It has been over a year since AEGEEDebate was introduced to the AEGEEan. Recently, a very relevant debate was published, in cooperation with Yvote, on the differences between national rules on participation in the European elections. This made us wonder how the project has developed over the last year and what the future holds, according to one of the initiators of the project: Ivan Bielik (AEGEE-Brno). 

European Presidential Debate 2014

What AEGEEDebate is

Ivan says that “the initiative started at the beginning of 2013. So far, there have been 12 online debates on various topics related to society, the EU, politics or AEGEE. There were experiments with the video debates recently, but because of some technical problems the text-based debates prevail. This year the website also got a Visual Identity template. So the AEGEEDebate initiative has got its own pace right now. People are slowly starting to recognize it and the format. One aspect that is still underdeveloped however, is the cooperation with other thematic bodies of AEGEE-Europe. This platform for debate has the ability to partly overcome the much discussed “lack of cooperation” on European level of AEGEE-Europe.”

The reason behind the creation of the platform

Ivan believes that there are a few definite answers in the world and thus we need to talk and argue about the phenomena that are not definite. “Our social reality is full of such indefinite answers. At Agora, when the prytania is dealing with for example removing nationalities from CIA or establishing regional structure of AEGEE (just to mention first two that crossed my mind), the arguments for or against do not possess a value true/false, but strong/weak. Therefore they offer the space for debate and controversy. The same applies when we talk about problems in society (elections, populism, immigration or war). So the reason for the existence of AEGEEDebate is to provide an online-space for controversial debates. In this way, the debate in AEGEE won’t be restricted and only open to Agora attendees, but provided to a broader audience.”

Benefits of AEGEEDebate

Ivan is convinced that the debate brings three basic benefits for AEGEE. “First, the debate is informative. You get information and knowledge when you listen or read the debate. Thus, you can learn new points of view and perspectives to the problem. Second, the debate develops your skills. I will divide them into two categories – quality of argumentation and ethics of argumentation. The quality of argumentation means that those who debate regularly are able to express their opinion in a brief and structured way that is to the point. Moreover, their arguments satisfy the logical requirements and are reasonable without fallacies (logical mistakes). The ethics of argumentation covers such values as tolerance and respect to different opinions. These values lead debaters into critical thinking about the ideas they heard or had in mind. Last, but not least, is the promotion of citizenship. This abstract concept covers the area of participation and education. Debating makes you engage in fields you care about. Whether it is in your local city, AEGEE or university, debate skills enable you to participate in decision-making and help to raise your self-confidence. Citizenship is also about recognizing between the facts and the feelings, between populism and reasonable arguments. All this is achieved by debating. All in all, as you can see, debating brings more good than harm.”

Involvement of participants

Last month Ivan realized that only organizing debates online does not contribute much to the above mentioned benefits. “That was a decisive moment to launch a new function of AEGEEDebate. From now on, you can find on the website the sub-page Resources that will be regularly updated with material to increase your knowledge about the debate. You can find out how to recognize arguments, what is a debate case or find some other debate portals to learn even more. By this, I believe I can fill the empty space on the website to provide information and basic materials for the development of your skills.

I would say an obvious statement that you can infer even from the text alone. Debate is important for any individual or organization. We need to face controversial issues and debate about them. AEGEEDebate tries to achieve this goal by online means.”

If you have any suggestion for the initiative or you are willing to help with it (PR, design, website or anything else) you can contact the AEGEEDebate team by email at aegeedebate@gmail.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.

Written by Ivan Bielik, AEGEE-Brno and Wieke van der Kroef, AEGEE-Leuven/Amsterdam

The European Democracy Project (EDP) is a proposal published by three AEGEE members: Ivan Bielik (AEGEE-Brno), Armin Weckmann (AEGEE-Darmstadt) and Thilo Zimmermann (AEGEE-Pisa) on AEGEEDebate. The Project aims to give young people the possibility to influence European politics and to demonstrate that a European democracy is possible. This will be done by launching one or more European Citizens Initiatives (ECI).

You can find a detailed project description here.

Ivan Bielik

Ivan, you have been working on AEGEEDebate for a while now with the International Politics Working Group (IPWG), is it related with the new project, and how?

Ivan: AEGEEDebate had been launched at the beginning of this year as a place within AEGEE for discussion in general. There are not only topics closely related to IPWG. Such limitation may harm the potential of the idea, because we, as AEGEE members, do various activities not related only to international politics.

The link between AEGEEDebate and European Democracy Project (EDP) lies in the need of initial discussion before we set off the project. We should know opinions of AEGEE members, promote the idea within the network and potentially recruit new people into the core team. For these reasons, AEGEEDebate seems to be a useful platform to start.

