AEGEE is the student organisation that promotes the idea of a unified Europe, assisted by an unmatched personal network of European Friends. As non-governmental, politically independent and non-profit organisation it is open for students of all faculties.
AEGEE was founded in 1985 in Paris as the "Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de l'Europe" and today has about 20.000 members in nearly 200 cities all over Europe. AEGEE's activities push for "European integration" and at the same time put the term into practice: Each year "Summer Universities" are held by most of the local groups to teach fellow students the language and culture of their country. It is a general policy that the participating students are hosted for free by the fellow AEGEE- members, making travelling in Europe affordable, and getting to know people easily.
In a similar fashion larger scale conferences are organised on topics as diverse as "European Security", "Tourism" or "Modern European Literature". Nevertheless, there is always a fun aspect to AEGEE activities, including cooking, parties or pub-crawls, and also sports, like a skiing weekend or a border crossing bike trip are on the list.
Being truly European, AEGEE does not make use of a national administrative structures and instead relies solely on the local groups and the European Board; support is provided by the European working groups, which take on topics Higher Education, International Politics, Human Rights, or Culture.
Yearplan-Projects that have successfully been realised the past years are "Europe and Euro" (1997), "Building a social Europe" (1998) and "Peace Academy" (1999). These Yearplan-Projects determine the theoretical focus of the network in a certain year. The "Peace Academy"-project, initiated by AEGEE-Athens, Thessaloniki, Istanbul and Ankara, gave inspiration to more than 20 AEGEE-antennae to organise an event about Peace, resulting in a big final conference in Rotterdam. For 2000 the Yearplan-Project is "Borderless Europe", including a conference in the European Parliament about enlargement of the European Union.
Besides Yearplan-Projects there are several projects going on within AEGEE, undertaken by AEGEE-Europe with other organisations, the Working Groups in co-operation with AEGEE-antennae or just by some locals together. Examples are "Socrates on the move" together with ESIB and ESN (2000), "Support for students in South-East-Asia" (1997-ongoing), Human Rights Working Group together with AEGEE-Heidelberg and "Education for Democracy" (1999-ongoing), by AEGEE-Kaiserlautern, Berlin, Munchen, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Nijmegen and Groningen.
The local level, finally, provides the base for all activities offering a regular social meeting. Often the ERASMUS students are taken care of, and usually speakers are invited to lectures on European and other topics of interest, including foreign language conversation groups. Thus the AEGEE members are given plenty of opportunity to train their organisational and social skills, challenged by groups composed of different - and sometime conflicting - mentalities.