Busan in South Korea seeks cooperation with THE HANSE

speakers and panelists

The second biggest city in South Korea, Busan, invited a representative of the Hansa to speak at their World Ocean Forum last week. Their intention with the Forum is to make it a leading international forum for maritime matters with Davos and its economic forum as a good example. The World Ocean Forum was organised for the second time and assembled around 300 participants from Korea, USA, Great Britain, Japan, China, Denmark and Finland. They wanted this year to stress also the values of cultural heritage as important ingredient in international relations and had therefore chosen the Hansa as evidence on that.

At the request of President Bernd Saxe, vice president Inger Harlevi accepted to participate and give a lecture as one of the key note speakers at the congress. Inger Harlevi made a short presentation of the medieval Hansa but mainly stressed the activities of the network today. The seminar was received with great interest and was followed by many questions from the audience.

Vice president of THE HANSE
Inger Harlevi speaking

The Internatinal Institute of the Korean Maritime University invited Inger Harlevi to further discussion regarding future cooperation. As Korea is a very young country, established in 1948, the idea about the own cultural heritage is very low. Korea former belonged to China or Japan and its history is therefore mostly regarded as part of the Chinese history. The university sees a necessity to create awareness about the Korean past especially among students.Therefore they have been granted money from the Korean state, 100.000€ per year during ten years, to be able to benchmark with a European organisation. Among several other existing networks the university has chosen the Hansa and the Hanseatic cities to be there preferred partner. The reason for that is that the Hansa has historic background, has managed to revive and is an active network of cities today. As next step a delegation from Busan wants to visit some Hanseatic cities during the summer 2009.

It’s a great possibility for the Hansa to accept this invitation about from Busan, Inger Harlevi says. It does not only mean benchmarking but also opens for enormous business activities. I will discuss this in the presidium and in the commission in Novgorod next week.