How did you come up with the idea of the European Democracy Project?

Armin: For me it all began with an increase of newspaper articles and documentaries indicating the growing influence of lobbyism at the expense of civic participation and representation. Just think about the  documentaries We feed the world, Taste the waste or Catastroika, think about the discussion about water privatisation bureaucracy, genetically modified food (Monsanto rings a bell) and especially political actions dealing with “The Crisis”. I felt the urge to share my concerns about this process since I see a connection between those different things. I wrote an e-mail to Ivan telling him about my concerns. This is how the article on AEGEEDebate “The EU goes nuts?” came up and, in my opinion, this was the seed for the EDP.

Thilo: My concern about the current state of the European Union started with the euro crisis. If you look at the consequences that economic decisions have on (especially southern) European citizens it becomes obvious that we need a European decision-making process. However, a more democratic Europe is often rejected because some scholars and politicians claim that there is no ‘European Public Sphere’ and a ‘European Democracy’ is therefore not possible. I got so interested in this question that I started a PhD thesis about the euro crisis and possible models of European democracy.

As a former active AEGEE member I thought that it is actually AEGEE, with its pure European structure, which could demonstrate that a democratic European decision-making process is possible. I was therefore searching for activities that AEGEE was doing on this field and found AEGEEDebate and especially the “EU goes nuts?” discussion. I contacted Ivan and Armin and together we developed the idea of ‘The European Democracy Project’.

So already the origin of this project illustrates what we want to demonstrate: With AEGEE you can discuss and plan ideas directly on the European level, without any national procedures. A successful project could therefore show that European people can connect to fight together for their rights. Civic participation is possible also on the European level. So with a successful AEGEE project, supported by young Europeans, we could create a story that is interesting for all: politicians, journalists and scientific scholars.

Thilo Zimmermann

You mentioned the special structure of AEGEE without any national organizations. Why is this important for the European Democracy Project?

Thilo: The economic integration has made us Europeans highly interconnected and dependent on each other. However, when you interact with other people you need rules, otherwise you risk to create chaos. On a low level of integration this rules can be created by intergovernmental regimes, however, on such a high level like we have today in Europe, you need a democratic European decision-making process to take certain decisions, despite all cultural problems and language difficulties. With ‘The European Democracy Project’ we want to launch several initiatives to raise the awareness of this fact. AEGEE, as a European forum to connect young people, is especially able to do this.

The European Citizens Initiative is a quite weak democratic instrument. Why do you think you can change something by using an ECI?

Thilo: Yes, the ECI is a very weak instrument, but at the moment the only instrument to prove that a ‘European Democracy’ is possible. It is an instrument that connects European citizens for a common political goal.

The challenge is to identify a problem that is affecting a lot of European citizens and that could be, at least in part, improved by a simple legal act of the Commission who, however, was facing too much national opposition from single governments and their national interests/lobby groups to release this legal act. An ECI can strengthen the democratic legitimation of the Comission to release this legal act.

The first Initiative that you want to launch is the OpenFacebook ECI: You want to ask the European Commission with a European Citizens Initiative to open anti-trust procedure against Facebook (and other social medias). What is it about?

Thilo: It is about European democracy! The European Commission does not have a lot of supranational competences. For example, since several years Vivien Reding of the European Commission is trying now to improve private data protection with a new directive. However, due to the opposition of Great Britain she was not very successful so far. An initiative to improve our basic rights is blocked due to the opposition of one single member state. Since the prism scandal we now know why.

But there is another way to change something. The reason why Facebook can collect so many data is the application of a so-called vendor-lock in: You have to be a member of Facebook in order to be able to communicate with other users. You are not able to choose your social network provider (that for example fits your privacy preferences) freely. Competition is undermined. That is different for example with your e-mail provider: you can easily send an e-mail from hotmail to gmail. It is important to understand that this is in principle also possible for social networks, as the examples of diaspora and friendica show.

Internal market affairs and anti-trust procedures are a clear and strong supranational competence of the European Commission. With a successful ECI we could show that, when you have strong European institutions and a high democratic legitimization (1 Mio votes), change is possible.

Armin: Another aspect also has to be taken into account – change in Europe lays in the hands of many people but those who have to deal with it the most are the young Europeans because of their age and their not yet fostered position in life (you are still trying to find “your place” in society). Unfortunately it took a long time before politicians were aware of their problems especially with the economical crisis the EU faces nowadays. This has, to my mind, two reasons: First one is the still weak lobbying position of young Europeans (political influence is mostly created by money – sad but true), the second is the from a supranational point of view unorganised way of resistance in a great scale. Student protests for example may be well organised on community or even state level, but for having an impact youth must coordinate actions European wide.

