Germany

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.

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.

The eurozone crisis reveals the exhaustion of the post-1945 model of Europe-building. This poses a historic challenge to Europe's current leaders, says Nick van Praag.

The president of PASOK and of the Socialist International addressed the German Green party in an audience including Dany le Vert and Cem Özdemir, the first son of Turkish guest workers to enter mainstream German politics, in Kiel on November 25. This is the text of his speech – a tour de horizon of the key elements of an alternative, democratic People’s Europe which he says just needs some time to re-occupy.

The lack of both security and cooperation is an enduring malady in the Middle East. Can global civil society apply itself to a solution?

Germany's elite: thankful but shocked at the truths and recommendations brought to them by the friendly but frank Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski

German-born Daniel Zylbersztajn has recently returned to Poland, two months after his father's passing away. In the son, this has prompted thoughts on neighbourly relations and the meaning of transformative dialogue in general, taking account of his experiences in Jewish - Palestinian dialogue and his upbringing in Germany.

A global day of collective action in 82 countries shook the world on October 15, 2011. Yet the protests were not co-ordinated by political parties, unions or other institutional actors. They were driven by the rapid dissemination of memes, made possible by the internet.

Many outward economic indicators still tell a story of German success. Inside, there are many signs of a troubled country lacking a strategic vision for itself and for Europe. The eurozone financial crisis highlights this vacuum - but the heart of the problem is political, says Ulrike Guérot.

The turn into a neoliberal direction of European integration is at the root of the present crisis. In the search to avoid a global depression, European leaders may be forced to move closer towards a federation. Such steps are fraught with difficulty and will meet nationalist populism head-on in a Europe without a democratically rooted common vision that goes beyond the common market.

In July, amidst great drama, the Eurozone seemed to enact a political compromise, saving the euro as a single currency. Its effects on stabilisation are uncertain, but a Eurozone that is politically ‘less weak’ will do ‘less badly’ in the coming major collapse.

Yes, European leaders could all agree when it came to imposing austerity on Athens, Dublin, Lisbon and Rome, ‘reassuring’ financial markets, saving creditor banks, increasing countries’ financial burdens and putting public enterprises on the market at sale prices. But such policies make exiting the crisis impossible.

The historic decision by Germany’s government to end the country’s nuclear-energy programme is owed to the enduring vitality of the anti-nuclear movement. Paul Hockenos maps the implications for the rest of the world. 

Foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan meet in Islamabad to discuss security issues. In northern Kenya, inter-communal clashes over resources leave ten dead while Maoist rebels kill five security men in attacks in central India. Germany has agreed to supply NATO with bomb components for operations in Libya. All this in today's security briefing.

It is taboo for Berlin of course, but a German strategy for EU withdrawal could actually be good for European cooperation.

Germany's decision to decommission its nuclear power stations is the outcome of a half century of anxiety about technocratic modernity.

Nobody has raised real debates in national or supranational parliaments to discuss the excesses of the securitarian discourse. Quite the opposite: the left has adopted the security discourse wholesale as its own and entered into a kind of auction with the right.

Centre-right parties across Europe are announcing the failure of multiculturalism. We are witnessing a co-ordinated revival of Enoch Powell's idea of the aggressive outsider out to dominate the rest; only now race and immigration are being played out on the terrain of culture and religion

Right-wing populist parties tend to be anti-multinational and anti-intellectual: they endorse nationalistic, nativist, and chauvinistic beliefs, embedded - explicitly or coded - in common sense appeals to a presupposed shared knowledge of ‘the people’.

Europe’s leaders are reversing their historically generous role in assisting countries out of criminality and fascism. What we are seeing now therefore strikes at the heart of the European project not just the euro.