I write from Berlin on German Unity Day, 3 October, as the city celebrates 36 years of reunification, and I find myself sharing in its joy.
Yesterday marked the conclusion of the 33rd edition of the Network Enhancement Programme on foreign cultural diplomacy, organised by the German Federal Foreign Office’s “Diplomacy by Networking” initiative. The coincidence carries its own significance. The platform was established in 1992 at the initiative of Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Germany’s foreign minister at the time of reunification. A country that had just reconnected its two halves decided to connect itself more closely with the world.
The programme brought together 17 participants from 16 countries. Behind the week stood a small team that managed everything with German precision, and with a warmth for which the country is perhaps less often recognised.
We began at the Humboldt Forum, on a site shaped by a long struggle over memory: a Prussian palace demolished by East Germany in 1950, followed by the Palace of the Republic, which opened in 1976 and was itself removed after reunification. Today, the same ground hosts cultures from around the world. It was there that we discussed the restitution of cultural objects to their countries of origin.
For an Egyptian, it was impossible to sit through such a discussion, only a short walk from the Neues Museum, without thinking of Nefertiti. What struck me was that the question was being asked openly, and from within the house itself.
In Potsdam, the lesson came from the opposite direction. The Minsk, built in the 1970s as a restaurant in East Germany and closed in the mid-1990s, survived plans for demolition after local residents campaigned to preserve it. In 2022, it reopened as an art venue displaying works from East Germany alongside contemporary art.
That afternoon, we walked through the gardens of Sanssouci, the French name meaning “without worries”, towards the New Palace of the Prussian kings. From socialist modernism to royal Baroque in a single day. This was how I saw Germany accommodating the different layers of its past beneath one sky. To me, this lies at the heart of what I call the “governance of meaning”.
Behind all this stands an institutional structure built around intermediary organisations in cultural policy. The state sets the broad framework and provides a significant share of the funding, while institutions such as the Goethe-Institut enjoy substantial institutional and programmatic autonomy. That distance gives their voices credibility that official statements alone would struggle to achieve.
We saw this model at the Goethe-Institut and Deutsche Welle, and in sessions ranging from heritage preservation and science diplomacy to German schools abroad, strategic communication and sport. During a World Café session, we discussed the challenges facing this form of diplomacy and its best practices, before taking our conclusions to senior officials at the Federal Foreign Office. On Thursday evening, we also met alumni from earlier cohorts. The network continues long after the certificates have been handed out.
I still have another week in Germany before returning to Cairo, and I will take with me three issues that this programme has added to my work on cultural policy, issues I want to develop into practical proposals between the university classroom in Alexandria and the public-policy table.
The first is the importance of maintaining a healthy distance between the state and its cultural institutions: enough to preserve strategic direction, while allowing room for initiative. The second is the need to bring heritage, education, science, sport and media together within a single soft-power strategy, rather than allowing them to continue operating separately, as is so often the case in Egypt.
The third, and the one closest to my heart, concerns alumni networks. Egypt has educated generations of students from Africa and Asia at Al-Azhar and at its universities. Some of them now occupy influential positions in their own countries.
Germany celebrates its unity today. I have spent the past week watching it build another kind of unity: one among people who came from different corners of the world and who, after this experience, will no longer be strangers to one another.
The question I will carry home with me is a simple one: how many of those who graduated from our universities do we still know how to reach?
Dr Ramy Galal is a governance and institutional reform specialist focusing on state capacity, accountability, and the design of effective public institutions, with an interest in the governance of meaning.