Title: European Civil Society: An Open Societal Model for Young People in Europe?
Abstract: Noting the difficulty of translating concepts such as citizenship and participation from one European language to another, Peter Lauritzen begins this article with an excursion into the explicit and implicit meanings of and associations with citizenship. Among Europeans, Lauritzen contends, Germans do not have it easy with such terms and concepts. Their history, as a nation and society, precludes a straightforward relationship between citizen and the state. The German language may have progressively been freed of much of its elitist and totalitarian baggage and terms such as civil society may have become an established element of contemporary political parlance, but for Lauritzen, a society wide consensus on the necessity of citizen empowerment remains to be achieved. Despite the fact that legal provisions regulating European citizenship de facto exist many of the terms associated with it – citizen / citoyen / Bürger; civil society / societé civile / Zivilgeselchaft; participation / Partizipation; community / communauté / Gemeinschaft; young people / jeunes / Jugendlichen – have different conceptual histories and continue to be understood differently according to where they are used.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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