AICGS

Civil Society

Reset

Yesterday’s Hiding Places are Tomorrow’s Stages: Reconciliation, community building, and transatlantic relations

Civil society in Germany and the United States largely enjoys freedom to act and to shape society. In so doing, people of both countries belong to the just 2 percent …

Back to Basics: Call for a Transatlantic Discussion on the Value of Migration and Democracy

Transatlantic estrangement has been going on for a while. And while it hurts Atlanticists, there is no point in trying and to “repair” U.S.-German relations for the sake of it. …

Combating Selective Memory and Complacency

On Thursday, April 9, 2018, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany announced shocking news: a survey conducted by Schoen Consulting found that in the United States, the collective …

Jörn Quitzau, AGSR Fellow

AICGS is pleased to welcome Jörn Quitzau as an AICGS/GMF Fellow with the American-German Situation Room in Washington, DC, in April 2018. Joern Quitzau (PhD, University of Hamburg) is a Senior …

Civil Society Can Lead the Way

Germans and Americans have a great many important common values and common interests, yet their respective national narratives—how they define their history and place in the world today—differ considerably.  Despite …

A New Strategy for How the History of Nazism and the Holocaust Can Be Remembered by German, Israeli, and American Youth

Four factors make urgent the necessity of German, Israeli, and American youth actively remembering Germany’s history of Nazism and the Holocaust. First, in both Germany and the U.S., there have …

NextGen Rising

The White Rose, the German Nazi resistance movement founded by Munich university students in 1942, started to trend on Twitter in February 2018 as Germans marked the 75th anniversary of …

Do We Still Need “the West”?

Diagnoses of a “crisis” in transatlantic relations often raise questions about the future of “the West.” Over the last fifteen years, pundits and scholars have discussed a possible “end of …

Transnational Reconciliation and the Value of Transatlantic Civil Society Actors

“States cannot be tried before foreign courts because of their sovereign activity, for example, the actions of their soldiers,” claims Minister of Justice of the state of Berlin, Dirk Behrendt, …

The Age of Youth: Civil Society and International Understanding Since World War II

After World War II, various discourses emerged that assigned the “youth” and the “young generation” to an important role for the material and mental reconstruction of the postwar societies. These …

Saving the Transatlantic Partnership: Why and How?

Since the end of World War II, the partnership between the U.S. and European countries, built on common security/economic interests and shared values, such as democracy, liberty, rule of law, …

We Need More Diversity in the Transatlantic Civil Society

Civil society organizations need to be more diverse in order to assume their pivotal role in transatlantic relations, especially in the current period of mutual alienation. In the past, dynamic …