UTOPIA      Instead of an editorial

   Dear reader,

   if you ask why we make a European student’s review I’d say because we damn need it. Students everywhere, especially in Europe, have the same problems — a powerless generation although we are not. But our malaise are not only tuition fees and the starvation of our public education system.

   The student of today is the symbol of the decadent intellectual culture, a citizen devaluated as a “human resource”, put into useless competition by career ideology, fear of existence and recist immigration policy. Many students still commit the grave dialectical error to believe that the system we live in is right although a thousand things might be wrong — instead of understanding that the system is wrong despite its thousand positive aspects. Fortunately the cultural consciousness that being a student grows, of being a new, different generation with a new understanding of the world and the wish to create it by ourselves — and that’s why we produce this journal.

   We do it inspired by the idea that being an international student in this new globalised age, the age of Restauration, of consumption, of illiteracy, is, or could be, the root of a genuine culture. This culture, as we understand it, is the endeavour, the habit, the practice of a common labour and art, it is young but it’s a marriage for life, and it’s based on the living traditions as taught us by Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Denis Diderot or Ignacio Ramonet (“le monde diplomatique”).

   I want to express my thanks to Kalle and Tom in Berlin, to Marco and Antonella in Rome, to Julien and Nathalie in Paris, to “il manifesto” and to all the others who made this first European issue possible. It will appear parallelly in the capitals of France, Italy and Germany, and hopefully spread over many other university cities with your critics and suggestions, dear reader, for a utopic society.

   Berlin, 2003-12-17
   Tino Brömme