Youth Opinion magazine: issue on the Campaign

Are designing the death penalty for our young Europe?

Today Europe needs to be prepared for the near complex future. The Intercultural dialogue I see as the key for successful finalisation of the project named Europe. Having a solid base of bad experiences that did not work in Europe and in the whole world, we should learn from them and not make mistakes that others did. I.e. the collapse of Yugoslavia started because of fake intercultural dialogue promoted in communism, many see it as dictatorship. This cultural dialogue, where one could feel included only it had the same opinion as the “dictators”, was so fake that even the oppressed victims started to believe on it. The moment the trick was understood everything collapsed. This is for me the understanding of the process of disappearance of our wonderful, reach, happy,  illusion (fake) country with many hidden agendas and loans from other reach countries. All other conspiracy explanations of big interests of big countries to destroy our “big love”, I think are products of the ones that created hatred among different cultures in order to achieve their dirty visions for bigger countries. This excuse will never be enough for me !

Let’s not do the same mistakes in Europe. Lets create conditions that are not going to be seen as illusion or utopia, because if we do that that we are going to sign a death penalty for our young Europe. Than… we will not have face to explain to our kids or nephews about our failures.  

There is a lot to be done today so we do not expect scenarios of Yugoslavia in Europe. The basis of knowledge for good and bad experiences I think are existing at our home in the place called Balkan and more specifically Yugoslavia. So, my thinking would be to put all bad and good experiences from the Yugoslav scenario and try to draw out lessons for future of Europe. This process I think should be done carefully. I personally see a lot of bad experience in the far past of Yugoslavia. Unfortunately the good experiences come near post wars past when a lot of knowledgeable capacities from abroad entered in to our circle of stereotyped minds, and … started a process of emancipation and synchronisation of our culture with the European one. Today I strongly believe that due to unfortunate reasons young people from Balkans have much knowledge on Europe and its culture than the opposite. The civil sector has developed remarkably good capacities to deal with many social issues.

Having the possibility to travel across Europe I understood that most of Europeans bear in mind a lot of stereotypes for Balkans, and for me. The existing stereotypes among young Europeans can be easily broken if they only come in our sunny Macedonia as tourist or seminar activists. Like this they will understand better our culture and way of leaving and we are perhaps going to exchange good characteristics of our culture. 

Thousands of activities are done until now by many organisation in this direction, but yet no one was able to make a very big complex project that will involve many social fields. We should have more big projects than the one of Council of Europe “All equal – All different”.

My believe is that European funds are to strict and careful when it comes to arriving to good project ideas because people there try to reduce the risks from bad projects. Being more flexible and taking more risks one will open the doors for flux of new fresh ideas from new generations. Above all the strict regulations and rules that have more articles than any law, are just making afraid the ones that want to do something interesting. We all want to work with trustful people but we have never thought that we have exhausted their creativity ! 

Young Europeans that will handle in the future the destiny of Europe should be aware that Europe will be hard to be managed because of its complex diversity. It will need far vision that can be achieved only if it is commonly designed to bring brighter future to all of us. If only one nation sees more benefit in this vision than the other than I predict the destiny of Yugoslavia to Europe.

I would say message to all parents in Europe to create conditions to their kids to be able to respect the others without any stereotypes. Once they accept the reality they will face and solve any problem when they are going to have Europe in their hands.

I started to write for on this issue because of my emotions and love of the big project EURPE and supportive measures such as is your project “All equal – All different”. I was writing what was coming in my mind, and sorry I simply could not classify my thoughts better.

Best Regards from sunny Macedonia,

Albert Hani