Life goes on
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Editor: Dr Andrew Warmington editor @ specchemonline. com
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JUL / AUG 2025
When you have been in an industry for many years and go to the same events year-in, year-out, eventually the memories tend to fold into each other and you struggle to remember one from another. I’ m sure many of you will know the feeling.
I have attended Chemspec every year since I first started at the magazine in 2002 bar 2017-8, when I was employed elsewhere and, and 2020, when it was cancelled due to COVID. Increasingly I remember them like the titles of episodes of Friends: The One With the Animal Rights Demo( Manchester, 2003), The One Where They Barbecued a Whole Tuna( Amsterdam, 2007 – maybe too specific?) and The One in the Freak Heatwave( Basel, 2016).
Chemspec 2025 in Cologne will clearly go down as The One With the Bomb Scare. For those who weren’ t there, a few days beforehand three unexploded World War II bombs were found during works to extend the river port and the first day of Chemspec was the day scheduled to defuse them. An area of about 1 km in diameter was forcibly evacuated, including 17 hotels. One of them was mine, a mere 40 metres away.
Fortunately, Messe Cologne was just outside the evacuation area and the show could still stake place. The bombs were defused in almost no time that evening and we were all allowed back. It was a graphic reminder, though, of how the past is very much still with us – as indeed is shown by the city itself, hastily rebuilt after terrible wartime damage that spared the cathedral but little else.
It feels like more than 33 years since Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, famously arguing that after the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, humanity had reached“ not just... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the endpoint of mankind ' s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.
Well, how did that go for you, Francis? Petty nationalism never really went away( the war in the former Yugoslavia was just about to break out even when the book came out); religious disputes still poison the well of international relations across the Middle East and South Asia; free market economics are being assailed from both left and right; and most alarmingly of all, authoritarian government is very much on the rise and in some of the most important states of the world, including the USA.
The world has probably not been so unstable and unpredictable in my lifetime. We feared nuclear war in the 1980s, of course, but at least we had a reasonably clear idea of where it would come from. Now, World War III is being talked of but where it might start( some say it already has) and what the sides will be is very hard to say.
In this industry, however, we are used to dealing with uncertainty. We have worked our way through the rise of China and India to dominate raw material supply and then the rise of‘ reshoring’. We have learned how to recreate supply chains that we thought had gone forever. However painfully, we have adapted to sudden shocks, be they caused by oil prices, events or maniacs in office. And as we quietly got on with business in Cologne, we proved that we endure.
Dr Andrew Warmington
EDITOR – SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE
SPECCHEMONLINE
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