Youth Rise for Peace!

"I object to violence because when it appears to do well, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent" says Ghandi. How many times that statement has been proved to be true recently? How many times we have witnessed how bloody the hand of so called good could be?

Our generation has been watching the Arab World like a movie. We have been witnessing an epoch-making year of our century; there has not been a single day passing without news about casualties, bombs and many other terrible things, but somehow we managed to keep a stiff upper lip. Our leaders offered olive branches accompanied by missiles and we failed to react properly.

Sometimes I cannot help wondering whether we are dragging into a dystopia. I cannot deny the influence of all the political fictions I have recently read, but once I come back to the real world, sit in front of my computer, surf among random news channels, I cannot help wondering, worrying. Either we have minds like sieves or we are indifferent to murder, death and blood. We see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Aren’t these the characteristics that the big brothers look for? Don’t they create the perfect circumstances to be under complete surveillance by the authorities? Isn’t it scary?

In the movie, V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue, it says, ‘’People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.’’ Doesn’t it mean, police are to be there to protect me not to beat me when we gather together to claim our rights? Doesn’t it mean that the court is to defend the human rights, people’s rights not the benefits of political power? Yes it does but is that really happening? Think for a moment... What is happening recently is corruption, suppression, violence.

Peace is not something we only wish for; it’s something we make, something we do, something we are, and something we should not give away. 21^st of September was the World Peace Day. It was the day to join forces, to show our own commitment to worldwide peace and to work in cooperation for this goal.

It was the day to imagine a brotherhood of men.

Gizem Karslı

Check more info about International Day of Peace here.

Goodbye dear Network, we will be around!

Lower picture l.t.r: Manos, Anya, Thomas, Mirka, Michi, Alla, Alfredo, Mirek

Dear Network, dear friends,

for us it was a wonderful year full of pleasent and extreme experiences, full of challanges, idealism and the big motivation to simply devote all of our time for AEGEE and you in order to move the association forward. Much of our work was just administrative, some of it had to be done since a long time and there was also an important part of what we were trying to do that was quite controversial. Even if not everything could be implemented immediately, but what we is definite now is the much higher awareness of various problems in our Network. Now it is you who is discussing things like the Working Group reform, Human Resources Management and the need for a Visual Identity just to mention a few of such topics.

But nothing that we were trying to work on would be possible without the support of you - the members, the Network. All of us have been working together with wonderful and enthusiastic people and enjoyed a lot to be part of such teams. We have been happy with every single member joining the European level and hope that in near future more and more people will get active.

Thank you for everything and please support our dear successors in even more, as without you nothing can be done.

Your Comité Directeur 2010/2011

Alfredo, Alla, Anya, Giannis, Kathrin, Manos, Michael, Mirek, Mirka, Thomas

Think, Plan, Act!

Imagine a nice weekend in the end of August: beautiful blue sky, extremely hot weather, sunny days - lazy days... I guess that you can imagine yourself having fun on the beach in Spain, enjoying Italian sun, hiking in Austrian mountains or hitch-hiking with Dutchies around Europe. But now, try to imagine a bunch of crazy AEGEE people, gathered in the high school gym in the middle of nowhere in the suburbs of Poznan who are spending their weekend locked inside the hot rooms with heavy air and brainstorming, discussing, thinking, planning and acting... YES, I´m talking about the Planning Meeting of AEGEE 2011. Important meeting where we are right now finalising Strategic Plan for AEGEE for upcoming three years and creating an Action Agenda for the next year.

Brave AEGEEans (who prefer working for AEGEE instead of relaxing on the beach) are developing our Focus Areas, improving their aims, creating objectives, brainstorming about activities and actions...all day, all night! Yes, some extremely committed members decided to skip the party yesterday and work till late night in order to assure high quality of our Strategic Plan – that´s what I call a dedication!

Writing these words on hot Saturday afternoon, being surrounded by people, ideas, discussions and having all those plans and creative thoughts in the air makes me wonder – where will AEGEE be in three years? Today is the last day of the Planning Meeting, so we all have to use the remaining power and focus on finalising our work. Well, we are working on the Strategic Plan, so I guess we simply have to work harder than ever, right? :)

Comité Directeur 2010/2011, Comité Directeur 2011/2012, planning team and a group of dedicated AEGEE members - those are the people who are currently planning the future of our association.

For us, Comité Directeur 2010/2011, this is the last event where we are representing the European board of AEGEE and we are starting to feel a bit nostalgic (and we still don´t believe that in few days, our term will be over and our non-AEGEE lives will start againJ). For the new team, Comité Directeur 2011/2012, this is their first event where they are still not officially in charge, but they are already experiencing that crazy mess and busy times, so they are starting to get an idea about how their upcoming year will look. For the hard-working planning team and amazing participants, this event is a great opportunity to contribute to AEGEE´s focus in next three years. And of course I have to mention also wonderful local organisers from AEGEE-Poznan who are doing great job assuring that the event is running without problems.

