Institut für Europäische Politik IEP – english version

Preparatory workshop on “Alternative Europe” at the annual conference of the Arbeitskreis Europäische Integration (AEI)

• December 9, 2016

At the second workshop on the topic of “Alter­native Europe!” organized by the Junges Europawis­senschaftliches Netzwerk (JEN), the youth associ­ation of the Europawis­senschaftliches Netzwerk Deutschland (END), we were not only able to tie in with the questions of the first workshop in Berlin, but also expand the discussion to include the question of the signif­i­cance of emotions in politics. While the first meeting was strongly influ­enced by partic­i­pants from think tanks and civil society, on December 1, 2016 European Studies scholars from various disci­plines from univer­sities and non-university research insti­tutes met. The workshop took place in the context of the annual conference of the Arbeit­skreis Europäische Integration (AEI) at the University of Mannheim.

Here, too, the group agreed that a more intensive cooper­ation between science and civil society would be fruitful for the devel­opment of a vision for the future of Europe. Based on two Scenario Challenges on Brexit and the European Elections 2019, the partic­i­pants took up the questions formu­lated in Berlin:

• What common goal could we set ourselves in the new network?
• What topics do we want to address?
• What methods do we want to use to achieve this?

In the presen­ta­tions of the results of the Scenario Challenges, two further points were addressed and then lively discus­sions followed: What role do emotions play in the current discourse on Europe? What can science contribute in terms of concrete visions of the future and European policy? Especially in the Challenge for the European Elections, it once again became clear that it is easier to pack negative messages into simple and emotion­al­izing campaigns than positive content. Due to its supposed simplicity, “EU bashing” often gets caught up more quickly, so that pro-Europeans usually “run after” a negative discourse. The group asked itself the question: If emotions function as “game changers”, what conclu­sions can be drawn from this for the commu­ni­cation of pro-European forces?

Although it seems easy to adopt and reverse the methods and strategies of Eurosceptic campaigns, science in particular must meet its own demands — pure populism is not enough. The partic­i­pants agreed that we need strategies to convey scien­tific content in a way that is generally under­standable. In this way, the various disci­plines could provide concrete sugges­tions for politics and society. Several partic­i­pants empha­sized that it is partic­u­larly important to leave one’s own scien­tific bubble in order to use this potential produc­tively. They said that content should be discussed with other disci­plines, civil society and EU citizens and strategies should be developed to present it in an appealing way in a “post-factual” environment. This is the task that the partic­i­pants want to tackle in a joint project in a broad network of science and civil society!