Sebastian Schäffer: Immediately

Sebastian Schäffer wrote a book with his mentor arguing that the Balkans belong in Europe. Not eventually. Immediately. The mentor, former Austrian Vice-Chancellor Erhard Busek, died in March 2022, weeks after Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine and the argument the two of them had spent years making became the most urgent question on the continent. Schäffer is still making it. Born in Munich, he gave his career to somebody else's neighborhood. He directs the Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe in Vienna, a think tank founded in 1953 and older than most of the European Union, and serves as Secretary General of the Danube Rectors' Conference, a network of more than sixty universities across the region. He founded SSC Europe in 2011 to run simulations and strategic foresight, which is also how he thinks: run the scenario forward, then ask what happens next. His own contribution to the field is a reversal. The Dilemma of Simultaneity described how post-Soviet states had to build democracy, markets, and nations all at once. Schäffer turned the mirror around and pointed it at Brussels, which now has to reform enlargement, reform itself, and become a real geopolitical power at the same time and under fire. In a July 2025 essay for Fair Observer, he wrote about an editor who asked him to stop using the word "disinformation" because it sounded too political. He refused, and called that kind of softening death by a thousand footnotes. What we get into: Why a man born in Munich built his life around the countries still waiting at Europe's door What "immediately" costs a person who has been saying it for fifteen years while institutions say "eventually" Why he treats a single word as worth fighting an editor over, and what he thinks gets lost when we let language go quiet