I have accepted AEGEE's invitation to be the keynote speaker of
their upcoming Agora (general assembly) gathering 1,000 students on May 2-3, 2012, in Enschede, Netherlands.
It will be the first time that I will address an AEGEE Agora since 1988, when I left the presidency of AEGEE-Europe,
a movement I founded in 1984.
I've always considered that it belongs to each generation of European students to buid its own path to the future and that it is useless for young generations to hear the "ancients" ramble about the past
But I've made an exception this time because the Agora organizers explained to me that due to the global crisis and its consequences for Europe, their generation longed for some change in the course followed by AEGEE in the past 15 years, in oarticular that their wished it to be involved again in the political field of the European construction. For this reason they wanted me to present and duscuss with their 1,000 delegates my vision of the future of the European construction and of the role students could play in this regard in the years to come. Since it is about the future and not the past, and since we're on the eve of the "second European revival", the offer and timing appreared to me adequate.
And I've decided to go to Enschede and explain how I anticipate Euroland and Europe will develop until the end of this decade and how, in my opinion, students can become actors again, instead of mere spectators, of these developments. From then on, their generation will take what they want from all this. The future belongs to the anyway!
Agora Enschede
