The two armies, North and South, had left close to ten thousand dead, rotting in the summer of Pennsylvania, after the battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863), perhaps the most crucial one of the Civil War (1861-1865). The state's Republican Governor, Andrew Curtin, ordered the burial of the bodies days after, previously undertaking an expeditious identification, where possible, to avoid epidemics.

/14.10.13/.- José María Aznar, stated on Monday, October 14 in San Sebastián that “the greatest task of today’s Spain is building, arranging and launching a great national policy based on the constitutional principles.” According to him, “we are facing a challenge which contrasts the most reactionary and destructive nationalism to the European civic culture of our Constitution”. Read here Aznar's address.

/11.10.13/.- José María Aznar sent a letter to the President of the Centrist Democrat International, Pier Ferdinando Casini, and to the members of its Executive Committee to ask them to address the “need to clear up satisfactorily the circumstances of the deaths of Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero in Cuba” during the meeting that was held on Friday 11th in Budapest. 

The Basilica-Cathedral of Our Lady of the Pillar (el Pilar in Spanish) is one of the greatest landmarks of Christian history in Spain. It indicates the starting point of evangelization in Roman times and also the great American mission that shaped Spanish Catholicism in the booming times of the 16th century.

The speech of the new king of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, about the need to replace the"classical Welfare State of the second half of the 20th century with a participation society" has opened a central discussion on our future. Its basic idea is simple: the Welfare State, a kind of enlightened despot which tried to solve the vital problems of the people "from above", by giving them solutions decided and managed by the bureaucratic-state apparatus has become a problem, from being the driving force of a sort of progress it has become a barrier to it.

November 9, 2004 was the fifteenth anniversary of the ?fall? of the Berlin Wall. To commemorate the event, the FAES Foundation organized a series of lectures called ?The Freedom Revolution?, in which twelve figures from the political and intellectual world in the East and West took part. The series was coordinated by Ana Palacio, a member of the Spanish Parliament and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, and it ran from November 2004 to May 2005.One of the main theses of the ?Freedom Revolution? is that the Berlin Wall did not collapse of its own accord. The Wall was pulled down by the determination of people who risked their lives in order to regain their freedom. If the Wall fell it was also because of the steadfastness of a generation of politicians who were determined to stop the advance of totalitarian tyranny despite of the incomprehension of a large proportion of intellectuals in the West. These efforts helped to bring freedom and peace to the other side of the Iron Curtain.Some of the eye witnesses of that time, many of whom played key roles in the process, took part in the lecture series and explained their vision of events and their response. Helmut Kohl, Bronislaw Geremek, Giovanni Sartori, Nicolas Baverez, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Francis Fukuyama, Guy Sorman, André Glucksmann, Richard Perle, Joseph Weiler and Christopher DeMuth took us through what happened in the Freedom Revolution. Their words, their memories and their teachings, given in the Great Hall of San Pablo-CEU University, are gathered together in this volume, which also includes the introductions made by José María Aznar, AnaPalacio and José María Lassalle.The FAES Foundation would like to give special thanks to Noah Clarke, Carmelo López-Arias, Elena Segura, Jessica Zorogastua and Miguel Ángel Quintanilla Navarro for their work in putting together this publication.We would also like to thank the Rector of San Pablo-CEU University, José Alberto Parejo Gámir, for the magnificent facilities offered by the university, which made this lecture series possible.

Europe is in the throes of two simultaneous crises: on the one hand, it is suffering from a political crisis, a crisis of leadership, one that has led to constitutional failure; on the other, it is suffering from a loss of identity, a phenomenon that results in cultural relativism. Marcello Pera, Speaker of the Italian Senate and Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Pisa, delivered a conference entitled “Strength of Identity” during the course of the FAES Campus 2005, a paper which the FAES Foundation is now publishing. Also known as the co-author of the book Senza Radici (“Without Roots”) alongside Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Professor Pera urges European culture to proudly recall and reaffirm its origins and its universal democratic principles: freedom, equality and tolerance. In this respect, Europe must recognise the intrinsic value of a civilisation, Western civilisation, that has given the world so many universal ideas. “Europe must be aware of the moral superiority of a series of values that have prevailed over centuries and that have produced beneficial results wherever they have become established”.