We launched the campaign on a well-attended conference in Bratislava on November 15-17, 2002.

The conference was for (hopefully) all participants a very exciting and interesting event. About 80 people from 22 countries met in Bratislava to exchange ideas about the European Referendum Campaign. After getting acquainted to each other on Friday evening by lots of personal conversations the Saturday started with a briefing by Roman Huber about the general situation in the EU especially concerning the lack of democracy.

Than Michael Efler gave some information about the "Convention on the Future of Europe", its background, previous activities and the status quo of its work. Afterwards he introduced a proposal of implementing Direct Democracy in a possible EU Constitution. To make that clear: This is NOT part of the European Referendum Campaign but part of the demands of Mehr Demokratie (Germany) whose main activity is the improval of citizens participation. In this respect Mehr Demokratie is NOT in favour and not against a possible constitution but demands that IF there will be a constitution than there must be instruments of direct democracy involved.

The following presentation was made by Heiko Dittmer and Thomas Rupp who - after a short overview of the previous history of the campaign - introduced the campaign itself to the audience. Here you can download the original presentation as pdf-file.

After the lunch break there were four seminars to choose from: Basics of Direct Democracy by Bruno Kaufmann, How to lobby the parliament by Michael Efler, How to build up a campaigning network by Heiko Dittmer and How to communicate the campaign by Thomas Rupp. These seminars were followed by workshops to the topics mediawork, international events, quality standards of referenda and first steps at home. The following plenary session showed that seminars and workshops were very constructive, inspiring and produced very interesting results.

Another highlight of the conference was a reception of H.E. Ambassador of Switzerland Rudolf Staub together with IRI Europe in the Forum Hotel. It was a welcome event with some good conversation and a variety of delicious titbits. The rest of the evening was spent in the beautiful old city of Bratislava.

On Sunday morning there were two short speeches: one - by Henrik Dahlsson - in favour of a Europe of indipendent states and one - by Paul Carline - about the need of a federal state. The idea of this morning was to present two visions based on the present situation and THAN afterwards to present a completely new vision of Europe, which goes far beyond the imagination of the present status quo. Erich Fritsch did this in a very extensive and thorough presentation. The question may be posed if - regardless of quality of the contributions - the concept of this Sunday morning session was well chosen by the organizers regarding the fact, that the participants were very motivated to go on with the campaign discussion.

The final plenary showed that all participants who spoke considered the NDDIE conference as a valuable event where they made good contacts and got some inspiring impulses. There will be a smaller meeting in Janurary 2003 and a big meeting on March 2003 for all organisations and individuals who want to/will get into the campaign.

Here you can read the press release written by Arjen Nijeboer. Available in English and French.

Here you can download the agenda of the conference (pdf, 40kB).

The conference reader is available online.