President

Session President

Session President, Kerstin Mathias from Germany

Dear friends,

It was Winston Churchill who in his famous speech to the academic youth held at the University of Zurich in 1946, in the very same room where we, the participants of the 73rd International Session of the European Youth Parliament, will be privileged to attend the Opening Ceremony of the event, predicted that “If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance, there would be no limit to the happiness, to the prosperity and glory which its three or four hundred million people would enjoy.”

However, inspite of European integration never having been deeper, the European Union just having been awarded the Nobel Peace Price and the Council of Europe currently counting 47 member states, if one was to ask any of the one million unemployed young people in Spain or Greeks who have lost their right to access free healthcare along with their job, they would probably take issue with Churchill’s claim.

Europe nonetheless is still one of the best places to live. Especially our host country Switzerland repeatedly outranks the rest of the world in e.g. the Quality-of-life index. But also the remaining European countries are not doing all that badly. According to the Human Development Index (HDI) rankings from 2012 six out of the ten most developed nations are European. Looking at the inequality-adjusted HDI this number rises to nine out of ten. According to data provided by the World Bank Greece‘s GDP per capita is still higher than that of any country in Africa, South America or most of Asia. And lastly, even Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows to Europe have remained somewhat stable throughout the crisis especially when looking at the eleven less prosperous EU Member States (EU 11).

The fact that we are doing better than most of the world must not encourage us to rest on our laurels and is not to suggest that Europeans should ever stop questioning their leaders, strive to find better solutions to the world’s problems and work towards truly sustainable economies. This especially holds true for the young generation and the International Session in Zurich will provide us all with a unique platform to do so. There is only a handful of organisations that bring together 300 participants from nearly 40 European countries for ten full days for an experience that has often been summed-up as hard to describe but fantastic to live. The success of any such venture always depends on its participants’ motivation, skills and preparation and as the organising team has already been working tirelessly for over two years to make this session as good as they possibly can, I trust that all of us will now join them in their efforts.

With this I would not only like to remind us how lucky we are to be European but also to be able to attend the 73rd International Session in Zurich. Let’s keep this in mind as we prepare for the event and anticipate our arrival in Zurich.

With great excitement,

Kerstin Mathias