, when I was a new, young official and he was in charge of the Agriculture Committee. He’s now Head of the Private Office of the President but, like me, persists in believing that we should write and teach about what we do and why. Unlike me, he is also a singer and a songwriter and was a star in his native Sweden in his early twenties. His pet project at the moment is ‘songs that Elvis could have sung’. You can hear him at www.gracelandking.com. As to the students, when I first started giving these causeries some fifteen years ago (most of the students are American), I spoke about the avoidance of war but now I am increasingly convinced that European integration is a successful model that can and should be imitated elsewhere in the world.
Hello Mr. Westlake, I was one of the Syracuse program students privileged enough to here you speak in Brussels this weekend and I wanted to thank you very much for you lecture. There were many acoustic distractions, but it was fascinating nonetheless!