Antenna Europe Direct Assemblea legislativa della Regione Emilia-Romagna

Everything starts with a circle

All of them made up a circle and looked at each other’s face, there’s a bit of blushing, often a hand covers one’s mouth not to let seep out some kind of comment or inappropriate smile. It is in this way that I started, too the first day of the European Youth Meeting class work, within one of the 3 groups of the 200 students leaded by facilitators who with patience and enthusiasm  knew how to guide their debate carried on under the form of a confrontation between their different life experiences and their different perceptions.

“Confrontation”, the key-word for starting the discussion on the rights that EU has solemnly embedded in the 2000 Nice EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

The first step was introducing ourselves, nothing of a formal kind, the formalities were soon forgotten, everyone in the class had to present himself/herself. The shyness, little by little, left the space to the participation, therefore, in the first day I listened to the Finnish students and the Cypriot student girls talking about the child labour and public health, in the meanwhile, I noticed the Estonian students’ preoccupation for environment, and the sensitivity the Italian students showed for the issue related to the barriers which the disabled people have to fight against everyday in every city.

Different problems with different solutions for each country. The only trait d’union is the Fundamental Rights Charter: the first task was to translate it into an informal language for being able to talk about rights exactly in the same way with the problems. To assure their tangibility with the problems I heard being raised by the European students, who discovered themselves being so alike within that class, at that moment. Divided in a little bit smaller groups, the students shared their tasks and easily started to work on them, discuss them by pushing away the last traces of shyness and giving totally free space to the mutual knowledge and experience.

Finding concrete proposals and consonant actions was not at all easy. Already getting to know each other  represented a challenge. After almost 2 days of work myself as the other students discovered new things i.e.: that in Cyprus the citizens have to pay a health insurance, that in Finland the disabled people do often actively take part to the community life, something not often seen in Italy, that in Estonia a wonderful woodland region was endangered due to city and harbour constructions’ expansion.  They are all shocking facts and honestly they are also disarming. The burden of the issues raised by the students doesn’t  give at all the image of a green Europe and easily accessible to all, on the contrary gives the image of a difficultly reachable Europe.
For an instant, while following the class work, I thought that the task of elaborating an active role and concrete actions to ask to  institutions was much too difficult and as the disillusion managed to gain space among some of the students, it seemed that the confrontation was deemed to end frankly facing the impossibility of being all equal. Although, no, it wasn’t meant to end up like this, after a new reshuffling of the groups within the class, the students successfully managed to provide their documents in due time.

A strange chemistry made in such a way that all the students who had been previously confronting in separate groups on a different thematic had had the appropriate instruments for explaining their own work and their own ideas to their colleagues from the last group of works.

The pursued objective: creating a synthesis of all the discussions in a single common document from which to had been   clearly emerging the importance of the rights tackled so far, their own engagement and the requests as long as the existing expectances at the EU public opinion level, in this case at the European Youth level.Hence, the confrontation had become the starting point for discussing possible alternatives to their own reality and the European Union had become the common territory where to express themselves.

Here we are, after four days of  hard work, the distance between the European Youth and the Institutions seemed to had been damped down, the texts elaborated and translated and the disarming reality of the facts surpassed. The proposals presented in the documents proved to be brilliant and the countries met in the class ended up by being not anymore different and distant, but alternative.

Laura Solinas

Translated by Paula Benea