Hunderte Millionen Europäer wählen ein neues EU-Parlament. Aber was denken die Menschen in den verschiedenen Staaten über die EU? M94.5 hat nachgefragt.

Name: Timo-Jaakko Uitto

Alter: 26 Jahre

Job: studiert Finanzwesen

Wohnort: Vaasa

Timo-Jaako Uittos Gedanken zur EU:

The negative sides of EU are more on screen in Finland than positive sides. The media and our politicians are discussing a lot of financing banks and crisis countries and ordinary people are talking about the price increase of daily consumer products and are missing our old currency back. However, I don’t want to find and tell about the negative sides of EU, because EU have given me more positive than negative experiences.

EU figured widely at school during my secondary and high school years. We had a couple of our Finnish EU parliament members as visitors and they were then telling about the activities and operations of EU to us. My high school even organized a course called ’EU course’ and the highlight of that course was absolutely a visit to the parliament in Strasbourg where we met Finnish parliament member Alexander Stubb (nowadays our Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade). Because of my quite young age, the whole trip via Germany to France was perhaps still more interesting than EU issues, but of course this familiarized me better with other Europeans. Yet, even better and more important trip to Europe was coming years later…

Student exchange programme Erasmus, financed by EU, gave me a possibility to go studying to another European country. This trip gave me lots of new perspectives about other Europeans and how to be an European. My stay in Odense, Denmark was a stunning experience. The great country and the city with lots of international students and the best of all, my flatmates from different European countries. Every European should experience this – a good way to get to know other Europeans and learn to understand their culture and a way of thinking. This is a crucial question to get EU succeed. I don’t want to give away my own Finnish culture and I believe this is the same in every country, but we have to get ourselves to understand and want to understand the views of others. Open Europe, free moving and programmes like Erasmus hopefully help us in this issue. This is important to me and I don’t think that I’m badly wrong. We have different habits in different countries, but we are not that different as humans, because the most of us want same things – happiness and peace. We have to realize this, because this leads to better and easier co-operation. In my opinion it seems that there is some lack of trust between Europe – many thinks that no-one is interested in our things, just only their own. This is not true and hopefully we get rid of this thinking model. EU has given me a lot and it can give more all of us. I want EU to be a success story.

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