We deplore the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video from the exhibition Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

It is an act of censorship which we condemn. In fact, we are compelled to express our outrage at the yielding to phobias and prejudices.

David Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre is outstanding in the history of world art and the contemporaneity of sexual diversity.

We highly appreciate the work of Dr. Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward in curating the exhibition Hide/Seek which should be shown in its integrity.

Even in Communist Poland museums tried hard to retain its independence. Now under Post-Communism, the freedom of cultural institutions was cherished this year during the exhibition Ars Homo Erotica in Warsaw’s National Museum. Its director, Professor Piotr Piotrowski, did not yield to the Archbishop of Warsaw’s pressures to remove Aleksandra Polisiewicz’s sound installation which depicted a scene of lesbian confession.

Would posterity not ridicule a museum which, instead of pursuing the truth, deny their audience the opportunity to experience eminent art?
Yours sincerely,

Pawel Leszkowicz, Ph.D., curator of the exhibition Ars Homo Erotica; Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University, al. Niepodleglosci 4, Poznan, Poland; Intermedia Department, Fine Arts Academy, Poznan, Poland; member of AICA. Telephone: +48 694 194 044. Email: pawel.leszkowicz@gmail.com

Tomasz Kitlinski, D.E.A. (Paris 7), Ph.D., Department of Philosophy and Sociology, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, pl. Marii Curii-Sklodowskiej 4, 20-031 Lublin, Poland; authors of essays on David Wojnarowicz. Telephone: +48 784 512 456. Email: tkitlinski@gmail.com

European Alternatives Staff

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HUNGARY

A return to a less than democratic past

Hungary’s parliament has recently approved the head and members to the Media Council, a powerful five-member body to oversee the new National Media and Telecommunications Authority (NMHH), which will be the new licensing body supervising both private and public broadcasting.

The Hungarian Parliament, endorsed Annamaria Szalai as the chairwoman of the Council along with four members, all nominated by the governing Fidesz party. Ms Szalai secured her place for the next “nine” years.

In June Dunja Mijatovic, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, appealed to the Hungarian Government to halt the media legislation sustaining that “its adoption could lead to all broadcasting being subordinated to political decisions.”
Nevertheless, in another vote, the parliament elected six out of a total of eight members of the Public-Service Foundation’s board. The board will oversee Hungary’s public-service media as well as governing the Foundation’s assets. Half of the elected members were nominated by Fidesz and the other half by each of the three opposition parties. The remaining two members, including the chair, will be delegated by the Media Council (controlled by the Fidesz).

Another controversial element of the media reform package will force journalists to identify their sources in stories involving national security and public safety.
IPI Press Freedom Manager Anthony Mills said: “An essential pillar of investigative journalism is the confidentiality of sources.  This latest move by Hungary’s parliament is another negative benchmark in the downward slide of Hungary’s press freedom environment.”
Dr. Ivan Lipovecz, an IPI board member, added: “The law is against the normal democratic thinking of people and has just made public broadcasting dependent on the government.”

Enjoying a two-thirds majority in Hungary’s parliament, the centre-right Fidesz party is clearly abusing its power and in the last months several party members have been appointed to vital positions in the country’s media and programming.

Hungary sadly represents another step towards the “Berlusconisation” of the mass media in Eastern Europe.

BULGARIA

Unfinished transition to democracy, interference of organised crime

After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Bulgaria introduced political pluralism and democratic institutions were set up. The transformations after the communist era, profoundly changed the media situation in the country. The liberalisation of the market and the free competition rapidly arrived in the media sphere. However, in recent years, several criticisms have been raised against the limitations to media pluralism and freedom of speech.

Bulgaria is, together with Romania and Italy, amongst the three EU member states which are listed as “partly free” by Freedom House, mainly because “the country’s reporters continue to face pressure and intimidation aimed at protecting economic, political, and criminal interests with the perpetrators that often operate with impunity, leading to some self-censorship among journalists”.

