ANSTOSS DEMOKRATIE

The ANSTOSS DEMOKRATIE initiative brings together the ERSTE Foundation, the European Forum Alpbach Foundation, the Robert Bosch Stiftung as well as the Mercator Foundation of Germany and Switzerland. It aims to establish a long-term partner structure supporting democratic culture in the D-A-CH region – the German speaking countries in Europe.

The iac Berlin serves as the hub’s incubator for achieving goals such as:

Developing criteria for an inclusive, decentralized and lean partner structure
Facilitating the building of a cross-border network
Supporting pilot projects

A co-creative incubation phase of about 2 years will serve to shape the initiative’s exact form according to specific and future needs. The body coordinating the incubation process has an interim role and will not be a part of the later partner structure.

Background

This initiative was founded to meet some of the central questions facing democracy today and in the future – such as:

How can we prevent pro-democracy actors and community leaders from becoming the target of online hate speech and, as a result, physical attacks?
How can we systemically meet the challenges that anti-democratic agitation poses to societal negotiation processes?
What forms of collective action and what - possibly hitherto unusual - partnerships are required for this?

Anti-democratic Threat

Every day, we experience threats to social cohesion in our open society. These threats are large and diverse – ranging from people denying the COVID-19 pandemic to so called Reich citizens in German speaking countries and extremists in general.

Traditional media’s continuous loss of relevance, digital and analog echo chambers, and the increasing dissemination and use of fake news are contributing to the spread of anti-democratic tendencies in the middle of society.

A Joint Response

A response to these threads needs to go beyond legal charges, institutional reforms or advertising campaigns. It requires a new visibility and connectedness, as well as joint action by pro-democracy actors not only in digital and analog metropolitan areas but especially in places where people grow apart from democratically constituted society.

The ANSTOSS DEMOKRATIE initiative sets out to answer these demands by joint action.