Thursday, September 14, 2017
Orangery Sanssouci, Potsdam
Facebook: @M100Sanssouci Colloquium
Twitter: @M100Colloquium, #M100SC
From 09:00 REGISTRATION
Overall moderation: Dr. Leonard Novy
(Intitute for Media and Communication,
Germany)
09:30 – 09:45 WELCOME AND PRESENTATION OF THE
M100 YOUNG EUROPEAN JOURNALISTS
09:45 – 10:00 OPENING SPEECH
Can Dündar, Editor-in-Chief of Özgürüz,
Germany/Turkey
10:00 – 11:30 SESSION I
DAWNING OF A NEW AGE
Moderator: Astrid Fohloff (ARD, Germany)
Input: Prof. Dr. Andreas Rödder
(Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz,
Germany)
Almost three decades after the end of the
conflict between capitalist and state socialist
systems, a new division is emerging in the
world – between functioning parliamentary
democracies and authoritarian governments.
The past ten years of crises have been
marked not by close, peaceful cohesion
between the member states of the European
Union, but by the rise of nationalist
movements and increased disintegration.
Europe is weakened, and meanwhile finds
itself confronted with new realities that make
joint action seem all the more important,
particularly in matters of foreign and security
policy. Great Britain’s BREXIT decision and the
presidency of Donald Trump have suddenly
thrown decades-old structures and certainties
into question – all at a time when relations
with Russia and Turkey have reached a low
point.
Many observers took heart in Emmanuel
Macron’s election victory as a chance to
reform and take new strength. But historian
Andreas Rödder cautions against the return to
living an integration-politics lie: “The moral
charge of the ‘ever-closer union’ has pushed
the great idea of the European Union too far,
turning it into an ideology. This impairs its
willingness to apply self-criticism and the
ability to correct problems, endangering its
unique historical achievements. What Europe
needs is a clever mix of realism and ideas – a
flexible union of its so very different member
states.” What’s left of project “West”? How
can the growing centrifugal forces within
Europe be countered? Could the politics of
Donald Trump ultimately lead to a
strengthening of the EU? What steps are
needed to reform the EU and overcome the
economic and fiscal-political lines of conflict
between northern and southern countries?
With these questions in mind, the opening
session of the M100 Colloquium discusses
political visions and concrete strategies in an
international order under new auspices. This is
inextricably tied not only to the question of the
future of transatlantic relations, but also to
future prospects for the EU, for whom the
defence of liberal democracy, both internally
and externally, has suddenly become one of
the major tasks at hand.
11:30 – 12:30 LUNCH
12:30 – 14:00 SESSION II:
FAILING DEMOCRACY?
Moderator: Christoph Lanz (Journalist,
Adviser, Germany)
Input I: Jason Brennan (McDonough School
of Business at Georgetown University, USA)
Input II: Victor Erofeev (Writer, Russia)
Liberal democracies are rightly regarded as
extremely stable from a historical perspective.
And yet acceptance of and consent to
democracy have always been based on the
fact that it has consistently guaranteed
prosperity and stability. Many people today
feel cut off from prosperity developments;
inequality is on the rise, and globalisation
certainly does not benefit everyone equally.
The result is an erosion of support for
democracy, as more citizens doubt the
democratic quality of political decision-making
processes and their concrete effects. The
Harvard political scientist Yasha Mounk warns:
“The percentage of citizens who feel it is
important to live in a democracy is declining –
in Germany, the US and in many other
countries. Meanwhile, the percentage of
citizens who are open to alternatives to
democracy is growing. These two factors
together amount to a global crisis of liberal
democracy. Our system is fighting for
survival.”
What becomes clear is this: The threat isn’t
disinterest in the sense of “disillusionment with
politics”, but the populist distance to
democracy. “Western states have lost
control,” journalist Ursula Weidenfeld notes.
“Once powerful countries now stand helpless
before the decaying world order that they
themselves have created.” Digitisation and
globalisation “ravage the democratic
foundations of the Western world, breaking its
order and leaving both states and individuals
behind with their experiences of
powerlessness.” This affects the established
parties, the media, and – as collateral damage
– what has hitherto been the basis of political
debates: the assumption that every human
being has the right to their “own” opinion but
not “their own facts”, as former US Senator
Patrick Moynihan put it. These developments
have found a powerful catalyst in digitisation,
the advent of “fake news” and new forms of
manipulation. How crisis-proof are liberal
democracies? Have populists reached the
zenith of their success? What has to change to
win disappointed citizens back to the idea of
democracy?
14:00 – 14:30 COFFEE BREAK
14:30 – 16:00 SESSION III:
THE NEW(S) MEDIA
Moderator: Ali Aslan
Input I: Mathias Müller von Blumencron
(Editor-in-Chief Digital Media Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurt/Main)
Input II: Áine Kerr (Head of global journalism
partnerships at Facebook, USA)
“Given the scandalisation of politics,
defamation of rivals and the split of the
electorate, it isn’t just the classic parties that
will have to deal with it but also the media,
without which this strategy would not work,”
German media scholar Dietrich Leder writes.
For the media, the lesson of the US election is
“that it isn’t enough to cut this web of lies,
accusations, and denunciations with rational
means, you also have to analyse the
circumstances in which a strategy like this is
successful.” But analysis is proving difficult for
those affected, both traditional and social
media alike. Digitisation and the growing
importance of social networks not only raise
numerous problems; they also seem to be
overwhelming everyone. One feature of the
current situation is the simultaneity of
transparency and confusion, of huge amounts
of facts and propaganda. We are experiencing
a crisis of public communication that comes not
from a lack of information, but from the
“communicative abundance” (John Keane) that
blurs truth and illusion. The US elections were
also characterised by maximum transparency,
and journalism was better than ever in many
respects. In short, users have never had so
many sources from which to gain a detailed
picture, practically in real time and often for
free. Nevertheless, we are experiencing a kind
of “system failure”: the products of classical
journalistic craft, all the research, all the fact
checking proved ineffective. In the words of US
journalist Susan B. Glasser: “We’ve achieved a
lot more transparency in today’s Washington
– without the accountability that was supposed
to come with it.” The demand for “fake news”
and crisis of journalism on both sides of the
Atlantic are inter-related in this respect.
Meanwhile, freedom of the press and of opinion
is under greater threat than it has been for
years and decades. This applies to
autocratically led countries such as Russia and
Turkey, but also to established democracies in
which independent media and journalists are
facing greater and greater restrictions. So
where do our public spheres develop from
here? And how can journalism – in light of
today’s rapidly changing political, social and
technical conditions – do justice to the
diversity of expectations laid at its door?
16:00 – 16:30 SPECIAL TALK
18:00 – 19:00 M100 MEDIA AWARD
Orangery Sanssouci
WELCOME
POLITICAL KEYNOTE
LAUDATIO
ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
18:00 – 21:00 RECEPTION