Journalists also suffer physical aggressions: a few months ago, Georgy Stoev, a reporter with expertise on organised crime, was shot and killed in Sofia. Moreover, in September the State Agency for National Security (DANS) had tapped the phones of several lawmakers pushing journalists to self-censorship.

According to Reporters Without Borders, Bulgaria is in fact Europe’s most repressive country towards journalists at a time when the press freedom situation in the EU is deteriorating.
“Instead of improving the situation, politicians in Bulgaria, regardless of their party allegiance, want to control the media. They continue to regard the press as a mouthpiece of the state and the government. Following Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union, it was expected that the country will raise its standards in this respect in line with the other member states, but it didn’t,” said President of RSF Belgium, Olivier Basille.

Another main problem in the country is the information on private investments, which raises many questions about the real owners of the media. “It seems that officially this information is available, but it is also true that many people come from the gray or black economy and they can influence the media through the advertising market. This market is very small and the share held by private hands is very often connected with the organized crime” concluded Mr. Basille.

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As recent developments within Europe indicate, the new era of the financial crisis and economic insecurity are far from over. The responses of national governments with measures of austerity have been extremely unpopular and it seems that continued protests throughout Europe have been unsuccessful in making any relevant impact on policy. However, potential inspiration for a new form of protest has been found for some from an unexpected source; former Manchester United star, Eric Cantona.

Although better known for his antics on the football field, in an interview with Presse Ocèan newspaper in Nantes, Cantona addresses the frustrations of the demonstrator, suggesting that “the real revolution is easy to do these days [...] the three million people with their placards on the streets, they go to the bank and they withdraw their money and the banks collapse”. This interview generated tens of thousands of hits on YouTube and has set off what appears to be a transnational citizen’s movement. Initially the interview inspired Belgian filmmaker, Géraldine Feuillien, and French actor and director Yann Sarfati to organize a bank run in France to be held on December 7 with the goal of opposing “a corrupt, criminal and deadly system”. Their initiative (bankrun2010.com) has received a surprising amount of support and has since then spread to 25 countries, unofficially making December 7th the Pan-European bank run day.

Although this initiative has not received much attention from the mainstream media, it has been massively popular with alternative media, making it possible to spread to a European and global level. The initiative itself has not been debated much by public officials, but the British Banker’s Association has admitted that if such an event were to take place on a mass scale, it could cause a financial crisis, while spokeswoman of the French Banking Federation has called the idea “stupid”.

Regardless, Facebook groups indicate that over 7,000 people are planning to attend the event in Italy, close to 8,000 in England, over 27,000 in France and thousands more in other countries. Whether or not one agrees with Cantona’s call to action, or indeed thinks it is advisable, and whether or not December 7th will indeed see a mass transnational bank run is yet to be seen. What is important however, is that such a form of political activism which has gained such massive support from European citizens has taken the form of a truly a transnational citizen movement.

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As ILGA-Europe report, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Slovakia Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland do not recognise same-sex marriages and unions celebrated in other EU countries. The European Parliament is sending a strong message to these national governments not to limit the rights of freedom of movement of EU citizens, as European Alternative has demanded in the last months.

European Alternatives welcomes the European Parliament’s vote and wishes to gather like-minded Europeans to get organised for common action to make sure that member states implement what legislated by the Parliament.

More information to come soon, stay tuned!

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photos: infomatique/Flikr
by: Sam Logan and Dominique Tuohy

After weeks of speculation in the media and pressure from the EU, Ireland finally announced at 8.30 on Sunday night that it would formally apply to the EU and the IMF for an emergency loan estimated to be in the region of 75-100 billion euro.

The announcement met an initially positive reaction from the financial markets, when Irish bond yields fell to below 8% on Monday morning. On Monday afternoon, however, Moody’s stockbrokers issued a warning that the bailout could be ‘credit negative’ for the country, and speculation has since mounted that contagion is likely to spread to Portugal and Spain.