Today, we´ll finish with all the work and soon after this event, you´ll get a chance to see the outcome of our Planning Meeting and you´ll also get a chance to contribute to the drafting of the final version of Strategic Plan.

Now I have to finish this blogpost, because soon the closing plenary will start and I still have to prepare some presentations for that:)

There must be something magical about August

There is some kind of noise coming from up, that slowly starts-up my brain. At first I'm still not aware of what it actually is. After a minute it becomes louder and starts to get more and more annoying. Then people start talking and wake me up completely. Feeling every step from the office upstairs, as the ceiling was about to crash, makes me jump out of my sleeping bag and run into the bathroom.

Kitchen is always the same. Mirka's voice is louder and faster than ever, Guillermo's laugh following her in step, Alfredo's combination of cereals and coffee and Alma always coming the last one. Slowly we are becoming a family.

There must be something magical about the month of August. For 30 days we are working more than ever, we are learning things we like and things we dislike. Every night is a new adventure sleeping around the dusty corridors, every morning we wake up harder and harder. But still it's hard not to notice happy faces all around the house.

First week was a big shock for all of us. The amount of work was endlessly growing, discussions about the strategic plan were ending late at night, and cooking for 14 people felt like you’re in army. But at the same time there are so many things that make you enjoy every day; from all the skills we’re building, good times we are having together, trips we take around Belgium, freezing Northern Sea we swam in.

Last week there was the Transition barbeque, gathering all the partners of AEGEE and different student NGOs. It was such a great evening where we got to know all these people living in Brussels, all their different activities and projects, and in the end the same lives we are living here.

This all wouldn’t be the same without an amazing current Comite Directeur. The effort they took that we feel like home, the knowledge they have and the way they transferred it, all the morning round meetings, all the cozy evenings in the garden. We’ll miss them.

When we come back from Poznan everything will change. We will have our own office, our own rooms and beds. When the office phone rings we will have to answer it, all the things we learned in these weeks now will be our tasks. The overcrowded house now will look empty. This one-year adventure seems a bit scary, but we all feel the same – we are ready for it!

De Urbe Alienata

I am officially living in Brussels, but I cannot really say that I feel like an 'inhabitant' here. And this feeling led me to an observation recently that I find rather striking.

To most of my friends I have always stated that I like Brussels, and from one side this is true - it has a nice architecture, not spectacular but cozy, subtle. But from another perspective I have come to fundamentally detest this city, because wherever I go, it feels abandoned, deserted, despite all the people on the street. Or maybe the best word to describe this feeling would be 'alienated'. This city is alien to itself.

When you grow up somewhere, you develop an emotional relationship with that particular piece of earth you are living on. German language has the nice word of Heimat for this place. It is like a personal friend: You know it inside out, the small streets, the old guy in the night shop, the wild apple tree in the fields, the dreamy atmosphere when all is covered with snow in January, year after year, after year, after... It is a friendship that you cultivate and cherish, and when you come home there after some time of absence, you and your habitat have a lot to talk about and catch up with each other.

Brussels gives you the feeling that it is actually nobody's Heimat anymore. This place is an emotional void. It has been conquered by aliens: on the one hand a high percentage of (mostly African and Oriental) immigrants with their small subcultural circles and their apparent dislike and emotional distance towards the place they are living in, and on the other hand a considerable amount of these infamous Eurocrats (to which I should definitely count myself). Even though these groups have otherwise nothing in common, what we have in common is that we give a shit about this city, we don't inhabit this city, we just... reside here, temporarily. And you can feel it in the air.

It is not a surprise that this happened to the capital of Belgium, a "non-country" (to speak with MEP Nigel Farage) that is anyway suffering a severe identity crisis. The forced co-existence of the Flemish and Walloons is contributing to the erosion of Brussels' local character as well, and already for a long time. But that is just the 'enabling circumstance' for a process that seems to be the order of the day, or rather the tendency of our time, not only in Europe: the step-by-step uprooting of our society, the systematic alienation through a universal loss of Heimat.

There is a tractate from 2007 called "L'Insurrection Qui Vient" that identifies exactly this process as one of the main threats that are inherent to the further development of our civilisation. Our urbanisation and our striving for unconditional mobility - what is described in this text as the merciless mobilisation of mankind for the service of the machine - is destroying our emotional relationship with our surroundings, is generally destroying everything that used to be lasting, that used to give us emotional stability in a world that is ever more full of opportunities - and threats. And we shouldn't expect this tendency to be reversed as long as we do not somehow put an end to globalisation. Hahaha.

So what we can expect from our future is a scenario where not only Brussels as a first daunting example, but all our cities have grown alien to themselves, devoid of emotional attachment, administered by statal drones whose mission is rationalisation, populated by anonymous people with anonymous lives who are paying a maid to water their plants and always ready to follow the next call that will lead them wherever. The concept of "belonging somewhere" is on the retreat. And what is worrying is that the feeling of responsibility (both human and civic) seems to evaporate wherever this feeling of belonging is lost. It's a brave new world we're looking forward to...

James Ensor, Les Masques

European Stories

European Stories

Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts

Last week there was a very interesting debate organized by the Spinelli Group in the European Parliament, which I attended together with Thomas.

