Has the EU failed us, or have we failed to forge a European identity?

As a Greek citizen long resident in Britain, I cannot help noticing the almost complete absence of any sense of European identity in the UK. It seems that Britain has never really seen itself as part of Europe. Britain has never felt comfortable with the ‘Continent’- and, as the linguistic register suggests, what separates the two is much more than the few miles between Dover and Calais

Media and Collective Action in Greece: From Indignation to Solidarity

This article explores the role of media and communication processes in the organization of collective action in Greece in the context of the Aganaktismeni (Indignant) protests and subsequent solidarity networks. Theoretically, the article employs the concept of communication ecology to highlight the complex network of media platforms in which collective action is embedded. The concept allows us to explore collective action both within the specific cultural and political environment in Greece as well as beyond specific moments of political mobilization and across time. Based on interviews with activists from various solidarity networks in Athens, we discuss the use of media and unmediated communication practices employed for the organization and mobilization of collective action. We argue that these practices need to be explored beyond the moment of protest in order to better understand how collective action moves across social and political sites

Radical democracy and collective movements today: Hegemony and autonomy

The 2011 movements of the squares, the ‘aganaktismenoi’ and ‘indignados’ as they came to be known in Greece and Spain respectively, brought to the forefront old and unresolved debates on the Left. During the crisis it became evident that the traditional Left failed to capture the popular imagination. As part of parliamentary politics, and together with the rest of the political establishment, the left had itself lost legitimacy, at least among a large part of society, and non-representational alternatives started to be entertained. The debates emerging from the movements were a response to the failure of the existing economic paradigm and an alternative economic vision challenging neo-liberal capitalism took front stage. Yet, at the heart of the movements was the realization that, without a political alternative compensating for the democratic deficit in the respective countries, such an alternative would be impossible. Resistance to the economic programmes of the troika (the IMF, the EU and the ECB) had to come from the ‘people’, the political actor who had been excluded from the decision-making process. Although the crisis was identified as economic, there was a sense in which the crisis concerned politics as well – indeed the crisis was of a general character to the extent that it could not be limited to a particular part of society

Media and collective action in Greece: from indignation to solidarity

This article explores the role of media and communication processes in the organization of collective action in Greece within the context of the Aganaktismeni (Indignant) protests and subsequent solidarity networks. Theoretically, the paper employs the concept of communication ecology in order to highlight the complex intertwined network of different media platforms within which collective action is embedded. The concept allows us to explore collective action both within the specific cultural and political context of Greece, as well as beyond specific moments of political mobilization and across time. Based on interviews with activists from a variety of solidarity networks in Athens, we discuss the use of media and unmediated communication practices employed for the organization and mobilization of collective action. We argue that these practices need to be explored beyond the moment of protest in order to better understand how collective action moves across social and political sites