The country was thrown into political disarray when the Green Party, junior coalition partners to Fianna Fail, announced on Monday that they would bring down the government once the forthcoming budget had been presented and the accompanying legislation ratified. They have demanded that a date be set for an election by January, which the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Brian Cowen then confirmed would happen. Most analysts believe that Fianna Fail, a party which has been in power for 53 of Ireland’s 88 years of independence, will be obliterated on polling day, due to public consternation about the mishandling of the economy, and in particular, the decision to prop up the banking system at enormous cost to the taxpayer.

Irish banks lent recklessly to developers during Ireland’s sustained property boom on the back of exponential property price increases and, for a while, insatiable demand. However, supply quickly exceeded demand as developers, blinded by the promise of easy money, hastily built projects in a desperate scramble to cash in their chips before each other, and before the inevitable collapse of the pyramid scheme. At one point, 80,000 houses were being built per year in a country of less than 4.5 million people, compared to 200,000 in the U.K., a country with a (rapidly increasing) population of 61 million. Clearly this was unsustainable, and the result is a country littered with as many as half a million vacant properties, most of which have never been occupied, and will possibly never serve any more useful purpose than as the setting for Flickr albums with titles like ‘Ireland’s ghost estates’.

As Eurozone interest rates were set to suit the economies of the majority of its members (the sluggish core economies of Germany, France and Italy), housing prices quickly reached astronomical levels. However, it is debatable whether or not the Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrats government of the boom era, which authored a number of pro-cyclical policies, and was considered by many to have strong organisational links to the construction industry, would have raised interest rates sufficiently to stem the tide of a property market at risk of spinning inexorably out of control.

As a condition to the emergency loans, the country has had to put together a 4-year economic recovery plan, which will be published on Wednesday and is expected to entail a reduction in the minimum wage, a review of the ‘Croke Park deal’ (an agreement to leave public sector wages and staffing levels untouched), up to 5bn euro per year in new taxes (including a new tax for property ownership), and the maintenance of the country’s highly contentious corporate tax rate of 12.5%, which on Sunday was described by the nation’s Prime Minister Brian Cowen as the ‘cornerstone of our industrial policy’. Due to the declining purchasing power of Irish consumers, who will have faced four successive austerity budgets in just over two years by next month, any recovery will have to be export-led. In 2009, 90% of Irish exports were produced by foreign firms attracted to the country by its low tax rate. Unfortunately, the Irish public is acutely aware that the ‘Celtic Tiger’ was built on foreign firms coming to the country for its attractive tax-rate, and in general believe that having a relatively well-educated English speaking workforce doesn’t act as a sufficiently strong carrot to potential investors which might outweigh the intrinsic disadvantage of being located on the edge of Europe, away from the continent’s main markets. Thus, despite the severe austerity being imposed on the population, most people do not expect corporations to have to share the tax burden.

The Irish public’s response to the bank guarantee announced in September 2008, though almost universally critical, has translated into very little in the form of political protest. In stark contrast with the Greeks, very few have been willing to take to the streets to make their anger heard. As the crisis broke out, the population seemed to have an epiphany whereby everyone instantly believed that mismanagement of the economy was the most natural, fitting thing in the world. We accepted of our natural status quo as the sick child of Europe. The response has been shame and docility as much as outrage. A sense of national inadequacy came to the fore again as if it never went away, as evidenced by the number of remarkably defeatist opinion pieces in some of the nation’s broadsheet titles published in recent months.

This remarkably muted reaction to the predicament the country has been in for the past two years has met with praise in a number of prominent right-leaning titles in the U.K. and elsewhere. The Irish have an admirable ability to ‘get on with it’, it was deemed. But is one’s propensity to accept one’s fate, perhaps a trait common in post-colonial societies, really such an admirably quality?

After two and a half years of rapidly compounding hardship, widespread negative equity and no sign of an economic recovery, the Irish public is finally showing signs of being no longer willing to meekly accept its fate of funneling the equivalent of the next six years of income tax into propping up an unchanged banking system.

