At the Origin of the European Union Youth Forum: The difficult Emergence of European Youth Organisations

• Joël Kotek ^[1]
  1. [1] Université Libre de Bruxelles

     Université Libre de Bruxelles

     Arrondissement Brussel-Hoofdstad, Bélgica

     
• Localización: Pliegos de Yuste: revista de cultura y pensamiento europeos, ISSN 1697-0152, 1 23, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Jóvenes y Europa: pasado, presente y futuro de la construcción de un continente en paz), págs. 23-34
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • Organisations are born out of crises usually in a hurry, if not in a panic. One thinks especially of the construction of Europe. Despite the butchery of World War I (9 million dead), World War II (40 million dead) and even the discovery of Auschwitz, the Europe we cherish would never have come into being. It took the Soviet threat - the Prague coup (February 1948), the Berlin crisis (June 1948) and the Korean War (June 1950), to force Europeans to unite. One of my University teachers in the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, Alfred Grosser, used to joke that we should put up a statue of Stalin in each of the largest public squares in our capitals to thank him for scaring us so much. If today the world of youth is relatively well structured, at least on a European scale, we also owe it to the Cold War, to three events linked to it.