Helsinki 20.11. 1995
Dear Friend(s),
enclosed please find an attempt to structure the CITIZENS'
INPUT-project, which is still in its initial stage. I send this by
e-mail or fax to a number of individuals and organisations around
Europe (and perhaps beyond Europe, because, where does Europe end?).
Feel free to comment on any aspect.
Yours,
-Mika
Version 0.1 Date: 20.11.95
'Sarajevo' also symbolizes the multicultural and multinational yet united Europe of the future. That will be a Europe which is not only united at state-level or as a common market, but is united at the level of its civil societies. Citizens' Input is committed to the unification of Europe 'from below', the knitting together of the civil societies of the European nations by thousands of cultural and social threads.
Europe has a common market. The common public sphere of Europe is much less developed. Therefore, the official European Union lacks political legitimacy. There can be no European democracy, if European Citizenship is only mediated by the National Governments (i.e. via the internal public sphere of each country). This problem of legitimacy is especially acute in the case of the inter-governmental conference, which has been called to revise the treaty on European union, in 1996. Citizens' Input aims at extending the European, i e transnational public sphere before, during and after the inter-governmental conference.
Public libraries and European information society. Today, the Internet provides the builders of a transnational public sphere and transnational civic activity with an adequate and sophisticated medium. Internet indeed is an extension of the public sphere beyond the borders of national states and beyond television, radio, newspapers and the printing press. As with any medium, however, everything depends on the freedom and the access of the public -- the users of the network.
In recent governmental and corporate planning information has all too often been treated exclusively as a matter of "bandwith", or as a commodity for consumption, with almost no regard to its human and social content. Thus billions of dollars or ecus are nowadays being invested into new "information superhighways", little or nothing of cultural or social value has yet emerged from the grandiose technological plans. Also, it is all too often forgotten that the governments and corporations are relatively insignificant, and always only secondary factors in the actual production and distribution of valuable information. The cradle of information is civil society. The authentic creators of valuable information, i e the authors, artists, researchers, philosophers, intellectuals, journalists etc. all represent civil society. The same goes for the main distributors of information; the universities and schools, the libraries, the publishers and the press, radio, TV and, to an increasing extent, the Internet. Either these are firmly rooted in, and connected to the information-production of the civil society, or they become increasingly dull and insignificant (=void of valuable information).
The public library and the Internet form an inseparable
couple of the non-governmental and non-commercial
information-services which are typical of the civil
information society. In particular, the World Wide Web
(the standard hypertext service of the Internet) is
potentially analogous with, and an extension to
the public library. This is already clearly perceived
among the library staff and by the public itself
in countries like Finland, which have robust library-networks
as well as deregulated tele-markets, thus permitting a rapid
spread of Internet from the academic world to other
sectors of society. Thus the general idea that libraries
and the Internet are and should increasingly be viewed
as a whole, has already become more or less of an
official policy. In this situation, there is a great
need for projects like Citizens' Input, which consciously
strive to realize the new possiblities for an extension of
the public sphere beyond national borders and
the dominance of the mass-media.
The collectioning and the presentation of Citizens' Input
in its written or documented form should therefore
be accomplished in close
cooperation with public libraries. The electronic documents
containing Citizens' Input should be freely available from the public
libraries and presented by the library staff as a part of their
collections.
Focus on security, democracy and citizenship The Citizens' Input project will focus on security, democracy and citizenship. These subject-matters are priorities of the peace and human rights transnational coalition. The priorization stems from the choice of Helsinki Citizens' Assembly as one of the main partners in the project. This means that in the limited framework of this project, input from citizens on economical and social policy, or on ecological issues, must be considered only to a lesser extent.
Usenet News and other similar electronic conferencing systems
are also of great potential value in the Citizens' Input project.
Some of the existing newsgroups indeed function as open
discussion-fora on European Union-related issues. The several years old
newsgroup alt.politics.ec is
an example in point.
As a medium, though, the newsgroups are like
on-going seminars, or just on-going cafeteria-talk, while
the WWW rather resembles the library or the archive. Both
are clearly needed by those who wish to be well informed,
but mostly these Net-services (News and WWW) fulfil
quite different tasks.
Tentative description of the Web Archive
To start with, consider the following examples:
One part of Citizens' Input should be dedicated to PR-work, lobbying and arranging shadow-conferences.