In his statement of Sunday November 21st, Brian Cowen called for the Irish people to match the solidarity offered to their country by their European neighbours and come together to back the yet to be announced four year economic plan and budget. “We must have faith in our ability as a people to recover and to prosper once more … Rebuilding our economy falls to our own efforts as a people. That is where the focus of our efforts must turn as a people, beginning with the four-year plan and then the budget. Now we need to show the solidarity in our own country that our neighbors have shown to us at this time.”

In an editorial last week European Alternatives asserted that where governments are failing their peoples, the only option is for citizens to take the initiative. Irish citizens should indeed take Mr. Cowen’s advice and come together in solidarity with each-other, to rid the country of his morally bankrupt and incompetent government – a government that has betrayed its citizens and relinquished the country’s sovereignty, and with their fellow Europeans to stem the tide of austerity currently sweeping across the continent. We must act together, now, to make ourselves heard.

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The view from the European Union

An interview with Timo Makela, Director of International Affairs at DG Environment, European Commission

Interview by Federico Guerrieri

How do you judge the outcome of the Copenhagen Summit?
The EU played an important role and was also a driving force in Copenhagen Climate Summit.  In fact, the EU was the only major economic region who came to Copenhagen with a clear and binding climate change mitigation programme.  The EU told upfront to our global partners that we will cut our emission by 20% by 2020.  And this will be done whatever the outcome of future global negotiations.  In Copenhagen, others, both developed and developing regions were not yet ready to follow the EU’s lead.  And this led to a situation in which the results fell short of expectations and the final outcome was set by others.
How would you judge the preparatory talks and conferences leading up to Cancun?
The Cancun Climate Summit will be a next step in climate negotiations. Progress can be expected in areas such as the financing of climate mitigation and adaptation,  the reduction of emission from desertification and forest degradation and the system of monitoring and verifying emissions. However, it will be difficult to reach an agreement on legally binding reductions targets.  We might have to wait for that for another year.

Is the European Union ready to assist developing nations?
The EU is the biggest donor of developing aid globally.  About half of all aid comes from the EU.  And much of this aid assists developing countries to protect their environment while promoting at the same time economic development and job creation. The EU is already investing in global biodiversity programmes some €1 billion annually and has committed some €7 billion additional support for the next 3 years.

Is a carbon tax preferable to carbon trading schemes?
Economic instruments are essential to move towards a low carbon economy. And they complement regulatory means which are also essential. Markets need to work for low carbon and resource efficient economy, not against it.  And in this both trading schemes and taxes play their role.  The EU has opted for an emission trading scheme as a major tool for reducing emissions from major energy and industrial installations.  But national and also EU wide taxes complement this. Environmental tax reforms are being implemented across the EU and carbon taxes, for instance for cars and energy production, are becoming increasingly common.

What is your view on carbon offsetting and the clean development mechanism?
Clean development mechanisms offer a possibility to combine development goals with our climate objectives. They have resulted in additional investment in developing countries for renewable energy and modern production technologies. As long as they really reduce emissions and enhance investments in renewable energy production they are a good tool for global climate action.  Of course, this is not enough and national plans, policies and measures are more important.

The view from civil society
NGOs such as Greenpeace international, WWF, Action against Hunger, Friends of the earth international will attend the UN climate conference in Cancún. But everywhere in the world, civil society protests will also take place to urge concrete actions on climate change. David Heller works with Friends of the Earth Europe where he coordinates the Climate Justice and energy work. For the past few weeks, he has been helping to organize the European Assembly for Climate Justice.
Interview by Séverine Lenglet

What is the European Assembly for Climate Justice?
The European Assembly for Climate Justice is a 4-day event taking place from 26th to 29th November in Brussels. It is timed to coincide with the start of the UN climate conference in Cancun, Mexico. Our event will have discussions, debates, actions, cultural and social events, and a chance for networking. We hope that people from various social and environmental movements from across Europe will join us for the event. Our main message is that the climate crisis is affecting the people in Europe – and around the world – who have done the least to cause the problem. We have to take into account the social impacts of the solutions to this crisis, to make sure we’re not adding to these problems through false solutions.