Since the EDP as itself sounds a bit “unsexy” at the first glance and the ECI doesn’t have the best reputation, this demands some preparation in order to raise awareness of young people European wide by discussions about a very important young platform, Facebook, on one hand, and by showing what you really can do with an ECI on the other.

The master plan would be: Gain momentum from the first Facebook ECI and focus it on the second, actually main ECI about European Democracy.

This sounds all very complicated. Will people understand all this connections?

Thilo: The basic message of the OpenFacebook ECI is very simple: Open an anti-trust procedure against Facebook. Everybody who feels annoyed by facebook and its data privacy rules will immediately understand why it is necessary. The rest is learning by doing: by signing the ECI you can contribute to change something.

How many people are you working on it so far? Do you plan on presenting it in Agora Zaragoza?

Ivan: The project is still in its initial phase when we are looking for support within the association and also explaining why it is useful to do. So far, we got positive message from two other people, but I believe this is not a final number.

Concerning the second question, I might attend Agora Zaragoza. So I hope I will have an opportunity to present and to show what we are about to do.

Platforms like AEGEE-L and the online forum have been created in the past to promote interesting debates as well but people are not active there. How do you believe your project will change this? 

Ivan: Now I should make a distinction between AEGEEDebate and EDP because I am not sure which project you mean. Concerning AEGEEDebate, I believe that by using Facebook page and mailing lists within AEGEE I am able to promote the idea of forum in AEGEE more easily and to reach more people. Consequently, more people could be informed and take active part in the debates even though it is not so obvious many times.

On the other hand, EDP may change a lot in AEGEE. Starting a European Citizens Initiative (ECI) could bring more visibility for our association and their values as well as push for the change in the EU to be more democratic (i.e. take into account voices of citizens). It is at least worth trying.

Armin: During the presentation of the project in Izmir at the EURENSSA event there was a controversial and very vivid discussion about the Facebook antitrust ECI – and that is exactly what we intended: It addresses the young people in their socialisation demand and their main platform of interaction, hence anybody is inflicted about what happens on FB. So starting a debate depends also on the media you use. Discussions via texts seem to be quite old-school and therefore not used so much. However, mailing lists and forums are not the main part of the project, they just help us as a means. Our further goal is also to involve other NGOs in this process in order to represent as many Europeans as possible. So actually it is not really about activities on AEGEEDebate or AEGEE-L.

On the other hand I believe a side effect could be an increase of political discussions of course.

How has the idea been received in the Network so far, did you get any feedback yet?

Armin: The feedback was controversial – some did not see the link between the Facebook anti-trust ECI and the European Democracy Project, some even didn’t see a point in the FB antitrust ECI at all. Others encouraged us to go on and had the same opinion as we have.

The people of the Network Commission are talking about how they can help with this project. How are you planning to incorporate other European Level bodies?

Armin: Any helping hand is welcome! We do not limit ourselves to the IPWG or even AEGEE. As previously stated, we also plan to involve other NGOs as far as they are interested. Especially concerning the Facebook ECI it will be helpful to involve Data Privacy organisations (dealing with the scientific part of the project) and other media since I guess Facebook will not support the advertisement or discussion of an ant-itrust-ECI about itself…

Concerning the NetCom it would be helpful to coordinate some activities that come along with the ECI such as information evenings, for example about Facebook, data privacy in general, computational possibilities and threads (search algorithms, KI), plenary discussions with other NGO members, also about the political role in data and internet issues, and in general how active citizenship in Europe is possible nowadays.

Also it would be helpful to involve the AEGEE Academy for workshops and know-how.

How are you planning to incorporate members in general?

Thilo: We will organize this project via the internet, so we will use Dropbox, forums, Skype conferences. So everybody who is interested gets opportunity to contact us!

What are the steps for this project during the next couple of months?

Thilo: The next step would be to create a homepage and prepare the ECI. Both, homepage and ECI should be translated in as much languages as possible. Every member who is motivated can join us to realise this project!

Armin: We also plan to make an organisational core team as it is done for any other big project. So people who are interested should contact us soon!

Written by Ivan Bielik, AEGEE-Brno

We all know that AEGEE stands for – and is also known as – the European Students’ Forum. However, some AEGEE members have the feeling that our association lacks the true meaning of its last word sometimes. A forum means a “place outdoors”, a meeting or assembly for the open discussion of subjects of public interest. So, where was the place to exchange ideas open to all AEGEE members, other than the Agorae?

