Christoph Becker-Schaum

As a historian I know about the extraordinary luck of the unique European integration process after WW II, but the European unity is far from invulnerability. The European Union started in the fifties as a reconstruction project, became a common space of economy, and brought at last the forty years divided European states together in a political community.

The more this European Union became deepened and widened, the more it is depending on the democratic support of the European people, which is not taken for granted. The three negative results of the referendums on the European constitution treaty in France, the Netherlands and Ireland were an impressive show of the exigency for all European parties to foster a democratic European political culture.

The parties themselves have to open up to the new Europe, to open up to a European political space of exchange and debate on the level of party membership. In the long run there is no alternative to a European members’ party. The individual supportership is the opportunity for Green party members to come together, to act together and to have a common space of exchange and debate.
That’s what I like to engage for in the coordination team.

Personal data:

57 years old; historian, scientific assistant at the Frankfurt University; member of the Greens
since 1983; in the late eighties/early nineties local councillor in Frankfurt/Main, active in
education and child protection politics, migration and integration politics; in the nineties
committee member of the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Hesse; since 1995 Director of the
Green archives, which is situated at Berlin since 2001; since 2002 also lecturer of political
science at Free University Berlin; after the founding Congress of the European green Party
individual supporter and co-coordinator of the German individual EGP supporters.

Berlin, January 26, 2010

Christoph Becker-Schaum