What do you think about the UN climate conference “COP16″?
We’re not opposed to the summit in Cancun, but we do think that the direction of international negotiations has to change. At the moment, there is a real risk that the UN conference will be used by rich countries, multinational businesses and international financial institutions such as the World Bank, to divide up and privatise what is left of our atmosphere, and impose their false solutions such as agrofuels, nuclear power, GM, carbon offsetting and the inclusion of forests in carbon markets.

Which problems do we face across Europe regarding climate and social justice?
We can already feel the impact of climate change across Europe, from melting glaciers affecting tourism in the Alps, to changing weather patterns affecting farmers right across the continent. There are also huge social impacts, as bills for heating and cooling homes are increasing – hitting the poorest hardest. More than this, Europe is in danger of missing a massive opportunity to invest in sustainable forms of employment, and take us away from the dangerous, dirty, fossil-fuel driven economy.

What is your view on carbon offsetting?
The theory was that offsetting would allow developed countries to meet part of their targets by paying developing countries to deliver greenhouse gas reduction projects. Since then offsetting has grown quickly, in particular in the form of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). But whereas offsetting counts action in developing countries as part of the cuts promised in developed countries, the science is clear that action is needed in both developed and developing countries. Offsetting does not ensure positive sustainable development in, or appropriate financial transfers to, developing countries, and is causing major delays to urgently needed economic transformations in developed countries.

More information: http://climateassembly.wordpress.com/
Pictures by Oxfam and Greenweek

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photo ‘Kissing Policemen’ by artist Blue Noses from the exhibition Ars Homo Erotica, Warsaw

Gay rights have quickly moved from fringe political activism to mainstream politics. In only nine years, starting from 2001, when the Netherlands became the first country to grant gay couples the right to marry and adopt, Europe has witnessed the rapid expansion of same-sex unions regulations across the continent. At the moment, in a majority of EU countries (17 out of 27) gay couples can celebrate their permanent unions or regulate their cohabitation. This takes different forms, including full marriage equality, civil partnerships, or regulation of cohabitation rights.

Due to the economic interconnectedness of the EU countries, the phenomenon of same-sex couples needing to relocate to another country that does not recognise their union has become widespread. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights makes it clear that “the right to marry and the right to found a family shall be guaranteed in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of these rights”. This article has probably been included as a caveat against future attempts to get EU-wide same-sex unions approved. But while a call for regulation of gay partnerships in the whole of the EU would be beyond its competences, there is plenty of room to demand at least a mutual recognition of existing marriages and partnerships.

There are at least four articles of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights that the current fragmentation of gay rights in Europe violates:

Article 9: everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life
Article 15: every citizen of the Union has the freedom to seek employment, to work, to exercise the right of establishment and to provide services in any Member State
Article 24.3: every child shall have the right to maintain on a regular basis a personal relationship and direct contact with both his or her parents
Article 33: the family shall enjoy legal, economic and social protection

At the moment, the lives of many couples and their children are not respected, if they cannot move within the EU while continuing to see their families recognized as such. While technically enjoying freedom of movement, many EU workers cannot practically opt for a job in another country in which their partner and children would not be legally recognized as such. As for children of same-sex families, often they can only be registered as offspring of one of their parents. This results in the other parent being denied legal rights over their own children.
Achieving recognition for all same-sex couples moving to another European state not recognising such partnerships may affect only a few Europeans in a union of 500 millions. However, EU history teaches us that integration in one policy area inevitably leads to further integration. As it happened in Canada, the legalisation of same-sex marriages in some provinces created a constitutional quagmire, as married couples would return to their provinces and demand recognition to their union. There was no option left for the Supreme Court but to declare gay marriages legal throughout Canada. The moment all forms of marriages and partnerships will be recognised across the Union, we ill continue to see British couple getting married in Tuscany, but also an increasing number of Italian and Polish couples getting married in Madrid or Amsterdam.

