The Austrian peace movement makes a resurgence. About a year ago, roughly 30 organisations, including SERI, began to draw up a position paper summarising many new and still current demands as part of one platform. The “Action Alliance for Peace, Active Neutrality & Nonviolence” (AbFaNG - Aktionsbündnis für Frieden, aktive Neutralität & Gewaltfreiheit) was formed as a thematic initiative of SDG Watch Austria, the Austrian platform for the implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The demands range from a rejection of the militarisation of Austria and the EU to global disarmament. A fair world economic order plays a special role in this. For us at SERI, this includes dematerialisation of the entire economy (worldwide as well as in Austria). Recently, we once again demonstrated in detail that this is possible in a project supported by the Austrian Climate Fund meetPASS.
In this context, SERI published a statement on this subject at the press conference of AbFaNG on 2 September (also on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War). “We call for a comprehensive dematerialisation of the economy to avoid future conflicts over raw materials: by reducing the use of primary raw materials in the economy, we will become less dependent on their exploitation in different areas of the world. Thus we are not drawn into resource conflicts and preserve our neutrality and independence,” said Stephan Fortelny of SERI. Beyond that we (in particular Christian Hinterberger) supported the initiative with the setup of a very informative and extensive website, which is already a compendium of Austrian peace initiatives and topics.