EU

In search of a new European politics, we must face the fact that we have skirted the political question of identity: how do we redraw the boundaries (symbolic and physical) dividing us so that we can re-democratize the European public space?

That’s how democracy works between the EU and Ireland. The EU and its servants in the Dáil either give the Irish people too many votes or none at all.

Safeguarding communities and nations from the potential threats of radical right narratives is not about controlling or prohibiting their political parties: but about bridging gaps between political leadership and communities.

This crisis is being used by the national leaders to push the EU down the wrong institutional path, namely intergovernmentalism. The British Tory-led government veto played a role in this, pushing the other member states down the only road that remained available to them, an intergovernmental treaty, but it did so on already ‘fertile ground’.

Peacebuilding and development can no longer be thought of in terms of what was always an over-simplified polarisation between the powerful stability of the giver and the weak turbulence of the beneficiary. It was always wrong to see the world that way; now it’s impossible.

The new 'fiscal compact' treaty agreed at Monday's summit aims to take vital economic policy choices out of the reach of democratic decision-making. Beyond that, there is no new thinking, nothing to stimulate growth, nothing to give some hope to the 23 million unemployed – and those who will join them as the recession deepens.

The report attempts to collate data on 2010 weapons sales by EU member countries. Western Europeans were the biggest arms exporters. The biggest customers were the repressive regimes of the Middle East and North Africa who collectively bought 8.3 billion Euros worth of arms.

With increasing geopolitical instability in oil producing states and the barriers that stand in the way of reaching a multilateral policy, the threat of sanctions in Iran only serves to intensify uncertainty surrounding oil price forecasts for 2012

If the heart of the crisis lies in the politics – including in the politics of the economic policy choices being made – then solutions may lie, not in yet more EU institutional changes and the creation of an austerity union, but in the practice and the dynamism of democratic European politics. But a certain tradition of creating a theoretically more democratic Europe for the people even if they do not seem to want it has deep roots in the EU elites. So far, this hasn't worked.

Whether the ratings agencies get this or that decision right or wrong - they were probably right in the case of the European downgrades - is not the point. They have become the buck-passing agencies for weakened states. The most important public judgements of credit-worthiness ought to be made in public institutions, not behind corporate doors

The coming months could leave an indelible mark not only on the very economic subsistence of many western states but also at a deeper level on an ancient philosophical debate between republicanism and liberalism.

To be a big player in Europe, England needs to be a big nation. Britain cannot fulfill that role because it is not a nation, but an empty shell.

The Copenhagen criteria for EU accession set strict democratic pre-requisites for any country wishing to join the club. But how should the EU react when members turn anti-democratic? This question of principle is given burning relevance today as Hungary's democracy comes under executive assault – even if Britain's parliamentary absolutism remains historically legitimate.

The still uncertain outcome of the eurozone crisis makes predictions for 2012 difficult. But its singular impact in the European Union's newer member-states could include a revived appreciation of the benefits of federalism, says Krzysztof Bobinski.

A historic year in the Arab world has also been a desperate one for Europe. But the sheer depth of commitment to Europe is a source of hope, says Andre Wilkens.

Short-term economic growth has been Europe's guiding star since World War Two. It's time for a new horizon, before our lack of imagination leads us into ever deeper crisis.

This draft appeal is launched by Rete@sinistra, Sbilanciamoci, il Manifesto and Lavoro e Libertà, who organised and spoke at the Florence Forum, ‘The way out. Europe and Italy, economic crisis and democracy’, bringing eight hundred people together to discuss 'our European alternatives' on December 9, 2011. The appeal, accompanied by its initial signatories, is undergoing discussion between several European civil society networks and groups, aiming at joint actions at the European level.

Lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans-gender (LGBT) unions are treated very differently within the member states of the EU. If the Union applied the same kind of zeal in imposing mutual recognition of contracts in this area as in commerce, its legitimacy as a democratic force would be greatly enhanced

This is the Raymond Williams Annual Lecture for 2011, coinciding with the publication of a new 50th anniversary edition of Raymond Williams’ The Long Revolution by Parthian Books, for which Anthony Barnett has written the foreword, also published here this week. In the lecture, he considers the potentially revolutionary events of the past year, starting with a double-democratic crisis in the ruling order, asking why now? and what kind of revolution is under way?

A failed bank robbery on November 4 this year, exposed a cell in eastern Germany calling itself the “National Socialist Underground”, apparently responsible for the murder of at least ten people, most of them immigrants, among other acts of violence over the last decade. Together with the murder of dozens last summer by a Norwegian right-wing extremist this case has focused a spotlight on the presence of a new right-wing terrorism. Until the media and the population at large start recognizing immigrants and others marked by ethnic or religious difference as belonging to Germany, a deep-seated, everyday racism will provide fertile soil from which such acts of extremism will continue to grow.