With a reticent Commission afraid of upsetting member states, it is up to European citizens to fight to have same-sex unions recognised in all countries. With a strong and organised transnational push from civil society it won’t be long before institutionally homophobic countries will have no option left but to recognize the family in every form it takes.

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Anastasia Mikhno, Analysis of Beauty

Interview with Paweł Leszkowicz

Curator of Ars Homo Erotica, National Museum Warsaw (June 11 – September 5, 2010)

Can you tell us about the background of Ars Homo Erotica? What was your motivation to curate such an ambitious exhibition on homosexual art?

The exhibition was commissioned and fought for by the new director of the National Museum in Warsaw – Prof. Piotr Piotrowski, a prominent Polish art historian with a social and political perspective on art. He invited me to curate the show and it was possible only because of his socially engaged vision of art. The exhibition was the first stage inreinventing the National Museum and turning it into an active agent of cultural and political democratic debates in the region. My motivation was the desire to create an exhibition that was immersed in the tradition of culture while touching on the current politics of sexual minority rights in Central and Eastern Europe.

The exhibition featured works from antiquity to the present, and yet it is not a simple chronological survey. How did you negotiate this complexity in your curatorial strategy?

Works from the collection of the National Museum as well as works of specially invited contemporary artists survey the history of culture and contemporary sexual politics. In order to systematise the multitude of homoerotic representations and metaphors, the three hundred art works were divided into thematic sections – The Time of Struggle, Male Nudity, Male Couples, Ganymede, Archive, Transgender, Lesbian Imaginarium, Homoerotic Classicism, and Saint Sebastian – which juxtapose historical and contemporary works of art. The section “The Time of Struggle” that dealt with contemporary queer rights in Central and Eastern Europe was presented in the main hall of the Museum as an entrance into the exhibition.

How was the exhibition received in Poland?

It is a miracle that this kind of exhibition could have happened at the National Museum in Poland. What is more, it coincided with Euro Pride that was organised this year in Warsaw. Yes, it was not easy to make it happen. When in Autumn 2009 the Museum announced its plans to stage a show on art and homosexuality, the conservative politicians and intellectuals protested ferociously. But the director of the museum was a fighter. The positive effect of those early debates was the excellent media attention and PR it stimulated for the show. The negative outcome of this early criticism was the resistance of commercial/corporate sponsors to support the project. When the exhibition opened as planned it was received peacefully, without protests or attacks. In the three months forty thousand people visited “Ars Homo Erotica”. In its entire history the Museum has never had such international attention with hundreds of articles and mentions in the international media. The first question was always: how it is possible that an exhibition on homosexuality is at Poland’s main museum? It goes against all the stereotypes about the country. And this is the biggest impact of the show and of the transformatory function not only of art but also of the institution of art. I would like to finish with a call. If it was possible to “queer-ise” the National Museum in Warsaw , it is possibly to do so in other Central Eastern European Museums. Let’s just think about all the art work and artists that need to be brought back to the light out of the closets of museum archives and historical art taboos.

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The dishonest principle “there is no alternative” has made a come-back, used once again by the leaders of European states to excuse drastically cutting public expenditure and justifying shifting onto labour the costs of the banking crisis. But this is a farce because the “orthodox” economic principles upheld are none other than those that have led to the crisis in the first place. And it is a farce because alternatives do exist, if only we looked for them in the right place.

Taken as a whole, the European Union finds itself in much better financial shape than leading global economies such as the United States of America or Japan, boasting lower deficit levels and lower public debt. And yet, to avoid financial turbulence Europe alone has had to embark on continent-wide austerity measures that will increase unemployment, decrease social protections, and prolong economic stagnation. Europe’s non-binding macroeconomic “vision” – the unsuccessful Lisbon Agenda and now the new 2020 Agenda – both place great importance in making Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world. And yet in all member states funding to education and university is being cut, or the costs are being shifted directly onto students with hikes in fees and a financiarisation of education through loans.

