In the very first keynote of this year's NECE conference, renowned social scientist and professor at the University of Konstanz, Aleida Assmann, chose to address the issue of a common European culture of remembrance. Taking the year 2014 as her starting point, Assmann began by questioning a common criticism, which holds that commemoration is a rather artificial concept, forced upon a society to serve an, often political, purpose of the present. For being an artificial concept, Assmann argued, the resonance has been "pretty impressive".

Christoph Müller-Hofstede, initiator and organizer of the NECE conference talks about what is special about the year 2014, why citizenship educators are urged to talk about conflicts and what he is most excited about in the programme of the coming days.

Petra Grüne, NECE initiator, about what has changed over the last 10 years, why it is both a good and a bad thing that there are more than 40 nationalities involved in the conference this year and why we should talk about our crises, instead of trying to brush them aside.

Manfred Wirtitsch from the Ministry of Education and Women's Affairs in Austria on why history should always guide us while making decisions for the future, his expectations for this year's NECE and why Vienna is the perfect city to host the conference.

Sigrid Steininger, Austrian coordinator for the Council of Europe's 'Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights' programme, talks about the advantages of an informal networking conference and her expectations for this year's edition of NECE.

2014 is a European year: One hundred years after the outbreak of the First World War, seventyfive years after the beginning of WWII, a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Europe has come a long way in its rather short history. In a lot of respects, we are standing at a crossroads as we speak. Not only since the financial crisis shocked the world economy in 2008 has the European project been called into question, time and time again.