Ivan Bielik, speaker of the IPWG

Ivan Bielik, speaker of the International Politics Working Group (IPWG), came up with the idea of a place to debate (“the ability of creating strong and valid arguments, thinking out of the box and defending your opinion”) inside AEGEE. Ivan is experienced in debating at an academic level, even though he strongly believes that it is not a skill that university is going to teach us, and he also admits that he constantly watches TED talks in his free time, using them as an inspiration for his talk at the last EBM in Valletta, under the title Dare to disagree.

“I said to myself that I could help solve this problem with my knowledge and experience which I have gained from debating at university level”, Ivan says. His idea was to launch an online platform that was simple, attractive and user-friendly, and to re-introduce the meaning of forum within AEGEE. This is the story of AEGEEDebate, which by now has three ongoing discussions.

The AEGEEan: We know you are experienced in academic debates, so how did you come up with the idea of AEGEEDebate?

Ivan: Debating is a skill, and I believe that the skills you practice in debates are essential for your life, but sadly, they are underrated. I believe that I have the responsibility to invite AEGEE members into discussions where they could practice these skills. I am not doing it for my own benefit or because I do not know what to do in my leisure time, but because I recognized that debating is essential for the whole Network to progress.

Then I came up with the idea of a common online forum, inspired by the British magazine The Economist: it has got its own sub-website dedicated to debates. I really liked the idea behind it. AEGEEDebate is more or less the same – two speakers, one relevant topic and an active audience. I am striving to achieve as higher quality as it is possible for our debate forum. Also, some friends of mine are active in a debate programme for kids and students. They are working voluntarily and with joy, and one of them set up a website for debating. It was and still is very interesting for me. I said to myself that I can do it as well for AEGEE, and the result is AEGEEDebate.

However, AEGEEDebate is not only focused on international politics, but on the internal work of AEGEE. Can these debates influence other bodies in AEGEE?

I intend to create a rather general debate forum. I expected some people would argue that it was not business of the IPWG to arrange debates about topics which are not relevant to this Working Group. I would like to clarify two things about this. First, I have a personal interest to keep the thematic purpose of IPWG and not to interfere with other AEGEE bodies. Second, I always try to be as impartial as possible when creating online debates. That means internal issues of AEGEE can be the subject of our debate forum if and only if the IPWG offers an equal opportunity for both sides to express their arguments (as in the recent regional distribution debate, for example).

Moreover, it would be a shame for me if I could create an online debate forum and then limit it only to politics-related debates. My idea is to have debates on current issues relevant for AEGEE members. That does not involve only politics, but also AEGEE world, economy, sports or human rights. The world is more complex than politics.

People who have taken the initiative to start projects in AEGEE know how hard it is sometimes to increase members’ motivation. Did you have to face this as well?

Good point. After realizing why I should do the project, there were still more practical problems: choosing topics of debates, promoting the debates and recruiting speakers, which is still a problem for me. I completely understand that so far people are reluctant to apply for the position of speaker in the debate, because they do not know what they should do, do not have a clear opinion on the topic or do not have time. This is normal for a new project. But how could you find out? It is only by trying. I love challenges, thus I am doing my best to overcome such obstacles.

Do you expect this to be a long-term project?

I do not like to do short-term stuff. Yes, this project is, at least for me, a long-term affair. The idea behind AEGEEDebate is worth of keeping. Therefore, I would like to ensure the continuity of the project.

What about taking it to a statutory event and organising a sort of ‘live’ debate?

Yes, I thought of having a real-time debate at Spring Agora Rhein-Neckar, but I am not going there. Positive sign, however, is that some people already sent me an email saying that they would like to have ‘live’ debates also during statutory events. Maybe during Autumn Agora Zaragoza the wish will come true.

Does the International Politics Working Group have any other projects this term?

AEGEEDebate is a pilot project during this term. But it is not all. We are preparing two initiatives now. First, there is an idea of small thematic seminars throughout Europe. I joined forces with two Master students that are eager to elaborate on the topic of ultra-nationalism in Europe. AEGEE locals should provide these two guys with logistical support and audience for their seminar. In the end, there will be a common European outcome about the position of youth about ultra-nationalism. I believe that this initiative could be successful.

Second initiative is tackling the topic of divided societies. The IPWG would cooperate with the Culture Working Group. Comité Directeur also supports this idea. Basically, we would like to encourage our members to tackle the issue of divided society through essays, photography, painting, song or whatever. It might have a competitive nature. The best inputs then will be put into a common booklet and sent to Prof. James Skelly (panel speaker at EBM Valletta), who liked the idea. I hope that we could preserve the thematic content of IPWG through these initiatives.

Written by Anna Gumbau, AEGEE-Barcelona