This paradox has a simple explanation. The nation-states of Europe find themselves at the mercy of financial institutions and rating agencies all too ready to speculate on their weaknesses for short-term gain. At the same time, Europe’s nation states are looking only to their short-term interests in working competitively against each other, as if unaware that ultimately we are all in the same boat. In a common market, each member state depends on the other, and policy choices in one country constrain the possibilities of other countries, whether inside or outside the Eurozone. The European Union as it is currently constituted encourages countries to cash-in by becoming more welcoming to capital investment than other countries, and that often means cutting back on social spending, cutting back on taxes on the rich whilst keeping average salaries low.

The austerity measures are justified by European leaders without mentioning the massive bail-out of European banks which has made deficits such a problem, nor the daylight robbery of the taxpayer that is taking place under the current arrangements for financing the debts of other European countries: at the moment the European Central Bank essentially pays the private banks for buying national debt of countries such as Greece.

Europe’s leaders have shown themselves unable to re-establish the European Union on the basis of democracy, equality and solidarity against the brutal egoism of international markets. Moreover, the European left, depressingly, is becoming increasingly insular and limited to defending what can be salvaged from the welfare models built in our nation states, instead of proposing radical alternatives at the transnational level where political decisions are now being decided again and again in favour of financial institutions, big business, and shareholders, instead of European citizens.

Yet in a unified Europe political alternatives are available: a European Central Bank which could take on debt itself could step in with bond purchases reducing the dependency of European states on international investors, instead of having to pay private banks to do it. Better, Eurobonds, guaranteed by all EU states, could mobilise large capitals cheaply for a Europe-wide investment project in infrastructure, renewable energies, education and research. A financial transactions tax, a financial earnings’ cap, and a carbon tax could be introduced continent-wide to shift the burden on the sectors that have caused the crisis in the first place.

As never before, Europe is paying an enormous price for its inability to act as a united political entity. A very tangible, economic price. But, above all, the intangible price of renouncing the chance of creating a more sustainable, fair, and democratic economic model, which would become a new paradigm for a world desperately in need of new ideas.

The economic problems which exist inside the eurozone are largely the same as those which exist at a global level – trade imbalances, unfair wage dampening, tax competition. Yet it is clear how these problems can be solved in a unified Europe that already has the institutions necessary to deal with them, whereas it is by no means clear how they can be solved at a global level. Already resolving these problems within Europe would lead to higher wages for more people and better working conditions, and an end to the ‘race to the bottom’. It would demonstrate that international cooperation is beneficial for everyone. This is the minimal lead Europe could take on the world stage: starting from this point very much more radical transformations of the current system of global capitalism could be proposed. But what is lacking is the political will to lead, and if the politicians are unwilling to take a lead then the citizens must.

Our national public spheres are caught by petty in-fighting whilst they attempt to take shelter from global storms: national medias are becoming ever more insular just at the moment when it is glaringly apparent that problems such as climate change, the shifting of global power to the East, and global currency and trade questions are becoming urgent and decisive for our futures. In this context, European citizens must find alternative means for shifting the focus of political attention to the transnational dimension. Only in this way can citizens work together to establish the democratic control over their society that was never in any case fully assured to everyone by the nation states.

This may all sound far-fetched and unrealizable, but it becomes possible as soon as citizens themselves start to act in even the most modest of ways to construct a new society beyond their nation states. Europe is a laboratory for such experimentation, and we see the role of our organisation as contributing to the emergence of such a society.

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The first meeting of TRANSEUROPA Network took place on the weekend of 25th and 26th of september in London, while the second meeting happened in Paris a month later.

The third meeting will take place on the weekend of the 27th and 28th of November in Rome, at the Spazio 26cc, in the characteristic Pigneto area.

The subscription for this meeting are now closed, but if you would like to take part in the network, please send your CV and motivation letter to editors@euroalter.com

Information on the Network available for download: (Agenda coming soon)

AGENDA AND INFORMATION ABOUT THE NETWORK
Directions and Maps – TRANSEUROPA Meeting 3 – Rome
Agenda TN 3 Rome

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