Euroacademia Conferences
- Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers (9th Edition) April 24 - 25, 2020
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- 8th Forum of Critical Studies: Asking Big Questions Again January 24 - 25, 2020
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- Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (8th Edition) June 28 - 29, 2019
- The European Union and the Politicization of Europe (7th Edition) January 25 - 26, 2019
- 7th Forum of Critical Studies: Asking Big Questions Again November 23 - 24, 2018
- Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers (8th Edition) September 28 - 30, 2018
- Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (7th Edition) June 14 - 15, 2018
Up to New Frontiers of Continued Prosperity and Peace: A Europe of Self Determined Demarcation Lines. But without Borders…
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Presentation speakers
- Gerhard Eichweber, Value Group, Switzerland
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Abstract:
The Combination of egalitarian repression of diversity, often under unifying flags of nationalism, and a focus on merely quantitative criteria, have led to paradigms regarding national states and the boarders between them, while these same boarders cut and divide ethnicities, cultures and familiar bonds. In fact, the nature and location of all borders, even “natural” borders, can and probably should best be regarded as incidental: The result of either gifts – or battles lost…
Even the braking of soil giving way to rivers, lakes and continents is of such incidental nature, rather than any reasoning or reason. Accepting the basic fact of democracy, the people being the only and superior sovereign, and politicians and burreaucrats being their servants to follow the peoples’ decisions, also the right of association and dissociation is an inborn right of all peoples, groups and regions following ethnical cultural, religious and whatever other criteria. Criteria, which are up to the people concerned to decide – and to nobody else. Criteria, which can best be realized in federal structures with sufficient subdivision into provinces and smaller units – and coordinated, also across “national” borders, directly by the local and regional bodies, in a framework of a supranational democratic organisation of united states of Europe. Consequently, national states have to delegate powers both upward, to ease a firm stance of peace in the world – and downward, to where the problems of the people are and can best be solved by their own independent best judgment. The concept of freedom of diversity inherent to the right of self determination leading to individual decisions is of much greater importance than just that of being a logical element of democracy: as the author has showed in his papers on economy, manifold diversity and the “culture” of treating qualitative distinction is the key deciding over individual and common prosperity – or crisis continuously building up further to end in a final finance-tsunami imminent rather sooner than later, if the deeper roots and true nature of the crisis is not understood. In this paper, the author draws a sketch of a Europe of prosperity for all based on appreciation of distinction: qualitative diversity not abused for ill arguments of superiority and inferiority, but as source of innovation and uniqueness of offers in their diversity precisely fitting the specific diversity of preferences and dreams of minorities. “Serving all minorities is serving the majority” is a statement by the author from the eighties. In his picture of a Europe of regions defined by local cohesion and self determination rather than by an ideology of nationalisms, the author sees an example of sustainable long term prosperity and peace serving the world as example.
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