The aim of the following essay is to discuss the quotation given, resorting to my knowledge about EU matters. My work will refer to my personal experience in interviewing young people; later I will draw meaningful conclusions about the data processed and finally I will try to suggest some ways of promoting European consciousness among young people.
The quotation given presents the Copenhagen’s purposes in a detailed way and clarifies the “Criteria” according to which Eastern countries, as well as Turkey now, would join EU. What strikes most the reader’s attention, in my opinion, is the sentence “Thus, enlargement was no longer a question of “if”, but “when””. There’s no doubt that nowadays a great majority of people disagree with European Enlargement process, as it seems that we are focusing too much on widening, nevertheless deepening is important as well for the process to develop.
As a matter of fact, according to the interviews processed, we understood there is a serious lack of information, especially among young people, and this is why, I think, we should work more on deepening rather than on widening. We’ve processed more than hundred interviews and the results we got were astonishingly not encouraging. People, especially the ones under 20 years, are not interested in EU matters at all. Only few of them showed a sufficient level of knowledge and in some cases someone tried to suggest possible solutions or expressed their own opinion. Generally the lack of information produced misunderstandings or more often people couldn’t simply answer due to their ignorance.
According to the results, the future of Europe does not seem to be so clear; EU should work more on deepening and especially it should promote citizenship and awareness of it among the new generations who will undoubtly lead EU in the future. Moreover taking Turkish issues as an example, I thought a referendum would be the best thing to do in order to understand what common people think about Turkey entry. But now, aware of what the real situation is, I completely disagree with the idea of a referendum, as it will be influenced by stupid fears and prejudices. Finally it seems that the medias don’t promote EU citizenship and more often, reporting common prejudices, don’t look in favour of Enlargement (Turkish’s one now and Eastern countries’ one years ago). Our future doesn’t seem too clear, but we have to realize soon it’s in our hands!