Introductory Speech: Toward the Europeanization of Digital Powers – The Role of Digital Technologies in the European Integration

• • 
  • Presentation speakers
    • Xavier Carpentier-Tanguy, Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe, Luxembourg

  Panel Description:
  In a period of communication and globalization, the European Union has been suffering the most daring challenges. New elements are continuously emerging. The new digital powers are some among others. Internet activism, online organization, blogosphere, e-petitions, corporate activism are some of its tools. Individuals, groups, lobbies acting at the European level have to be seen as new cultural encounters designing new perspectives of sharing ideas, values and norms.

  In the idealized model of democratic policy making, ideas, values and norms are exchanged and adapted at several stages of deliberations, in hierarchical way. Such distributions are clearly challenged by new ways of bringing issues and aggregating engagements. Networks do not connect only to the center, they link us to each other as well for sending and receiving original contents and for coordinating actions: they consequently create effective political movements. Anonymous versus the Acta treaty, REDDIT, the Piraten Partei (at the Berlin Senat, at the European Parlement), the Chaos Computer Club or WikiLeaks, all of these examples are linked to traditional powers and able to mobilize for changes or/and to lobbying.

  The “free movement of knowledge”, described as the 5th Liberty in the Lisbon Treaty, strongly invites European states to facilitate circulation. Consequently, by allowing access to information or by facilitating collaboration mediators and translators as persons but also as tools are needed since they facilitate such circulations.

  The panel aims to focus on such facilitators with a specific focus on those claiming for a new culture and new political type of activities trough and with digital activism.

 

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