Europe Opens the Continental Meetings

June 18th, 2001

Peles Castle, in Sinaia (Rumania), is hosting as of yesterday and until 21 June, 140 men and women from 40 European countries who are dealing with the challenge of presenting solutions for the construction of an open Europe for the future.

The group Democratic Governance for Europe is working on the proposal that civil society should design a European project for the future, both utopian and realistic, at the service of citizens, by building a European public opinion recovering the role of politics in the context of economic globalization, and by promoting the European Union’s contribution to a global governance.

From the point of view of the Work and Social Organization group, we are moving from homo ecomomicus to homo ludens. We need to solve the trust crisis in politics by increasing civic involvement in common affairs. How can we organize our societies when the idea of having a permanent job as a source of income is also in crisis?

According to the group Rural World and Sustainability, we need to elaborate new systems of sustainable production and a new contract between agriculture and society ...

As for Migrations and Intercultural Citizenship, it points out that today’s “Fortress Europe” should be changed. We need to consider Europe’s future with the rest of the world in mind, through sustainable codevelopment, which contributes to the development of the weaker economies, and by reorganizing immigration policies and integration processes.

The European Meeting thus opens a whole thinking process along with four other regions of the world: America and Asia (19-23 June), the Arab World (21-24 June), and Africa (21-26 June). In the same way that this meeting, which gathers people from different European cultures, is a key experience for learning how to create a common future in Europe, the five Continental Meetings will also be a way of building, all together, a more responsible, plural, and united world on a world scale.