New Europe and Global Citizen

Movement Profile

About the projects

New Europe is a centre-left political think tank based in Denmark. The organization was established in 1998, when Denmark was preparing to vote on the Amsterdam Treaty. Many centre-left voters in Denmark were – in our opinion for no good reason – against the Amsterdam Treaty. New Europe was formed to change this development and get more centre-left voters in Denmark to support binding cooperation in the EU. Since succeeding in that initial goal, our focus has shifted in recent years to working to strengthen the EU’s formal and informal democracy. We are federalists and we welcome the fact that the EU is increasingly becoming a bicameral system. Now the task is to strengthen the EU’s participatory democracy.

Global Citizen is a very ambitious initiative which I have worked on for several years together with students and others. It will later be detached from New Europe and become an independent, nonprofit, cross-policy project. Global Citizen will be developed into one of the world’s leading open innovation platforms for global solutions on economic, social, environmental and demographic challenges. On a solid foundation of knowledge (we are working on more than 2,000 topics sorted in a taxonomy for globalisation) and driven by a very comprehensive network (we will in time need more than 1,000 student editors for the many topics) the plan is that we will be able to facilitate a process of innovation where citizens around the world will be able to cooperate on the development of new products and new solutions. We will combine market and politics in clever new ways.

Our vision for European Citizenship

Let me be direct, hoping that will get my most important points across faster: The debate concerning a European citizenship is mostly (but not exclusively) about European participatory democracy, which, in my opinion, is a debate that is derailed in the EU. There are two reasons for this:

Approach: Too many, even among the EU’s politicians, do not understand that an EU closer to citizens presupposes an EU where citizens are closer to each other. As citizens, we must be able to discover that we are dealing with common problems and that political alliances can go across borders. It is not a task that can be solved under the headline ‘communication’.

Proportion: Too many in the debate about European participatory democracy yearn for quick fixes. They miss the fact that the EU is composed of 500 million people who are also part of a global community with nearly 7 billion people. An enormous effort is needed to get a participatory democracy for that many people to work.

But enough about the big picture. I will now look at some of the central questions in the debate about European participatory democracy and European citizenship. There is not room for more than general thoughts, but they are also important.

What is the point of departure? We see an EU citizenship as a first step towards a global citizenship. It should not be based on nationality like today, but instead on equal participatory rights and residence. Politics are, in my opinion, about reflection or action after the fact. Politics are never ‘the first’ but rather something that people, more or less successfully, try to use when everything else fails. I think it is the same way with themes such as democracy, participatory democracy, citizenship and rights. These are themes that we have to deal with when we are faced with societal problems that need to be fixed or processes that go wrong.

So democracy and citizenship influence the severity of the economic, social and environmental problems we face, or rather, the problems as we see them. Europe and indeed the entire world face many important problems, but realisation of this has not taken root among EU citizens. This is why it has been so difficult to breathe life into European participatory democracy and why the process of creating an actually meaningful European citizenship is happening so slowly.

What does citizenship mean? The concept of citizenship is brought into play as one of several answers to the economic, social and environmental challenges we face inside a certain geographic framework like the EU. Citizenship has in our time especially been connected to the national level. We have used the notion of citizenship to ascribe each other rights in a national context. This has meant numerous positive things for us as citizens.

In Europe we long ago acknowledged that a number of problems can no longer be handled at the national level. So we established the binding cooperation we call the European Union, where a majority of citizens and countries can decide what we all should and should not do in certain areas. In our globalised world, this is a completely sensible development.

It is in the wake of this development that we should see European citizenship. Through European citizenship we can ascribe each other rights. So far so good, but the concept of citizenship also contains the dimension that some do not have a Danish, German, French, Polish – or European citizenship. All those people are, so to speak, not members of the club.

If I am in need, I can, through my Danish citizenship, expect medical and social help from the Danish state. If my friends in third-world countries are in need, the best they can expect is development aid from the Danish state. Do not be mistaken. Those are two very different kinds of help, and the difference is decided by whether you have a Danish citizenship or not: by where you are born and where you live.

How can we secure actual content in the European participatory democracy and the European citizenship?

There is not enough space to give a sufficient description of why it is so difficult to secure a real European participatory democracy and actual content in the European citizenship. I ask the readers to accept the premise that this is the way it is, so that I can just barely hint at my take on the solution.

I believe that we in the EU must invest heavily in a democratic infrastructure. In practice this means that the EU must invest in such a way that at least 1 million citizens can meet every year in transnational face-to-face meetings for a few days to discuss problems and topics of common interest. A democratic infrastructure also means that we must invest in organizations that today are just national, before they can have a chance to take root at the European and global level.

Transition to the next entry in the debate

Here I have just tried to set the tone. Later, I will discuss in a more comprehensive paper how we can strengthen Europe’s and the world’s informal democracy, and thereby also strengthen the world’s formal democracy. Then I will also address some of our initiatives that might contribute to fulfil this vision. I will also describe how our efforts for a stronger European citizenship are connected to Global Citizen.

I am certain that the strengthening of the European participatory democracy and the work to secure actual content in European citizenship must be seen in the light of a corresponding global endeavour. It is clear that no European countries can do it alone. It must also be clear that this is also the case for Europe, which is just one continent in the world.

My name is Søren Winther Lundby. I was born in 1966 in Denmark. I am married to Bjanka who was born in Flensburg, Germany and who is still a German citizen. Together we have two daughters: Josephine is 12 years old and Danish-German; we adopted Mathilde, who is six years old, from China, so she is thus Danish, German, and Chinese. All four of us are European but Mathilde is also Asian. We are all citizens of the world.

In the ’90s I studied metaphysics and social science at Aarhus University. I have travelled extensively in Europe and Asia and today I am privileged enough to get to work with my main interest. I am the managing director of New Europe and Global Citizen. In both contexts I work to strengthen European and global citizenship by working with models and platforms that ensure that we as citizens get better opportunities to shape a joint future on a foundation of knowledge, cooperation and sustainable economic, social and environmental solutions.