The Edmund Burke Foundation was founded in 2000 by a group of young
conservatives, including professor
Andreas Kinneging and journalist
Bart Jan Spruyt, dissatisfied with the consensus of Dutch politics, the level of public debate and what they believe is the dangerous drift of philosophy and culture in the Netherlands. It is named after the 18th-century conservative philosopher
Edmund Burke. From 2000 to 2005, the Foundation was active as both a think tank and an educational group. In that time, the foundation took positions that are both fiscally and socially conservative. It organized an annual summer school for undergraduate students, conferences, seminars and lectures on topics such as the
multicultural society, education, health care, foreign policy and defense. Conservatives associated with the Foundation were, for example, in favor of health care privatization and tax cuts. The Foundation has links with conservative think tanks in the U.S., including
The Heritage Foundation and the
American Enterprise Institute. Speakers at the foundation's events included
Roger Scruton, the Burke scholar
Peter Stanlis, Dutch writer
Leon de Winter, Islam-expert
Reuel Marc Gerecht,
Frits Bolkestein and
Onno Ruding, former finance minister of The Netherlands. In the summer of 2005, the Board of the Foundation decided to focus its activities more exclusively on its educational, cultural and philosophical programs, taking the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute explicitly as a role model. Consequently,
Bart Jan Spruyt stepped back as full-time managing director of the think tank to join the political party of
Geert Wilders, but remained a member of the governing Board of the Foundation. Several former employees then spun off the think-tank activities into a new group called the European Independent Institute. ==Media activities==