by the entire I AM EUROPE team,
The European Year of Citizens – 2013. How timely! Citizens throughout Europe are not exactly in love with the European Union these days.
The EU is divided, riven with conflict; as the Irish poet WB Yeats put
it, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold … the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. People lash out at their chosen scapegoat: from political parties and
national governments to immigrants and ethnic groups, from Germans to ‘lazy
southerners’, from ‘Brussels’ to the EU as a whole to international finance.
If one believes in simplistic, irrational solutions (‘Brussels’ is the
source of all evil, get rid of all immigrants, etc) it is easy to be
single-focused and passionate. However, the citizens in the I AM EUROPE
project believe that lashing around in blind or blinkered anger will take us
precisely nowhere; that hard, critical but constructive work is needed to come
up with wise and workable solutions to improve European democracy.
A return to economic growth is unlikely to
remove the division and distrust. The EU needs to profoundly change the ways it
deals with its citizens. But we are
Europe; therefore it is we who must
change. Living democracy is a way of life, a civic culture in which citizens participate
creatively in public life, achieving solutions that combine insights from diverse
perspectives and experience.
Democracy is not what we have,
but what we do. And I AM EUROPE is all about doing democracy.
Over the
past three months, the citizens involved in this project have met in the four
corners of Europe, exploring how citizens may truly participate in the processes
of EU decision-making. This newspaper – produced by citizen journalists from
eight countries across the EU, from Belgium to Bulgaria and from Poland to
Spain – is intended to give you a taste of our many hours of discussion and debate,
the numerous questions we’ve asked ourselves.
You, too, are Europe. Without you, we cannot build a better Europe …
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