During the current economic crisis, the European Union has focused its efforts on building a financial union – while making next to zero progress on a political or social one. If there is really no alternative on the table, then democracy becomes a façade (“Fassadendemokratie”).
Kanak Attak in Germany is an anti-racist collective of people with mixed ethnic backgrounds who aim to turn the dominant discourse on migration upside down. They invite us to consider the role of intellectuals in migration regimes.
In 2010 and 2011 migrants behaved like activist citizens throughout Italy, initiating a new cycle of struggles in the crisis of neoliberalism. Their contestation of an exclusionary, racialized and competitive model of society could become a goal shared by migrants and nationals alike.
The uncritical understanding of what constitutes a ‘community’ and the failure to grasp what forms of citizen self-government are possible in current conditions is what betrays the intellectual laziness of the Big Society’s key thinkers.
In France, the Manifesto of Appalled Economists underlined some of the country’s most prominent economic concerns about the European response to the global crisis. It was signed by over 700 economists and more than 6,500 concerned citizens. Today, we publish their call for a more open, more democr
The results of Belgium's local elections has brought victory in the northern Flanders region to the conservative and nationalist but democratic New Flemish Alliance. This represents the transformation of Flemish nationalism, says Cas Mudde.
On September 15 in Madrid, over one hundred thousand people answered the unions’ call to demand a referendum on austerity. In both its aims and its format, this action confirmed that the trade unions have been influenced by the 15M movement.
People across Europe are critiquing the morality of the political and economic system. Globalisation has helped to engineer an empty democracy, with political-economic processes depoliticised and decisions made by experts. And what of the European dream? “Whoever can understand it, that is ‘the mo
Occupy is part of a wide range of subterranean movements that explore ways to complement representative democracy and empower citizenship. Some citizens want to build stronger democratic institutions: others don’t trust elected representatives any more and promote a change that starts at a local l
