Welcome!
I warmly welcome you to the Radio for European Citizens. This is our first broadcast. A solemn beginning, which I have only dared to dream about for years.
In 2009, I took the initiative in Brussels of ‘Back to the Radio’, which is the simplest means of transmitting information. I have been a member of the European Economic and Social Committee since 2004, and a year or two later I realized that the European Union does not have a so-called public service radio and television in the official languages of the European Union.
Why was this a shock?
Because I imagined that if we are European Citizens, since ten of us joined in 2004, and then in 2007 with the addition of Romania and Bulgaria, and later Croatia, the European Union is a community of 27 member states, which has more than 400 million citizens, and we are all European Citizens, but if we want to be informed in our mother tongue every day about what decisions are made in the European Union and within its institutions, then we cannot do this, because there is none.
What else is the radio good for?
Only for transfer of information? No! For learning, training, and why is this important? Because in the global world, where from morning to night we only hear horror news about war, climate change, various economic crises, sanctions policy, possible unemployment, especially among young people, and I could list the many, many problems that we don’t know what the solution for would be, since we do not receive the information from the European Union in our native language.
That is why the idea of the Radio for European Citizens was born, which is an online radio, and where we defined the goal that everyone who is a member of the European Economic and Social Committee, which is an advisory body to the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council of the European Union, so that they can exchange information with the citizens of their own state or inform them in their native language, and that those citizens who are citizens of each member state can hear the information that interests them in their native language.
I wish the listeners of the Radio for European Citizens good luck in finding the audio recordings on the website under the national flag of each member country, from which you can obtain information.
We eagerly await your reactions in order to improve your information.