The debate was about the new book called “European Stories” which was edited by Justine Lacroix (Professor at Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Kalypso Nicolaidis (Professor of International Relations, University of Oxford).

The book is basically a debate about the debates, analyzing different ways of how public intellectuals (political philosophers, scholars, editorialists or writers) in Europe perceive the EU and its history, focusing on the era after 1989. The book has a very ambitious aim – to provide an overview of how thinking about Europe and about EU varies depending on the country and the current time.

Twelve different countries have been selected for deeper analysis in this book – from founding to non-EU members states, in order to give a broader overview of the topic.

The debate about this book that was organized by the Spinelli group last week in the European Parliament was attended by policy makers, European lobbyists, Euro-commissionaires, as well as by representatives from different European associations. Apart from the two editors of the book, there were other panelists, such as Philippe Van Parijs (UCL – Harvard), Isabelle Durant (member of the Spinelli Group in the European Parliament) and Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Co-president of the European Greens–European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament).

The topic of European integration is a very hot topic nowadays and it’s being discussed not only in Brussels, but in all 27 member states. In every single one of them, the view of Europe is very different and it’s strongly influenced by the national context – and that’s exactly what this book is trying to analyse and discuss.

“This is a brilliant book. It's highly instructive chapters on how issues of European unification have been discussed from different aspects in different countries reveal in each case the strong dependence on national contexts -and the lack of mutual concern and coordination we observe in Europe even among intellectuals.” (Jürgen Habermas)

“European Stories” is not meant only for political philosophers, historians or international relations officers, but for all readers that are interested in the intellectual debates about Europe.

(You can read and sign the Manifesto of the Spinelli group here)

Quo Vadis Youth in Action?

The Youth in Action Programme for years has supported and financed young people all over the continent, and in some cases also outside of it. For yours it has been the biggest youth fund, which allowed hundreds of thousands of youngsters, students and young graduates to explore other cultures, other countries, to work and volunteer abroad, to share their visions and develop project which aimed to change environment they are living in. The Programme has been teaching us how to be good and active citizens, how to respect others and diversity and how to work on common goals and strive for European unity.

But now, waiting impatiently we are all fear that it might be all, it might change in the future. We fear that the change that has been made by the Programme, especially in the mentality of many young Europeans, might never happen again with the next generations! For all of you, who are not aware of what is going on at this very moment, the European Commission is now just about to publish the first communication on the future of mobility, education and youth. The future of many, maybe sometimes not perfect, maybe sometimes object of our complaints, but still important and valuable, Programmes.

What are the needs of young people in the current Europe is quite obvious. Millions of young people are struggling to find a decent work, which matches with their experience, knowledge and education. Millions of people are simply unemployed, and often these lucky ones which got a job, are unable to get a permanent, long-term contract. Often young people are dissatisfied with what the labour market has to offer them. Many claim that we are the best educated generation in the history of Europe, with the fewest opportunities and chances to apply the knowledge we gathered during our studies in our professional life. There is also a risk that we will be the first generation to have fewer opportunities than our parents had. So for sure employability, entrepreneurship and challenges of the labour market are the issues that have to be tackled by the next generation of the EU programmes prepared for 2014-2020. These are also one of focuses of the EU2020 Strategy, to increase opportunities working for young people all over the continent.

But is it the only thing that should be tackled? Is it the only thing that we expect from these programmes? Definitely not. For years EU programmes strongly supported active citizenship, participation of young people, intercultural dialogue and building of the European society! Reflection of thousands of people, which were published just before the weekend in the report from the public consultations on the future of the Youth in Action Programme, shows clearly that expectations towards the Programme are more or less the same. Young people do look for more opportunities to implement their ideas, which are not necessarily, directly connected with their future careers. They are looking for chances to work with others, to meet them, to learn usually completely immeasurable skills, sometimes even hard to describe. But was also one of the great advantages of the previous rounds of the Programme, that it provided a great tool to support non-formal education and informal learning.

We have to keep also in mind that even with the current priorities of the Programme, it increases chances for employment of young people. It is not only supporting non-formal education, but also providing to young people a very unique tool of the European Voluntary Service, which supported mobility of young people and gave them a chance of experiencing learning and working abroad. So all the complaints, that the project under the current shape does not have an impact on employability of young people would not be true. Our generation is expecting different ways of learning and acquiring skills, but it means that what we are provided with is not only formalised education and skills which are easily describable in our CVs.

Many people, who are now involved directly in the future of Youth in Action fear, that the Programme in the future will change its shape, from a considerably flexible support for young people to help them in implementation of their projects, to a strictly career-oriented support system for people preparing themselves for entering the labour market. Of course it is important, and I guess everybody who has any knowledge about problems of young people would admit it, but it cannot be the only focus. And the European Commission should be aware of that.

The communication is approaching us. Let’s hope that the successor of Youth in Action will be focused on various aspects, that will give young people a chance to work on what they are interested in, that it will contribute to building in the future of a common, open, pan-European society.