I. The EU-Studentvote pioneer project:

EU-Studentvote today constitutes one of the principal e-democracy projects on a world-wide level.

The John Kennedy School of Governance at Harvard and the Politics Online site thus elected it among the 5 projects which will revolutionize the political Internet on a world-wide level during a survey carried out in March 2001 of 25,000 Politics Online subscribers.

It is, furthermore, the first large project of sectorial democratisation of the European Union, organised in a trans-European framework, and calling on the 12 million EU students to elect, from March 4 to 8, 2002, their 50 representatives of the first European Student Council.

Between March and June 2001, the site presenting the project (http://www.eu-studentvote.org), available in French, English and German has already received more than 1.5 million visits from students all over Europe. Detailed presentations of the project have also been given at the request of various organisms throughout the world: the 19 Ministers of Education and Research gathered in Hong Kong by the Asian Development Bank, the Universities of Mercosur, and several conferences in the United States.

II. The questioning " e-vote/confidentiality of data/social link/general will ":

EU-Studentvote, a pioneer project both in technological and political terms, completely represents one of the interrogations at the centre of this round table discussion, " Do electronic voting systems allow us to ensure the secret of convictions and to preserve the social link without which the expression of the general will could only be virtual? ".

The project is, moreover, designed to attempt to bring concrete elements of response to this essential question, as its approach is marked out by questions on the methods, means and purposes to which answers are brought progressively by the partners, researchers, student-electors and student-candidates who are interested in the project.

Technically, the project is based on the e-voting systems by the Election.com company (http://www.election.com), partner in the project, which have already been tested on different scales, notably during the democratic primary elections in Arizona. The EU-Studentvote project, therefore, does not seek to develop new technological approaches (particularly in matters of security, reliability and confidentiality of the vote and the data) but rather to place the current experience in a far-reaching and innovating political context.

This panel's central question clearly sets out the problematic socio-political nature of voting by Internet: the social link and the expression of general will weighed in the same scale with the demands for guarantees of confidentiality/security/reliability.

The context of the EU-Studentvote is threefold:

EU-Studentvote, therefore, aims at exploring the potential of the Internet in order to accelerate a necessary process of democratisation of the EU and to allow the socio-political expression by the under 30s on the trans-European level. It has set itself the objective of " learning while advancing " and in particular by creating on a large scale the conditions for the emergence of a new trans-European social link as an expression of general will on the trans-European scale. These two constraints appear unavoidable on the horizon of the current decade in Europe. Such is the analysis by Europe 2020 (http://www.europe2020.org), one of the European 'think tanks' who conceptualized the EU-Studentvote project, and of which I am director of Studies and Strategy, and by the various foundations, research centres (EU-Studentvote thus offers complete access to its data to any solid research project backed by a commission of researchers from various European laboratories), companies, or institutions who support the initiative. However, and this must be mentioned as that is a part of the experiment, not all are in favour of these evolutions.

Today, despite the bombastic speeches on new technologies and the Europe of citizens, entire sections of the European Commission, numerous ministers of education, and certain student unions are violently opposed to such a project . . . nonetheless supported by 9 heads of State and government of the EU and by the consumer Commissioner, Mr. David Byrne. Certain people thus seek refuge behind " techno-democratic " talk, which specifically distort the legitimate preoccupations of organisms such as yours, simply in order to ensure that, above all, no innovation would allow the expression of a general will on a European scale, which might overturn the status quo.

III. The e-vote, an instrument of " electronic democratisation " more than of " electronic democracy ":

In that sense, the vote by Internet, in this very particular space which is the " European public non-space ", creates social link and democracy. There, where there is nothing, it creates an embryo of something: process, method, experience, actors, etc.

Naturally, this should be done, and is done, in taking care to guarantee the imperatives of confidentiality/reliability/security, but the particular conditions of the election, especially the fact that it concerns the election of a sectorial organ, an election without precedent and which does not have a decisive influence on the fate of the citizens, allow us to be satisfied with the limits of the current systems. Furthermore, it is a test which will certainly allow us to improve procedures for future elections by Internet.

If I may say so, the term " electronic democracy " is unsuitable. EU-Studentvote represents what one might call " electronic democratisation ". The difference is not only formal. Democratisation is a dynamic process, always changing, demanding constantly renewed methods and instruments. It implies that the Internet is the current instrument of an evolution of our democratic systems which are constantly confronted with a renewal of the forms and the actors of power. Today, the EU is certainly the most flagrant example, as it has become a source of immense power . . . confronted with national democratic systems of a smaller scale.

That also means that, in the coming years, the potential for voting by Internet is basically situated in its capacity to make " democracy " emerge, where there was none or not sufficient, rather than to take the place of classic forms of voting where democracy functions well.

To conclude, I wish to stress two important points: Firstly, a large scale experiment such as EU-Studentvote is an enormous operation of making the younger generations aware of the questions which are central to the work of the various data protection organisms. This protection is a necessary condition for any evolution of Internet voting in the direction of " essential " elections (parliamentary, presidential, referenda, etc.) and, it would be necessary for everyone to be conscient of this and to have experience of it with the least risk. As you know, the younger generations, used to the Internet, are much more preoccupied with these questions than the older generations. To work on the pedagogics is, therefore, not superfluous: it is for this reason that we have created a large e-democracy section on EU-Studentvote, in order to inform e-electors of the problems attached to this new approach.

Finally, beyond the e-vote, election by Internet is a wonderful occasion for preliminary debates (here particularly on a European scale and multilingual) and for confrontations of ideas which, for reasons of costs and methods, would be simply unimaginable without the support of the web and the e-mail. Democratisation also means generating debates which earlier were impossible, such as a trans-European debate on the citizen scale.

It is our hope that the pioneer project EU-Studentvote will simultaneously push forward the European social link, the expression of a trans-European general will, and the awareness of the importance of the questions of confidentiality/security/reliability, acquired from the second wave of democratisation (XX° century), to make the third wave succeed, that of the XXI° century. For, in my opinion, protection of data in political matters, only makes sense if it guarantees the progress of democracy, which, in return, needs guarantees of this nature.