The following paper presents a summary of the contributions collected during the 2021 Vigoni Forum for Students. The Vigoni Forum for students is organized every year by Villa Vigoni, the “German-Italian Centre of European dialogue” and includes the younger generations using Impulse-presentations and discussion rounds. In 2021, the participants tried to find answers to the question “Europe’s crisis: Failure or renewal?” whilst concentrating on three topics and analysing the corresponding measurements taken by the EU. The first step has established that the Next Generation EU project as well as the European Green Deal represent the attempt of the European democracies to overcome the crisis based on a (new) ethics construed in an intergenerational manner. The second step was based on an analysis of the first months during the “State of emergency” the pandemic caused. How does the relation between democracy and science present itself? What analogies and differences are there between Italy and Germany? Finally, during the last panel, an attempt was made to analyse the crisis caused by the lack of active civic participation in democracy, to identify its origin and to evaluate the EU’s approach to solving it, taking the “Conference of the European future” as an example.

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