... Only with young people!

Yesterday evening I went to hear a lecture by Paul Nolte, a German professor (with a background in history and sociology) and leading intellectual. Some time ago (well, it must actually be a year or two ago already), I found one of his books and read it with great interest. The book was called “Generation Reform” and provided a couple of – in my opinion - very good thoughts and ideas about the future of the German state. Because the book was so inspiring to me, I really wanted to go and hear him speak.

His lecture was called “The price of chances - About the economy of a new citizen society” and was organized by the Körberstiftung as part of their “Körberforum”, which is subtitled “For people, who don’t want to leave everything as it is” :) His lecture was basically divided into four parts. In the first part, he outlined the different values and guiding principles of the citizen society over the last three decades and especially how they changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall (basically in the 80ies, citizen society (or civil society as you might also call it) existed as a form of self-organization against the power of the state, whereas in the early 90ies the state wasn’t seen as enemy anymore; citizen engagement started to be was seen as “activities of individuals in social networks”).

The second part focused on the relation between the citizens and the state. For Germany, Paul Nolte identified four important “crisis”, which have a huge influence on our society:

1. The crisis of the consumer society (consummation past its peek at the end of the 80ies and is since declining)


2. The crisis of the tax state (people are less willing to pay more and more taxes but at the same time are less aware of the rising costs of public services)


3. The crisis of the welfare state (growing state debt since the 70ies and a growing feeling of people to give more than to receive)


4. The crisis of the public sphere (people are retreating into privacy and democracy is not res publica anymore, but rather seen as a political system that should ensure as much freedom of privacy as possible).

In the third part of his lecture, Paul Nolte presented his idea of the new “innovative citizen society”. Instead of being just mere consumers of resources and having a lot of expectations to gain from the state and others, people should invest more into society again and also show more solidarity. Everyone should ask themselves: “What can I do as an individual to serve the society I live in?” The whole concept is based on a sustainable and more long-term approach: innovations that are made today will bring benefits tomorrow – this is something that people seem to have forgotten. One good example is that in Germany, parents are not willing anymore to invest in the education of their children if that means that they have to cut down their own standard of living (not to mention that investing in education is generally “out” so to say – something that I know from my own experience with my mum).

Lastly, in the fourth part, Paul Nolte described how the state could address some of the problems highlighted in the second part.

While the lecture was generally good, the discussion with questions from the audience that followed it was much more eye-opening to me (probably also because I had already read about many of his ideas in his book). There were quite a number of people who spoke up and they were generally quite critical of his vision. A number of people even compared his visionary idea of more socially active citizens with the vision of communists who claimed that for socialism to work, a “new human” is needed. But in general (making the comparison with communism or not), people argued that his vision is unachievable. You could hear comments like: “”People are not interested in the society anymore, they just care about themselves and you can’t change that” or “the majority of people wants to be led and for those who lead, we have our politicians” - which is a comment that totally ignores individual leadership and is in my opinion exactly what Germany is lacking!

Over the last years, it has become more and more embarrassing to talk about one owns individual engagement. Doing social work is not really something that is openly valued and appreciated – people are not grateful to others to do this kind of work (and this is exactly one of the things that Paul Nolte mentioned in his speech as well) and instead of those of us who are active telling others that they should do the same and show more solidarity with their fellows, we are hiding ourselves and our activities when talking with other people about them (in my case, I know that telling many people at university about the things I do, I would just hear from them things like “why don’t you go out and party more?”). In addition, I strongly believe that we need more leadership in all spheres of live. This is an area where we can learn a lot from America – promoting leadership skills, valuing them and awarding leaders for the benefits they bring to our society. All this is non-existent in Germany.

I actually very much liked one of the responses that Paul Nolte gave to a statement that we can’t change a thing anyway. He said: “Only because a disease is hard to combat, doesn’t mean that we don’t try curing it”. But adults are so … disillusioned, vision-less, exhausted from life or as Kumi Naidoo’s son apparently once phrased it “contaminated with experience”. Renée, the Coordinator of the Millennium Campaign in Germany, who spoke at the event of the European Youth Forum, which I attended this weekend, said in response to the question, why she chose to focus in her Campaign on young people: “If I speak to adults about the MDGs, they might agree that they are very important, but they are very skeptical if they can actually be achieved. If I speak to young people about the MDGs, they say: Ok, let’s do it and make them become a reality!” It was exactly these words that I had to remember yesterday evening when I heard all these old people speak. And maybe the reference to communism isn’t something that we should just laugh about. Maybe there lies a deeper truth in it. If you look at people in Germany who “don’t want to leave everything as it is”, then you’ll find out that (still) a majority of them are “Alt-68er” (those who were part of the big student demonstrations in 1968). Many of them were communists, but after the fall of the Berlin wall, all that they believed in over many, many years suddenly fell apart. They had to realize that their vision was unrealistic – and they became disillusioned by that.

But if the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism disillusioned so many – then this is yet another reason for me to turn the power to young people, whose minds are still “uncontaminated” and who still believe that, if you just work hard enough, then it is possible to make a vision come true! Giving up before the work has even started is a virus that unfortunately, too many people have already been infected of.