Participation Now! Citizenship Education and Democracy in Times of Change 21 - 24 November 2012 Córdoba, Spain
Critical Summary by Benjamin Barber Political Theorist (USA)
It is a difficult task in light of the great diversity and richness of our week of meetings to try to summarise or pull together common themes from our conference. There are so very many of us, and as we each listen to one another, we filter what we hear through our own concerns, backgrounds, and commitments. So, please don't take this as anything but one particular take on our debates. Perhaps you can use it as an excuse to do your own critical thinking, to reach some of your own conclusions and your own recommendations, using my remarks this morning as one possible benchmark. I suspect the organisers are hoping that everybody will, in their own way, do this both on their own but also with one another. After all, as the organisers said this morning, the richest and most productive part of our meetings is not when you are out there and some of us are up here but when we are together at lunch tables or over coffee talking with one another, dialoguing about the workshops and the focus groups. So, think of this as one side of a multi-sided dialogue where I have a rather long opening statement and then we continue a conversation right through until next year in the Hague. I was fortunate to be at the conference last year in Poland and as the 20 percent of you (about one out of five from this year's group) who were there will remember, because we were in Warsaw, there was a focus on what we might call East/West relations, at least within the European context. Western Europe/ Eastern Europe relations were key, and though we talked about "new democracies", they were the newer democracies in the East that were our subject not the Arab Awakening. The debate took place, as it did this year, in a situation of some urgency and crisis because the fiscal crisis was already well underway. The European recession was a dominant force, the debate over austerity well underway. As a result, our Polish conference was anything but a complacent meeting, a gathering in which participants simply said, "Let's talk about civic education and making nice little citizens out of young people." This year, as we all know, in place of that East/ West focus, what we have seen all week is a North/ South focus. European and Mediterranean Europe, with an awareness of North Africa and the Middle East. We again confront a context of crisis, urgency – the urgency of new "new democracies" in the making, the urgency of the Arab Awakening (we have learned this is a better phrase than the patronizing "Arab Spring"). This awakening is quite different than what we might call the European Awakening, because the European Awakening and the East European Awakening came out of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the beneficiaries were countries that were technically part of Middle Europe for four centuries. Whereas, here we are seeing now is an awakening of a part of the world in which democracy and citizenship and civic education have been rare aspirations. What we face is a world of new aspirations, new hopes, new struggles that take a form quite different than those associated with Eastern Europe.
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