Inter Alia’s Strategy for Political engagement | 2024-2026
Inter Alia’s work aims to build up the power of civil society across borders by organising people into assertive communities. We put our energy into activities at different levels – local, national, EU, international – and a range of areas: policy; research; advocacy; protest; education; culture. In this way, we aspire to listen to people and familiarise ourselves with their struggles and concerns, support them to act in the public sphere and influence the way they think about themselves and their communities.
Our work in the field of political engagement will focus on the following:
Financing civil society organisations: EU funding for programmes should enable long-term planning for organisations and be more accessible and inclusive. Funding criteria should be more versatile and context-specific. The European Commission, at least in the policy areas that Inter Alia is involved in, is gradually understanding that project writing/management cannot be the engine that will move European societies to inclusion, justice, prosperity and sustainability. On the one hand, the existing practice that overemphasises on technical aspects of civil society work such as project writing and implementation rather than needs analysis, community work and impact measurement, has disempowered progressive resistances, which are becoming all the more important now that anti-EU forces and far-right parties are gaining momentum. On the other hand, generative ΑI incrementally renders project writing skills irrelevant. However, the evaluation and funding instruments are built around those skills while the EU institutions steering these instruments are apparently unready or reluctant to introduce new mechanisms that take the aforementioned condition into account.
It is not easy for a bureaucratic structure to change a practice that has been dominant for decades. There needs to be a common mobilisation by EU institutions and organised civil society for a structured debate towards more sustainable, participatory and inclusive designing of EU programmes. Political will is key. European politicians have to be persuaded that the route of safety and predictability reflected in the project management culture and the call for continuous innovation and quantitative results is obsolete. It can neither cope with the cries and simplistic responses of the far right that can only be faced by continuous monitoring of the public discussion and thoroughly elaborated argumentation, nor with the wrongful use of generative AI that creates short-cuts to funding and side-steps the essential groundwork. The experience that civil society organisations have in implementing EU programmes should be at the core of forthcoming strategies and action plans. Organising this knowledge and promoting its results to EU institutions is a strategic goal of Inter Alia.
Alliance building: In challenging practices that we consider wrongful, unjust or obsolete, continuity of collaboration based on stipulated values and processes are key for effective collaboration and impactful action. In the coming three years, we will continue participating in networks and alliances in our areas of interest: migration; youth; inclusion; EU democracy; and education. We aim to align different agendas on the grounds of compromise and mutual understanding and thus challenge practical obstacles and cumbersome, top-down institutional realities and practices. Alongside this dynamic process, Inter Alia will strive to promote better organisation of the agendas, the fieldwork, and the structure of these networks and alliances. Moreover, Inter Alia will commit more time and effort to reaching out to actors outside the realm of civil society and engaging them in our work and mission. The primary targets of this outward-facing campaign will be universities focusing on social sciences, humanities and arts, municipalities across the EU, and high schools in Greece.
Research & monitoring: In order to challenge or propose policies and regulations that better reflect the concerns of citizens, civil society needs information and data as well as the time and human resources to utilise them. The use of secondary data produced by existing institutional tools (e.g. Eurobarometer, the Group of States against Corruption of the Council of Europe) while useful is insufficient. Also, they reflect the concerns and agendas of their creators and thus often undermine the capacity of civil society actors to produce original results and, therefore, to proceed with radical action. Starting from 2024, Inter Alia will make use of existing independent research methods and develop new ones. We aim to bring to the fore information coming from the people in a language that is closer to the real world, more understandable and easier to express.
The lack of information about developments in European decision-making centres or the lack of pluralism in representation by mainstream media is a significant shortcoming connected to the EU’s failure to constitute an empowered transnational civil society. In Greece, for instance, there are no independent media outlets channelling information created by civil society about EU institutions to citizens. Inter Alia will further invest in providing news, comments, policy proposals and comparative analyses on EU policy developments on a monthly basis. Starting from January 2024, this information will also be available in Greek.
Participation in elections and other democratic processes: Europeans’ intention to participate in elections is rising along with their overall interest in EU affairs. According to the Eurobarometer EP Autumn 2023 Survey: Six months before the 2024 European Elections, “most Europeans (53%) wish the European Parliament to play a more important role, a majority view in 21 Member States. The majority (57%) also expressed interest in the upcoming elections to the EP and 68% say they would be likely to vote if European elections were held in a week’s time – nine points higher than 5 years earlier”.
While this seems like a positive sign and a reason to remain optimistic, the simultaneous rise of the far-right and anti-EU forces causes us great concern. At Inter Alia, we will continue working to predominate against extremist, anti-democratic, xenophobic views and to cause a ripple effect that will improve the quality of representation in the European Parliament. In the short term, we aim to increase the turnout in elections in Greece and the EU through activities directly involving citizens, practitioners, scholars and decision makers. In the medium and long term, we aspire to upgrade the discourse on EU affairs by enabling citizens to participate in and articulate political argumentation. Beyond elections, we will promote participation in deliberative democratic processes and push for institutionalising them as regular processes and increasing their tangible effects on policy. Specifically, we are committed to contributing with all our forces to the process of EU treaty reform, whenever it is decided, through advocacy actions, research and public positioning on the issues that Inter Alia consistently monitors such as education, civil rights and citizenship, enlargement, democracy and the rule of law.
Protests: Recent European and international history has manifested that protest movements across borders on environmental issues, taxation, inequality and anti-racism are possible and can be effective. Viewing crises as indications of systemic failures rather than a series of unfortunate developments, Inter Alia will invest in promoting the international perspective of local or national struggles and in enabling communication and connections between local grassroots initiatives to transnational networks with similar causes. Working with our community, we will claim our place within transnational claims on burning issues such as housing, migration, the climate crisis, wars and conflicts that affect our followers, our audience and ourselves and make use of available legal means of protest within our powers to push decision makers to take these claims into account.