When European heads of state meet in Amsterdam on Monday to finalise the first revision of the Maastricht Treaty,
they will hide behind countless police and thousands of metres of barbed wire.
'This scenario perfectly symbolizes how far European decision making is distanced from the European peoples.',
comments Joris Wijnhoven, press speaker of the Alternative Summit parallelly staged in Amsterdam by hundreds of
European NGOs. 'The bizarre security measures give evidence that heads of states themselves expect their decisions
to be very unpopular.', he adds. Experts and representatives of civil society gathered at the Alternative Summit
complain about the undemocratic structures of the EU and demand a right to influence the shaping of a future Europe.
Their struggle for a different Europe became name and programme for a Europe-wide network involving a wide
political and societal spectre. The Alternative Summit exposes and criticizes the dominance of obsolete free market
ideology in the European project. 'Neoliberalism is bancrupt', summerizes Wijnhoven the findings of the conference.
'The European employment situation is a tragedy. The state of environment is suffering from the sustained ignoration
of all promises and declarations from the past. Exploitation and exclusion strategies might satisfy by corporate lobby
interests but are destroying Europe's social fabric.'
With the network established in this and previous alternative summit the European heads of state found their
watchdog. Major shifts demanded regarding the direction of Europe's future development prioritise social and
ecological aspects.
The Amsterdam Summit turns the democratisation promises once given in Maastricht into lies. The forming of a fast
growing European Coalition for a Different Europe signals to Heads of State and EU structures that for Maastricht
III they better root the discussion process deeply into civil society or they won�t find fences high enough to hide.
'Let us reclaim Europe', is the Alternative Summits message to the European citizens.