Experience and shape Europe. From July 20 through August 2, 2009, the fifth Allianz Summer Academy (ASA) was held in Kempfenhausen on Lake Starnberg. Using as their guiding theme "Making Europe Yours – Inclusion, Participation and Legitimacy", twenty-seven students from five European universities engaged in intense discussions on the challenges of European integration, and they formulated their own visions of forward-looking and sensible European politics. Since the 2008/9 winter semester, the participants prepared themselves for this academy session in work groups at their respective universities.

The Allianz Summer Academy was opened with a talk given by the director of the Center for Applied Political Research (CAP), Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Werner Weidenfeld. The renowned political scientist made a plea for long-term goals in European politics, stipulating that they had to be formulated independent of voting cycles and particular interests. As a role model, he named the European domestic market, whose completion was defined as a strategic goal in the mid-1980s by Jaques Delors, the European Commission president at that time.

In his welcoming speech, chairman of the Supervisory Board of Allianz SE and board chairman of the Allianz Cultural Foundation Dr. Henning Schulte-Noelle recalled the remarkable success story of Europe's integration after World War II. As a good example of this, he referred to Allianz, which, since 2006, exists as a European joint stock company (societas europaea) and conducts many of its areas of business in English. However, Dr. Henning Schulte-Noelle also emphasized that Europe should not be taken for granted. Europe only has a future if it can be actively experienced and shaped by young Europeans as well.

During the academy session, the students exchanged their knowledge and positions with professors and in workshops in order to distil them to a collectively formulated statement in the end. This summarizes the results of the ASA and the opinions of the participants. Here, for example, one clearly grasps the demand for long-term competitiveness and the stability of the European Union on a global level, but also in economic as well as social and ecological terms. In this way, the European Union should find a greater concordance and claim its characteristic diversity at the same time.

With the ASA, the Allianz Cultural Foundation makes it possible for committed students to establish contact with their peers in other countries and become members of a Europe-wide network of ASA alumni. The alumni meet regularly at alumni academies in major European cities where the presidency of the Council of the European Union is being held at the moment. The Allianz Summer Academy is thought of as the active contribution to a European public sphere in which mutual European thinking and action is developed.