On Europe Day 2022, the Conference on the Future of Europe, a citizen-led series of debates and discussions, comes to an end with the delivery of a final report presenting the citizens’ recommendations to the Presidents of the European institutions in Strasbourg. Alongside this unprecedented transnational and multilingual initiative on deliberative democracy, for the past seven months, the European University Institute (EUI) has been contributing to the debate with topical research carried out by our academics.
The campaign was based on academic output covering the main themes of the Conference, such as health, climate change, economy, digital transformation, democracy and more. A wide review of open source publications resulted in selecting 300 of them and 30 online events. The campaign aimed to disseminate the policy proposals made by EUI academics and it succeeded to promote the selected publications and lecture recordings.
“Our colleagues at the EUI do cutting edge research on almost the whole range of topics covered by the Conference on the Future of Europe,” Robert Schuman Centre Director Erik Jones insists, “hence, the priority is to get that message out and show how that research can help shape the conversation.”
Results show that the campaign reached more than 335,000 people, and more than 10,300 actively shared a post or visited our website.
In the promotion of each publication, our team highlighted the key findings of the research undertaken and presented them in an accessible way. Some of the most engaging proposals included studies of the human rights perspectives of the COVID-19 measures, the EU migration reform, the trade and climate debate and analyses of the Conference on the Future of Europe itself.
In the final stage of the initiative members of the EUI community shared their bold ‘What if’ scenarios for the future of Europe in an inspiring series of four videos .
In December 2021, the EUI also hosted 200 citizens on campus for the third session of the panel on ‘Democracy, Values, Human Rights, Rule of Law, and Security’.
The campaign is reaching its conclusion and it made the research done at the Institute more visible and accessible, as a contribution to the overall democratic exercise of proposing ways to make the EU better.