Democracy is often taught as a system to understand, and discussed as a problem to solve.
But it is rarely treated as a practice, something people must experience in order to learn.
The EU Democracy Campus was built around a simple observation: democratic breakdown does not come from a lack of opinions. It comes from a lack of shared spaces where disagreement can be held, navigated, and sustained across difference.
Europe, in particular, faces this challenge at scale.
Multiple languages. Multiple political cultures. Multiple historical memories.
Very few opportunities to experience what it actually feels like to deliberate together.
This is why we built a virtual parliament. Not as a symbol, but as a working civic environment.
In the EU Democracy Campus, young people from different countries don’t consume content about democracy. They enter a shared space where rules, roles, procedures, and time shape how participation unfolds. They debate, negotiate, listen, and experience the weight of collective decision-making.
Virtual reality matters here not because it is immersive, but because it makes presence possible without proximity.
It allows democratic practice to happen across borders, in real time, under conditions that resemble the complexity of European public life.
This video offers a brief look inside that space.
Not as a promise about the future of technology, but as an argument about what democracy requires if it is to be learned at all.
