Fundamentals

At the request of AEGEE-EUROPE, Franck Biancheri presented his vision of Europe’s evolution in the coming decade, and outline what could be a successful European students action regarding EU’s future and the democratization of Euroland. At a time when both the European project and European youth are facing daunting challenges, the students of AEGEE-EUROPE are searching for inspiration and advice on how to conduct what they call a European (r)evolution.

In 2010, Franck Biancheri, in his book “World crisis – The Path to the World Afterwards” published by editions Anticipolis, wrote that the likely developments of the decade 2010/20120 will be a chain of events that will lead to the disintegration of the current international system. In this excerpt he posed the Sino-US relations as

We estimate to over 80% the probability that the week of March 20-26, 2006 will be the beginning of the most significant political crisis the world has known since the Fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, accompanied by an economic and financial crisis of a scope comparable with that of 1929.

In 2005, Franck Biancheri founded the first trans-European political party, the Newropeans, after a first experience in 1989 with IDE (Initiative pour une Démocratie Européenne). Immediately after, the party seized the 15 proposals submitted by Franck  Biancheri in June 2002, in his book entitled “VISION Europe 2020: Reinventing Europe, 2005-2020”.

First 14, these proposals became 15 for the purpose of a marathon of conferences for European democracy  between 2002 and 2003. These conferences allowed Franck Biancheri to meet and have discussions with more than 10,000 EU citizens in over 100 European cities on the topic  “Where is Europe Going? Bring democracy to new frontiers in terms of size and diversity“. These  later became the 16 proposals and the matrix of the Newropeans programme for the elections of 2009 and were translated into 20 European languages

Since WWII, almost all EU countries, one after the other, have discovered the issue of immigration, while for decades or centuries they were only emigration countries.

A scenario elaborated by Franck Biancheri, for Europe 2020, in November 1998. Extremism in Europe is the heir of a very old couple : on the one hand the culturally nurtured fear of ‘The Other’, ‘L’autre’, and on the other hand, the deadlock of political democratic processes. The Europeans praise themselves for being the ones shaping up a common political identity based upon the dual concepts of unity and diversity. But these two concepts have historically formed the core engine of both Europe’s most astounding successes and failures.

2500 years ago, in this same place, our hosts of today, the Greeks, invented democracy, a system which was going to become one of the pillars of European culture. Today, in this same place, with this conference ” Reinventing Europe “and the launching of the project Europe 2020 on internet, we are going to try to combine this democratic tradition with the process of European unification using this new continental Agora which the internet might become.