Europe's Young People Taste the Future

Published on May 22, 2014

Society

“Tell me, and I will for­get. Show me and I may re­mem­ber. In­volve me, and I will un­der­stand.” Con­fu­cius.

As the Eu­ro­pean elec­tions draw closer, hun­dreds of or­gan­i­sa­tions were in­vited in early May 2014 to par­tic­i­pate in the Eu­ro­pean Youth Event at the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment in Stras­bourg. Aim­ing at bridg­ing the gap be­tween young Eu­ro­peans and the inner work­ings of Eu­ro­pean pol­i­tics, the three day event gath­ered more than 5000 young­sters from all over Eu­rope.

A total of 120 young Eu­ro­pean jour­nal­ists were given the op­por­tu­nity to doc­u­ment the event held for newly elected Mem­bers of the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment (MEP).

The ever con­tro­ver­sial Daily Mail de­scribed it as a “bizarre event” and ac­cused the EU of try­ing to bribe young Eu­ro­peans be­fore the elec­tions. But de­spite the Mail’s crit­i­cism, the “bizarre event” proved to be a first class op­por­tu­nity for young Eu­ro­peans not only to raise their voices, but also to ex­pe­ri­ence the daily is­sues faced by MEPs.

I was, for ex­am­ple, in­vited to look at work­shops and sem­i­nars dis­cussing Eu­ro­pean val­ues in the global era. “The bright side of glob­al­i­sa­tion" in­volved a role-play in which young Eu­ro­peans sim­u­lated a ple­nary ses­sion. “The aim is for the par­tic­i­pants to take on the role of var­i­ous par­ties and party groups of par­lia­ment and work to­wards agree­ing on a com­mon text as a draft pro­posal,” ex­plained Frands Ped­er­sen, aca­d­e­mic lec­turer at West­min­ster Uni­ver­sity.

For six hours, fifty par­tic­i­pants took on the role of MEPs from one of the seven lead­ing Eu­ro­pean al­liances to dis­cuss a cur­rent Eu­ro­pean issue: the In­ter­na­tional Cocoa Agree­ment.

In re­cent years, Eu­ro­pean coun­tries in­clud­ing France, Bel­gium and the United King­dom have been im­port­ing cocoa beans from West­ African coun­tries such as the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nige­ria and Cameroon. The Cocoa Agree­ment is a deal be­tween lead­ing cocoa pro­duc­ing coun­tries and Eu­rope’s lead­ing cocoa con­sum­ing coun­tries, aim­ing to make the trade fairer and more trans­par­ent.

Per­son­ally, I was not only im­pressed by the way the par­tic­i­pants tack­led is­sues in­clud­ing child labour, food safety, en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion and human rights, but also by the com­plex­ity be­hind a pro­posal for some­thing that seems as nor­mal as pro­duc­ing choco­late.

For Mar­ton Hajdu, an of­fi­cial from the Eu­ro­pean In­sti­tu­tion in Brus­sels, it is im­por­tant for young Eu­ro­peans to un­der­stand “the merit of an open de­bate and of com­pro­mis­ing” be­cause this is “what Eu­rope is re­ally about.”

In the wake of the ab­duc­tion of over 200 hun­dreds school girls in Nige­ria by ex­trem­ist group Boko Haram, the Eu­ro­pean Youth Event also shed light on an­other cur­rent global issue: human traf­fick­ing. The work­shop, at the ini­tia­tive of Cypriot non-profit or­gan­i­sa­tion Vraka Folk­loric Group, par­tic­i­pants ex­plored the ‘dark side of glob­al­i­sa­tion’ and brought up pro­pos­als in­clud­ing stronger leg­is­la­tion to pro­tect vic­tims of human traf­fick­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to Vraka, the de­vel­op­ing tech­nolo­gies of glob­al­i­sa­tion have a down­side as they fa­cil­i­tate the trans­porta­tion of human be­ings by crim­i­nals. But for Maria Kypri­anou, a PhD stu­dent at University Col­lege Lon­don and a mem­ber of Vraka: “Young Eu­ro­peans can change the fu­ture of Eu­rope. United we can stop human traf­fick­ing.”

Over the week­end, over 200 sim­i­lar work­shops and sem­i­nars took place in the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment and out­side in the Yo!Vil­lage set up by the Eu­ro­pean Youth Forum. The Eu­ro­pean Youth Event 2014, which had as its motto "Ideas for a bet­ter Eu­rope", ex­panded the global un­der­stand­ing of young peo­ple of the is­sues that MEPs face dur­ing their time in of­fice. While it is some­times dif­fi­cult not to find Eu­ro­pean in­sti­tu­tions bu­reau­cratic, I must say that the Eu­ro­pean Youth Event has left me both self-re­flec­tive and de­ter­mined to con­tinue en­gag­ing with Eu­ro­pean val­ues.