By now, it is proven without any doubt! There is a place even more remote and afar from civilization, than Hansenberg itself. As we all know, any cultural pleasures such as a REWE within the next 30 kilometers or a vibrating neighborhood always threaten your working morale and have a limiting influence on your discipline. Thus, it was no wonder that the delegation of five Hansenberg students found themselves at a youth hostel in Linsengericht-Görlitz to attend their first “Model United Nations” simulation. This simulation was the official beginning in a series of MUN’s that will take us from Hamburg to Frankfurt and in the end straight into the Headquarters of the UN and therewith to New York, the city that never sleeps.
MUN in general describes a simulation of UN conferences for students, in which every student has to represent a country in a simulated committee, such as the Security Council. Throughout the course of every simulation the students try to pass a resolution, covering as much of the position of the represented country as possible, just as real diplomats would do. Our NMUN project and its preparation are mainly being carried out by the University of Frankfurt and due to the school’s cooperation with the university, we are given a contingent of five delegates to send to New York within the delegation of thirteen university students.
For the weekend, the five of us (Jan-Gunther Gosselke, Luisa Schonhart, Jieer Xu, Franziska Mathée and Maxim Polo Leon) were therefore stuck in this youth hostel and collected some very valuable experiences for the oncoming events. First of all we received a feedback on speeches we had to deliver earlier in the week and that were recorded on camera. And let me tell you, it is quite an experience to see yourself on screen for the very first time, especially when delivering a speech on a complex political topic in a foreign language. While some of us are way to go and still a little nervous in front of an audience, others already have the experienced and professional radiance of real diplomats. After having had quite a number of good laughs about all the speeches, we were given a short introduction to the admittedly quite complex and multi-layered rules of procedure. These rules are determined to maintain a smooth and comfortable working process during the conference. Therefore, we started to employ these rules straight away and tried to stick to them for the whole conference. Pretty soon we had to notice how strict and almost over-formal diplomatic conduct appears to be. Although in real life, addressing questions directly to your classmates, for instance, might be appropriate, in a MUN, however, you firstly would have to formulate your wish to ask a question by raising your plaque and announcing “Point of information”. After having gained the right to ask, you may rise from your seat, address the distinguished fellow delegates present in the body of your committee as well as the honorable chair and then finally ask in a concise and short way. Pretty tough, isn’t it? This high complexity makes it inevitable to practice diplomatic conduct several times before really entering the stage of a MUN in Hamburg or Frankfurt for example.
After the workshop we luckily found some time to get in touch with the delegates from Frankfurt and form a whole and coherent group from a number of 18 students and high-school students in total.
The next morning was the official beginning of our simulation. Since some people already had experiences with MUN’s it was a little easier than actually expected to start Formal Debate. What came as a little surprise was the time we took before definitely getting started to debate on substantial questions, such as the situation in Somalia concerning piracy. For almost forty-five minutes we discussed how long everyone should have the right to speak, in which order to set the agenda a related formal questions. During the day we have been working very extensively on passing a resolution to solve the problems in Somalia. As the actual work of any UN committee is mainly done in caucus, formal debate was frequently interrupted by phases to discuss without moderation. During these, we were especially busy preparing position papers, finding allies and finding compromises that would guarantee most nations to accept the resolution. But in the end it was all worth it, and after approximately ten hours of work we could pass a resolution that satisfied most of the present nations.
