Euro-integration as part of some civil society organizations' agenda

A road that is being traced with information and without mutual coordination

European Movement in the Republic of Macedonia. This year (EMRM) was given the MCIC award “Gert Jan van Appeldoorn” for civil society and democracy for achievement in the previous year. It was founded in 1991 and since 1992 it has been an official member of the International European Movement in Brussels and in 1993 it received the status of a full member. Today, in the process of increasing the number of civil society organizations in Macedonia that work in the field of Euro-integration, its experience is of great use.

Lidija Nedelkovska, representative of the Movement’s team, who, among other things initiated the action for coordination and relation of the European movements from the South-Eastern European countries and holding a meeting with their presidents last year in Skopje, where a document was set up and circulated in the June EU Summit in Thessalloniki, emphasizes that the Movement’s activities can be divided into two phases. The first phase is related to lobby-activities of the founders, prominent intellectuals about the recognition of Macedonia, and the second one from 1999 until today is related to approaching the European idea in Macedonia, with promotion of the Macedonian achievements on a European level. “Two years in succession we have been working on the realization of the initiative for informing citizens about the European institutional dedication that is not familiar in our education, so last year, educating high-school students, we covered 9 towns and this year we are planning to increase that number. The material has been adjusted to our conditions, the lecturers are post-graduate students at the Faculty of Philology for Euro-integration and the education is carried out through municipal and regional quizzes of knowledge. Our intention is to introduce a special school subject in the high-school education related to integration in the EU. The European Movement also works on adults education, through the Tempus programme where the Euro-integration Sector and the Faculty of Law are involved with a team that educates 5 profiles of occupations: professors, civil servants, European oriented journalists and businessmen. The lecturers are from the European Institute in Bruges and the European University in London, the training is free and the attendants are given certificates. For next year Nedelkovska announces the start of a two-year project through the program CARDS for Europisation and strengthening the civic sector. It will last for 20 months and will be realized in almost all parts of Macedonia through various activities. “We are having intense preparations to open a European Institute in cooperation with the European Commission delegation. In most of the European countries the institutes are open under the aegis of the European Movement in the home country and they are a part of the global policy of the International European Movement” – points out Nedelkovska, mentioning that their orientation for work is directed towards young people as carriers of the future changes and development. She evaluates the cooperation with the Euro-integration sector as good, regardless of the change of ruling structures in the past period. She also considers the cooperation with the European Commission and local authorities to be good. The European Movement for Macedonia also realizes the School for Politics, a big European project where contents are incorporated from the field of economics, politics, peace studies, human rights, business and politics.

 

European House
 

The European House organization is involved in the process of informing and education of young people in Macedonia about the actual processes of Euro-integration. It was founded in 1999 and its representatives, the president Zoran Dimitrov and the general secretary Toni Masevski point out that its idea is not to work on integration in the EU as the Euro-integration Sector, but with young people, to help where state institutions cannot achieve the necessary. As a result of this, the European House activities are primarily related to the project “Europe at school”, started in 2002, matching their intention that is in accordance with the Youth Forum of Central and Eastern Europe, to realize thematic and long-term activities. “Europe at school” operates on a yearly basis, but it has been operating in Europe for 50 years. Their intention is to introduce their project to schools and they cooperate with the Ministry of Education and Science and the Development Bureau. The European House is satisfied with the so far course of implementing thematic art and literature competitions realized in 10 high-schools, with an announcement that in the following phase the number will increase to 100 schools throughout Macedonia. Competitions are carried out in mother tongue on a level of a school and in the national competition works are translated into Macedonian language. The members of the European House lack training courses for the activities related to the EU processes and in their opinion there is a need for the governmental sector to decide what the civil sector should work in this process of integration and what the Government should do.

“Except in Slovenia, in no other country is the civic sector treated as a partner in the process of the EU integration”, they mention and in their opinion only a partnership relation can contribute towards not repeating same activities and unnecessary wasting money. “It is necessary to form a body that will inform and coordinate, perform systematization of the work of the two sectors, the governmental and the civil sector. The public opinion should be respected and citizens should be continuously informed on what the EU is, what its process of functioning is, about advantages and disadvantages” – say Dimitrov and Masevski.

 

Macedonian Center for European Education
 

The Macedonian Center for European Education with its motto “Get ready for Europe” at first glance associates to the necessity to inform and educate a wide profile of citizens about various aspects of the EU organization and functioning. This Center, founded in December 2002, by a group of authorized trainers, about the European Union issues, considers its mission to be serving the public interest with affirmation of the contributions from the integration in the EU through training, consultants’ services and lobbying for changes. They have developed a program for European training and they say it has been made to help everyone advance in their careers in public administration, economics or politics, media and civic society, at the same time making the process of European integration in Macedonia easier. The programme conveys the basic principles of the European integration, policies and institutions of the European Union, the Economic Monetary Union, the law of European communities, as well as the approach of the Republic of Macedonia towards this process.

Unlike other trainers from the region, the work of the Macedonian trainers is institutionalized and the process of education is related to the preparation of modules for training, primarily prepared and transferred by foreign experts and later by the members of the MCED, because, as the president Lidija Dimova says, “The feeling of what we need in Macedonia is ours, so we prepare the modules and offer them to the users according to that”.

In the so far process of work she is satisfied with the cooperation with the Euro-integration Sector. They have common workshops, but she comments on prolonging them, which leads to frequent change of the modules. Evaluating the level of how much the people who attend the training courses are informed, she says that our civil servants need basic information offered to them together with the technical information received by experts. “The Government orders training courses and we evaluate what kind of a module they need”. We organize training courses for the representatives of the institutions with standard topics, integrated in all modules: political and economic reasons for Euro-integration, the process of stabilization and association, the Stabilization and Association Agreement and the program CARDS, as well as the European partnership.

MCEE also works with the civil sector through voluntary workshops realized in the FIOOM resource centers and they are given an introduction module with ten fields, ranging from more general information to ones that refer to the national level. “Informing is bad at both representatives of the state institutions and the civil sector, but the civil sector’s motivation is bigger. The civil servants know something, but most of that is wrong, so bigger effort is necessary to correct the mistakes, and the members from the civil sector who attend the training courses are young people. The problem of the level of informing is in the Government, the information from the media. Journalists also make mistakes in the essential issues related to the EU, but they have not shown interest for training yet. “We are a civil society association that offers products that can bring financial assets, therefore foreign consulting companies know us and employ us to deliver training courses they can pay for” – Dimova says.

The plan of the Macedonian Center for Education is in two-three years to have a consulting company so that the present civic organization can deal with representation, and also to open towards other profiles of trainers from the legal sector, internal market, communications, state support, customs administration, environment, culture, courts, internal politics, industrial ownership etc.

These three organizations cover only a small part of the great number of existing and necessary segments of the actual process of integration in the EU, but what is to be a problem in this phase is the fact that they are not informed enough about the existence and the work of the others. The fact that they do not inform themselves will sooner or later appear as an obstacle, because the common circle gets bigger and bigger every day.